With Pure Storage, Virgin Media O2 eliminated customer outages, reduced time to valuable analytics, and achieved power reduction of 96%

Virgin Media O2 is leveraging Pure Storage solutions – including FlashArray//X and Evergreen//Forever – to support its 47 million connections.

Sharing the UK entertainment and telecommunications operator’s experience at the Pure//Accelerate 2023 conference in June 2023, Ajit Sharma, Business Optimization Manager, Virgin Media O2,described how Pure Storage enables Virgin Media O2 to deliver fast, reliable access to phone and mobile services, supercharge data analytics on customer choices, and support the company’s drive to hit carbon-zero by 2030.

Challenges

Virgin Media O2 supports over 47 million connections across broadband, mobile, TV, and home phones across the UK. Additionally, the company’s fixed network currently passes 16.1 million premises, alongside a mobile network that covers 99% of the nation’s population with 4G, and more than 1,600 cities with innovative 5G services.

With pressure to deliver fast and reliable services to its growing customer-base, Virgin Media 02’s existing storage system was putting its reputation, customer satisfaction and retention, sustainability efforts, and revenue at risk.

From products reaching end of supported life, to upgrades causing significant disruption to end users, the company’s decade-old legacy storage architecture was at risk of failure.

Combating risks

To combat growing risk, Virgin Media O2 moved its data to Pure Storage’s FlashArray//X, supported by Evergreen//Forever, which immediately provided the power, speed, and scalability that it needed, and a solid foundation for future growth.

“For Virgin Media O2, Evergreen enables us to drive continuous improvements while building new, innovative solutions that we can bring to market,” said Ajit.

“With our legacy storage infrastructure, we were looking at spiralling costs and the prospect of building an additional data center. With the flexibility of Pure, however, we are confident that we can easily scale our capabilities to keep pace with growing data volumes, without worrying about the storage infrastructure our business relies on.”


Benefits

With Pure, Virgin Media O2 has benefited from:

    • Increased power efficiency to support sustainability efforts: Pure enabled Virgin Media O2 to immediately reduce its storage racks from 42 to just three, providing a 96% power reduction and avoiding the need for a new data center. The company now runs its core storage on just a few arrays, which handle over four petabytes of data.
    • Reduced downtime to support a connected nation: Since implementing Pure Storage, Virgin Media O2 has experienced zero Priority One alerts – a daily occurrence with their legacy storage – and has run three upgrades with no customer disruption. As a result, Virgin Media O2 is able to shift its focus from addressing performance issues to driving innovation and ensuring longevity of its solutions.
    • Reliable, scalable storage to drive organization-wide value: With Pure, Virgin Media O2 now has a stable storage foundation with the power and scalability to grow alongside the unique data demands of the telecommunications industry. Pure’s Evergreen//Forever subscription provides a significant capex advantage for Virgin Media O2, enabling it to buy support and maintenance upfront, driving value throughout the entirety of its business.
    • Reduced time to analytics with growing data volumes: Since 5G use generates significantly more data than 3G/4G, Virgin Media O2 needed to ensure its ability to store and analyze data quickly and effectively. With Pure, the company is able to complete analytics in real-time to maximize the value of customer data and offer its users faster and more robust analytics services.