Case Study: Capita Children’s Services achieves 6x faster test environment builds and rapid development cycles with Pure Storage

Capita Children's Services gains faster development cycles and greater productivity with Pure Storage

Capita Children’s Services (CCS) develops SIMS, a mission‑critical school management platform, and needed to speed up its fast‑growing development and test environments without disrupting service. Legacy spinning‑disk SANs supporting 400–600 VMs suffered constant I/O and latency issues, slowing builds (about 30 builds/day at 22 minutes each), prolonging upgrades, and limiting the team’s ability to scale with 10% month‑on‑month growth.

After a successful Pure Storage proof‑of‑concept and rapid deployment, CCS saw dramatic improvements: build time fell from 22 minutes to 3.5 minutes and daily builds rose from 30 to 47; creating a 100GB VM dropped from eight minutes to nine seconds; cloning, backups and upgrades were cut from hours/days to minutes/hours. The new array also reduced power/cooling needs, slashed IT overtime, and delivered significant productivity and time‑to‑market gains.

Capita Children’s Services

James Buckingham

Senior Virtualisation Administrator