Case Study: Skullcandy achieves sub-millisecond latency and massive throughput with Pure Storage FlashArray

Pure Storage's performance helps Skullcandy focus on customer needs

Skullcandy, a Park City–based retail audio company founded in 2003, relied heavily on data analysis for forecasting and supply-chain decisions but was held back by legacy spinning-disk storage that caused major performance problems and high management overhead—including latency spikes up to 5,000 ms. The IT team needed a scalable solution to support expanding production databases and analytics without ballooning costs or administrative burden.

After a vendor bake-off, Skullcandy deployed Pure Storage FlashArray (with VMware vSphere), which drove latency from thousands of milliseconds to sub-millisecond levels (just eight small spikes >1 ms in 30 days) and pushed throughput beyond 20 GB. The result: consolidated databases, freed rack space, reduced pending Oracle/Microsoft licensing costs, eliminated the need for a dedicated storage admin, and enabled faster, more granular analytics that improved product and customer insights.

Skullcandy

Brent Allen

Director of Infrastructure