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Pure Storage® users have known for years just how easy their lives can be, once they move from complex legacy storage systems to self-driving Pure FlashArray™ systems. And now, they have some hard numbers to back up just how much that effortless storage experience is saving them.

Forrester Consulting produced a Total Economic Impact (TEI) study* in June of this year, looking closely at the real-world savings that Pure users enjoy, especially when compared to traditional storage with its complicated installation, maintenance and upgrade procedures.

Pure Storage Saves Money—to the Tune of over Half a Million Dollars

This is mainly due to reductions in the number of dedicated storage personnel and costs associated with setting up their storage, keeping it running, and modernizing it. Users say they require less than half the dedicated storage infrastructure staff as they did before moving to Pure FlashArray. And they have virtually eliminated downtime of any kind, planned or unplanned. Those are the kinds of results that can help drive not only better IT efficiencies, but also help to fund truly value-add projects that drive the business.

In webinar from 2019, guest speaker Joe Branca of Forrester Consulting explained how this TEI demonstrates the positive impact Pure can have on an organization. Here are some of the key findings.

3 Ways Pure Storage Saves Money

Easier to deploy storage and add capacity

In the past, customers spent days deploying legacy storage, and even longer migrating data from one system to another. And they often required outside consultants and system integrators to complete the work. This was often repeated when performing capacity upgrades. By contrast, they deployed their Pure FlashArray systems in hours, and capacity was added with minimal effort and without disruption.

No downtime for upgrades

Customers reported that every year they faced significant periods of downtime, especially around upgrades, with their legacy storage. But these disruptions ended with the move to FlashArray, since Pure manages firmware upgrades for them and delivers it in a way that avoids business disruption. In fact, users reported reducing all downtime by up to 99.5%!

Consistent delivery of business services

The unplanned downtime that these organizations faced with their legacy storage resulted in significant business disruption — in one case, taking down critical applications for days, forcing employees to resort to paper to capture transactions. But with Pure FlashArray, the risk of downtime was virtually eliminated.

“When customers upgraded from legacy storage solutions to Pure Storage FlashArray solutions, they benefited from the easier management and maintenance of the storage arrays,” said Joe Branca of Forrester. This benefit came through not only in the quantified survey data that Forrester gathered as part of the TEI process, but also in the detailed interviews done with four organizations in various industries, who have implemented Pure FlashArray.

As part of the TEI process, Forrester aggregated data from Pure customers and created a composite organization, providing a single view of the financial impact for customers. The composite organization has annual revenues of $500M, and upgraded two legacy storage sites with about 160TB of effective capacity each to Pure FlashArray //X20 storage arrays.

The TEI shows that the composite organization received around $1.1M in total benefits over  a six-year period, including:

  • $490K in reduced storage management and maintenance effort — moving from dedicated storage management resources to storage management now being a part-time task
  • $390K in avoided capital expense and maintenance re-buys when modernizing storage — in other words, no forklift upgrades
  • $78k in reduced effort in storage deployment workflows, especially during upgrades and refreshes

When factoring in the cost of Pure FlashArray, and adjusting for NPV and risk factors, the composite organization saw net savings of $585k.  That represented 111% ROI and payback of less than six months.

Casey McKnew, Assistant Director of IT Infrastructure at Hodges University in Florida, knows firsthand the struggles of dealing with legacy storage, and how Pure simplifies his life. “[Our old systems] were great, until something went wrong. So I’m spending my nights and weekends trying to fix it,” Casey said. “With Pure, I don’t have to worry about any of that.”

What Casey really likes is how easy setting up and managing Pure FlashArray is for him and the team of eight in IT at Hodges University. “It took us probably 10 minutes to get it up and running. I get emails from [Pure] support, ‘Hey, there’s an upgrade that needs to be done’, or, ‘We noticed this about your array’, before I even noticed it — so it’s been a real big help.” And, Pure has helped Casey and team through upgrades and keeping their storage modern, too. “Where we’ve really seen results are around downtime – we’ve been through two upgrade cycles with Pure Storage and there’s no downtime.”

Read the full Forrester TEI on Pure FlashArray

Watch the full webinar  on Driving Down the Operational Costs of Storage, featuring Forrester’s Joe Branca and Casey McKnew of Hodges University – and find out more about Casey’s experience with Pure, including whose arrays Pure replaced to make his life easier!

* “The Total Economic Impact™ Of Pure Storage FlashArray Storage Solutions, a June 2019 commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Pure Storage”