Pure Storage reworks Evergreen subscription service

Green computing
Green computing

Pure Storage has reworked its Evergreen subscription to provide a more coherent set of services and optimizations that can extend across a customer’s entire fleet of Pure arrays.

There are now three Evergreen offerings: Evergreen//Forever, which is the basic customer-owned arrays offering; Evergreen//One to provide consumption-based use of Pure’s arrays; and Evergreen//Flex in which customer-owned arrays with added fleet-wide performance and efficiency services.

Prakash Darji, GM of Pure’s  Digital Experience Business Unit, said: “The growth of our Evergreen portfolio is a testament to Pure’s commitment to uncomplicating data storage … Further distinguished with the launch of Evergreen//Flex, Pure offers the broadest procurement flexibility and choice across the storage industry today.”

Evergreen shoots

Evergreen, launched in 2015, is a software subscription contract which includes hardware and software upgrades. Since launch, the program has delivered over 10,000 non-disruptive controller upgrades to more than 3,000 customers.

Evergreen Gold, the standard subscription, delivers the full set of capabilities across software and hardware, with so-called white-glove support and maintenance. Customers get the benefit of a SaaS-like model, but for on-premises storage.

Evergreen-as-a-Service was launched in 2018 as a hybrid cloud pay-per-use offering that supports storage-as-a-service for block, file, and object workloads. It delivers storage capacity on demand, backed by Pure’s hardware, software, and support, on a $/GB basis for terms starting from 12 months.

In September 2019, Pure renamed Evergreen-as-as-Service to Pure-as-a-Service and said it would make all Pure products available on subscription. Its popularity grew and Pure’s subscription services made up 33 percent of total revenue, exceeding $738 million and representing 37 percent year-over-year growth in fiscal 2022. Pure-as-a-Service is now being renamed for branding consistency.

Three new Evergreens

Evergreen//Forever – the renamed Evergreen Gold which offers traditional appliance ownership with a subscription to software, and hardware in place updates at regular intervals to modernize media and blades. There is no downtime and no media migration.

Evergreen//One – the renamed Pure-as-a-Service is a consumption-based service model for storage, with proactive monitoring and non-disruptive upgrades and performance and usage SLAs.

Evergreen//Flex – new fleet-level hybrid Evergreen scheme which unlocks and moves stranded storage capacity to where it is needed most. It applies to the full Pure portfolio and provides non-disruptive upgrades and capacity-on-demand availability. The customer owns the hardware and pays Pure for the capacity they use. There is a fleet-level subscription with site-level reserve capacity. Sets of Pure’s Direct Flash Modules (DFMs) in Data Packs can be moved across the fleet to optimize utilization. Evergreen//Flex takes Evergreen//Forever beyond the box, and is the most efficient way to run a fleet of storage enabled by an asset utilization model.

Pure Storage Evergreen
Pure Evergreen briefing slide

Evergreen//Flex is somewhat similar to Zadara’s managed storage service, which now includes compute (servers) and has become a full stack offering. It has a focus on external-to-the customer location in a so-called edge cloud. There are more than 440 points of presence in this cloud around the world, provided by more than 250 managed service providers (MSPs).

Evergreen//Flex effectively extends the managed service to cover a customer’s entire set of Pure arrays in the customer’s own and co-location datacenters with fleet-level optimization. Pure can do this because it has Pure1 cloud-based management using telemetry from the arrays.

Pure1 is a cloud-based AIOps service providing a single web or app interface for a customer to manage all their Pure storage arrays. It provides insights into the installed Pure technology stack, including a topology view to simplify VM troubleshooting. By using its capabilities Pure can monitor overall fleet operation, model it, and recommend moving less-used capacity (DFMs) to actual or potential hot spots. The potential for this kind of service extends to DFMs between FlashBlade and FlashArray, and moving storage compute, meaning storage blades as well. Evergreen//Flex could improve the efficiency and TCO of Pure fleets significantly.