Case Study: Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. achieves sub-1ms latency, ~80% smaller data footprint and $200K hardware savings with Pure Storage FlashArray

Sierra Nevada is brewing up business transformation with Pure Storage

Sierra Nevada Brewing Co., a pioneering craft brewery, faced performance bottlenecks as it expanded—adding a second brewery, growing from 7 to 25 servers, and seeing data grow ~30% annually. Traditional spinning-disk storage caused slowdowns that impacted VDI, SQL, Exchange and production systems, hindering employee productivity and operational responsiveness.

The company deployed Pure Storage FlashArray, which cut latency from 300 ms to under 1 ms, stored about 35 TB of data in 7.5 TB of capacity (dedupe/compression), and saved roughly $200,000 in hardware while using about one-tenth the power of spinning disks. The Forever Flash program eliminated future forklift upgrades, sped deployments at the new site, and delivered more reliable, energy-efficient performance for core applications and manufacturing systems.

Sierra Nevada

Justin Ainsworth

Information Systems Manager