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Pure offers Evergreen energy and rackspace cost guarantees

Pure Storage will take upfront payments for power and rackspace and guarantee those for product lifecycles in its Evergreen One, Flex and Forever consumption purchasing models

Your power and datacentre rackspace paid for by the storage supplier, with efficiency guarantees measured in watts per terabyte and rackspace per terabyte. Those are key additions made by Pure Storage as it elaborated its Evergreen consumption purchase offers at its Accelerate event in London this week. 

Pure also showcased a customer that claimed total cost of ownership (TCO) savings of 70% to 80% through use of Evergreen purchasing (see box below). The flash storage specialist also further enhanced its move towards a wider data management portfolio with the announcement of Pure Protect disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) and a range of customer self-service and benchmarking features.

Key announcements centred on Evergreen One and Evergreen Flex, with Pure saying it would pay for power and rackspace and would provide a space and power efficiency guarantee on Evergreen Forever customer commitments. 

Evergreen One and Flex are Pure Storage’s pay-as-you-go procurement models, while Forever involves upfront purchase with built-in upgrades.

Customers will not need to provide energy supplier invoices or other documentation. Pure will set guarantees at the International Energy Agency’s kilowatt-hour rate for the country where hardware is deployed.

“We’ve always promised these things,” said Pure’s general manager for digital experience, Prakash Darji. “And the skeptics have always said, ‘When are you going to break your promise?’ But now we’re going to put it in the contract, and once you’re on Pure, it’s the last data migration you’ll make. We will give a performance and capacity guarantee, and if we get it wrong, we will update the hardware.”

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Among the dashboard-focused additions announced were data protection resilience scoring and benchmarking that go beyond monitoring Pure products and drill down into backup products used by the customer. Scores of 0-5 will show, for example, resilience, or in other cases energy efficiency, with clickable advice on the next best steps to take. 

Automation is a key feature of the way Pure wants to allow customers to interact with it. Darji drew an analogy with self-driving cars, where you can opt to drive yourself or allow the car to do more: “That’s the choice ... The direction is towards handing it over to the vendor.”

Pure customer claims 80% TCO saving with Evergreen

Joanna Drake, CIO of THG, claimed it expected up to 80% total cost of ownership (TCO) savings from a forthcoming shift to Pure Storage FlashBlade//E on Evergreen One.

THG provides applications and commerce platforms for companies in health and well-being markets, while also providing cloud services to customers from more than 30 datacentres. 

It has moved to an all-Pure storage infrastructure after rationalising from what Drake described as a “mish-mash” of many suppliers, roll-your-own and open source hardware.

“There were so many overheads and costs and renewals, so we embarked on the ATSOOE – Automate The S*** Out Of Everything – programme,” said Drake. This involved standardisation and simplifaction of the IT with storage infrastructure procured via Pure’s Evergreen One and Forever offers. 

Drake said the pay-as-you-go nature of Evergreen allowed for flexibility in a rapidly changing market.

“We’ve got customers that we know how they’ll scale and when. But we’ve got others where we just don’t know,” she said. “So, we use the subscription service to spin things up quickly when we need to and spin them down if we find we no longer need them.”

She said benefits include predictability on cost and the ability to upgrade with no downtime. 

In terms of quantifiable benefits, Drake pointed to a project to migrate around 2.5PB (petabytes) of creative data to Pure FlashBlade//E from hard disk where TCO savings of 70% to 80% are predicted. 

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