Helping customers build homes they love

RC Willey started as a small store in the farmlands of Syracuse, Utah, in 1932. Today, the home furnishings retailer is a multimillion-dollar business operating 13 locations across Utah, Idaho, Nevada, and California. RC Willey is a Berkshire Hathaway-owned business.

Offering everything from kitchen appliances and couches to pinball machines and lawn mowers, RC Willey helps customers create a living space they truly love. To enable a seamless experience online and in stores, RC Willey operates a network of distribution centers, carrying a wide range of product lines and offering next-day deliveries. 

“Many customers don’t want to make big-ticket purchases online—they want to be able to see, feel, and touch an item first,” explains Chris Weiss, Senior Systems Administrator at RC Willey. “Our hybrid approach to retail empowers customers to reserve items online and then come to the store and have an employee show the product in person. Our customers can choose to mix and match online and in-store shopping any way they want throughout the entire journey.”

RC Willey relies on its IT infrastructure to facilitate the sophisticated logistics that underpin seamless online and in-person retail. Over three decades, the company has built up and customized its core systems to support these mission-critical workloads.

To enable business continuity and comply with information security requirements, RC Willey uses Veeam. However, the company’s legacy storage environment was standing in the way of rapid disaster recovery.

Weiss says: “Availability is critical for us. If our core systems were down for an extended period, we’d eventually have to close our stores until the systems were back up—potentially resulting in a huge loss of revenue. We felt that the risk of downtime was becoming unacceptable and decided to look for a fresh storage platform.”

After reviewing the storage market, RC Willey selected Everpure FlashArray//C™ as its Veeam backup target. The company captures regular snapshot backups of its production data on a FlashArray//C in its primary data center, which is replicated to a second FlashArray//C at its disaster recovery site.

With Evergreen//Forever™, RC Willey gains the peace of mind that comes with nondisruptive updates, predictable pricing, and regular upgrades to ensure always-modern storage.

“While other vendors we looked at offered capabilities such as encryption, immutability, and deduplication as optional extras, Everpure gave us everything we needed practically out of the box,” explains Weiss. “When we considered the added value of an Evergreen//Forever subscription, Everpure was a no-brainer. As the cost of hardware has skyrocketed in recent years, the benefits of Evergreen//Forever have gotten bigger and bigger.”

Based on the strong performance of its FlashArray solutions for backup workloads, RC Willey decided to consolidate its production storage to the Everpure Platform. The company plans to replace the legacy storage systems in its primary data center with two FlashArray//XL™ solutions, configured for high availability using ActiveCluster™. The company will use ActiveDR to replicate all production data to a third FlashArray//XL solution at its disaster recovery site, eventually relocating its FlashArray//C solutions to act as additional backup targets.

“A couple of years ago, we had an experience where our endpoint protection tool pushed an update to all our virtual machines at the same time,” says Weiss. “The result was 50,000 IOPS on our legacy storage, which totally crushed the system. To put the FlashArray//XL to the test, we hammered it with 100GB file requests from all our physical and virtual hosts. We got all the way up to a million IOPS, and the solution never missed a beat—it was incredible.”

After a quick and easy first deployment, RC Willey has experienced the ease of managing and upgrading the Everpure Platform firsthand.

“We just went through our first Evergreen//Forever upgrade, moving from FlashArray//C50 to //C70 solutions,” recalls Weiss. “The whole process was totally seamless. The Everpure team came to swap in the new controllers, and there was zero impact on our normal operations. With Evergreen//Forever, we also have the security of knowing exactly what we will pay year after year.”

With Everpure and Veeam, RC Willey has a robust storage platform that helps it provide outstanding customer experiences while ensuring strong data protection and cyber resilience.

“We have a solution that is much more performant and has all the cybersecurity features that our auditors expect—all at a much lower cost compared to our previous vendor,” confirms Weiss. “With Everpure and Veeam, we’ve cut our recovery time objective from 40 minutes to just two minutes. At the moment, our recovery point objective is 15 minutes, but with ActiveDR we expect to cut that down to just seconds. When we combine that with immutable SafeMode™ Snapshots, we can all but eliminate the risk of data loss in a recovery scenario.”

RC Willey sees Veeam and Everpure as a winning combination for data resilience. Weiss says: “Veeam is a very powerful piece of software, but it cannot overcome the limitations of your storage; you need both to get the best results. By moving our backups to Everpure FlashArray, we’re unlocking the full speed and power of Veeam.”

One Veeam feature that RC Willey can now use to its full potential is Veeam Instant Recovery, which allows users to quickly spin up temporary production environments using backup storage. While RC Willey’s previous storage lacked the performance to enable Veeam Instant Recovery, Everpure enables the company to restore its operations in two minutes.

“I get a lot of requests from our database programmers asking us to restore specific chunks of data,” adds Weiss. “With Everpure FlashArray and Veeam Instant Recovery, I publish the database from the backup, they can pull the tables they need, and then I unpublish it again. It’s that simple.”

By continuously enhancing its IT environment with Everpure and Veeam, RC Willey is delivering the high-quality retail experiences that customers have come to expect.

“When you work with Everpure, you’re buying into a framework that really understands data storage and gives you built-in reliability and security,” concludes Weiss. “Everpure unlocks the ability to utilize the high-end analytics, recovery, and orchestration capabilities of Veeam. It brings us confidence in our daily operations—we don’t see a limit to the performance of the system.”