Case Study: The Swiss Red Cross achieves 5–7x faster performance, high availability and lower operating costs with Pure Storage FlashArray

With Pure Storage, the Swiss Red Cross Remains Able to Act, Even in an Emergency

The Swiss Red Cross, a 150-year-old humanitarian organization operating in Switzerland and over 30 countries, was struggling with a growing virtualized ICT environment of nearly 200 servers and a slow Citrix VDI. Its legacy disk-based SAN could not meet rising IOPS demands (5,000–6,000) or SLA expectations, causing high latency and management complexity while the organization needed to control operating costs and maintain high availability for emergency response.

SRC deployed Pure Storage FlashArrays in both data centers, replacing the legacy SAN with an all‑flash solution that was commissioned in about five hours. The new platform now supports the full virtual server and VDI estate (≈200 servers, ~80 desktops) with simplified management, 5–7x faster data processing in some workloads, and 70–80% reductions in XenApp/XenDesktop footprints—delivering high availability, lower TCO, and the performance needed to meet SLAs and stay within budget.

The Swiss Red Cross

Benno Stucki

Head of ICT Services