CASE STUDY
Managing the subsidies that keep
Scotland’s rural economy thriving
The Agriculture and Rural Economy
(ARE) Directorate, headquartered in
Edinburgh, Scotland, operates within the
Scottish Government and plays a key role
in Scotland’s rural economy. As well as
interpreting EU regulations and assessing
the validity of farmers’ subsidy claims, it
is also responsible for paying subsidies
directly to farmers. With over 20,000
farmers claiming through ARE each year,
the directorate pays out £750 million in
subsidies annually.
As a government body, ARE is regularly
audited and can face significant fines if the
correct procedures are not followed. This
makes the ability to store and process data
without any downtime a high priority for its
IT team.
“We play an important role in the rural
economy and supporting Scottish farmers.
We can’t have any delay in processing claims
and getting money to the farmers,” explained
Neill Smith, Head of IT infrastructure for the
Scottish Government Agricultural and Rural
Economy Directorate.
The directorate is supported by a large
number of IT staff, who work across
numerous environments including
development, system testing, user testing
and production. All of these need to be
underpinned by a storage environment
that allows the team to process and share
data instantly.
Legacy storage struggled to cope with
VDI and data replication demands
ARE’s IT team began to notice performance
and latency issues with its hybrid storage
solution as its VDI environment grew. As a
result, developer build times increased to 30
minutes per build, which had a significant
impact on the directorate’s resources.
Smith and his colleagues needed to find
a way to reduce management time and
quickly realised that an all-flash array was
the only solution.
“Imagine a developer does four builds a day
and each takes 30 minutes,” Smith said.
“But swap your old storage solution for an
www.intelligentcio.com
all-flash array and it only takes 15. That’s a
time saving of at least an hour per day per
developer. Multiply that by 100 developers
and you can see how significant that time
saving becomes.”
The directorate ran a POC in its primary
data centre to see if its requirements could
be met using an all-flash array. Impressed
with the initial results, Smith and his team
proceeded with an open tendering project,
which saw several major vendors compete
side-by-side. Pure Storage stood out on both
technical performance and price.
ARE becomes first Pure Storage
customer in Scotland
“Pure Storage more than exceeded the
requirements we had when we ran the initial
POC, but we also had to consider our long-
term strategy for flexibility and sustainability.
This was something we knew Pure could
support. We were actually the first customer
in Scotland back in 2015,” highlighted Smith.
Pure Storage FlashArray proved to be an
extremely effective solution for ARE’s
VDI environment. As well as fulfilling
performance requirements, its competitive
pricing also added considerable value to the
product’s expected ROI.
Since ARE’s initial deployment in 2015, the
directorate has tested Pure Storage for other
applications such as snapshot cloning and
has upgraded its FA405 arrays to the M20
models. After an overwhelmingly positive
experience with Pure in VDI, the team
decided to use one of its arrays to meet
another of its major challenges.
Building a resilient DR strategy with
Pure Storage
In addition to improving internal build
times, the performance of ARE’s external
website is also a high priority for Smith and
his colleagues.
Smith explained that while there is a
three-month window for farmers to submit
subsidies through the ARE site, it’s not
uncommon for traffic to spike just before
the deadline. This means high-performance
storage that can support a resilient disaster
recovery strategy is key.
Previously, when data was replicated over
from ARE’s primary site to its failover site,
the storage infrastructure couldn’t deliver on
the required IOPS.
However, the team knew that they already
had the perfect solution with FlashArray
and so decided to take one of the arrays
out of VDI and move it to the server side of
the business.
Simple, fast and reliable
storage significantly reduces
management time
The directorate now has a Pure Storage
array in each of its two data centres. By
implementing Pure’s all-flash array to
support the directorate’s VSI, Smith and his
colleagues got a storage solution that not
only delivered the IOPS they needed, but also
significantly simplified the replication process.
Having the capability to fail over and
replicate simply has been a major win for
the team. “The way our external website
functions is important from a reputation
perspective. The fact that we don’t have to
worry about data recovery now is extremely
reassuring,” confirmed Smith.
The support from Pure Storage also makes
the solution incredibly easy to maintain.
If something happens, Pure Storage is
immediately aware and is able to alert the
team to fix any issues, significantly reducing
THE FACT THAT WE DON’T HAVE TO
WORRY ABOUT DATA RECOVERY NOW IS
EXTREMELY REASSURING.
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