Pure Storage announced new enhancements to its storage procurement and ownership model Evergreen Storage. The vendor added significant enhancements to the Evergreen Storage model, enabling customers to acquire, run and non disruptively upgrade storage now with investment protection.
First launched in early 2014, the Evergreen Storage model changed the traditional vendor maintenance and upgrade programmes by eliminating forklift upgrades and allowing customers to routinely upgrade the performance and scale of their array with modern controllers. Now, Pure Storage is expanding the vision of Evergreen beyond controllers and performance, to incorporate the rapid density and scale evolution of flash as a media.
The new Capacity Consolidation programme helps customers expanding their storage capacity to simultaneously consolidate older, less dense flash storage and receive trade in credit for that older storage, meaning customers do not have to go through the cycle of constantly re-buying storage they already own during upgrades. Additionally, with the new right size guarantee, customers can bypass the risk and guesswork of buying storage with data reduction and instead purchase directly on an effective capacity basis, just as their requirements indicate.
Compared to traditional solutions, Capacity Consolidation eliminates periodic and disruptive capacity re-buys by expanding and modernising the media in an existing array, online and with trade-in credit. Capacity Consolidation eliminates scale-up forklift re-buys, and scale out re-buys associated with aging nodes removed from their cluster. Customers install new capacity into their FlashArray, while the data on the older, consolidated capacity is automatically and non-disruptively migrated into the newer, denser capacity.
Evergreen Storage can deliver significant and ongoing savings of 33% or more, even assuming the same initial purchase price for competitive arrays, which can accelerate innovation across customer organisations. The underlying technology feature, called Shelf Evacuation, shows how Evergreen Storage combines purpose built technology and business model innovation.
Capacity Consolidation works in tandem with other Evergreen Storage offerings such as Upgrade Flex bundles. Customers can keep expanding their capacity and get both modern, denser flash as well as modern, higher performance controllers, without re-buying any of their storage.
Storage buyers want to buy effective capacity, without worrying about the potential of purchasing an undersized array due to thin provisioning, RAID protection, data reduction capabilities or any of the other variables behind that effective capacity outcome. With the right size guarantee, Pure Storage provides proper sizing and effective capacity outcome itself.
To define effective capacity requirements by workload, Pure Storage uses cloud based workload intelligence. This eliminates worries about data reduction and undersizing for unique data, even if it is non reducible. Pure will size an efficient array and guarantee the effective capacity result, backed by a six-month written guarantee to make it right with non disruptive, free additional flash to meet the customer’s specified needs.
“From the customer perspective, effective capacity is the only metric that matters,” said Matt Kixmoeller, Vice President, Products, Pure Storage. “By guaranteeing effective capacity for our customers, Pure eliminates risks associated with data reduction and simplifies the buying process so that they can purchase with confidence and begin transforming their business immediately. The right size guarantee is a simple, customer-friendly alternative to data reduction oriented guarantees and their associated risks and complexity.”
“The Evergreen Storage model represents a positive and much-needed shift in the industry, because it offers a way to reduce the pain and cost of the perpetual treadmill of storage hardware upgrades and data migration,” said Tim Stammers, Senior Analyst at 451 Research. “By adding Capacity Consolidation and the right size guarantee to the model, Pure is extending the potential to improve customers’ experience.”