What makes storage resilient from an architectural perspective? If it’s built from the ground up for easy modular scaling.
What makes storage agile from a business perspective? Flexible consumption models, reliability, and predictable pricing. When you don’t have to rebuy it over and over again, you’re insulated from the unpredictable: fluctuating demand, volatile markets, and massive up-front expenditures at the mercy of fluctuating prices.
To preserve resilience and continuity and minimize risk, transparent contracts and SLA-backed services are game changers. It’s where the Pure Storage platform and Evergreen architecture stand out from legacy providers who have always profited on complexity and cycles of rip-and-replace.
But, don’t take our word for it—take the Evergreen challenge and find out for yourself.
“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
The Evergreen Challenge: How Does Your Storage Measure Up?
Question 1: Does Your Vendor Offer Predictable Economics, Reliable Supply Contracts, and SLAs?
Evergreen//One acts as a financial and operational safety net, giving businesses the tools to remain agile, control costs, and maintain stability.
Unlike traditional models with fixed terms or rigid upgrade cycles, Evergreen agreements—whether in financing, subscriptions, or supply contracts—allow businesses to extend or adapt their commitments as needed. This flexibility enables organizations to manage cash flow more effectively with stable, subscription-based pricing or rolling agreements.
This predictability shields businesses from sudden spikes in costs, such as those caused by tariffs or supply chain disruptions, allowing for better financial planning and budgeting even when external conditions are unstable.
Service-level agreements (SLAs) can also prevent unforeseen expenses…
Question 2: 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.
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, we pioneered eliminating storage rebuys. Pure Storage users keep their storage environment agile and modern and have real peace of mind, no matter the economic climate.
Ever Modern is the first included-upgrades program in the industry, 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. Evergreen 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.
Question 3: 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. Ever Modern 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. Want to move more workloads from older legacy arrays? Ever Modern fits this scenario perfectly, especially during unforeseen events when workloads have grown faster than anticipated or new workloads are required.
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.
Question 4: 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—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 Storage 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
Here Come the Copycats
Recently, some legacy storage vendors have started to offer controller upgrades or trade-ins. Compare Ever Modern to some of the recent offerings from legacy vendors, and you’ll find the others nowhere near as flexible. 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.
Most vendors lack any kind of on-demand controller upgrade offer. 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 Storage (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.
Get Peace of Mind with Evergreen from Pure Storage
We launched the Evergreen Storage program in 2015, but we designed our products to be upgradeable non-disruptively from the beginning. We introduced the first included-controller upgrade in 2014 and, every year since then, we’ve expanded and improved.
Resilience. Less risk. Transparent pricing. Peace of mind. Isn’t it time you expected more from your storage vendor?
Get more information about Pure’s Evergreen Storage and listen to the Pure Report podcast on The Evergreen Challenge.
