What makes storage agile from an architectural perspective? If it’s built from the ground up for easy modular upgrades, storage then becomes an enabler of innovation, instead of a roadblock.
Unfortunately, legacy storage adds complexity and holds you back rather than making your job easier and propelling you forward. That’s why Pure Storage designed all of its products, like FlashArray™, from the ground up to be upgraded with data in place, without downtime or performance loss.
So, what makes storage agile from a business perspective? Investment protection, so you don’t have to rebuy it over and over again.
It’s why we launched Evergreen® Storage in 2015. With Ever Modern included controller upgrades, anytime Ever Agile controller upgrades, and Capacity Consolidation for keeping flash dense and modern, Pure Storage’s Evergreen subscriptions pioneered eliminating storage rebuys and providing business agility. Pure Storage users rely on Evergreen to keep their arrays agile and modern and to have real peace of mind.
“Our cloud team doesn’t have to plan on big, expensive, and complex storage upgrades every five years. With Evergreen, we’re always current.” –Dale Sanders, President of Technology, Health Catalyst
How Does Your Storage Measure Up?
Does Your Vendor Offer Simple, Included-controller Upgrades?
We’re all too familiar with the three- to five-year legacy storage cycle of purchase, obsolescence, and repurchase of storage infrastructure. What was once a system that met your needs now is either too slow, constrained on capacity, or lacking key features you need to run your business. Sometimes users can extend the maintenance and support on their aging systems, but that’s often at a significant markup from the original contract.
Eventually, the cycle begins again and you have to look for a new storage system that fits today’s needs, and hopefully, at least some of tomorrow’s needs as well. Ripping out old storage, buying new storage, going through a massive data migration project…it’s expensive and wasteful. And not how we do it at Pure Storage.
Don’t Settle for the Status Quo
With Evergreen Storage, there’s no need for you to rebuy your storage over and over again just to stay modern. Industry analyst firm ESG recently validated that Evergreen can save users up to 58% in total cost of ownership (TCO) over legacy storage. We were the first in the industry to offer an included-upgrades program—called Ever Modern—designed to keep your storage array modern at about the same pace that legacy storage was refreshed, every three years or six years.
With Ever Modern, you can upgrade to the latest-generation version of your current-model controller when renewing your Evergreen//Forever™ or Evergreen//Flex™ subscription, usually every three years. For the Pure//E™ family, this would occur every six years. Pure Storage’s Evergreen architecture makes this completely non-disruptive: Your data stays in place, available, and performing at full speed even during controller upgrades.
Ever Modern is well-suited to users who want routine modernization, but whose workloads may not be growing rapidly. You stay at the latest generation of technology while benefiting from improvements in processing, throughput, capacity limits, host connectivity, and many other areas. And it’s included in your Evergreen subscription, for the ultimate in simplicity and peace of mind.
Here Come the Copycats
Recently, some legacy storage vendors have started to offer controller upgrades or trade-ins. But they don’t provide truly modular architectures, so it’s unclear just what benefits you’ll get from controller upgrades or how disruptive they’ll be. These offers vary widely in their benefits. Some include promises of unspecified trade-in credits toward newer controllers or cloud services. Some offer a next-generation controller, but take pains to say that it might not be the latest generation of controller—just one generation better than what you already have. Or, it may be limited to a one-time upgrade, regardless of the length of your support contract.
And unfortunately, the terms of these vendor upgrade offers are often hard to find, and even harder to understand. In other words, there are a lot of marketing promises, but few concrete details. And since they’re so new, there’s not much track record to rely on. Compare this with Pure Storage’s Evergreen Subscriptions (please!). We post all of our Evergreen terms and conditions, in plain language—just as we have since the program launched in 2015. That’s because we believe in transparency, not games and vague promises. It’s just one of the ways that Pure Storage provides you peace of mind about your storage purchase.
Does Your Vendor Offer Upgrades Whenever You Need Them?
If recent events have taught us anything, it’s that the unexpected can happen at any time in business, and IT has to respond with agility. So what about situations when you have to upgrade now?
The Evergreen//Forever and Evergreen//Flex subscriptions include Ever Agile, which enables you to trade in older controllers and capacity for the very latest generation, on demand, at any time. You can also easily upgrade within the FlashArray product family, say from an //X50 to an //X70. It’s the only ownership program that allows you to do both at once. With total flexibility and agility, Ever Agile is the most popular Evergreen controller upgrade option.
What’s more, there are no limits on the number of times you can use Ever Agile. It even comes bundled with added capacity so you only need to buy the array model and capacity you need now and can easily grow and expand it as your needs change. No need to waste resources by over-provisioning your storage and trying to guess where your needs will be in three to five years like you have to do with many legacy storage platforms.
Like many organizations, you may want to move more and more workloads from older legacy arrays after seeing the simplicity of FlashArray. Ever Modern fits this scenario perfectly, especially during unforeseen events when workloads have grown faster than anticipated or new workloads are required. As organizations have shifted to more digital and remote interaction, many Pure Storage users were able to ramp up VDI and other solutions quickly.
Compare Ever Modern to some of the recent offerings from legacy vendors, and you’ll find the others nowhere near as flexible. Most vendors lack any kind of on-demand controller upgrade offer. And for those that claim to offer something, it is often very limited: It’s one-time only or forces you to choose between next-generation (again, not latest-generation) or next-model. That’s not agility. And it certainly doesn’t instill peace of mind that a vendor stands behind you.
Evergreen//Forever and Evergreen//Flex also offer Capacity Consolidation, which is unique in the storage industry. It lets you trade in older, less dense flash for newer, denser flash. As a result, you can shrink your storage footprint even as you expand, without ever having to rebuy your capacity.
Does Your Storage Vendor Have a Proven Track Record of Delivering on Its Promises?
We set out from the start to be a different kind of storage company, one that strives to provide transparency and peace of mind to our users. And they love us for it. We have the highest audited Net Promoter Score (NPS) in the industry, a whopping 81.4—that’s four times that of our largest competitors.
“Pure was ahead of the other company in terms of flash technology and its software. And the Pure Evergreen [subscription] program was a huge plus. But the primary differentiator for Pure was—and remains—the level of support they bring to our partnership.” –Bill Hudson, SVP and CIO, John Muir Health
We launched the original Evergreen Storage program in 2015, but our track record goes back even further. We designed our products to be upgradeable non-disruptively from the beginning and introduced the first included-controller upgrade in 2013. Every year since then, we’ve expanded and improved Evergreen to include guarantees for satisfaction and effective capacity, Flat and Fair maintenance rates, and new trade-in programs. We expanded even farther in 2018, when we pioneered storage as-a-service subscriptions with what is now Evergreen//One. In 2022 we launched Evergreen//Flex, which combines ownership with pay as-you-go consumption. Just this year we added even more guarantees and investment protection, to provide additional peace of mind for our customers. Most importantly, over the past ten years, we’ve delivered more than 10,000 controller upgrades non-disruptively and with full investment protection to users.
As industry analyst firm IDC puts it, “Pure Storage has been successfully differentiating themselves from their competitors for years through its ability to deliver a consistently positive CX [customer experience] that has reset customer expectations in the enterprise storage industry.”
IT agility. Peace of mind. A positive customer experience. Isn’t it time you expected more from your storage vendor?
Get more information about Pure’s Evergreen Subscriptions and listen to the Pure Report podcast on The Evergreen Challenge.
