Life can be full of surprises, including unexpected expenses which can throw off even the most thought-out budget. And with high interest rates on credit cards, the total amount you’ll pay for these surprise bills can add up to a hefty amount.
It can be an uphill battle to get out of the debt cycle with resources going to paying off things that you bought two, three, or even more years ago. This can leave you with little budget for new things—even if you desperately need them.
What is Tech Debt?
This common financial challenge applies to the IT world, too. It’s called “technical debt,” or tech debt for short.
With legacy storage, you have to rebuy storage to upgrade or expand it. This refresh cycle is similar to the credit card debt cycle with high interest rates. Every few years, you must find extra budget to rebuy storage and fund a data migration project, or pay almost the same amount in maintenance fees just to keep the old storage. The long selection, procurement, installation, and migration projects required only add to the problem.
The result: You end up deferring modernization of your legacy infrastructure while you accumulate more tech debt.
As a result, most organizations are lucky to get one to two years of usable life from their storage. By the time you’re done with the selection process, installation, implementation, and tuning of your new storage, you may only have 18 months left on your maintenance contract. At which point, you need to start the selection process again before the maintenance extortion starts.
Is your legacy storage contributing to your technical debt and holding you back? The good news is that there’s a much better way that not only breaks the tech debt cycle, but also frees up budget for innovation and IT agility.
Symptoms and Causes of Tech Debt
Most organizations have 12-month budgeting cycles and up to 18-24 month cycles for CAPEX. The longer the equipment sits without an upgrade, the less useful and less valuable it is to your organization. It doesn’t help that the cost of maintenance can double or triple on this aging equipment once your initial contract ends.
Legacy storage has a standard three- to five-year refresh cycle. A need to move to new technologies often necessitates a forklift upgrade with complete rebuys of terabytes you already own. Forklift upgrades involve a data migration process that is complex, expensive, disruptive, and time-consuming. You must not only keep the old storage longer but also may need to bring in outside agencies to help you with the data migration.
As the hurdles to replace storage mount, many organizations opt instead to keep renewing their maintenance. What ends up happening is the old technology doesn’t get updated, resulting in more tech debt. And this has a ripple effect throughout your infrastructure as more resources go toward keeping or replacing legacy storage that could be used for more urgent or profitable projects, like analytics or new workloads.
To break the tech debt cycle, organizations need agile storage that can be easily and cost-effectively modernized. They need flexible subscription models that can help them reduce costs overall. Fortunately, you have an ally in Pure Storage and our Evergreen Storage™ subscription model.
Eliminate the Hurdles
Pure Evergreen Storage helps cancel tech debt and slash your sustainment budget cost by eliminating storage refreshes and data migrations. We designed our architecture specifically for easy non-disruptive upgrades. This is totally different from legacy storage that breaks the standard three- to five-year refresh model and eliminates the huge spikes in expenses. We eliminate hurdles by enabling your storage to keep up with technical advances. Doing so eliminates tech debt.
With Evergreen, you deploy your storage once and stay modern with seamless hardware and software upgrades, and built-in compatibility with future technologies. There are no hurdles. As your organization grows, you can scale storage as needed—without downtime, performance impact, data migrations, or forklift upgrades. Controller upgrades are included every three years when you renew your Evergreen subscription. If you need to upgrade sooner, you can get full trade-in credits for your older controllers anytime. This protects your existing investment as you grow and modernize your storage.
With Pure, you’re not just eliminating debt. You’re funding your innovation. You don’t need to defer the modernization of your infrastructure. You can save on resources that can be put back into modernization and transformation. There’s no more endless cycle of technical debt caused by the procurement process and aging infrastructure sitting on the floor. No more dealing with three- to five-year refresh cycles and maintenance extortion. Evergreen breaks the log jam—the cycle of technology investment and tech debt.
For more information on how Evergreen works and the economic benefits of the program, check out this ESG Economic Validation white paper.
