Is Evergreen A Disruptive Technology or Marketing Gimmick?

It’s a story as old as data storage itself: A customer deploys an application on a legacy architecture. Every few years, that app and others are migrated to a new array. Each time, a weekend outage, data migrations, new best practices to learn, new zoning, cabling, and configuration—all lead to application downtime.

With Pure Storage, you’ll get a different narrative: Deploy an application on Pure FlashArray™ and you immediately experience unprecedented availability. During migrations, there’s no application downtime or performance degradation. Read between the lines, and you’ll see that the bolted-on fixes, marketing gimmicks, and new names that legacy storage providers offer are no match for truly disruptive thinking.

After nearly 30 years in the enterprise data storage industry, I have plenty of firsthand experience with the legacy way. Encouraging customers to purchase new storage arrays with faster drives, faster processors, and quicker interconnects doesn’t deliver anything different—it’s more of the same. Legacy vendors still don’t get it.

But Pure has done things differently from the start. This led to a different, better way: no more migrations, no more re-purchasing capacity, and no more software licenses for features.

That is disruption.

Evergreen Isn’t a Marketing Gimmick

The Evergreen™ Storage platform isn’t just a name or something added on. The value of the Evergreen architecture is the customer experience, and it’s where legacy storage providers simply can’t compete.

In fact, the term Evergreen was chosen to describe the revolutionary nature of the array. Anyone who refers to Evergreen as a marketing gimmick simply doesn’t understand how the technology works. And those who do understand it, can’t provide the same customer experience, often deflect their own shortcomings. Others just market themselves as evergreen but don’t offer the same experience.

Others just market themselves as evergreen but don’t offer the same experience.

Suppose a customer deployed an application on FlashArray in 2012, when it was first introduced. The application could have been through four or more non-disruptive upgrade cycles to remain modern—with no downtime, no performance degradation, no data migration, no re-purchased capacity, and no add-on software licenses. Compare that to legacy providers that, in the same time, would have forced you through four cycles of re-purchased capacity, application outages, data migration, weekend planning, and re-purchased software.

Evergreen is real. Evergreen is technology. What it’s not is marketing hype. At Pure, we think it’s something you should experience for yourself! Imagine no storage migrations. It’s something no one else in the industry can promise.