Case Study: Afrihost achieves 30x faster VM provisioning and five‑nines reliability with Pure Storage FlashArray

Afrihost Finds the Key to Client Happiness with Pure Storage Flash Arrays

Afrihost is a South African SMB-focused ISP and managed services provider that grew rapidly into two VMware virtualized datacenters hosting thousands of VMs. That growth exposed limits of thin‑provisioned HDD arrays (RAID10): high $/TB, frequent performance complaints, capped IOPs and heavy storage administration—critical issues for a company that relies on quality service without locking clients into long-term contracts.

Afrihost deployed Pure Storage FlashArray (POC then a 35TB system upgraded to a 47TB FlashArray 450) achieving 3.6:1 data reduction, five‑nines reliability and sustained IOPs (typical 15k, peaks 35k). The move cut VM provisioning from 30 minutes to under one minute (≈30x), eliminated storage performance complaints for Pure-backed VMs, reduced ops overhead, enabled online upgrades and improved backup and disaster‑recovery planning as more than 1,000 high‑demand VMs migrated to flash.

Afrihost

Brendan Armstrong

Chief Technology Officer