Case Study: Dunelm achieves 10x performance and faster reporting with NetApp all‑flash platform

Dunelm - Customer Case Study

Dunelm, the UK’s largest homewares retailer with 150+ stores and multichannel sales, faced growing storage bottlenecks on its aging NetApp FAS3240 platform—poor IOPS, 40 ms latency and strained CPU/memory—forcing the IT team into constant firefighting and limiting business growth.

Dunelm deployed an all‑flash NetApp AFF8040 for primary storage and disaster recovery, added NetApp E‑Series E2760 with Veeam for backup, and upgraded to clustered Data ONTAP with direct NetApp support. The change delivered roughly 10× performance gains, latency down to 2–3 ms, CPU use at ~28%, five‑hour faster store reporting (now 2:30 a.m.), faster backups, improved supply‑chain accuracy, scalable growth capacity, and freed IT to focus on business initiatives.

Dunelm

Ben Ashdown

Head of IT Services