The Mississippi Department of Revenue (DOR) plays a critical role in funding state services, collecting more than $9 billion in annual revenue for road construction, police and fire protection, hospitals, and schools. Its tax collection and motor vehicle registration applications need to run smoothly so employees and taxpayers statewide can access them without delay or disruption.
After successfully moving these applications several years ago to FlashStack, the leading software-defined hybrid cloud infrastructure solution from Pure Storage® and Cisco, performance more than doubled. This in turn saved the DOR a combined 39.5 hours of staff time every day. Given this success, the DOR once again looked to Pure when growing data volumes made it increasingly difficult to back up and restore critical information.
After adopting Pure Storage FlashBlade, the DOR has accelerated backups of their databases, preventing data loss and protecting the information that keeps the state’s revenue stream flowing.
That’s why the Mississippi DOR is our Data Warrior of the Year.
Growing Data Calls for Faster Backup
The DOR oversees applications that serve taxpayers and businesses in 82 counties. These include MARVIN, the motor-vehicle registration system used by auto dealers and county vehicle-registration offices; and MARS, the state’s tax-collection system, which supports a taxpayer portal and allows liquor stores to order alcohol. These two applications alone account for 95% of the state’s revenue.
The DOR uses FlashBlade to conduct full nightly backups of its SQL databases. 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.
“An application, without its data, is not much of an application,” says Mike Deehan, Enterprise Architect at the DOR. “FlashBlade is the big hammer in our toolbox, enabling us to quickly access data and achieve a level of built-in protection that we could never achieve with other solutions.”
Combined with the proactive system monitoring and support from Pure1, the technology is a powerful way to keep the DOR up and running—and growing.
“The beauty of the FlashBlade architecture is that it can scale in a linear fashion, and we don’t have to worry about bottlenecks as our data volumes grow,” says Deehan. “We’ve also greatly simplified storage tasks with a central point of management. Overall, Pure has been a great partner to our team, and to the organization.”
We congratulate the Mississippi DOR on achieving Data Warrior of the Year status and look forward to partnering for many years to come!
