INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Data Centres
Forever Flash programme
Pure Storage has called for an end to the industry’ s longstanding practice of maintenance extortion with its expanded Forever Flash programme. The improved Forever Flash programme extends the useable life of all Pure Storage FlashArrays indefinitely, for both new and existing customers with current maintenance contracts. This includes consistently flat or better maintenance and service pricing with no out year increases; free controller upgrades with every three year maintenance and service contract renewal to ensure storage investments benefit from Moore’ s Law, delivering consistent performance advantages and the latest software features; and no-cost proactive replacement of equivalent or better hardware components when needed, including flash in the event of wear.
Customers are getting a raw deal today from big storage vendors. Dramatic escalation in out-year maintenance fees are used to force them into purchasing replacement storage arrays that require moving equipment in and out of their data center every few years, and necessitate complex data migrations and costly downtime. In many cases customers have to repurchase the same array software they just wrote off. Pure Storage is committed to better serving its customers by offering storage that lives productively forever, without compromises, forced migrations or price hikes. Pure Storage is moving customers from legacy disk era business practices with the introduction of perpetual storage.
Forever Flash turns the prevailing storage industry business model on its head. Pure Storage is now expanding the advantages of Forever Flash. All of the programme’ s benefits are now fully extended to every FlashArray customer. Total cost of ownership is further reduced, and maintenance has been permanently flattened and simplified in all array usage scenarios.
The new Forever Flash programme is comprised of three components:
# 1 Flat and fair, forever This offers guaranteed flat or better maintenance and service pricing rates forever. Customers will never be subjected to increased out year maintenance fees, and will typically see a reduction in per TB maintenance rates over time. When a customer’ s maintenance renewal is processed, any maintenance and service contracts arising from new capacity upgrades will be consolidated into a single, simple contract, just as if they had purchased a new array, with the same maintenance and service rate they received at the time of their original, or better.
# 2 Forever maintenance This ensures proactive repair or replacement of any hardware components when needed, including flash devices, with components of equal or greater functionality for customers with active maintenance and support contracts.
# 3 Free every three year controller upgrades, forever In addition to Flat and fair maintenance pricing and Forever maintenance, every customer also receives free controller upgrades with every three year maintenance contract renewal. Customers can now keep their storage current in performance, scale and features, without complexity, risk, inconvenience or costs associated with traditional storage migrations and forklift upgrades.
The prevailing enterprise storage business model of planned obsolescence continues to force customers to either pay for new storage they may not need, or face hefty year three and four maintenance penalties, ensuring vendors continue to profit while customers get squeezed.
Revised Evergreen Storage model
The new Capacity Consolidation programme helps customers expanding their storage capacity to simultaneously consolidate older, less dense flash storage and receive trade-in credit for that older storage. This means customers can break free of the cycle of constantly re-buying storage they already own during upgrades. Additionally, with the new Right-Size Guarantee, customers can bypass the risk and guesswork of buying storage with data reduction and instead purchase directly on an effective capacity basis, just as their requirements indicate.
Pure Storage uses cloud-based workload intelligence to size the right array for the job. This eliminates worries about data reduction and undersizing for unique data, even if it is nonreducible. Pure will size an efficient array and guarantee the effective capacity result – backed by a six-month written guarantee to make it right with non-disruptive, free additional flash to meet the customer’ s specified needs.
With Capacity Consolidation, Pure Storage customers can rest assured that their infrastructure can scale to handle exploding data growth by periodically upgrading to denser, more modern flash without paying for the same terabyte twice. Compared to traditional solutions, Capacity Consolidation eliminates periodic and disruptive capacity re-buys by expanding and modernising the media in an existing array, online and with trade-in credit.
Capacity Consolidation eliminates scale-up forklift re-buys, and scale-out re-buys associated with aging nodes removed from their cluster. Customers install new capacity into their FlashArray, while the data on the older, consolidated capacity is automatically and non-disruptively migrated into the newer, denser capacity.
Evergreen Storage can deliver significant and ongoing savings of 33 % or more, even assuming the same initial purchase price for competitive arrays – which can accelerate innovation across customer organisations. The underlying technology feature is called Shelf Evacuation, and is another example of how Evergreen Storage combines purpose-built technology and business model innovation to deliver much simpler, easier, and more cost efficient storage.
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