Today, we’re excited to announce our Evergreen™ Storage Service (or ES2 for short), a Storage-as-a-Service (STaaS) offering designed for true OPEX1, non-stop services in private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. Pure ES2 is purpose-built for the cloud model, delivering enterprise-grade availability with better-than public cloud economics, and delivered with our proven enterprise-class features and all-flash performance!
Today’s service providers and enterprise IT managers are fully embracing the cloud model of operations to address the unpredictable nature of their businesses. Cloud services provide elastic, flexible consumption that aligns with business requirements – driving efficiency and cost savings. To support this model, storage and other tier 1 infrastructure must be architected for (and proven to deliver) non-stop service without planned downtime. New pay-per-use financial consumption models can complement such services, delivering tremendous value for those enterprises with OPEX-centric budgets (even mandates) and/or a higher need for short term-flexibility not possible with CAPEX solutions. Historically, many storage vendors have attempted to address this market requirement by wrapping operating leases around standard CAPEX storage products in an attempt to provide an OPEX-like experience.
However, new lease accounting rules from the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) are re-defining what it means to be a true OPEX lease. The result is that most “storage utility” models offered from other storage vendors are no longer considered OPEX, which is exactly the opposite of the cloud model.
Tier 1 Storage for Your Cloud
The Evergreen Storage Service is a pay-per-use offering that marks the arrival of enterprise-class Storage-as-a-Service (STaaS). Pure ES2 is designed as an OPEX consumption model, providing the benefits of the public cloud coupled with the industry-leading enterprise flexibility, availability, security, performance, and efficiency of Pure’s tier 1 all-flash storage.
Pure ES2 flexibly delivers your storage capacity as a service in your private or hybrid cloud – backed by Pure’s industry-leading hardware, software, and white-glove support – on a pay-per-use, $/GB per month basis with terms starting as low as 12 months.
You now have the choice to consume tier 1 Pure Storage either by purchasing our Evergreen Storage FlashArray (in a CAPEX model) or subscribing to our Evergreen Storage Service (in an OPEX1 model). Either way, you and your internal and/or external customers receive enterprise-grade Pure Storage resources without maintenance windows to slow you down or interrupt critical business. With Pure ES2, you no longer need to give up enterprise-grade features to move to a Storage-as-a-Service model.
Your Best-of-Breed Smart Data Cloud
With the Evergreen Storage Service, you can finally build the private and hybrid cloud you’ve been waiting for, leveraging the public cloud natively and consuming all services via a STaaS model. You’ll get tier 1 availability and services for your tier 1 apps, combined with maximum public cloud agility for your emerging, bursty apps. The result is a true multi-cloud, with flexibility to develop, release, scale and optimize all manner of applications and services flexibly and easily.
On the hybrid cloud front, you have the ability to connect Pure Storage arrays to AWS via AWS Direct Connect or Azure via Azure ExpressRoute either from your on-premises data center or from a nearby colocation data center, such as Equinix.
We have collateral, design guides, and videos to help you get started, and we also offer Open Connect software which accelerates and simplifies this hybrid cloud connectivity. Head over to https://code.purestorage.com/ to get the goods. No surprise, you can do all of this with either your own Pure Storage arrays or with Pure’s via Evergreen Storage Service.
Enterprise-Grade Availability with Better Than Public Cloud Economics
The Evergreen Storage Service works just like the cloud-model services you are used to, but in your own data center. Similar to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (or EC2), Pure ES2 is comprised of two components: On-Demand capacity (paid as-you-go) and Reserve capacity (committed for the length of your service term).
Your reserve capacity will be your floor, and is charged at a discounted rate. Your on-demand capacity is charged at the standard rate but gives you the elastic flexibility to expand and shrink both your usage and payments, as needed. Pure Storage uniquely charges for actual used effective capacity, not merely provisioned effective capacity. This difference translates into significantly better economics than the public cloud services.
The Foundation of the Evergreen Storage Service
Pure ES2 is powered by our proven, award-winning FlashArray, so let’s start by exploring the CAPEX model. The green curve represents your actual storage consumption. Traditional storage architectures are hard to scale easily and non-disruptively as capacity grows, and traditional storage vendors want to extract as many up-front dollars from customers as they can (not very customer friendly in our view). This leads to the traditional large CAPEX purchase cycle (represented by the grey area) which leaves significant amounts of storage capacity idle for long periods of time, often years, wasting expensive resources. The flip side of this is when demand outstrips the time to provision new storage, leading to lost opportunities and delayed time to market.
Pure Storage revolutionized the CAPEX storage industry with our “Evergreen™ Storage” by enabling easy, incremental, non-disruptive scaling and operations (i.e., no maintenance windows). Our customers love how our unique, lean CAPEX approach already lets them stay closer to their actual consumption curve, with a non-stop FlashArray that just works. With Evergreen, customers with CAPEX-centric budgets have a much better, and more capital efficient, alternative to CAPEX purchases from traditional storage vendors. But what if you want OPEX? While you could wrap a traditional lease around Evergreen Storage – we now have a much better answer.
Our new Evergreen Storage Service builds on our lean, Evergreen foundation. With Pure ES2 you request an initial amount of effective capacity, say 100TBs, and we deploy enough capacity into your environment to give you that baseline plus at least a 25% buffer. The buffer resources are your on-demand component and are only billed for, when utilized. We maintain at least a 25% buffer as your usage grows. Pure configures, upgrades and expands the capacity as needed (without performance disruption or downtime) to meet your requirements over time. Pure ES2 is designed from the ground up to be a true storage service, for terms as short as 12-months.
Raising Your Reserve Lowers Your Blended Cost
The Evergreen Storage Service lets you keep your minimum Reserve constant and simply scale elastically up all the way to 3PB effective per array and all the way back down to your minimum Reserve if needed. Talk about flexibility! That said, if you’re like most storage users you’ll probably keep growing throughout your subscription term and only occasionally shrink your usage. To help you manage your costs even more effectively, you can routinely expand your minimum Reserve as you grow (we’ll co-term each Reserve expansion), thus lowering your blended (or average) $/GB rate.
Bring on The Cloud Model!
If you’re looking to pair the best available private cloud, enterprise-grade storage with the transparent consumption model of the public cloud, our new Evergreen Storage Service is for you. And if you’re new to Pure and our FlashArray and are unsure whether we are a fit for your workloads, you can effectively use Pure ES2 as a way to try-before-you-buy with a short 12-month term and no commitment afterwards. If you love your experience as much as the rest of our customers, you can scale up from there or transition to a net-new CAPEX array – you choose!
No surprise, getting started is easy! All you need to tell us is how much storage you want to start with (your Reserve, in effective TBs), and the length of your term (minimum 12 months).
Give us a call, or better yet, visit us at Pure Accelerate 2018 to learn more!
1 OPEX treatment is subject to customer’s auditor review.
