Whether your use case is analytics, AI, file and object, backup and restore, or many more business-critical workloads, Pure FlashBlade™ is designed to address them. The elasticity, agility, and scalability of FlashBlade enhance your ability to seamlessly grow, so you can respond and adapt to changing business and IT priorities.
Pure’s Evergreen™ Storage is designed to provide you flexibility as you acquire, run, grow, and modernize your storage. One of its key benefits is how it protects your investment by eliminating the frequent re-buys typical of traditional legacy storage. If you’re an existing Pure customer, you’ve probably already benefited from Evergreen features through trade-in credits, especially if you use Pure FlashArray™. While FlashBlade users have enjoyed many of the other benefits of Evergreen, they haven’t had a formal trade-in program — until now.
Capacity Consolidation has been a feature in Evergreen Gold subscriptions for FlashArray since 2016, and is unique in the storage industry. Simply put, you get trade-in credit when you replace less-dense flash media with newer, denser flash — up to 25% of the new purchase.
Now, a new addition to Evergreen Storage takes the same basic concept and extends it into the FlashBlade world. Capacity Consolidation for FlashBlade enables you to protect your existing investment as you continue to grow your FlashBlade deployment. You can take advantage of Capacity Consolidation for FlashBlade under your current Evergreen Silver subscription for FlashBlade.
How capacity consolidation for FlashBlade works
Simply put: As you grow and modernize your FlashBlade infrastructure, you can trade in existing blades for newer, higher-capacity, and denser ones, and get trade-in credits to protect your original investment. Shrink your already-dense FlashBlade footprint even further, even while you expand and grow your capacity and workloads. And get up to 25% toward the cost of the new blades in trade-in credit for your old blades. That level of investment protection is almost unheard of in the storage industry – unless you’re a Pure customer.
Here’s a typical scenario. Let’s say you have a FlashBlade system with around 60TB of raw capacity, and it’s now time to expand capacity. Your analytics workloads running on your FlashBlade are growing. Meanwhile, you’re finding new workloads for your FlashBlade, like fast backup and restore. With new Capacity Consolidation for FlashBlade, you can trade in those original blades for higher-density ones, quadruple your storage in the same footprint, and get credit for all the capacity that you already own. In other words, you can increase from 60TB to more than 240TB, in the same chassis and footprint. But with a 25% credit for the blades you already own, You pay for only 180TB of the new 240TB capacity. Net-net: you don’t rebuy your original capacity. That’s investment protection that truly matches the agility of the FlashBlade scale-out platform.
Differences between FlashBlade and FlashArray™ — and what that means for Evergreen Storage
At the heart of FlashBlade’s unique scale-out architecture lies the blade, which combines compute, network, and DirectFlash™ technology into one unit. You can simply hot-plug blades into the system to add capacity and performance. Combined with the Purity//FB operating system and an innovative converged fabric, this advanced architecture delivers performance that grows linearly and is built to scale to billions of files/objects and beyond. An elastic scale-out architecture at every level, FlashBlade expands with your data.
Because they include both compute and flash storage, blades scale both capacity and performance together. This architecture differs from Pure’s FlashArray, which has a discrete controller that you can upgrade to increase functionality, expand capacity limits, and scale performance.
In the FlashArray world, controller-based upgrade programs (included in Evergreen Gold) like Free Every Three and Upgrade Flex protect your investment while you stay modern. Capacity Consolidation also delivers that same investment protection benefit to FlashArray, providing trade-in credits on flash media while you grow. We’ve now taken the Capacity Consolidation concept and customized it to fit FlashBlade’s unique architecture where compute and flash are combined. So now, as your needs change and your FlashBlade expands, you can have protection for your investment along the way.
How Evergreen compares to the competition
No other major storage vendor has a program like Capacity Consolidation. There is no published media (or blade) trade-in program like it that allows you to consolidate on denser flash. Unlike some of our competitors, Pure’s Capacity Consolidation isn’t vague promises of future trade-in credits with a value that the vendor will set later. Nor is it one-off side agreements that need to be repeatedly renegotiated. For example, though Dell EMC offers a full-system trade-in on some of its systems, in typical cases it only provides for credits of less than 10% of the original investment.
Pure’s Evergreen Storage combines a flexible buying program with 100% non-disruptive product architecture. It’s designed to free you from the legacy storage approach of complex, risky, and expensive forklift upgrades. At Pure, Evergreen started as a product architecture designed to enable continuous upgrades of storage components. It applies to blades in FlashBlade or controllers, flash media in FlashArray, as well as backplane, chassis, cables, software — everything.
This Evergreen DNA at Pure runs deep. Our engineering teams are always committed to delivering non-disruptive expansion and upgradability in our products. We want you to have the capability to constantly evolve in place vs. having to forklift-replace your storage every three to five years like our competition. Our competitors, with their legacy architectures, simply haven’t made this level of commitment to non-disruptive technology.
With Evergreen Subscriptions, Pure offers you unparalleled value, flexibility, and peace of mind. Evergreen is more than just a sales or marketing program. It’s our way of doing business. It’s part of our philosophy of making your life as an IT professional simpler and easier. And it’s one of the reasons that Pure’s audited and certified net promoter score (NPS) is 86.6, many times the industry average.
To learn more about how Evergreen compares to the competition, see our latest series of posts.
