In a recent Pure Report podcast, I chatted with Pure Storage veteran Stan Yanitskiy, Digital Experience Solution Architect, about the realities and misconceptions of storage as a service (StaaS)—and what sets Pure apart.
The STaaS Reality ‘Buzz’
There’s a genuine buzz around storage as a service (STaaS) and subscription-based solutions right now. Why?
Because companies need them to meet the growing demands around managing the ever-increasing volumes of data coming their way without breaking the bank or taking on additional risk. But are these services truly delivering value in the way enterprises hoped or are they delivering broken promises?
I sat down with eight-year Pure Storage veteran Stan Yanitskiy, Digital Experience Solution Architect, to explore the state of STaaS in the first part of a multi-part series uncovering the facts and details around Pure Storage’s Evergreen//One™ subscription offering. Here are the key takeaways.
Pure Culture: The Best Breeding Ground for STaaS
One of the things about Pure, Stan said, is its desire to always be doing special things that are innovative but also genuinely helpful for customers.
“At Pure, a lot of the meetings and the hand-wringing that happens of, ‘Do we release this product,’ or, ‘How do we do this?’ is really about what’s the best possible way we can deliver an experience for the customer, rather than, ‘How do we just release a new thing?’” Stan noted.
It’s precisely this culture of innovation and help that bred Evergreen//One, Pure’s STaaS offering. But it’s also what makes things difficult, Stan said.
“You don’t really hear about companies just going, ‘How do we give customers back money?’ And that’s something that’s happened at Pure that I think is probably unique.”
Stan is referring to Pure’s relatively recent announcement of a Paid Power and Rack Space Commitment in the Evergreen® subscription portfolio. In essence, we’re giving our STaaS customers a true cloud experience on-prem and taking financial accountability by paying them back for hosting Pure Storage arrays in their data centers. As Pure Storage has the most energy-efficient storage technology on the planet, we intend to stand by it financially.
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The Two-fanged STaaS Advantage
Along those lines, Pure Storage developed STaaS to help companies take full advantage not just of their data but also of their time and resources.
“There’s risk and there’s opportunity cost,” Stan said. “What could people have been doing if they weren’t managing storage and doing something else like building automation, setting up infrastructure, or learning Kubernetes and getting into that world and getting your business kind of into the next generation of technology?”
In this way, Evergreen//One helps companies create competitive differentiation by letting their talent focus on the things that are most interesting and important to them. It also allows them to hand off risk and more directly match company business objectives to the SLAs required for data to support those efforts.
“I think customers are finding they can hand off even more risk because they don’t need to understand what it is that a specific box is capable of doing,” Stan noted. “If you come in and say, ‘I need 10 gigs per second of throughput,’ we will give you something that will give you 10 gigs per second of throughput.”
Pure: A Better Way to Do STaaS
One of the bigger misconceptions about STaaS, Stan noted, is that it doesn’t strictly have to be an OPEX offering or a way to “pay for the box.”
“A lot of our customers that are on Evergreen//One actually recognize the revenue as CAPEX,” he said. Another key differentiator of Evergreen//One is the SLA guarantees around performance, six nines uptime, and buffer capacity (a guarantee of getting at least 25% more capacity than what you have committed to).
And finally, every Evergreen//One customer gets a dedicated customer success manager who is always there to make sure they have everything they need both now and in the future. “We’ve got a team of fantastic people that really stick their neck out for their customers,” Stan said. “They really are advocates for our customers.”
Learn how Evergreen//One lets you take full advantage of your data storage through an SLA-driven subscription.
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