Case Study: Waitrose achieves high-performance demand forecasting and a 75% smaller datacentre footprint with Pure Storage

Waitrose Needs Flash Storage To Run Crucial Demand Forecast Application Waitrose Is A Major Retail Chain

Waitrose, the UK supermarket chain with 346 stores and part of the John Lewis Partnership, runs a critical in‑house demand‑forecasting application on AIX and SAS that directly drives order fulfillment and supply‑chain decisions. Its legacy IBM V7000 spinning‑disk array couldn’t meet IOPS needs without massively over‑specifying capacity (leaving ~80 TB unused), and cloud options couldn’t meet performance or locality requirements, so Waitrose looked for an in‑house flash alternative.

After proof‑of‑concept tests against HPE and EMC, Waitrose deployed two Pure Storage //m50 FlashArrays. Installation was quick and the arrays delivered the required IOPS, roughly 3:1 compression ratios (non‑prod and nearly the same in prod), and far more usable capacity so Oracle workloads could be consolidated. The change boosted performance, simplified operations, cut datacentre footprint by 75%, reduced power needs, and proved cost‑effective — prompting Waitrose to consider further Pure Storage purchases.

Waitrose

Aaron Denton

Infrastructure Development Manager