Data is perhaps the most valuable commodity to nearly any enterprise. That’s why we invest heavily in data center storage to ensure its fast access and always have extra capacity on hand. However, there are recurring costs as most organizations depreciate storage after five years and re-buy and migrate to new storage (also known as a forklift upgrade).
Pure Storage has addressed these challenges with our Evergreen//Forever™, Evergreen//Flex™, and Evergreen//One™ storage subscriptions, which include non-disruptive hardware and software upgrades and expansions with no re-buys. You can even move to an all-OPEX model with no upfront hardware purchases with Evergreen//One. This allows you to take full advantage of Pure’s ultra-fast storage for a low monthly fee. You only pay for the capacity that you use and it’s all backed by performance and capacity SLAs, plus an industry-first energy efficiency SLA. One question we hear often is: Who manages the subscription? With the Pure1® SaaS management platform included in your subscription, anybody can!
AI-driven Storage Management with Pure1
Pure1 is our all-in-one management platform that allows you to manage your entire storage fleet with intelligent and actionable recommendations to maximize performance, capacity, security, and efficiency. You can plan for future capacity needs, upgrade your storage, monitor your VMware and Portworx® environments, and even request quotes all within one tool. What’s more is that you can also manage your subscriptions. Our product and engineering teams are constantly adding new enhancements, and we’re excited to share some great new changes to improve how you manage your Evergreen//One subscriptions so you never miss a beat.
New Asset Management Page
Managed service providers, finance and asset management teams, and partners will be happy to know that Pure1 provides a centralized asset management portal for all their Evergreen//One, //Flex //Forever and //Foundation subscription assets. This includes critical information about all contracts, licenses, and appliance details to easily manage inventory and availability for maintenance and contract compliance. Avoid downtime associated with expired subscriptions, licenses, or end-of-life hardware, and avoid shadow IT. Customers can also leverage Pure1 tags to easily categorize and identify appliances based on ownership or any other criteria your organization needs.
The asset management page is also useful for practitioners and all other users. You’ll get details of your hardware and software lifecycle, utilization, location, and energy usage all from a single page so you can stay always modern and always efficient. Plus, all this information is available for export and via APIs to integrate into custom or third-party systems.
If your manager ever asks when the last time your storage was upgraded, Pure1 has the details. The Appliance Genealogy tab shows the lifecycle of all your Evergreen//One, //Forever, and //Foundation assets. This will give you a timeline of important events such as when the asset went into service as well as all hardware and software upgrades that have happened thus far. Likewise, the Subscription Genealogy shows the lifecycle of your Evergreen//One and //Flex subscriptions from the contract start, to expansions and renewals. Plus the genealogy views are exportable as CSV/XLXS.
New Subscription Pages
The subscription page is now broken down by subscription type which can be selected by using the tabs at the top. Evergreen//One subscriptions are represented by their status and focus on subscriptions that require attention, namely those coming up for renewals or those for which you have pending orders. You’ll also get SLA indicators to track your Evergreen//One SLA’s.
Subscriptions can consist of multiple licenses which are commonly used for multi-site deployments. By selecting a subscription, you’ll see the associated licenses, their usage, PRE (pre-reduced and encrypted) ratio, and energy efficiency. You can also access license-level actions, such as requesting additional capacity and modifying notification thresholds. Additionally, selecting one of these licenses will populate the bottom section with more license-specific details.
Here, we have four tabs to get more in-depth into each license. The summary tab is essentially an expanded view of the information provided in the table above and designed for rapid identification of any issues, such as reaching your reserve commit or subscription expiration. You can also check on the status of your energy efficiency and bandwidth SLA’s.
Evergreen//One is billed based on capacity usage (measured as effective used capacity) and there are two rates that apply. Reserve capacity is intended for your long-term capacity needs and is billed at a discounted rate. On-demand capacity is there for those times when you need to grow beyond your reserve temporarily. As this is billed at a different rate, it’s a good idea to expand your reservation if your growth is long term. The capacity tab lets you see your capacity consumption over time in comparison to your reserve capacity. Pure1 can alert you when you approach your reserve limit and this threshold can be modified in the capacity chart, summary tab, or on the table view above. The capacity view can show your overall usage or break it down by array.
When you purchase your Evergreen//One subscription, you’re buying a tier of service which is tied to the delivery of performance throughput. Pure1 provides visibility into how well performance is being delivered. However, when it comes to bandwidth, there are several other factors to consider. This may seem obvious to some, but seeing bandwidth numbers well below the SLA does not necessarily mean there’s an issue or that SLA’s are not being met. In most cases it means the array isn’t being pushed hard enough to exceed your threshold. That’s why we’ve also included latency and load metrics to provide additional context in understanding what is happening on the array at that time.
Earlier this year, Pure added an industry-first SLA to Evergreen//One subscriptions focused on providing the most energy efficient storage for your organization. This helps customers meet their sustainability goals and essentially caps energy spend. Pure is all about transparency and provides this information in Pure1 so you can see how well we’re delivering against this SLA.
The Pure1 SLA indicators are meant to provide additional transparency but are not the sole benchmark of your subscription. Refer to the Evergreen//One Service Level Agreement Guide for more information.
The last tab provides a breakdown of each array included in the subscription license. This includes version information, usage, and performance information.
Pure1 also has another great trick up its sleeve when it comes to subscriptions with some new enhancements to the capacity planner. By leveraging Pure1 Meta® AIOps, we’re now able to predict up to a year into the future to see when you might exceed your reserve capacity.
With Pure’s subscriptions, you can expand at any time. Pure1 lets you model your reserve capacity expansions to see the impact this has on projected time to on-demand to help reduce overspend. You can also request a quote from your account team immediately from the planner.With these new enhancements, Pure1 makes managing your subscriptions even easier. For more information, check out the Evergreen//One product page and the Pure1 page.
