Outpacing the competition with ultra-personalization

One of the largest automotive retailers in the United States, AutoNation offers a wide variety of new and used vehicles, customer financing, parts, and expert maintenance and repair services. With a nationwide network of dealerships, the company was founded in 1996 and is headquartered in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

AutoNation is on a fast-paced growth track. For the last six years, the company has been expanding organically and by acquisition, enabling it to support customers through every stage of the automotive life cycle, including new and pre-owned vehicles, servicing, financing, collision repairs, parts distribution, and more.

This success didn’t come by accident. Behind the scenes, AutoNation has committed to shaping some of the most highly personalized and convenient customer experiences in the industry.

Adam Rasner, Vice President of Technology Operations at AutoNation, explains: “Our goal is to make finding and owning a vehicle seamless and enjoyable. Our website and mobile app are key enablers, empowering customers to browse our inventory of cars and services and complete their purchase, lease, or trade-in within a matter of minutes. That’s something most of our competitors just can’t match.”

Over the years, AutoNation has developed a powerful suite of digital services to underpin the customer journey. For example, the company’s equity mining tool automatically estimates the value of a customer’s vehicle and suggests alternatives with similar or lower monthly payments. Similarly, AutoNation’s custom-built customer relationship management (CRM) software uses near-real-time data on customer sales and service histories to deliver personalized recommendations to customers considering their next car.

“Our digital core is the heartbeat of the business,” Rasner continues. “We rely on several large Microsoft SQL Server databases to drive our services. These databases are extremely performance-sensitive, which means storage is a key component of our IT environment.”

When support services from its incumbent storage vendor began to slip quarter after quarter, AutoNation felt the time was right to make a change.

“We’d lost trust and confidence in the vendor,” says Rasner. “Our business growth was showing no signs of slowing down, and we wanted a partner we could trust to deliver fast, dependable storage to keep us at the front of the pack.”

Working with its trusted partner Cumberland Group, AutoNation assessed the storage market. “We asked our partner who we should be looking at, and that was our first introduction to Everpure,” recalls Rasner. “We like to be at the leading edge when it comes to IT, and Everpure was offering something that was extremely unique in the storage market.”

AutoNation put Everpure FlashArray//X to the test, running a head-to-head comparison with an equivalent solution from a traditional storage vendor.

“We were really impressed with FlashArray,” says Rasner. “Not only did the Everpure solution offer the excellent performance we wanted, it also came with the option of continuous, nondisruptive updates and upgrades through an Evergreen//Forever subscription. We hadn’t seen that combination anywhere else.”

Working with Everpure, AutoNation moved its production data to FlashArray//X, deploying arrays in its production data centers and disaster recovery site.

David Pinto, Director of Systems Engineering at AutoNation, says: “Planning, testing, and performing the service cutover took thorough and careful work, but deploying FlashArray was really no effort at all. Together with the Everpure team, we moved almost all our production data to the new platform, including our Microsoft SQL Server databases and VMware virtual machines.”

As AutoNation has grown its business, the Everpure Platform has grown with it. Since its initial FlashArray deployment, the company has scaled out its solutions to support new and growing workloads, including its Splunk log aggregation solution.

“Splunk strengthens our cyber resilience with security information and event management capabilities, and its high IOPS requirements made it a perfect fit for the Everpure Platform,” comments Rasner. “We see Everpure as the Cadillac of our IT environment; if it’s production data, it’s going on FlashArray.”

Pinto says: “We’re delighted with how Everpure has evolved as a business, and that they always deliver what they promise. We were skeptical at first, but we’re believers now.”

Through its Evergreen//Forever subscription, AutoNation has accomplished many successful storage expansions and upgrades. 

“With our old platform, moving from version to version always required our engineers to get involved,” says Pinto. “With Everpure, the upgrade process couldn’t be more different. We just schedule in when we want the work to happen, and the Everpure team runs with it. We’ve never had a single second of storage-related downtime with FlashArray, even during controller upgrades.”

Rasner adds: “One thing that really impresses us about Everpure is how proactive their support model is. We’ve had a couple of occasions where Everpure has come to us with hotfixes for software bugs that other customers have encountered, so we can avoid the same issues ourselves. That’s a level of service I’d never have expected before we started working with Everpure.”

Since it started its journey with Everpure, AutoNation’s business has grown by around 40%, and data volumes have been rising by approximately 20% year over year. While the demands on its storage platform are always increasing, AutoNation’s FlashArray systems are handling the new workloads with ease.

“Recently, we did an analysis to determine whether we needed to move up to a higher-capacity FlashArray//X model,” says Rasner. “Everpure took it upon themselves to analyze the performance impact of upgrading our controllers instead, which turned out to give us the headroom we needed for the next three years. By doing that upgrade through our Evergreen//Forever subscription, we avoided around $1 million in capital costs. The whole experience drove home to us how committed Everpure is to AutoNation’s success.”

While AutoNation’s usable storage capacity has grown to over 625TB, its data center footprint is staying lean and efficient. The initial replacement of its legacy controllers, cluster switches, and storage shelves cut rack space usage from 52U to just 12U, a 76% reduction.

“Our old storage was spread out across two racks, each of which had redundant power,” states Pinto. “By consolidating everything down to a compact footprint in a single rack, we were able to reduce our power and cooling needs—cutting energy usage by around 50%.”

When it comes to the end user performance of AutoNation’s digital channels, storage is where the rubber meets the road. Since moving to the Everpure Platform, the company has enjoyed performant, 100% available storage to power its critical customer-facing services.

“Getting the performance we needed from our previous storage was a full-time job; we had to constantly tinker with LUNs and partitions to make sure we didn’t overload our controllers,” says Rasner. “With FlashArray, we can provision new storage in three clicks and get all the insights we need in real time from the Pure1® management app. As a result, we’ve saved hundreds of hours a year on IT management—time we can spend on building and enhancing services for the business.”

Data continues to fuel AutoNation’s growth, and the company sees AI as the next opportunity to innovate the digital customer experience. With FlashArray systems at the heart of its business, AutoNation has the capacity and performance to ingest the large volumes of data to support its new AI services.

“For AutoNation, the Everpure Platform is foundational,” concludes Rasner. “FlashArray supported our key production workloads when we started, all the new things we’ve introduced in recent years, and I’m confident that it will support whatever comes next for AutoNation.”