Pure Storage Enhanced Evergreen Storage

Pure Storage, Inc. announced enhancements to EvergreenStorage – the storage procurement and ownership model that has changed the storage industry.

The company added enhancements to the Evergreen storage model, enabling customers to acquire, run and non-disruptively upgrade storage now with even more comprehensive investment protection.

First launched in early 2014, the Evergreen Storage model revolutionized traditional vendor maintenance and upgrade programs by eliminating forklift upgrades and allowing customers to routinely upgrade the performance and scale of their array with modern controllers. Now, Pure is expanding the vision of Evergreen beyond controllers and performance, to incorporate the density and scale evolution of flash as a media.

The Capacity Consolidation program 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 can break free of the cycle of constantly re-buying storage they already own during upgrades. Additionally, with the 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.

“With the new Evergreen Storage, Pure has taken another significant step in making the lives of its customers easier, which translates to direct benefit for our guests,” said Matthew Morgan, VP, information technology, Red Hawk Casino. “The expanded Evergreen model eliminates the risky and expensive hardware upgrade cycle, and also means that we’ll never have to worry about our capacity requirements not being met. That’s transformational for both our operations as well as our bottom line.“

“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, 451 Research. “By adding Capacity Consolidation and the Right-Size Guarantee to the model, Pure is extending the potential to improve customers’ experience.“

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Right-size guarantee
Proven data reduction ensures customers get efficient, cost-effective storage. But storage buyers want to buy effective capacity – not worry 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, the company guarantees the proper sizing and effective capacity outcome itself.

Customers work with Pure and our partners to define effective capacity requirements by workload. Behind the scenes, the company uses cloud-based workload intelligene to size the right array for the job. This eliminates worries about data reduction and undersizing for unique data, even if it is non-reducible. The firm will size a 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, VP, 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.“

Capacity Consolidation
With Capacity Consolidation, company’s customers can rest assured that their infrastructure can scale to handle exploding data growth by periodically upgrading to denser, more modern flash without paying for the same terabyte twice.

Compared to traditional solutions, Capacity Consolidation eliminates periodic and disruptive capacity re-buys by expanding and modernizing 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 ongoing savings of 33% or more, even assuming the same initial purchase price for competitive arrays – which can accelerate innovation across customer organizations.

The underlying technology feature is called Shelf Evacuation, and is another example of how Evergreen Storage combines purpose-built technology and business model innovation to deliver simpler, easier, and more cost efficient storage.

“After a recent upgrade the new FlashArray//m series from Pure, we found ourselves with more storage than required to meet production needs,” said Jamey Wofford, senior network engineer, County of Muskegon. “At the same time, the Pure Storage array at our DR site required additional storage. With Pure’s new Shelf Evacuation capability, we were able to consolidate data right into our production chassis and move the newly emptied shelf to our DR site. A true simple and cost-effective solution, just what we’ve come to expect from Pure.“

Capacity Consolidation works in tandem with other Evergreen Storage offerings such as Upgrade Flex bundles. Customers can keep expanding their capacity and get both denser flash as well as higher performance controllers, without re-buying any of their storage.

“Pure’s Evergreen Storage model completely changed the way our clients think about value when considering their storage,” said Jason Anderson, chief architect, Datalink Corp. “The enhanced Evergreen Storage program completes the picture, providing our clients with simple, straightforward storage acquisitions and upgrades through the entire life of their workloads, reducing risk and guaranteeing investment protection.“

What technology alliance ecosystem saying about Evergreen Storage