Mississippi Keeps State Revenue Streams Flowing

The Mississippi Department of Revenue (DOR) collects more than $9 billion in annual revenue to fund critical services for the state. The department successfully migrated tax collection and motor vehicle applications to the FlashStack converged infrastructure from Pure Storage and Cisco. The department also selected Pure Storage FlashBlade to simplify backups, protect against data loss, and power an increasing number of file and object storage applications. Combined with proactive system monitoring and support from Pure1, the technology is a powerful way to keep the DOR up and running—and growing.

Part of Mickey Yates’s job as CIO of the Mississippi Department of Revenue is overseeing applications that serve taxpayers and businesses in 82 counties. These include MARS, the state’s tax-collection system, which supports a taxpayer portal and allows liquor stores to order alcohol; and MARVIN, the motor-vehicle registration system used by auto dealers and county vehicle-registration offices.

To protect the data in MARS and MARVIN, Yates and his team are constantly backing up and restoring the SQL databases to ensure they never lose a bit of information as employees, taxpayers, and businesses across the state use the systems. But at 12TB of data, backups were increasingly unreliable.

“To be blunt, it was a nightmare,” says Yates. “We tried several products, but we had nightly backup failures.”

Looking for a backup solution, Yates already had an idea of what he wanted. A few years ago, he migrated MARS and MARVIN to the FlashStack converged infrastructure solution—creating a much faster, smoother experience for state employees, taxpayers, liquor stores, and auto dealerships. On MARS alone, a study showed that faster response times saved the DOR a combined 39.5 hours of staff time every day.

When backup became an issue, Yates turned to Pure FlashBlade to take advantage of its long-term cost-of-ownership benefits and central point of management—simplifying backups for his network engineers.

“Backups have become an afterthought—not even a blip on the radar anymore. With Pure Storage, it just works,” says Yates.

FlashBlade handles full nightly backups to protect against data loss. It enables snapshots every 15 minutes, allowing point-in-time restores if needed. And it supports weekly restores for staging, testing, and development environments, giving teams the space to perform upgrades and testing without affecting production.

Combined with the proactive system monitoring and support Yates gets from Pure, the technology is a powerful way to keep the DOR up and running. “I don’t think I can overstate the value of Pure technology and the Pure team,” he says. “It’s a relationship you don’t necessarily get with other vendors, and the peace of mind makes it one of the best products on the market.”