Inside Pure Storage's Answer To Killing Downtime Forever

Pure Storage’s Evergreen//Forever strategy isn’t some warmed-over subscription model; it’s a full-frontal assault on legacy storage. While competitors fumble to mimic the surface, they miss the seismic shift beneath: Evergreen isn't a pricing hack; it’s an engineering revolution.

“Evergreen is unique in the industry as it is not so much a delivery mechanism but rather an engineering approach,” explains Matthew Oostveen, chief technology officer for Asia Pacific & Japan at Pure Storage. “By definition, Evergreen delivers customers a way to non-disruptively upgrade not just production hardware, but also the infrastructure software that powers the Pure Platform.”

Killing downtime softly

For decades, storage leaders treated downtime disruption like a law of nature. System upgrades, capacity expansions, and hardware refreshes have turned IT teams into masters of the planned outage. So when Pure Storage says this is an archaic dance we can live without, users question it.

“Users have been conditioned to accept downtime as part of their storage upgrade experience, so claims it can be done non-disruptively are often treated with suspicion,” Oostveen notes.

To make inroads, Pure Storage has made its mission to build trust. “Trust is foundational to Pure's success in the data center, so guiding our customers on the journey from the old way of thinking towards Evergreen is what our teams do every day around the world,” Oostveen explains.

Today, the company is winning over its customers. The proof? Pure Storage boasts an industry-leading Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 82. That’s more than just happy customers; it speaks to what happens when an engineering-first philosophy like Evergreen//Forever translates directly into customer satisfaction.

Pure Storage’s commitment to engineering excellence is also backed by significant investment. “We lead the industry in terms of our R&D spend as a percentage of revenue,” Oostveen reveals. “One dollar in every five we earn is reinvested back into making our products better for customers.”

Breaking storage boundaries in three ways

Pure Storage’s Evergreen//Forever has three innovative aspects. One lies with capacity management. “For customers with more than one array, should that array reach capacity, then Pure's technology enables operators to utilize capacity on any Pure system,” Oostveen explains. “This provides ruthless levels of utilization, simultaneously reducing waste and risk.”

This is a paradigm shift. Forget the old days of overprovisioning just to avoid a meltdown. Pure Storage not only optimizes resource utilization but also provides a buffer against technology obsolescence.

Another aspect is Evergreen’s inherent acknowledgment that hybrid clouds need a hybrid cloud solution — not a water down version of a cloud-native solution or a bootstrapped on-premises one. Oostveen believes storage leaders need a real-world solution that bridges the gap between traditional infrastructure and cloud-native approaches.

“Cloud is not a place but a delivery model,” Oostveen emphasizes. “Consequently, we focus heavily on building a platform that enables customers to take ownership of their cloud-delivered IT services, which means offering an end-to-end pricing structure.”

For Pure Storage, this means bravely extending Evergreen beyond mere technology to include comprehensive service guarantees: “We even go so far as to pay for our customers' datacenter space, power and cooling costs and back up our offering with SLA-driven services,” Oostveen adds.

Perhaps the most compelling aspect of Pure’s Evergreen strategy is its answer to the warp speed at which technology changes. “The tech world is moving faster each year, which makes planning for the future more challenging than ever before,” Oostveen observes. “Having a data platform that is always state-of-the-art and ready to run the workloads of the future translates to value for customers not painting themselves into a corner with regrettable infrastructure choices.”

Competitors try to ape Evergreen, but they’re missing the point. Their efforts largely focus on replicating the subscription aspect rather than the underlying engineering philosophy. “Some of our competitors have attempted to hijack the Evergreen term with feeble claims they can replicate it,” Oostveen notes. “The truth is they are just describing a mechanism to 'scale-out' storage or use a lease-based subscription model.”

The path forward

With a four-week development cycle and continuous feedback loop plugged directly into its support organization, Pure Storage has created a system that can rapidly evolve to meet emerging challenges. This agility and its engineering-first obsession position the company to continue leading the storage industry's transformation with Evergreen.

The most important takeaway?  Don't be fooled by subscription smoke and mirrors; look under the hood. As Oostveen puts it, “The mistakes our competitors have made trying to copy Evergreen serve as valuable corroboration that we are on the right trajectory with our engineering approach.”

Image credit: iStockphoto/master1305