Pure’s Earth Day Commitment: Sustainability for Customers and the Planet

With the recent publication of Pure Storage®’s inaugural ESG report and the celebration of Earth Day on April 22, it’s the perfect time to highlight Pure’s commitments toward a better future for our planet, as well as the ways our products and services enable customers to make a difference for the environment.

One of the many things that sets Pure apart is our mission to deliver products that not only exceed our customer’s expectations for performance, reliability, and simplicity but also for energy consumption and space efficiency. Simply put, Pure’s products and flexible consumption services allow customers to achieve significantly lower energy consumption, cooling costs, and GHG emissions. For us, building products the right way means doing right by our planet, which is also a win for our customers both inside and outside their data centers.

Sustainable Products and Services

From a product perspective, Pure is leading the way in sustainability for storage and data management because of the technologies we’ve developed and design decisions we’ve implemented:

• DirectFlash® technology delivers unparalleled density and efficiency from flash, driving significant energy reductions above what is possible with SSDs. In as few as three rack units, FlashArray™ can provide more than 1.3 PB1 of effective capacity while delivering sub-1ms IO response times.
• Built-for-flash software combined with DirectFlash technology deliver more reliable products, longer service lifetimes, and three times the industry average SSD reliability—dramatically reducing e-waste.
• Always-on data reduction further enhances storage efficiency, reducing effective energy usage without compromising performance. Because there are none of the performance trade-offs typically associated with competitive storage data reduction capabilities, Pure customers can realize the full efficiency and lower emissions benefits from their storage.
• Our ethos of delivering performance and simplicity allows customers to consolidate their IT environments, reduce their overall storage footprint, and drive higher utilization and reuse.

In addition, Pure’s industry-leading product services and flexible consumption options enable our customers to reduce their environmental impact and achieve greater energy efficiency:

Evergreen™ Storage Advantage

Pure’s Evergreen Storage Architecture extends sustainability further by allowing us to continually improve technology and seamlessly deliver new software and hardware components when customers need to upgrade or expand their storage needs—and we deliver this through our Evergreen Subscription service. Simply put, Evergreen leverages Pure’s modular, upgradeable architecture and brings many of the benefits of the cloud operating model to an on-premises storage purchase. 

Evergreen delivers two key environmental benefits to our customers:

• Reduction of wasted energy: Through Evergreen non-disruptive upgrades, customers can upgrade in place vs. the months-to-years-long process typically required to perform a migration, during which time both the old and new arrays are running and consuming energy. 
• Reduction of e-waste: Continual upgrade of array components also eliminates the industry’s traditional method of upgrading storage by replacing (and junking) existing whole systems. The longer lifespan of our DirectFlash Modules—which are proprietary to Pure—coupled with our Evergreen Subscription of continuous upgrades, significantly reduces e-waste.

Flexible Consumption-based Storage

Pure as-a-Service™ extends on the Evergreen architecture and subscription to deliver storage to customers based on capacity and performance service-level agreements (SLQs), as opposed to a pre-configured product. 

Pure as-a-Service allows us to deliver two key environmental benefits:

• Reducing the energy and waste of underutilized equipment: By flexing up and down only as capacity is needed, Pure as-a-Service can reduce underutilization. Compared to traditional purchasing models where three to five years of capacity and performance is deployed in advance and sits underutilized (often for years), Pure as-a-Service allows us to serve customers with only the resources they need and to expand as their consumption grows.
• Reuse and redeployment of equipment, further extending service lifetimes: We can right-size the equipment necessary to meet each particular SLA, in some cases repurposing previously used equipment, extending the effective service lifetimes of a physical piece of equipment and significantly reducing waste.

The Win-Win for Pure Customers

All these benefits sound great, but how big of a win are we talking about? How do Pure customers’ energy savings translate in terms of sustainability? 

To answer these questions, we used the U.S. EPA calculator to calculate equivalents for the annual CO2 emissions reduction (52.7 kilotons C02) for a single FlashArray compared to equivalent storage products: 

A 52.7 kilotons reduction of CO2 emissions per FlashArray is comparable to:

• Charging 6,416,650 smartphones
• Consuming 122 barrels of oil

This is equivalent to the amount of greenhouse gas emissions avoided by:

• Replacing 1,999 incandescent lamps with LED bulbs

This is equivalent to the CO2 offset from:

• 62.4 acres of U.S. forests in one year

And with Pure’s Evergreen upgradeable storage architecture, these savings should continue even further into the future since the useful life of our products is typically two to three times that of competing storage. As part of the goal to also reduce Scope 3 emissions, Pure is committing to further reducing our sold products emissions by 66% per petabyte. Competitive storage products were simply not designed with the same focus on energy efficiency, modularity, and sustainability.   

For e-waste savings, the story for Pure customers is also a winning one. Based on upgrade and repurposing rates, approximately 14 tons of e-waste per year avoids being sent to landfills annually. This is accomplished by: 

• Consolidating storage (onto fewer, larger DirectFlash media) into existing racks.
• Swapping new controllers into the same physical chassis. 
• Partial re-use of returned controllers for internal lab infrastructure, testing, analysis, and long-term reliability studies.

Conclusion 

Designing products that enable our customers to gain winning advantages inside and outside of their data centers is the result of meticulous design and unwavering dedication to innovation. The efficiencies we’ve highlighted here are part of Pure’s overall initiatives across environmental, social, and governance for our company. 

To learn more about Pure’s industry-leading products and services and how they’re contributing toward a sustainable future for our planet, read the full ESG report. If you have any questions about our ESG programs or the report, contact ESG@purestorage.com.

¹Assumes average customer data reduction rate of 5:1.