Case Study: City of St. Petersburg achieves sub-millisecond application performance and faster VDI with Pure Storage

City of St. Petersburg Basks In Storage Paradise With Pure Storage

The City of St. Petersburg, Florida, a 260,000‑person municipality that relies heavily on server and desktop virtualization, faced severe storage-related performance problems by 2016. Its legacy SAN couldn’t keep up with about 1,200 VDI users—causing freezes, slow application loads, and regular latency spikes of 30–50 ms that limited VM density and degraded citizen and employee experiences.

After a successful pilot, the city deployed Pure Storage FlashArray systems, migrated VDI and critical business systems, and saw sub‑millisecond latencies and dramatic performance gains: 719 desktops booted in 61 minutes versus more than four hours previously, average desktop boot time fell from 58 to 26 seconds, app launches were cut in half or better, SQL reports went from minutes to seconds, and the Police Department could implement GIS/BI tools. IT management was simplified, about 300 staff hours a year were saved, data reduction rates of 5.5–6:1 provided capacity savings, and improved mirroring and reliability strengthened disaster recovery and lowered operating costs.

City of St. Petersburg

David McLean

Computer Operations Manager