In the tale of the Ship of Theseus, a question is raised: If all of a ship’s planks are replaced one by one over time, is it still the original ship? Or, is it an entirely new ship? Philosophical question aside, the important thing is this: The ship was able to stay afloat throughout change and to evolve and be refreshed over time. With Pure, your data will keep sailing for the journey ahead.
Pure Storage Keeps Your Data Sailing
In much the same way, at Pure, we believe that your data is your array, and that survives the particular hardware and software that’s delivering it today. Our goal is to help you continue to modernize and upgrade the hardware and software that serves your data over time, without disruption—continually keeping you online.
And, like Theseus’ ship, Pure Storage has designed storage arrays and software to be upgradable and scaled non-disruptively. Since day one, every Pure product, including FlashBlade®, has been designed to ensure that components and capabilities can be continuously and seamlessly refreshed, like trading oars for outboard motors.
It’s a promise we’ve kept to this day:
Legacy Hardware Is a Sinking Investment
We’ve always believed hardware should grow and change along with your organization. Yet, too many legacy products are designed to become obsolete. Back to our metaphor, this means no ship is decommissioned and set off into the sunset—it’s only improved and evolved:
Bottom line: This isn’t by accident. If you’re a FlashBlade or FlashArray™ customer today, every upcoming innovation will be yours for the taking, systems stay online, and data stays in place. How does your storage stack up? Answer these questions to find out >>
The Beauty of Shared Platform Development
Designing non-disruptive, continuously improving, and future-proof products is no small feat. It requires constant focus and attention. But doing so across multiple product lines also requires shared ethos and shared technology to be consistent and seamless.
At Pure, a single team innovates on hardware for both product families, allowing us to co-innovate between products and share advancements. And, both products share common software roots.
For example, FlashBlade was born out of two major dynamics:
- A demand for increased performance at scale for unstructured (file and object) data workloads.
- An attempt to address this in part with flash by resolving a bottleneck where SSDs were getting bigger, but speed was limited by the standardized connections available to the industry for communicating with flash drives.
Additionally, we saw an opportunity to leverage the NAND expertise that had been built up in the development of FlashArray and take it a step further to fully optimize the media. In 2012, we engineered a new architecture called DirectFlash®, which allowed our smart storage software to communicate directly with raw NAND flash via fast connection. This eliminated all of the “translation layers” that were created to enable SSDs to work in disk-first architectures.
In 2016, FlashBlade was born, proving out this new technology. Since then, we’ve brought that technology into the FlashArray product family and continued to expand upon it.
When there has been a fundamental technology shift in our technology platforms, Pure made the experience non-disruptive, even if this means taking additional time to overcome challenges that our competitors would hesitate to take on. You don’t earn an NPS of more than 85 with disruptive experiences and lost investments. We’ve always preserved customers’ investments in hardware and software and don’t plan to stop.
FlashBlade + Evergreen: Protecting Your Investment with a Subscription to Innovation
When we say that Pure is a different kind of storage company, it definitely starts with the design of our products, but it doesn’t end there. Our Evergreen Storage™ subscription offers even more benefits:
- Array software included at no extra charge, fully upgradable online, without downtime or performance hits.
- New features included through your subscription.
- Seamless scalability, with upgrades from the 8TB blade to 17TB and 52TB blades and single chassis to multi-chassis expansion, without having to rebuy.
- Non-disruptive upgrades, so data remains in place.
No matter where a customer starts on their Pure journey, Evergreen (and the technology that enables it) ensures they get an investment-protected path to modernization that keeps their array modern over time.
All this to say: Your original ship may have all new parts, but it’s still the one you bought with Pure, and it’s never stopped sailing. Because that’s how we built it—and how we promise it always will be.
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