Flash storage pioneer Pure Storage Inc. said today it’s once again disrupting the storage-as-a-service industry with its Evergreen portfolio, introducing what it says is a first-of-its-kind commitment to pay for customers’ power and rack space costs.

At the same time, it announced expanded energy efficiency, capacity density and zero-data loss guarantees, plus flexible upgrades, across the entire portfolio. As part of today’s announcements, Pure Storage also revealed a new disaster recovery-as-a-service offering, plus scalable artificial intelligence-powered management capabilities to support more sustainable and intelligent storage operations.

Pure’s Evergreen is an ownership model that caters to organizations as their storage needs grow and evolve over time, helping them maximize the efficiency of their investments. Companies can benefit from immediate upgrades and expansions to their storage resources when they require them. The storage upgrades can be implemented immediately and without any downtime or impact on performance, with costly and time-consuming data migrations also eliminated.

By relying on Evergreen, Pure says, businesses can ensure their storage remains both modern and highly efficient, with minimal disruption to their business operations. “We’re making storage an appreciating asset,” Prakash Darji, vice president and general manager of Pure’s Digital Experience Business Unit, told SiliconANGLE in an interview. “It’s no longer a depreciating asset.”

The Evergreen model was introduced in 2015 and Pure has slowly but surely expanded the portfolio over time. For instance, it launched what it says was the industry’s first true STaaS offering, Evergreen//One, in 2018, and followed that with the debut of Evergreen//Flex last year, combining storage ownership with fleet-level consumption economics.

Now, the Evergreen portfolio is evolving again, with Pure Storage offering its commitment to pay all of its customers’ power and rack space costs to help them meet their efficiency goals. The company said customers will front the bill for these costs when they first take out an Evergreen One StaaS subscription. After that, Pure will take full responsibility for day-to-day running costs associated with the offering. In doing so, it eliminates customers’ concerns over rising electricity and rack unit space costs.

NAND Research founder and analyst Steve McDowell told SiliconANGLE that consumption-based on-premises storage-as-a-service offerings have, to date, only solved one aspect of the financial equation for enterprises, replacing the upfront capital expenditure with more budget-friendly operational expenditure. However, the model does nothing to eliminate the operating costs of this equipment.

“In the cloud, the provider pays the electricity bills and everything else,” McDowell explained. “To make on-premises as-a-service offerings truly competitive with the cloud, those costs need to go away, and that is what Pure Storage is doing now.”

Pure Storage said the onetime, upfront payment it charges enterprises can be made in cash or with service credits. It’s based on kilowatt per hour and rack unit fixed rates, and is proportional to the customer’s geographic location and contract size, the company said.

The expanded energy efficiency and density guarantees are designed to support Evergreen//Flex and Evergreen//Forever customers’ efforts to consume less power and store more data with less space. They will allow subscribers to report their actual watts per tebibyte — a little more than a terabyte — with much greater accuracy, Pure said, helping them to achieve their internal sustainability goals. As for the new zero data loss and no data migration guarantees, these will help customers to mitigate the unplanned costs that result from data loss incidents while maintaining day-to-day operations, Pure explained.

“Pure’s new Paid Power & Rack Commitment calculates the cost of powering the equipment and gives that back to the customer,” McDowell said. “This makes Pure’s Evergreen//One look much more like the cloud environment it is replacing. Pure is the only OEM doing this today, and it’s a powerful competitive differentiator. I expect Pure’s competitors will follow its lead on this one.”

Pure said the flexible upgrades announced today are designed to give Evergreen customers better access to the latest innovations in storage performance, density and energy, with bigger discounts when they trade in their existing hardware.

Simpler, more secure data resilience

Besides reassuring customers on the storage costs front, Pure also wants to provide assurance to Evergreen customers that their data will always be in safe hands. To that end, it announced a new, consumption-based disaster recovery-as-a-service offering called Pure Protect, which it says will dramatically reduce recovery times, business disruption and costs in the event that they’re hit by a cyberattack or suffer some other kind of disaster.

Pure Protect is said to provide customers with a clean environment and multiple restore points, enabling them to recover clean copies of their on-premises vSphere data to Amazon Web Services Inc.’s EC2 service, no matter what underlying storage infrastructure they use. At the same time, Pure Protect also isolates the customer’s data center so they can carry out an investigation unhindered, while quickly resuming business operations.

Customers will gain further confidence in Pure’s disaster recovery capabilities with its new Data Resilience Score, a new offering within the Pure1 Data Protection Assessment that allows them to assess their entire storage fleet configuration against industry best practices.

McDowell said Pure’s new disaster recovery-as-a-service offering and its service-level agreement provides a solid guarantee for customers, backing up its claims around the reliability of its storage systems. “It provides an insurance policy against data loss and unplanned outages, covering the costs for any customer who does experience an issue,” McDowell added. “Every storage vendor should do this.”

Finally, Pure unveiled new AI-powered asset and lifecycle management services. On the asset management side, Pure customers can now inventory key subscription contract assets, such as licenses and storage appliances, while tracking maintenance and compliance. They can also track any historical changes to subscription assets to gain insights into their ramps, expansions, expirations and renewals over time.

To get a better handle on subscription lifecycle management, Pure is offering a subscription viewer tool that allows customers to understand when their subscriptions require attention and renewal. It also debuted predictive tracking of the customer’s storage capacity utilization, a new Pure1 Marketplace to simplify the subscription shopping experience for customers, and service-level agreement indicators to track how well their investments are meeting Pure’s performance and efficiency agreements.

With reporting from Robert Hof

Image: Pure Storage