Today, you can go online and purchase movie tickets (or pretty much anything else) without having to read a manual. Similarly, you can buy a (smart) phone and intuitively know how to use it right away. And, with the click of a button, online maps easily take you to your destination in a reliable fashion.
Yet, with many IT products and storage products in particular, you have to rely on 1000s of pages of manuals, complicated tuning, and constant monitoring to keep things working and optimized.
Imagine if your storage were so simple, intuitive, and reliable that you barely even thought about it – let alone had to read (and re-read) manuals. Complex and tedious storage administration would become a relic of the past. Freedom and innovation would follow. You would get your nights and weekends back, and jump into higher value-add projects (think private cloud automation, DevOps, or even data science) — driving innovation for your business while enhancing your career. We call that the Effortless advantage!
Our founder John “Coz” Colgrove had a vision to deliver such an advantage.
Why Effortless Matters
Businesses are adopting the Cloud IT model to deliver the agility that digital transformation requires. Complexity is the antithesis of agility. IT must therefore eradicate the underlying complexity and the management frameworks that (partially) mask that complexity. Organizations that fail to remove complexity and remain slow can face an existential threat. Similarly, organizations that gain agility can achieve a competitive advantage.
With every storage vendor touting solutions that are “simple”, storage users and buyers must carefully evaluate alternatives to identify if the simplicity offered is merely a superficial value proposition, or if it actually makes your life significantly easier. Legacy architectures that have been retrofitted to address the demands of the all-flash digital age still fail to deliver the agility required. In contrast, storage solutions that do deliver the agility demanded by the Cloud IT model have been architected with an effortless framework from the ground up.
The Pure Effortless Advantage
At Pure, we design storage specifically for Cloud IT and with an effortless design center. The resulting experience is one that our customers absolutely love. In fact, our effortless customer experience is one of the key reasons that Pure Storage has achieved a Satmetrix-certified NPS (Net Promoter Score) of 85.2, which ranks in the top 1% of B2B companies. An effortless experience also means that our customers can actually focus on innovation rather than administration.
HOW EFFORTLESS IS DELIVERED
Always-On, Always-Fast
With Pure, the effortless experience starts with reliability. In the first year since we shipped it, FlashArray//M has delivered enterprise-proven 99.9999% availability – inclusive of upgrades and maintenance, and without requiring a second array configured with replication. Watch how Pure re-defines six-nines availability.
Even better, full performance remains available through failure, upgrades, and maintenance. Your application workloads remain available and fast, making it safe to perform upgrades during normal business hours. Checkout non-disruptive upgrades in action here and learn more here.
Goodbye downtime. Goodbye maintenance windows. Goodbye performance troubleshooting.
Self-Managing and Plug-N-Play
The appliance-like install of FlashArray//M takes 30 minutes or less – one chassis, 6 cables to install. We designed the install experience to be so easy even a 10-year old can do it. How do we know? Our founder Coz made sure his own son could install an array without issues (with some grownup help lifting it of course!).
The web-based graphical user interface is simple and intuitive, and practically no tuning is required at any layer (storage, file system, virtual machine, or database). That means provisioning a storage volume takes seconds – not hours – and can be performed without requiring a manual or any specialized training or costly professional services. In fact, anyone can manage the FlashArray. Everything you need to know to manage and troubleshoot the array fits onto a tent card (think two business cards front and back).
Goodbye lengthy installs. Goodbye complex provisioning. Goodbye tuning. Goodbye RAID, pool, aggregate, cache, and controller-to-LUN mapping management.
The Pure FlashArray is always-secure with your data encrypted at all times and without requiring key management or configuration. A single global pool of flash combined with 512-Byte variable block metadata means the FlashArray delivers high and consistent performance to consolidated mixed application workloads. Advanced data services such as disaster recovery (DR) are built-in (no external controllers or a-la-carte software fees).
Goodbye encryption key management or performance impact with encryption switched ON. Goodbye tiering or performance tuning. Goodbye component-level performance monitoring. Goodbye external controllers or exorbitant disaster recovery software tax.
FlashArray//M is integrated, automated, optimized and connected with what matters in your data center. Comprehensive virtualization integration means you can manage the FlashArray however you like, including directly from within VMware vCenter. It’s automated and orchestrated with VMware vRealize, SRM, vROPS, Cisco, OpenStack, and more. A full REST API and Python automation toolkit are also available. Pre-validation along with best practices captured in Reference Architecture documents and even Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs) enable a plug-n-play application-optimized experience across common applications. Pre-built connectors to infrastructure add to the effortless experience.
Goodbye complex integration and partial automation.
As you can see, once the array has been set up, there really isn’t much else to do. It’s storage that just works. If your attention is needed, we’ll let you know..
Cloud-Connected
Pure Storage arrays are cloud-connected and phone-home rich telemetry data every 30 seconds. Pure1, our SaaS-based monitoring platform, builds on this foundation and delivers insights about the health and performance of the arrays, accessible from anywhere, via any smart device without having to purchase and install management servers or on-prem software.
Pure1 provides an intuitive, card-based view for global monitoring and reporting of your fleet of Pure arrays. Performance and predictive capacity analytics make planning a snap. Simply select a linear forecast or a representative period and let Pure1 predict if or when your array will run out of capacity. Native mobile application and support ticket integration make the experience even more effortless.
Of course, when you have an array that is always-on and always-fast, you’ll find that you don’t feel the pressure to constantly monitor the health of the arrays. Customers often report that they haven’t had to login to the array or Pure1 for months.
Goodbye monitoring. Goodbye purchasing, installing, and maintaining management servers.
When you buy a Pure array, you not only get an array, but you also extend your team with our team. Armed with real-time telemetry data, our support team is uber-proactive. They monitor on your behalf and take proactive action to remediate any issues that are discovered.
Pure1 Global Insight combines predictive analytics and machine learning to deliver a new support level: Predictive Support. Similar to anti-virus scanning, the logs from the Pure arrays are continuously scanned in the cloud against a library of “fingerprints” (ie. early symptoms of an issue). If there’s a match, the array may be susceptible to the underlying issue and support is automatically notified for proactive remediation before the issue occurs on the array.
A key ingredient in delivering 99.9999% availability, Pure1 Global Insight has led to over 7,700 issues being automatically identified and resolved, and over 170 sev1 issues prevented to date.
You can read part1 and part2 of the blog series as well as watch the lightboard series to dig deeper into the value and learn how predictive support analytics work.
Goodbye downtime. Goodbye reading the release notes.
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In the age of online and mobile maps, you would not think about using paper road maps. With the availability of smartphones, dial phones are fading into memory. In the Cloud IT model, you would not, and cannot, tolerate complex storage or any other significant source of complexity. Cloud IT needs storage that just works and Pure delivers that effortless advantage. Hello Innovation.
So, what would you do with all the free time? Would love to hear from you.
