Pure Storage: Evergreen Storage Service

Pure Storage, Inc. announced updates to its Evergreen Storage program

Starting now, customers can subscribe to the Evergreen Storage Service (ES2) for pay-per-use on-premises storage, as well as new Evergreen Gold and Silver benefits that extend the life of Pure’s existing Right-Size Guarantee with any capacity expansion – indefinitely.

Introducing Pure Evergreen Storage Service (ES2)
It applies a cloud-like approach to on-premises storage that eliminates the need for forklift technology rebuys and planned downtime. With ES2, organizations can leverage cloud-like, Storage-as-a-Service to adapt to fluctuating capacity requirements. It is of course Evergreen, which allows organizations to benefit from future innovations, implemented non-disruptively behind the scenes. It can be onboarded in days and offers customers a fully-elastic, scalable on-premises solution complete with tier-one, enterprise grade features. ES2 provides on-demand, enterprise-grade storage at up to 50% less than public cloud with proven reliability. It is available for terms as short as 12 months with a base commitment as low as 100TB effective.

“The Evergreen Storage program isn’t just a great customer service model, it’s a feat of engineering,” said Matt Harris, head, IT, Mercedes AMG Petronas Motorsport. “Pure has eliminated the most painful part of storage purchase and maintenance with arrays that were architected for the era of flash, cloud and machine learning. While legacy systems require full rip-and-replace upgrades every three-to-five-years, Pure has designed its arrays to easily integrate new features, capabilities and technologies – like NVMe – so that the benefits are passed along to our drivers immediately instead of several years down the line. In today’s highly-digital, fast-paced environment, Pure allows us to add competitive differentiation in real-time.“

Health Catalyst helps clinicians and technicians in 100 hospitals across the United States improve care by combining its data warehouse with a set of sophisticated analytic applications for more effective modeling of healthcare data. Given its growth and the fluctuating needs of its clients, it puts high value on flexibility. ES2 delivers the agility and flexibility benefits of public cloud, coupled with the resiliency, security, performance, and cost-effectiveness of tier-1 all-flash infrastructure.

“We were getting into a situation where we wanted to bring on new customers quickly, but the process of getting procurement authorization for additional storage imposed unacceptable delays,” said Dale Sanders, president, technology, Health Catalyst. “ES2 is a perfect fit for several reasons. It allows us to add additional storage capacity on-demand with little risk, like a public cloud, with a predictable pricing model that we can easily apply to the pricing we offered to our clients. And, it maintains all the benefits we have come to expect from Pure Storage arrays.“

Engineered to be purpose-built for flash, the firm’s arrays remain in place and online while software, controller and flash media updates upgrade system performance and capabilities as they become available.

“With their flexibility and pay-as-you-go pricing, cloud storage services are providing excellent options for IT organizations, but are still not able to deliver the enterprise-grade features that many business-critical workloads require,” said Eric Burgener, research VP, Storage, IDC. “Conventional on-premises infrastructure meets those needs better, but does not support the attractive flexibility, continuous technology refresh, or IASB 2019-compliant storage utility pricing models. With the introduction of the Evergreen Storage Service, Pure Storage has provided the best of both approaches, offering quick deployment, on-demand expansion, easy, non-disruptive technology refresh, and an OPEX pricing model for on-premises all-flash infrastructure that delivers six nines availability across their fleet and a full complement of enterprise data services.“

Additionally, enterprises and service providers can deploy ES2 on-premises or in colocation facilities such as Equinix, Inc., which provides the flexibility of supported hybrid cloud environments and enables direct connection to public clouds like AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

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Buy with confidence: Extends right-size guarantee
Customers can also extend the guaranteed effective capacity benefits of the ‘Right-Size Guarantee’ over the lifetime of their arrays with a six-month coverage extension as part of any capacity expansion. The ‘Right-Size-Guarantee’ is focused on guaranteeing effective capacity, and not merely data reduction or total efficiency. This focus on the effective capacity outcome ensures customers do not over-buy capacity, or end up with too little.

“Today, infrastructure requires flexibility, room for growth and the freedom to invest in new technologies confidently,” said Jason Nadeau, VP product marketing, Pure. “Pure’s Right-Size Guarantee ensures customers get the storage they need not only at initial purchase, but also over the Evergreen life of their array as they expand for long-term peace of mind. Evergreen allows customers to move beyond traditional data reduction, raw and usable terabyte complexity to focus on delivering cloud-like effective capacity to business applications, developers and data scientists.“

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Additional key components of Evergreen Storage program include:

All-inclusive array software. The software features are all-inclusive at the time of purchase, and also include access to any future array software features.
White-glove support. A higher level of support experience, including predictive support and 15-minute SLAs.
Free every three. Customers get the latest generation of FlashArray controllers included with every three-year Evergreen Gold renewal.
Upgrade flex. Customers can upgrade their array controllers whenever they need, with trade-in credit for older controllers towards new, upgraded controllers.
Capacity consolidation. Benefit from improved flash densities and increases in performance while keeping infrastructures modern with trade-in credit for previous generation flash media towards current generation media.

Customer momentum
Organizations across the world representing nearly every industry have taken advantage of Evergreen Storage to keep mission-critical infrastructure up and running through significant performance, capacity and feature upgrades.

By optimizing its infrastructure with the company, Cengage, Inc., an education and technology company, is able to offer its digital higher education course materials with high performance and reliability, while focusing on the overall value proposition for students. By offering learning tools at an affordable price point, including Cengage Unlimited subscriptions – which include ebooks, courseware and more, Cengage increases access to higher education while keeping its infrastructure armed with the latest solutions.

“With Evergreen Gold Upgrade Flex, we are able to extend the life of our storage frames while continuously upgrading performance through non-disruptive software and hardware upgrades. Not only is this a benefit to our students, but it allows us to free up resources that would normally be engaged with time-consuming migrations. And with Pure’s Evergreen architecture, we can depreciate our arrays over 10 years instead of the usual three or four. This means we realize better support and value for our investments and are better positioned to meet customer needs,” said David Hungler, VP, digital technology solutions, Cengage.

Picard, France’s frozen food retailer, chose FlashArray to accelerate business intelligence and improve the customer experience across its network of 920 stores.

“The faster we get Pure’s latest innovations into our data center, the faster we get our own to market,” said Ismaël Simoes, CTO, Picard. “Evergreen powers our business model – our storage has to keep up with our growth without a massive rebuy expense every few years. With Pure, we’ve had no disruption, no downtime and made no net-new purchases. Pure Storage delivered on its promise and proved we made the right choice.“

Resources:
Blog: Pure’s Evergreen Delivers Right-Sized Storage, Again and Again and Again
Blog: True OPEX storage for private, hybrid and multi-cloud
Read what our partners are saying about Pure Evergreen Storage Service (ES2).