Pure Storage has come up with a novel way to help customers make the decision to keep their storage on-premise: they’ll pay them for the space and power that the systems will use.
This means customers are effectively paying for just the consumption of storage capacity – so they get many of the benefits of using cloud-based storage while retaining their data onsite, says Daniel Teixeira, systems engineer at Pure Storage.
This is just one of the announcements being made today at Pure Storage’s annual conference in Johannesburg.
The company is also helping companies upgrade without pain.
New technology is being developed all the time, but when it comes to upgrading their storage, businesses have to balance their need for uptime with the desire to migrate to better solutions.
Pure Storage has made this quandary a thing of the past with non-disruptive upgrades, whereby customers can simply failover the data from the old system on to the new one. The old one is then removed to be reused or recycled, and the customer continues working with all the benefits of the newer technology.
Daniel Teixeira, systems engineer at Pure Storage, points to the example of one customers that has used eight different generations of Pure storage over the last 10 years – each move involving a no-forklift upgrade that maintained 99,9999% uptime throughout the upgrade and maintenance process.
Over that time, the customer has increased storage capacity and storage density by 73x, gained a 13x performance increase while using 19x less power/TB. They have migrated through 24 software releases and eight generations of hardware.
“We believe no other vendor can do this,” Teixeira says.
In addition, with Pure Storage’s Evergreen offering, warranties, services and subscriptions never expire.
New storage as a service offerings
The company has introduced its Evergreen portfolio together with a commitment to pay customers’ power and rack space costs for the Evergreen//One Storage as-a-Service (STaaS) and Evergreen//Flex subscriptions.
For years legacy STaaS vendors have packaged the same capex solutions on an opex basis, ignoring what it means to deliver a true service. What enterprises want from STaaS are SLA-based outcomes that not only optimise IT budgets and spending but also optimise labour, while furthering security, sustainability, and agility goals.
Pure Storage first disrupted the storage ownership experience with the introduction of its Evergreen architecture in 2015 and has since grown its storage subscription portfolio to meet each customer where they are. In 2018, Pure Storage launched Evergreen//One, the industry’s first true enterprise STaaS offering, delivered and managed via unique SLAs and guarantees. In 2022, Pure Storage introduced Evergreen//Flex, combining storage ownership with fleet-level consumption economics.
Now, Pure Storage has committed to pay its customers’ power and rack space costs, aligning total cost of ownership (TCO) savings and long-term efficiency goals.
The company also unveiled its new No Data Migration, Zero Data Loss, and Power and Space Efficiency guarantees, coupled with flexible upgrades and financing, across the Evergreen portfolio.
The announcement includes:
- Paid power and rack commitment: Pure Storage will pay for its customers’ power and rack space through an Evergreen//One Storage as-a-Service (STaaS) and Evergreen//Flex subscription to take responsibility for the associated costs of power and rack unit to run our offerings. By eliminating the growing challenges of managing rising electricity costs and rack unit space, Pure Storage further exemplifies what it means to offer a true, seamless cloud experience, on premises. The one-time, upfront payment can be made directly as cash or via service credits, is based on kilowatt per hour (kWh) and Rack Unit (RU) fixed rates, and is proportional to the customer’s geographic location and contract size.
- Power and space efficiency guarantee: While Evergreen//One and Evergreen//Flex customers benefit from a paid power and rack commitment, expanded guarantees support customers who opt to own their storage via an Evergreen//Forever subscription, further establishing Pure Storage as the most innovative subscription portfolio in the enterprise storage industry. The Power and Space Efficiency Guarantee supports Evergreen//Forever customers’ efforts to consume less power and store more data with less space, reduce energy costs, and report more accurately with transparent measurement of actual Watts per tebibyte (TiB). If the guaranteed Watts/TiB or TiB/Rack is not met, Pure Storage will cover the tab. The Energy Efficiency guarantee is already available as an Evergreen//One SLA.
- Future-proof business guarantees: With new No Data Migration and Zero Data Loss guarantees for Evergreen//One (SLA), Evergreen//Flex, and Evergreen//Forever, Pure Storage empowers its customers to mitigate unplanned costs due to data loss incidents, while maintaining day-to-day business operations amid upgrades. With the Zero Data Loss guarantee, Pure assures data protection with advanced data recovery services for any hardware or software product-related incidents, at no cost. With the No Data Migration guarantee, Pure ensures seamless technology upgrades with no data migrations, reducing customers’ overall risk exposure, cost of ownership, and e-waste. In fact, Pure’s Evergreen architecture extends equipment life up to 10 years or more.
- Flexible upgrades and financing: Pure eliminates the need for major upgrades while providing customers with more choice. Pure’s Ever Agile program now includes a capacity plus controller trade-in delivered at up to 20% lower price than new controller costs. Meanwhile, the Capacity Consolidation program now includes expanded capacity trade-in credits valued at up to 50%. The latest updates, available via Evergreen//Forever, give customers flexible access to the latest innovations in performance, density, and energy efficiency. Additionally, with extended STaaS financing options for Evergreen//One, customers also gain flexibility in the procurement and deployment of Evergreen//One.
DRaaS solutions
Pure Storage has also debuted critical new data resilience offerings, including the introduction of Pure Protect//DRaaS, a unique Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solution, new energy efficiency guarantees for its Evergreen portfolio, and scalable AI-powered storage services via its Pure1 management platform to global enterprises.
With the introduction of consumption-based disaster recovery via Pure Protect, a unique data resilience scoring system via Pure1, and updates to Evergreen subscriptions that include a new Paid Power and Rack commitment, Pure Storage enables enterprises to adopt a complete, end-to-end storage strategy that assures data resilience, reduces labour costs, accelerates sustainability initiatives, and delivers unrivaled TCO benefits.
The rate of devastating ransomware attacks and the increasing frequency of natural disasters are upending business continuity more often each day. While many organisations recognise the importance of a disaster recovery (DR) plan, current DR solutions on the market are complex, expensive, and disruptive.
Likewise, the current energy crisis, new environmental regulations, and ethical imperatives to improve corporate sustainability have led companies to set ambitious net-zero goals, but reckoning with the typical data centre’s power demands has remained challenging. And, with digitisation at scale and data proliferation and fragmentation, end-to-end operations management further aggravates the skill and budget shortages for IT.
The introduction of Pure Protect //DRaaS and updates to the Pure Storage Evergreen portfolio not only address these critical industry pain points, but also set new milestones for customer-centricity with compelling guarantees.
Highlights of the announcement include:
- Assured data resilience: Pure Storage enables enterprises everywhere to maximise data protection with a complete, multi-layered data resilience strategy built from the ground up. With intrinsic data protection built into its Evergreen architecture via ActiveDR, ActiveCluster, and SafeMode Snapshot capabilities, Pure Storage has now expanded data resilience with new trusted operations capabilities and a new disaster recovery service, including Pure Protect //DRaaS, Data Resilience Score, and a Zero Data Loss Guarantee.
- Enhanced service experience, everywhere: With Pure Storage’s AI-powered asset and lifecycle management services and policy-based automation, customers can achieve operational excellence, anywhere and on any scale. Solutions include asset management and genealogy, subscription lifecycle operations, policy-driven upgrades and the PureOne Mobile App.