LONDON — A Scottish government agency is working with the data storage company Pure Storage.
Scotland’s prosecution service, The Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS), engaged Pure Storage for better storage performance and stability, without downtime, and increased cybersecurity preparedness, according to Pure Storage this month.
COPFS investigates and prosecutes crime as well as looks into allegations of police misconduct.
The agency has processed over 900,000 reported cases since 2016, which created a large data challenge for the organization.
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By moving to Pure, COPFS expanded its capacity and capability to process, manage, store, and access its many terabytes of case data. This includes images, CCTV footage, and mobile phone extracts in addition to operational data, such as emails.
Through Pure, COPFS consolidated its production workloads, virtual desktops, virtual servers, and Oracle databases to create one stable infrastructure.
Since moving all Oracle case management databases to Pure, COPFS has seen a 15% operational improvement in core applications, according to Pure Storage. Pure’s guaranteed 3:1 data reduction also saved COPFS 18 square feet in its data center, lowering power consumption.
“Decisive action”
“The COPFS team needed, above all, peace of mind and certainty,” said Shaun Collings, director, U.K. public sector, Pure Storage.
“We worked closely with them to provide a solution which is simple, flexible, and provides predictable operating expenses, while delivering high service levels. … In addition, meeting energy-efficiency goals is increasingly a key pillar of any public sector organization’s technology commitment.”
Adam Biggs, head of IT services at COPFS, said the agency’s data consumption was “growing rapidly, and a long-term solution had to be found to avoid an operational issue we couldn’t manage. Our legacy disks were at their physical limit. We had to take decisive action and move to a modern data solution that could solve our challenges and support wider COPFS digital transformation in the future.”
For instance, with Pure Evergreen, COPFS has the “OPEX predictability and IT agility to upgrade and scale seamlessly, without disruption,” Biggs said.
Biggs added that Pure’s SafeMode feature and immutable snapshots “mean we are protected whatever happens,” saying in “a worst-case scenario, we can now restore everything in our virtual server environment.”
Government engagements
Pure Storage established other relationships with various government organizations over the last year: such as with an agency in the U.S. Department of Treasury for all-flash solutions; with an agency in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to power its advanced analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) operations; and with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for Pure as-a-service to modernize its infrastructure and applications.
Pure Storage in the storage market
Pure Storage holds 4.1% of the enterprise external OEM storage systems market in Q2 2021, according to IDC. Dell Technologies held the No. 1 position with 26.8%, and HPE held the No. 2 spot with 10.9%.
Pure Storage reported revenue of $1.684 billion for fiscal 2021, a year-over-year increase of 2.5%.
The company is focusing on providing automated storage-as-a-service across multiple cloud environments.
The growing storage market
The global data storage market was estimated to be valued at $65.28 billion in 2020, and it is projected to reach $118.22 billion in 2025, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.5%, according to Grand View Research.
The storage market’s growth is being driven partly by growth in the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing sectors as well as the “massive rise” in the volume of digital information across industries, Grand View Research reports.
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