Pure Storage and Rubrik Keep TTX on Track to Optimize Railcar Pooling Operations

PURE STORAGE AND RUBRIK RADICALLY SIMPLIFY IT OPERATIONS
“Together, #PureStorage and #Rubrik help our operations in that we have the high
performance in the front end and we have the performance in the backend by minimizing
impact to our primary storage in terms of stun time and backup time,” Plemons said.
The move to all-flash arrays has greatly simplified operations in the IT department.
“If we were still on spinning-disk, we would have to be managing different data stores
for each application and always worrying about whether we had the right amount of
storage matched to every need. Now, with Pure Storage, we don’t have to differentiate
between workloads from a storage perspective. We just have two pools of resources —
one in each data center. We no longer have to think about where the storage resides.”
The new storage systems support TTX’s strategy of an “active/active” approach to its two
data centers. “We want to get our IT infrastructure out of the disaster-recovery business
and into being a high-performance, reliable platform for applications,” Plemons noted.
“The performance and reliability provided by Pure Storage has allowed us to implement
an active/active strategy high up in the application stack.”
The simplicity of managing Pure Storage arrays is a welcome change in the lean
IT infrastructure department, which has a staff of only five to manage the entire
infrastructure. “When we first looked at solid-state, we had a person on staff whose
day-to-day job was just storage administration,” Plemons observed. “With Pure installed,
anyone on the team can perform whatever tasks are necessary for storage. And there’s
not a lot to do. It’s a set-it-and-forget-it system.”
With Pure Storage arrays so easy to manage, he added, the IT staff can devote more
attention to higher-value projects with a greater impact on the company. For example, the
Pure arrays give the IT department the ability to support evolving business needs, such
as business intelligence (BI) analysis. “We have a lot of data that can be mined,” Plemons
said, “but the work the BI team does can be very resource-intensive. Now, we don’t have
to worry about the impact on performance. With Pure, we’re able to spin up new systems,
attach the data, and allow the BI group to do its thing, without concerns about what it’ll
do to our production environment.”
Plemons praised the support he receives from both Rubrik and Pure Storage. “Pure is
like an extension of a NOC (network operations center). Their customer support team
have their eyes on our system 24/7 and proactively identify issues — which are rare —
whenever necessary. Rubrik takes the same approach to support.”

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