Toyota Financial Services places significant emphasis on best practices and the ‘Toyota Way’. While much of its value proposition depends on the reliability and quality of its service, the team was struggling with a storage system that could not live up to either ideal.
“Speed was one of the biggest factors,” says Darren Wiseman, IT Manager at Toyota Financial Services NZ. “We had so many issues just getting anything on and off of the old EMC system. Our organisation has a huge interest in business intelligence and data warehouse reporting, but we were experiencing bottlenecks that made many of the things we needed to do each day nearly impossible.”
Toyota Financial Services runs on Alfa, a business-critical system which is used to set-up finance for customers, manage fleets, and much more. “When Alfa became sluggish because of our previous storage environment, there was a deep organizational impact,” Wiseman says. “If you had to run a report at 3 pm in the afternoon, it would run so slowly that we’d get complaints because our receivables system would break down.”
To maintain its position as a market leader, Toyota Financial Services needed a premier IT environment. After dealing with issues and latency problems for two years, Wiseman and Toyota Financial Services Senior Database Administrator Barry McAuslin put out the call for a new storage provider. “We chose to go with Pure Storage because of how it was architected,” McAuslin says. “Daily management was so much more straightforward and certainly a lot easier than what we were used to.”
Wiseman adds, “Aside from what the technology itself can do, Pure Storage stood out by consistently being very keen to help. That level of support and ease-of-use is especially critical for a team of our size.”
