One of our customers recently replaced their ageing enterprise storage with Pure Storage’ FlashArray’s through our company, Centum Services.
In this blog, I outline 8 key benefits that Pure Storage can provide you beyond the traditional increased bang-for-buck you expect with a generational storage technology refresh. I also explain how some of these benefits differentiate Pure Storage from other vendors.
No 1: Availability
Pure Storage FlashArray’s are engineered with stateless “active-active” controller architecture meaning next generation controllers can be hot swapped in with no outage. This architecture means scheduled maintenance is no longer required with all upgrades being non-disruptive as you transition through storage controller generations over time.
No 2: Reliability
Pure Storage arrays have a guaranteed up-time of 99.9999% and as mentioned, there is no requirement for scheduled maintenance. This reliability figure is based on real world telemetry data gathered every 30 seconds from customer deployments across the globe.
No 3: Performance
Rather than just bolting SSD’s into an array, Pure have designed their arrays from the ground up to run flash, they have never supported spinning disk. Their FlashArray //X family run NVMe memory allowing Pure to write directly to silicon rather than being hamstrung by the overhead of traditional disk protocols necessary with SSD.
No 4: Reduced Cost of Ownership
Pure Storage has brought ‘Hardware-as-a-Service’ to the enterprise storage market with their Evergreen support model. Evergreen Gold for the Pure FlashArray family means you breakout of the traditional 4 to 5 year storage replacement cycle and includes:
- New controllers of the latest generation every 3 years
- No end-of-life on the chassis means no more disruptive technology upgrades, you can expect 10+ years from the chassis you initially deploy
- Capacity consolidation means Pure will replace older, smaller disk packs over time with larger packs to prevent datacentre sprawl
Together, these benefits mean your Pure array will be so much better in 10 years than when you initially purchased it.
No 5: Customer Support
Pure’s “Flat and Fair” maintenance program means the cost of support is guaranteed to always be the same or lower than you paid in year 1. Consider this when compared to other vendors who traditionally ramp up the support costs after 3 or 4 years, in an attempt to encourage you to replace your entire array even though it may still be meeting your requirements.
Pure continue to maintain one of the highest Net Promoter Scores (NPS), a measure of customer loyalty, across any industry meaning their clients are more likely to recommend Pure Storage to colleagues, than any other storage solution. This in itself indicates that clients love the overall Pure experience.
No 6: Security
Pure arrays are deployed in some of the most challenging environments across corporate, government and defence meaning they must meet the strictest security requirements. With always on encryption, Pure FlashArray’s provide in-line FIPS 140-2 certified AES 256 encryption with no performance overhead.
No 7: Simplicity
Pre-configure your networking and we can have your Pure array production ready within hours. Pure arrays are extremely simple to configure meaning you don’t need weeks of commissioning services to get them up and running. We regularly deliver new arrays in the morning and customers start migrating production workloads the same day.
Additionally, the Pure1 SaaS management platform means you don’t need any internal server infrastructure to manage your storage. Pure1 can be accessed through a browser or smartphone so you can easily see what’s going on with your storage from anywhere, any time. If anything does go wrong, Pure1 will initiate internal support processes and send you an alert.
No 8: Risk Minimisation
Capacity Guarantee – as part of the sizing process we run a scan across your existing storage environment to determine the workload and capacity required. Based on this information Pure provide a written guarantee that your existing workload will fit into their recommended solution meaning you only buy the storage you need without any risk of falling short.
Love-Your-Storage Guarantee – provides a 30-day money back guarantee, so if having tried a Pure array you don’t absolutely “love it”, we’ll take it back with no questions asked.
Effectively, the Capacity and Love-Your-Storage guarantees can significantly shorten your purchasing process through risk minimisation. Taken one step further, conduct a Proof-of-Concept in your environment running your workload on Pure, if you like it purchase the array, if not we take it away.
Any questions?
If you have any questions or would like to discuss Pure Storage further, please use our Contact Us form to get in touch or call/email Kris van Dyk directly on 0421 643 916/kris@centumservices.com.au