Case Study: SurveyMonkey achieves 50% faster SQL Server response times and 8:1 data consolidation with Pure Storage

SurveyMonkey Pinpoints Preference for Flash Storage from Pure

SurveyMonkey, the world’s leading online survey platform handling roughly 500,000 surveys per month and nearly 3 million responses a day across 190+ countries, was outgrowing its legacy SAN. With storage needs above 50 TB and expected to grow ~15% yearly, the company needed enterprise‑grade scalability and much lower latency to support new high‑end products and fast analytics for corporate customers.

SurveyMonkey deployed Pure Storage FlashArray‑420 systems (two in California, one in Oregon) and migrated its Microsoft SQL Server workloads, seeing an immediate 20–25% performance boost and up to 50% improvement in database response times. Over 98% of IOPS now run under 1 ms, batch jobs dropped from as long as seven days to under 24 hours, data reduction reached as high as 8:1, multiple database copies run without extra CAPEX, and rack space and power use were substantially reduced — all backed by strong vendor support.

SurveyMonkey

Argenis Fernandez

Lead Database Operations Engineer