It’s been a wild five-plus years driving the all-flash enterprise storage disruption here at Pure Storage. When we first came out of stealth and introduced the Pure Storage FlashArray to the world in 2011, we defined a new “recipe” for how all-flash storage could be engineered to be mainstream adoptable, capable of replacing Tier 1 disk and unlocking new levels of IT and business transformation. At first we were doubted, but eventually we succeeded in defining a vision for the industry that many are now attempting to follow. Pure Storage is taking advantage of the flash transition to re-imagine and re-invent almost everything about how the storage industry works, from products to services to business model.
Today, we at Pure Storage are making our most important announcement since our original product introduction. We’re announcing three new things: FlashArray//m, our new flagship FlashArray which delivers end-to-end software and hardware innovation, Pure1, our new cloud-based platform which unifies and modernizes the support and management experience, and Evergreen Storage, a better model for storage acquisition and ownership. Taken together these innovations will re-define your expectations of what enterprise storage, and an enterprise storage company, can and should be.
Business and IT Transformation, Delivered
Flash can help make your business faster and smarter. At Shutterfly, Pure Storage improved site performance by 500% during their busiest traffic times. At Nielsen Ratings (best known for their Nielsen ratings around major events like the Super Bowl), Pure Storage enabled their customers to run ratings reports 6x faster by reducing latency. Faster storage can have some surprising business impacts, like a global medical device manufacturer, who used faster and more in-depth inventory analytics to reduce inventory on-hand by 5 days, resulting in savings expected to exceed $100M by deploying FlashArray! It can also help you be more innovative and create new services, like SurveyMonkey who used the FlashArray to help introduce a new survey product with never before accessible analytics for a competitive advantage.
Just as impactful, flash can save you money in IT, freeing even more budget to invest in innovation. This often surprises people, as flash was historically viewed as expensive (before Pure Storage, that is). Sierra Nevada brewery, for example, saved over $200,000 by reducing data center space by 50% and power by 90%, all while transforming their IT organization into a cloud architecture. Spectocor, a cardiac monitoring company, seamlessly implemented high-performance virtual desktops and doubled the productivity of it’s highest-cost personnel while improving their mobility and compute experience. On average, we estimate that for every Tier 1 array that is replaced with a FlashArray, customers can save $500K in total costs, and free-up the productivity of ½ a person to focus on more strategic projects.
These are just a few examples of the dramatic business and IT transformation that Pure Storage is helping our customers worldwide achieve, and today’s announcements are going to help put this success into over-drive.
Our Next Wave of Storage Innovation
When we think about innovation here at Pure, we try to innovate in three dimensions: technology, customer experience, and business model. Today’s announcements create a substantially better-looking future for storage users and buyers:
- Evergreen Storage. Let’s start with the model. At Pure we challenged ourselves to imagine a world where the wasteful 3-5 year storage forklift upgrade merry-go-round was put to rest, and where a storage product could add value in a customer datacenter for a decade or more. We call that model Evergreen Storage, and uniquely deliver it by combining our FlashArray’s software-defined, modular, and upgradable architecture with our Forever Flash business model that includes periodic controller upgrades as part of predictably-flat maintenance & support. Once you experience Evergreen Storage, we believe you’ll never want to own any other kind. We invite you to read more about Evergreen Storage in-depth, and learn more about our vision.
- FlashArray//m. Pure Storage originally set our sights on delivering the most innovative, purpose-built software for flash, and so we built a software-defined FlashArray (leveraging best-of-breed 3rd party hardware) that set the standard for all-flash functionality and efficiency. But we realized that deeper innovation was possible, and that we could substantially raise the bar in almost every dimension if we could marry our leading software with the perfect hardware, designed for flash and optimized end-to-end. So two years ago we started the FlashArray//m project, and married our maniacal focus on software innovation with a top-notch hardware engineering team. FlashArray//m represents the first 100% in-house designed hardware platform from Pure Storage, and we believe the first all-flash array with hardware and software designed end-to-end for flash. The result is a new bar for efficiency and simplicity in Tier 1 storage. We invite you to learn more about what makes FlashArray//m special, and to meet the FlashArray//m team:
- Pure1. The storage industry has conditioned customers to expect and tolerate a level of complexity that is fundamentally unreasonable, and nowhere is this more evident than the storage management and support experience. Pure saw an opportunity to use technology and big data, embrace mobility, and leverage a cloud/SaaS-based model to re-think storage management and support completely. We wanted to set a new bar for proactivity in the support experience that shifts the burden from the customer back to where it should be: the vendor. If Pure takes on more and more of the “management” burden of arrays – then the line between management and support blurs, and a common platform for the two becomes obvious. Today we’re introducing Pure1, a new cloud-based platform for global management and support of FlashArrays. Our Pure1 journey is just beginning, we’d like to tell you more about our vision, and show you the new Pure1:
Pure Transformation
So drop in and explore what’s new, because we believe that, taken together, these announcements represent a radical leap forward in the Tier 1 storage ownership experience. One of the most gratifying things about the journey at Pure thus far, is that beyond our own customer’s successes, we believe we’ve challenged the industry, and as a result the entire storage industry has upped their game for the benefit of all customers. We hope today’s announcements raise that bar a good deal higher.
And if you’d like to join us LIVE today from New York City, you can watch the live stream of our launch event here. You can also meet us over the next month in one of 50 cities worldwide to get a first hands-on introduction to the FlashArray//m, register here today.
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