Case Study: First Rate achieves consistent on-time reporting and SLA compliance with Pure Storage

First Rate Realizes an Attractive ROI in Pure Storage

First Rate, a provider of daily investment performance reporting for banks, wealth managers and advisors, was struggling with unexplained overnight processing delays that threatened contractual SLAs. The company handles massive nightly workloads (clients can send up to 1GB/day and the total footprint exceeds 100TB) and traced the problem to a flawed hybrid storage system that forced cold blocks onto SSDs, causing inconsistent and lengthening job times.

A 30-day Pure Storage proof‑of‑concept eliminated the delays and First Rate deployed Pure FlashArray systems (later upgraded to FlashArray//M50 and //M20R2). The all‑flash solution delivered sub‑millisecond latency and routine peaks of ~40,000 IOPS, enabling processing to finish an hour or more before SLAs (previously within ~20 minutes), a consistent 5:1 overall data reduction (one DB shrank 15.5TB→2.4TB), reduced rack space and costs, faster onboarding of clients onto SLAs, and markedly higher client satisfaction.

First Rate

Brian Moffitt

Information Security Manager