Five Years of Redefining the Storage Industry

Here are five ways Pure Storage has redefined the storage industry with Evergreen over the last five years.


5 minutes

Work happens 24×7, anytime, anywhere. All organizations face the challenge of staying agile, adapting to changing consumer behaviors, and meeting the demands of an evolving workforce. To be more agile, you need an infrastructure that ensures the availability of the right data at the right time. We no longer measure data centers by the number of terabytes a full-time employee manages. Now we judge them by how quickly they can drive innovation in delivering data, information, and applications.

Since its introduction in 2015, Evergreen Storage™ has delivered on the promise of freeing you from the legacy storage approach of forklift upgrades. Only Pure is built from the ground up to offer the agility required to respond to changes in your business. From acquiring to managing to upgrading your storage, it provides ongoing value and peace of mind. It’s a subscription to innovation in your data center.

In the last five years, Evergreen has not only revolutionized what people have come to expect from the storage industry but also has led to a change in how legacy storage vendors offer their support programs (yes, we’re flattered by all the knockoffs). Evergreen isn’t just a maintenance or support program but a direct result of critical architectural decisions. This architecture, combined with a flexible buying program, future-proofs your storage investment.

A Look Back at the Last Five Years  

With Pure, you can break the storage refresh and rebuy cycle without breaking the bank. And we’re constantly evolving within our Evergreen program. We’ve come a long way since we introduced Free Every Three; we’ve added the Right-Size Guarantee, Upgrade Flex, and Capacity Consolidation¹.

Here are five ways we’re redefining the storage industry:

Storage Industry Evolution with Evergreen StorageContinuous, Non-disruptive Upgrades 

Evergreen has delivered more than 3,000 controller upgrades over eight hardware generations (from the first and second generation FlashArray™ 300 and 400 series to the latest //X R3) without expensive and time-consuming planning, coordination, or downtime. Most legacy storage users still face the challenge of reaching the end of their storage platforms far earlier than they anticipated and budgeted for. When Band-Aid solutions like adding cache or flash don’t work, they’re left with no other option but to surrender to a forklift upgrade. We pioneered eliminating forklift upgrades and love empowering people to #SayNoToForkliftUpgrades.

An End to Maintenance Extortion 

Organizations have had no choice but to pay handsomely for maintenance and support just to keep their aging storage going, thanks to legacy vendors and their support policies. Over time, these costs just kept increasing. We once again changed the conversation by introducing Flat and Fair maintenance pricing, which guarantees maintenance and support rates stay flat over the life of the array. In fact, they may even go down. Evergreen also includes (at no extra cost) premium proactive support to predict and resolve issues before they become outages. The Pure1® management platform leverages advanced AI analytics across Pure systems to alert teams and automatically begin remediation for over 70% of problems. Evergreen maintenance provides failure protection for the life of all components. There are no restrictions on age or usage patterns, and we offer proactive replacement before failure (with customer consent). 

A Practical Storage Capacity Guarantee (Not Just a Ratio)  

The Right-Size Guarantee gives you the confidence to buy exactly the capacity you need—never too much, never too little. It guarantees the effective capacity you’ll get in your array. If somehow your array doesn’t deliver on the guaranteed effective capacity, then we provide additional solid-state storage capacity, non-disruptively and at no charge, to make it right. Coverage lasts for 12 months and you can extend it indefinitely as you purchase more capacity. Another benefit? It also guarantees a total efficiency ratio, allowing confident comparisons of efficiency ratings across the storage market.

Anytime Upgrades with Full Trade-in Value 

When it comes to Evergreen, most people probably think of Free Every Three, which enables you to upgrade non-disruptively to the latest-generation controller with every three-year renewal. However, Upgrade Flex is the program’s hidden gem and what helps you stay modern on your own schedule. The original anytime-upgrade feature, it’s especially useful if your organization is prone to unplanned events such as growing workloads, new application deployments, or workload consolidation from other systems due to mergers and acquisitions. You can upgrade not only to the latest-generation controller but also scale up to the controller model that best fits your needs. With Upgrade Flex, you receive full-value trade-in credit for your old controllers along with the ability to meet the performance and capacity demands of unplanned events, whenever you need them. 

Save More and More and More 

Evergreen isn’t just your subscription to innovation—it’s your subscription to innovation while saving money. By avoiding a forklift upgrade every few years, you can realize up to 45% in TCO savings over six years, as this ESG study confirms. You don’t have to buy more storage than needed or overspend with the hopes that it’ll be worthwhile later. With all-inclusive array software and AI-powered management tools, included controllers, trade-in credits for old controllers, and capacity, the savings keep getting better. In fact, as Ryan Wadsworth, director of technology at investment firm KordaMentha, shared:

“Our cost savings are estimated to be around $400,000 over the next four years. That will grow to $1 million [AUD] if we extrapolate it over a 10-year period, based on the Evergreen storage model.”

Since its introduction five years ago, Evergreen redefined the storage industry as the only program designed for IT agility and customer peace of mind. And it continues to drive innovation forward. If you’re still conflicted with the false promises of legacy vendors, it’s time to rethink your storage approach.


  1. With Evergreen Gold subscription.