Our early vision starting in 2009 was to lead the charge to replace disk with all-flash. Fast forward to today, and all-flash is the new normal. Customers are largely deploying “flash-first” for new deployments, and offerings are available (some retrofit, some purpose-built) from all of the relevant players in storage. So where to next, what continues to make Pure different, and where are we focusing our innovation?
It’s helpful to think about smartphones as an analogy. They totally reset the bar on what a “phone” meant. While adding flash to the phone was a key catalyst for that, it was much more about re-inventing every dimension of the phone experience – software, hardware, apps, and cloud-connected services. And today, you just think of your “phone”, not your “smartphone” – it’s the new normal. In exactly the same way, we are redefining the entire category of storage with a radically better end-to-end experience, with flash simply as the catalyst.
And so we’re super excited to share what makes the Pure Storage experience so different from the rest of the pack. Simply put – we’re delivering Smart Storage for Cloud IT. We’ve created an experience purpose-built for the new cloud operating model of IT, which demands that infrastructure behaves like a service – operating as an agile resource pool that is easy to consume and scale and just keeps getting better.
EFFORTLESS, EFFICIENT, AND EVERGREEN
Smart Storage for Cloud IT is built on three core beliefs – Effortless, Efficient, and Evergreen. These beliefs are a sort-of manifesto that sets the criteria for everything we do, today and into the future. We’re really proud of the innovation we’ve already delivered in these areas and are working on a ton of cool stuff that pushes the envelope – and you’ll hear about that coming innovation in every episode of our new web series Outside the Box. Not just what we’re doing, but how we think about it, why we made the choices we did, and considerations for the future.
So let’s get into the specifics of Effortless, Efficient, and Evergreen to give you a sense for how we are redefining the storage experience.
EFFORTLESS: STORAGE THAT JUST WORKS
Effortless starts with reliability, with storage that is always on, always fast, and always secure. Imagine getting 6 nines or better availability – inclusive of maintenance and upgrades! Effortless is a lot better than just easy. It can only happen when you completely eradicate all manner of complexity and tasks designed to manage that complexity – cruft that’s built-up in the storage experience for 20+ years. No more tuning, storage pools, caching, tiering, performance troubleshooting, planned downtime, forklift upgrades and more. It means storage that manages itself and only involves you when absolutely needed, and that just plugs & plays with your environment. It’s a storage array experience that’s never farther away than the mobile app in your pocket. Effortless is also fully cloud-connected, with management, analytics, support, and protection delivered as a service, where big-data driven insights from our global installed base are continuously improving your storage. Imagine storage that automatically snaps and backs up your data, whether to a lower-cost flash tier or to a cloud service – giving you application consistent recovery anytime, anywhere, at the click of a button.
What does Effortless look like in practice today? One global bank has over 5 PB of Pure, with more than 50 of our arrays – and one admin. That freed up others to focus on strategic projects that move the needle for the bank. That’s a win for the bank and a win for the team as they expand and build their resumes and skillsets up the stack. And a Fortune 100 pharma giant with 20+ arrays improved their IT-wide availability metrics from 97% to >99% – and everyone got their bonuses for the first time in 3 years!
EFFICIENT: STORAGE THAT DOES MORE
Efficiency is about collapsing your storage tiers and consolidating all your data, whether block or file, structured or unstructured, into efficient all-flash storage that takes 10X less space, power, and cooling. Imagine a data center storage footprint so small you could cost-effectively locate it in another hosted facility, perhaps even co-located with public cloud compute services (for example with Equinix) to get a best-of-both worlds cloud! Efficient also means that all your storage data services are zero-compromise. Data reduction, encryption, QoS, snapshots, replication and so on – you get all the benefits, all the time, with no trade-offs. Efficient is fully automatable and extensible, so you can fully integrate your storage into an on-demand catalog of cloud IT services, enabling your developers to spin-up VMs and databases instantly at will. Imagine on-prem IT with agility equal to or better than any public cloud – all under your own control.
What does Efficient look like in practice? Nielsen consolidated 50 racks of hybrid disk onto 5 racks of Pure, and radically boosted their customer analytics, now delivering customer insights hourly instead of just daily. Tribune Media consolidated 54 data center’s worth of storage into 7 racks with Pure. And they’ve delivering 100% self service IT to their internal customers using Pure + vRealize, at half the cost of public cloud alternatives.
EVERGREEN: STORAGE THAT GETS BETTER WITH AGE
And finally, Evergreen™ Storage is about applying a cloud-like approach to storage that lives on prem, enabling you to simply subscribe to a storage experience that keeps getting better with age. Imagine buying your storage once, and upgrading it as needed forever, all without any disruption, and without rebuying any TBs you already own*. Evergreen means you can frequently harness rapid software, hardware, and flash innovation – annually or even faster – with no need to wait for your 4-5 year refresh to get the latest and greatest. Just like SaaS, Evergreen is an all-inclusive subscription model purpose-built for cloud IT — just stay on active maintenance and support. Imagine being able to consume storage with your choice of CAPEX or OPEX, with flex up and down just like a cloud, and with pricing that always reflects the typically 50% lower 6-year ownership costs that come as a result of the non-disruptive, no-rebuy Evergreen model.
And what does Evergreen look like in practice? We’ve completely eliminated the forklift upgrade and the expense, risk, and waste that goes along with it. Here’s an example of what owning a Pure Storage array for the past five years has looked like:
Imagine owning the same array and increasing your capacity by 53X and performance by 5X in five years, evolving across four hardware generations, all in-place and without disruption, performance hit, or data migration, and while never losing your initial storage investment!
Red Hawk Casino was an early adopter of Pure deploying their first FlashArray in 2013 who has gone on this journey. Since then, they’ve seamlessly and non-disruptively upgraded to two subsequent FlashArray generations – without any storage re-buys. They have a modern, cloud-like infrastructure that is staying modern, and saving an independently verified 30-40% in CAPEX for storage upgrades.
IT’S TIME FOR A NEW NORMAL
Smart Storage for Cloud IT is about redefining the entire storage experience as only Pure can, by making it Effortless, Efficient, and Evergreen. Hopefully this post illustrates not only how much better that experience is already, but also how our vision will continue to drive innovation – for you – into the future. To learn more about how we’re delivering Smart Storage today, including with our next generation FlashArray//m, check out our product pages.
With our customers giving us a Satmetrix-certified Net Promoter Score (NPS) in the top 1% of B2B companies, it’s clear they are enjoying that experience immensely. Want to feel it for yourself? Call us today – and accelerate your new normal!
*See the Evergreen Storage Program Terms for more details.
