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Pure Storage Introduces New Sustainability and Power Efficiency Capabilities

Pure Storage sponsors this blog post. To find out more about Pure Storage, visit www.purestorage.com.

Introduction

On 10th of October 2023, Pure Storage announced a host of service improvements related to both data resiliency and energy / sustainability commitments. Q4 is usually a very busy time for vendors and customers alike, it’s therefore definitely worth recapitulating those significant announcements in case you missed them.

Here is what was announced from a sustainability and power efficiency perspective:

  • Paid Power and Rack Commitment
  • Power and Space Efficiency Guarantee
  • New Future-Proof Business Guarantees
  • Flexible Upgrades and Financing

In addition, flexible upgrades and financing options were announced. These are covered in one of our latest articles covering Storage-as-a-Service, which also includes a strong connect on environmental sustainability and energy efficiency.

Paid Power and Rack Space commitment

One of the first services launched in October 2023 is Pure Storage’s Paid Power and Rack Space commitment, an industry first in the Storage-as-a-Service (STaaS) market, available to Pure Storage’s Evergreen//One and Evergreen//Flex customers.

Related topic : Understanding the Pure Storage Evergreen Porfolio

As the name implies, Pure Storage provides two elements here. The first and easiest to explain is the rack space commitment, where the company guarantees that the agreed upon storage capacity will fit into a specific rack space footprint, even considering future growth patterns. The second commitment is paid power, where Pure Storage will pay for the customer’s power consumption tied to Pure Storage’s footprint in the organization that is covered by a Pure Storage Evergreen subscription.

Paid Power commitment is available worldwide, and Pure has gone to great lengths to measure energy prices and provide a compelling value proposition to its customers. Second, paying for energy consumption is not a light endeavor, especially when coupling a large count of customers with significant storage appliances, sometimes even geographically distributed.

Those commitments are only possible when the vendor has a very acute understanding of its platform capabilities. Pure Storage uniquely benefits from architectural decisions made early and that continue to pay off on the long term, such as:

  • a flash native, non-disruptive modular architecture based on storage dense DirectFlash Modules
  • architecture-optimized core data services (distributed flash translation layer, data efficiency algorithms, etc.)
  • AI/ML-based monitoring that includes power efficiency metrics and predictive analytics (Pure1, Pure1 Meta)

Those architectural enablers allow Pure Storage to measure power consumption and capacity growth trends.

Power and Space Efficiency Guarantee

For customers on Evergreen//Forever subscriptions, Pure Storage offers a Power and Space Efficiency Guarantee that supports its customers’ efforts to consume less power and store more data with less space, reduce energy costs, and report more accurately power consumption.

Customers can assess the power efficiency of their Pure Storage systems by tracking the Watts/TiB consumption metric. Similarly, space efficiency can be tracked using the TiB/rack metric.

This guarantee, already available as an Evergreen//One SLA, ensures customers that Pure Storage will cover the costs in the unlikely case where one of those metrics would not be met.

New Future-Proof Business Guarantees

These guarantees are all about maintaining business operations untouched and minimizing unplanned costs due to data loss incidents. Available with Evergreen//One (SLA), Evergreen//Flex, and Evergreen//Forever, two new guarantees are introduced:

  • No Data Migration guarantee: Pure ensures seamless technology upgrades with no migrations. This guarantee is clearly based on Pure Storage’s superior architecture, which enables non-disruptive controller upgrades and inter-generational upgrades, enabling a longer infrastructure lifespan that extends equipment life up to 10 years or more.
  • Zero Data Loss guarantee: Pure Storage assures data protection with advanced data recovery services for any hardware or software product-related incidents, at no cost.

Those two guarantees, built on top of the intrinsic data protection capabilities of Pure Storage’s solutions, provide an additional layer of trusted operations to assure better resilience against disruptions of all kinds.

Worth mentioning, TECHunplugged recently covered Pure Storage’s complete data resilience strategy in a dedicated article that also covers disaster recovery and cyber resiliency.

Flexible Upgrades and Financing

Although financing may seem unrelated to sustainability and power efficiency, flexible financing provides more agility to organizations, enabling in turn better investment opportunities into a sustainable and efficient solution. The elimination of disruptive upgrades enables better continuity of operations and reduces the financial burden of complex replacement projects from a time, labor, and complexity perspective.

Pure’s Ever Agile program now includes a capacity plus controller trade-in delivered at up to 20% lower price than controller costs. In addition, the company’s Capacity Consolidation program now includes expanded capacity trade-in credits valued at up to 50%. Those updates, included in Evergreen//Forever, allow customers to benefit from the latest innovations introduced by Pure Storage, providing improvements in multiple areas such as performance, density, and energy efficiency. Those can be coupled with Pure Storage’s Evergreen//One STaaS offering for even more flexibility.

TECHunplugged’s Opinion

From an energy and data efficiency perspective, the guarantees and commitments covered above are the logical development of Pure Storage’s innovative storage architecture. Clever architectural decisions made a decade ago if not more gave birth to a platform that can sustain the test of time while always delivering innovation to its customers, including continued improvements in capacity and energy efficiency.

Looking at the power and rack commitment for its STaaS customers, the company takes away one of the pain points that impact many organizations, by delivering Storage-as-a-Service in the only form it should be: storage as a turnkey service without having to care about space or power, and with cloud-like economics. To its broader customer base, similar guarantees are provided, ensuring that even non-STaaS customers benefit from the same outcomes.

Also noteworthy, data availability guarantees increase Pure Storage’s overall data resiliency strategy and provide additional confidence to organizations that seek to deploy Pure Storage systems for their mission-critical workloads, allowing optimal and nondisruptive use of the storage, saving precious time, resources, and avoiding the cost and impact of downtime.

Additional Resources

Do not miss our interview with Prakash Darji, VP and GM, Digital Experience Business Unit, Pure Storage: