Our unique Evergreen ™ Storage model is great for our customers, but we know there are still a lot of folks out there who are stranded on not-so-Evergreen storage like Dell EMC XtremIO or VMAX. These folks are faced with myriad of disruptive and expensive forklift upgrade paths into an uncertain future – and we can help. Have you ever felt like choosing between your vendor’s multitude of AFA options is a bit like the modern dating scene? Think “Tinder meets all-flash.” If so, you may have a good chuckle, or you may find this hits a bit too close to home.
Well, amongst all these compromises, there’s a new //X in town, one that’s powered by 100% NVMe flash. All Pure customers can upgrade to NVMe directly, but we didn’t want Dell EMC customers to be left in the cold…so today we’re announcing that we’re extending (as much as we can) the Evergreen experience to VMAX and XtremIO. Dell EMC may not do it for you, but we will!
Today we’re excited to announce our “NVMe Now!” promotion, which extends the same Evergreen TB for TB trade-in program loved by Pure’s customers to all XtremIO and VMAX products. We’re here to help – contact us!
Over the years our customers have benefited tremendously from being Evergreen. Because all of our products are engineered to be 100% modular and field upgradeable (even across generations) without disruption or data migration, let alone downtime, our customers can easily keep their storage modern and fresh. Our Evergreen Gold subscription builds on this technology wizardry to make staying modern truly affordable, with trade-in credit for both controllers and media as customers upgrade and expand their arrays.
The financial result is that our customers can avoid re-buying their storage every generation, and end up saving close to 50% in a six-year TCO compared to other vendors’ AFAs. Since Evergreen is not time bound, that TCO just keeps getting better with every subsequently avoided storage re-buy and data migration. It’s no wonder our customers are in the top 1% of all B2B customer sat, and that we’ve been in the Leaders Quadrant of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for three years in a row!
How NVMe Now! Works
Through October 31, 2017, customers who purchase a new FlashArray//X array may trade-in and consolidate a portion of their existing installed XtremIO or VMAX capacity into a new array. Just as we do for our own customers, we will provide a trade-in credit for up to 25% of the new FlashArray//X capacity and up to 12.5% credit of the Evergreen Gold Subscription to complement the //X (i.e. both, not either/or). As part of the trade-in we’ll even help you remove your old storage from your data center, freeing up valuable space and power in the process. And remember, since your new FlashArray’s capacity has superior data reduction, Pure TBs go much, much farther towards storing your data.
Let’s look at some example scenarios:
- 40TB (2x20TB) XtremIO – Partial Credit for Nearest //X Upgrade
- 40TB (2x20TB) XtremIO – Full Credit for //X Consolidation
- 300TB VMAX – Partial Credit for Nearest //X Upgrade
- 300TB VMAX – Full Credit for //X Consolidation
40TB (2x20TB) XtremIO – Partial Credit for Nearest //X Upgrade
Here you upgrade your 40TB (raw) XtremIO array to a nearest equivalent 44TB (raw) FlashArray//X – in 3U. You receive 25% TB for TB trade-in credit of 11TB (=.25*44), and thus only need to purchase 33TB (=44-11). So, you get a 44TB //X for the price of a 33TB //X. And because our data reduction is typically ~2X better than XtremIO, you’ll likely see a big jump in effective capacity available for your applications, on average about 75% more.
40TB (2x20TB) XtremIO – Full Credit for //X Consolidation
Here you couple your upgrade with a large capacity expansion such that you get full TB for TB credit for your entire original array – i.e. no TB re-buy. Talk about an Evergreen on ramp! You trade in your 40TB (raw) XtremIO array for a 182TB (raw) FlashArray//X – also in 3U. Your maximum allowable 25% TB for TB trade-in credit is 46TB (=.25*182), thus you get to trade-in all 40TB of your original XtremIO and you only need to purchase 142TB (=182-40). So, you get a 182TB //X for the price of a 142TB //X. Once again because our data reduction is typically ~2X better than XtremIO, on average you’ll see a BIG increase in effective capacity – about 7X more. You’ll have enough capacity to absorb and consolidate storage not just from the XtremIO array, but from other legacy storage as well, while leaving plenty of headroom for growth over the next few years.
300TB VMAX – Partial Credit for Nearest //X Upgrade
A big difference here is that the vast majority of deployed VMAXs are not all flash and also won’t have any data reduction, meaning there is a lot less raw required from Pure Storage to deliver a similar size array in effective capacity terms. Another way to look at this is that every raw Pure TB is worth about 4.5 raw VMAX TBs in effective terms. So, we’ll use effective capacities throughout to help illustrate the comparison.
VMAXs also tend to be used as general purpose consolidators with a lot more storage deployed than XtremIO. As a result we’ll use a 300TB (raw – mostly disk) configuration, which after accounting for RAID6 (~75% of raw) and TB to TiB conversion (~91% of raw) delivers about 200TB (=300*.75*.91) of effective capacity. That 300TB VMAX likely takes two racks of data center footprint, meaning we can free up a LOT of power, cooling, space, and overall complexity while we are at it.
You upgrade your 300TB VMAX array to a nearest equivalent 91TB (raw) FlashArray//X. You receive 25% TB for TB trade-in credit of 23TB (=.25*91), and thus only need to purchase 68TB (=91-23). So, you get a 91TB //X for the price of a 68TB //X. That 91TB delivers about 270TB of effective capacity at our global average 5:1 data reduction (11:1 in efficiency terms including thin provisioning). You end up with about 33% more effective capacity in a 100% NVMe, easy to use, and Evergreen 3U footprint.
300TB VMAX – Full Credit for //X Consolidation
This is a pretty radical expansion and consolidation scenario, and while it’s probably unrealistic for most customers (especially those new to Pure) it is still illustrative (and frankly fun) to explore. Once again you couple your upgrade with a large capacity expansion such that you get full TB for TB credit for your entire original array – i.e. no TB re-buy. Given the sheer amount of raw storage being traded in, we’ll use multiple Pure Storage arrays all seamlessly managed via Pure1.
You trade in your 300TB (raw) VMAX array for seven 182TB (raw) FlashArray//X arrays. Your maximum allowable 25% TB for TB trade-in credit is 319TB (=.25*182*7), thus you get to trade-in all 300TB of your original VMAX and you only need to purchase 974TB (=182*7-300). So, you get 1,274TBs of FlashArray//X for the price of 974TBs of FlashArray//X. That 1,274TB delivers about 3.7PB of effective capacity at our global average 5:1 data reduction (11:1 in efficiency terms including thin provisioning). If you work in an enterprise-scale organization (i.e. the sweet spot for our products), you’ll end up with an incredibly effective and efficient tier 1 consolidator in half a rack. You didn’t have to re-buy any of your VMAX TBs, and you got 4.5X more effective capacity from each one. That’s what we call Evergreen transformation to the new consolidation king.
There’s Never Been a Better Time to Upgrade
We’re super excited to extend Evergreen to XtremIO and VMAX to help you upgrade to Pure – for a limited time. Keep this thought top of mind!:
The data migrations you’ll undertake to upgrade to Pure will be the last migrations you’ll do for that data. You’ll have finally ended the Forklift Upgrade cycle.
Finally, we used the 2x20TB XtremIO array and 300TB VMAX array in these examples since we expect these to be pretty commonly deployed configurations, but the same principles apply to any config (or configs) you may have. Contact us and we can walk you through the specifics for your unique situation. And, if your use case doesn’t demand the full capabilities of //X, we’ll upgrade you with our NVMe-Ready and Evergreen FlashArray//M, which you can convert to NVMe whenever you’re ready. Keep in mind this promotion lasts until October 31, 2017.
