Picture this: A rocket that lands itself, gets refueled, and launches again—reliably, and more affordably than ever before. SpaceX made that real, and in doing so, redefined aerospace economics. That same principle—architecting reuse as a native capability—inspired our vision for FlashArray//RC20.
With FlashArray//RC20, we’re re-engineering high-value renewed components of a storage array and combining them with brand-new components to deliver a capacity-optimized entry-level enterprise storage array built and supported to the uncompromising standards of a Pure Storage® FlashArray™.
FlashArray//RC20 builds on a decade of innovation rooted in the Evergreen architecture—a foundation that has already reshaped expectations in the enterprise storage world.
Evergreen: The Gift That Keeps on Giving
Since its launch, Evergreen® has disrupted the way enterprise customers consume storage. While most storage vendors rely on forced disruptive migrations, forklift upgrades, and painful refresh cycles, Pure Storage took a different approach. With Evergreen//Forever™, we introduced a non-disruptive model that decouples hardware refreshes from software innovation—allowing customers to continuously evolve their infrastructure by upgrading components without re-architecting or migrating their entire environment. Just imagine getting your home remodeled every three years, without ever having to move all your stuff.
It was a better customer experience made possible by fundamentally better engineering architecture, grounded in a core design principle: Data is durable; everything around it should be replaceable. Our subscription model ensured continuous innovation without disruption. Customers could retain their data in place and add new features and capacity without starting over. Evergreen became a strategic asset for companies, not just a support plan.
And as it turns out, Evergreen also created a supply chain advantage: It returns high-value components—specifically storage controllers—back to us at predictable intervals, typically every three years. Fully functional, high-performance controllers, with substantial potential life ahead, are returned as part of our customers’ Evergreen lifecycle, as they take advantage of the latest product innovations. The return of these high-value assets isn’t an accident—it’s the deliberate result of the Evergreen business model.
FlashArray//RC20
Smart Reuse at Scale
The Pure Storage Evergreen business model enables the intelligent return of high-performance storage controllers—what we call “Z-Gear”—creating a reuse by design opportunity for Pure Storage.
These returned controllers still have a ton of runway. Based on our Weibull* curve reliability models—built from millions of hours of telemetry across our global install base—these controllers can perform reliably for well over 10 years. The Weibull model is a widely used reliability engineering tool that helps predict the likelihood of failure over time, and it allows us to confidently project the life of these assets. That’s not marketing spin; that’s statistics based on years of field data.
In the case of FlashArray//RC20, we do more than repurpose—we remanufacture with purpose. These controllers return to us in peak functional condition, and we enhance them to serve capacity-optimized workloads. One of the key upgrades we make is expanding the memory of the controller—unlocking more scalability and performance for large data sets. We also replace age-prone components, wear-prone boot drives, and mechanical parts such as fans, effectively extending the reliability and lifespan of the controllers. In fact, with these proactive replacements, the reliability of FlashArray//RC20 systems may exceed even the projections modeled in our Weibull-based lifecycle analysis. Each controller is not just renewed—it’s rigorously requalified, performance-tuned, and engineered to thrive for another full tour of duty in the field.
These re-engineered controllers are then paired with a brand-new chassis and entirely new DNVR media. The result is the FlashArray//RC20 array—functionally and physically, a reincarnation and ready to deliver reliable, enterprise-grade performance tailored to the next generation of workloads. It’s not just reuse—it’s intelligent reintegration, made possible by the Evergreen model and the foresight of our platform engineering.
The reincarnation extends beyond the hardware, building layer by layer into how we support, upgrade, and sustain every system over time. The real engineering marvel is how our engineering teams designed an end-to-end lifecycle plan for this product. From release planning and QA certification to long-lived software support and non-disruptive upgrades, we’ve built FlashArray//RC20 directly into our unified Purity release strategy. FlashArray//RC20 is backed by the same rigorous standards that govern all our products across our portfolio—ensuring FlashArray//RC20 functions as a fully integrated, strategic member of the Pure Storage platform, with no compromise to performance, support, or design principles.
What makes this even more powerful is our investment in Pure1® AI-assisted support. Every FlashArray//RC20 system benefits from over a decade’s worth of machine learning, telemetry analysis, and proactive diagnostics. These models are refined across tens of thousands of arrays in the global fleet, helping each new deployment become smarter, more resilient, and more predictive than the last. FlashArray//RC20 customers receive the full strength of the Pure Storage support engine.
FlashArray//RC20 is a celebration of our engineering discipline, customer-first design, and strategic reuse model. It’s not just sustainability—it’s affordability at enterprise scale, executed with a customer-first mentality.
The Real Innovation: A Structured Five-year Lifecycle with Flexibility to Extend
FlashArray//RC20 is unique in the industry for the rigor behind its reuse strategy. We built a complete release strategy around these controllers. Each FlashArray//RC20 configuration comes with:
- A five-year support lifecycle that can be extended to eight years with a timely controller upgrade
- Optionality to upgrade to Evergreen//Forever later—reducing initial acquisition cost while preserving a path to Evergreen//Forever
- Alignment to Purity software releases
- Support SLAs equivalent to net-new products
- Pure1 enabled proactive support
This is unmatched in the industry—a proactive, lifecycle-integrated offering built on the same principles that define our entire platform. With a fully unified release strategy, long-lived release planning, and dedicated roadmap alignment, FlashArray//RC20 reflects our commitment to innovation—not as an exception, but as a core strategy.
Sustainability, Economics, and the Next 10 Years
FlashArray//RC20 helps reduce e-waste by building a circular infrastructure model that aligns economic value with environmental responsibility. It’s about leveraging the very systems we’ve built—and the data they’ve generated—to do something the industry has never seen before.
We’re enabling customers to:
- Deploy enterprise-grade storage at lower TCO
- Extend the lifespan of field-proven hardware
- Align IT infrastructure with ESG goals
- Benefit from predictable support and software evolution
And we’re doing it with confidence, backed by a foundation that’s already transformed enterprise storage.
The Future Is Circular—and It’s Built on Evergreen
FlashArray//RC20 is not a departure from Evergreen. It’s an evolution. It takes everything Evergreen enables—non-disruptive upgrades, decoupled lifecycles, and telemetry-informed reliability—and adds a layer of sustainability and reuse that delivers even more value.
This is infrastructure for the next decade: engineered for performance, optimized for lifecycle, and designed for a world that values sustainability as much as speed.
Welcome to FlashArray//RC20: where innovation flies again.