Case Study: Sally Beauty achieves dramatic performance gains and major cost savings with Pure Storage

Pure Storage Puts a Fresh New Face on Sally Beauty's Operational Efficiency

Sally Beauty, a NYSE-listed retail company with over 5,000 stores and 14 distribution centers supporting global operations, was struggling with legacy storage: four cabinets from a leading vendor that provided no visibility, frequent disk I/O errors and high latencies, and an inability to diagnose or fix SQL Server performance problems that threatened nightly processing windows and business continuity.

Working with Soccour Solutions and Pure Storage, Sally Beauty deployed two FlashArray//M50 systems (after a brief trial) to replace the legacy arrays. The change eliminated recurring performance issues, improved IOPS and latency, and delivered data reduction ratios over 4:1; capital cost was about one-tenth of the prior system, rack footprint dropped to 3U from two full racks, operating costs (power and space) fell sharply, and storage management became transparent and vastly simpler, allowing SQL-based systems to run reliably.

Sally Beauty

Brian Armstrong

Director of Infrastructure and Operations