We’re all familiar with service providers, such as Uber and DoorDash. For a reasonable fee, someone arrives at your door and drives you to a destination or brings you tacos from that new restaurant. But what if Uber or DoorDash offered a self-managed option? It would be Uber without a driver or DoorDash without delivery. Confused? So are we.
Here’s how it works. For a slightly lower fee, DoorDash will park their bike on your porch, and when you are craving those tacos while binge-watching your favorite show, you can click pause, pedal yourself down to your favorite restaurant, and pick up your own food.
Where exactly is the service?
Don’t Get Fooled by the Low Price of Customer Managed
Unfortunately, this is what some storage vendors are calling “customer-managed storage as a service.” For a recurring fee, you can pay your storage vendor to provide you with “some” level of storage and then watch them walk away.
Sure, you’ll get their technical support. But at the end of the day, all of the operational complexities and the burden of updates, upgrades, and risks of data migration are in your hands. With their offering, you’re responsible for the performance and capacity management of their hardware, along with keeping up with software and firmware updates. In other words, it’s like renting a car and being responsible for topping off all the fluids and rotating the tires before returning it. Sure, it’s cheap, but they make no guarantees as to what performance or uptime you can expect from their service. That’s all on you, too.
When did risk and control become synonyms? Plus, what happens when the hardware is due for a refresh? It looks like a disruptive migration with downtime for you. This is nothing more than a legacy approach to an agile world.
Subscription vs. Real Service
I have written several blogs to demonstrate the difference between a subscription and a service. Subscription is all about financial engineering, but service, on the other hand, is all about the experience—a guaranteed experience.
See: Real Storage as a Service vs. Broken Subscriptions
(Pure Storage Blog)
In the As-a-Service economy, ‘subscription’ without ‘service’
just won’t fly (betanews.com)
The true as-a-service solutions are about buying a service with built-in guarantees, i.e., service level agreements (SLAs). You should be able to start small, grow over time, and have complete transparency over pricing and related performance indicators. The customer should never feel like they’ve bought something and are now on their own—or that they’re locked into a service that offers little benefit other than financial engineering.
Make the Right Choice
Pure Storage® Evergreen//One™ provides a customer-friendly SLA-based approach for your block, file, and object storage needs. With no upfront costs, you’ll get a guaranteed uptime of up to 99.9999% of availability, as well as performance, capacity, and supply chain SLAs—with service credits if we don’t meet these commitments. Pure will provide its Evergreen storage on premises as a true storage-as-a-service (STaaS) offering. You select the performance and availability you require, and we’ll handle the rest. You see, Pure Evergreen//One is all about YOU. It’s as easy as that.
And since Pure offerings are built on often imitated, never matched Evergreen architecture, we eliminate the need to migrate your data when it’s time to upgrade your hardware. That’s the beauty of the Evergreen architecture and design principles. Zero downtime upgrades, with all the performance gains of new hardware at no additional cost. Running low on capacity? Pure is already making sure you have plenty of storage by maintaining plenty of headroom and supplying new hardware when expansion is needed. And we don’t charge for that headroom either; you only pay for what you use. Oh, and we guarantee you’ll have your new hardware within six weeks.
Check out Pure Evergreen//One today.
It’s a modern approach with YOU in mind.
