Whether your use case is analytics, AI, file and object, backup and restore, or business-critical workloads, Pure Storage® FlashBlade is designed to address them. FlashBlade is the industry-leading unified fast file and object (UFFO) storage platform. It delivers the elasticity, agility, and scalability you need to grow seamlessly. It enables you to respond and adapt to changing business and IT priorities. Read on to learn more about Evergreen Storage for FlashBlade.
FlashBlade Investment Protectionpoli
Pure’s Evergreen™ Storage subscription model provides you with the agility to acquire, run, grow, and modernize your storage. Protect your investment by eliminating the frequent rebuys that are typical with traditional legacy storage. If you’re an existing Pure customer, you’ve probably already benefited from Evergreen features through trade-in credits, especially if you use FlashArray™. But, did you know that FlashBlade users can also enjoy many of the benefits of Evergreen, including a formal trade-in program?
Capacity consolidation has been a feature of Evergreen Gold subscriptions for FlashArray since 2016. This offering is unique in the storage industry. When you replace less-dense flash media in your FlashArray with newer, denser flash, you get trade-in credit—up to 25% of the new purchase.
In 2019, we extended this concept to FlashBlade. Capacity consolidation for FlashBlade enables you to protect your existing investment as you continue to grow your deployment. You can take advantage of capacity consolidation for FlashBlade with a current Evergreen Silver subscription.
How Capacity Consolidation for FlashBlade Works
As you grow and modernize your FlashBlade infrastructure, you can trade in existing blades for newer, higher-capacity, denser ones. You’ll get trade-in credits to protect your original investment. Shrink your already-dense FlashBlade footprint even further while you expand and grow your capacity and workloads. And get up to 25% toward the cost of the new blades in trade-in credit for your old blades. That level of investment protection is almost unheard of in the storage industry—unless you’re a Pure customer.
Here’s a typical scenario. Let’s say you have a FlashBlade system with 60TB of raw capacity and you need to expand capacity. Your analytics workloads on FlashBlade are growing. Meanwhile, you’re finding new workloads, like fast backup and restore. With Capacity Consolidation for FlashBlade, you can trade in those original blades for higher-density ones, quadruple your storage in the same footprint, and get credit for the capacity you already own. In other words, you can increase from 60TB to more than 240TB in the same chassis and footprint. With a 25% credit for the blades you already own, you pay for only 180TB of the new 240TB capacity. The result: You don’t rebuy your original capacity. That’s investment protection that truly matches the agility of the FlashBlade scale-out platform.
FlashBlade, FlashArray, and Evergreen Storage
At the heart of FlashBlade’s unique scale-out architecture lies the blade, which combines compute, network, and DirectFlash® technology into one unit. You can simply hot-plug blades into the system to add capacity and performance. Combined with the Purity//FB operating system and an innovative converged fabric, this advanced architecture delivers performance that grows linearly. It’s built to scale to billions of files/objects and beyond. An elastic scale-out architecture at every level, FlashBlade expands with your data.
Because blades include both compute and flash storage, they scale capacity and performance together. This architecture differs from FlashArray, which has a discrete controller that you can upgrade to increase functionality, expand capacity limits, and scale performance.
FlashArray has controller-based upgrade programs (included in Evergreen Gold subscriptions) like Free Every Three and Upgrade Flex. They help you protect your investment while staying modern. Capacity Consolidation also delivers that same investment protection benefit to FlashArray, providing trade-in credits on flash media while you grow. We’ve taken the Capacity Consolidation concept and customized it to fit FlashBlade’s unique architecture which combines compute and flash. As your needs change and your FlashBlade expands, you can have investment protection along the way.
Evergreen Compared to Other Vendors’ Offers
No other major storage vendor has a program like Capacity Consolidation. There’s no published media (or blade) trade-in program like it that allows you to consolidate on denser flash. Pure’s Capacity Consolidation isn’t made up of vague promises of future trade-in credits with a value that the vendor will set later. Nor is it one-off side agreements that you need to repeatedly renegotiate. For example, Dell mentions a vague full-system trade-in policy (in other words, yet another forklift upgrade) for some of their systems, but don’t provide any public details on the value you will receive. For PowerStore, they promise regular intervals or Anytime Upgrades but have no public references of customers using it. We have >7000 controller upgrades via Evergreen and scores of public references.
Pure’s Evergreen Storage combines a flexible buying program with 100% non-disruptive product architecture. It’s designed to free you from the legacy storage approach of complex, risky, and expensive forklift upgrades. Evergreen started as a product architecture designed to enable continuous upgrades of storage components. It applies to blades in FlashBlade, or controllers, flash media in FlashArray, as well as backplane, chassis, cables, software—everything.
This Evergreen DNA at Pure runs deep. Our engineering teams are committed to delivering non-disruptive expansion and upgradability in our products. We want you to have the capability to constantly evolve in place instead of having to forklift-replace your storage every three to five years. Other storage vendors that offer legacy architectures haven’t made this level of commitment to non-disruptive technology.
With an Evergreen subscription, you get unparalleled value, flexibility, and peace of mind. Evergreen is more than just a sales or marketing program. It’s our way of doing business. It’s part of our philosophy of making your life as an IT professional simpler and easier. And it’s one of the reasons that Pure’s audited and certified net promoter score (NPS) is 83.5. That’s many times above the industry average and in the top 1% of Medallia-surveyed B2B scores.
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