Six years ago when Pure Storage was launched, its go to market approach driven by its founders, was two-fold. The first was that flash storage was here to stay in the datacentre. The second was that storage in the enterprise had become too complex and too expensive and was a significant pain point for end customers. Mainstream storage vendors were bringing out new products and were using that as a reason for end customers to migrate from one platform to another.
Pure Storage approached the market and turned the prevailing business model on its head. In 2014, it broke ranks by locking the metric cost of maintenance and services contract for end customers to day-one of the start of the contract. No incremental and hidden costs as the years roll on for Pure Storage end customers. At the end of the third year and increments of three years thereof, it offered free upgrade of the controllers, thus enabling its end customers to switch over into latest technology platforms. All for free, no hidden unpredictability’s, no incremental add-on costs, no forklift removals of hardware and no forklift upgrades.
The first programme where the maintenance and services metric costs are locked into the day-one base line, Pure Storage calls its Evergreen Storage programme. The second programme where end customers get controller upgrades at the end of three year life cycle milestones, Pure Storage calls it Forever Flash programme. These two programmes give Pure Storage end customers a predictable total cost of ownership across the life cycle of their storage technology investment.
Ben Savage, EMEA Head of Channels and Alliances, Pure Storage, explains the benefits that end customers get from Pure Storage versus from mainstream vendors. “When they move to flash with Pure Storage, then the benefits to customers is cost predictability. Historically from our competitors they have had very much what we would describe as a forklift upgrade every three to four years. They have their storage infrastructure set in place and when they look to renew their maintenance or move to a new platform, they see a significant hike in their storage costs. That unpredictability has caught a lot of customers out in terms of budgeting and financing.”
The longer term predictability of total cost of ownership around flash storage solutions from Pure Storage is working well with managed service providers offering cloud solutions. Both the Evergreen Storage offerings around lock-in of maintenance costs and free upgrades under Forever Flash ring well with the business model of managed service providers. Managed service providers offer compelling service level agreements based on specific cloud solutions demanded by their end customers. A forward looking predictable storage cost base around Pure Storage products allows managed service providers to offer more assured and competitive contracts for their key end customers. That is disrupting some of the support contracts that managed service providers have with mainstream storage vendors.
Savage points out that when an end user considers migrating from a dedicated IT infrastructure to a hybrid cloud infrastructure they are looking at two key benefits. This includes cost savings and flexibility. With Evergreen Storage and Forever Flash offerings available for managed service providers, this creates a definite appeal for them to build on and forward offer to their end customers. “You can imagine, those two elements built into a cloud model. It is extremely compelling not only for the service provider but also for the customer in terms of ongoing predictability of cost and value. And we are disrupting it from a cost value perspective. In that situation, Pure Storage as an all flash provider would sit within the cloud service provider.”
The managed service providers where solutions from Pure Storage tend to fit in well, are those that follow a multi-storage-vendor, best of breed approach. “You tend to find that most significant managed service providers, have got best of breed technology across their service catalog.”
Channel partner strategy
- Best partners are creating blue print for other partners
- Helping customers identify workloads to be managed
- Speaking to business about cloud
- Helping them understand tipping point for flash is behind us
- Partners need to bring simplicity of management to forefront
- Pure Storage growth not linked to number of partners
- Looking at performance of each partner at granular level
- Evolving partners into application-aware and application-centric
Another key opportunity for Pure Storage is the datacentre. The vendor remains committed that long term datacentres will go all flash. While converged infrastructures have also exhibited rapid growth in the datacentre, the best fit of converged infrastructures and suitable applications depends on the size of the end user organisation. For flash solutions from Pure Storage, the demand is being driven by database applications. Other application workloads like virtualisation around server infrastructure, and virtual desktop infrastructure applications can fit into converged and flash storage solutions based on the scale out of the application. “We are not saying all flash is correct for all storage infrastructures. But we do believe that all flash will be able to cover majority of the datacentre requirements today and certainly for high performance applications.”
Globally, in terms of market segments, financial services, healthcare and public sector are the primary demand segments for all flash solutions. Inside financial services large database applications, and inside public sector virtual desktop infrastructure applications are important workload areas for all flash solutions.
Pure Storage follows a 100% channel partner led sales approach in its go to market. Since the key benefits for its end customers accrue over the three year milestone cycle of cost-free upgrades and from its lock-in on day-one of maintenance and service contract metric costs, Pure Storage expects its channel partners to have end customer relationships of similar longevity. By going to market with its Evergreen and Forever Flash storage programmes, the vendor has also established a significant level of transparency in its cost of goods and services for channel partners to build upon. “Pure Storage does not have a services organisation and unlike many of our competitors we do not deliver services ourselves,” explains Savage, about the possible opportunity that channel partners can exploit in the market place.
Since system integrator and storage channel partners are usually multi-vendor, to become part of the Pure Storage partner programme they need to be ready to disrupt mainstream vendor presence. Next they need to understand the cost base approach followed by Pure Storage across its programmes and be ready to work with end customers over the longer term.
Across the Africa region, Pure Storage is presently only operating in South Africa and one of its leading channel partners is system integrator Data Sciences Corporation. The key market segments for Pure Storage in South Africa are financial services, healthcare and cloud service providers. Compared to the Middle East region, the South African region provides less vendor competition in the flash storage solution space, but more competition with mainstream storage vendors. Another difference is channel partners here have extended relationships with end customers often even managing their IT infrastructure. Savage expects such channel partner to continue to lead the go to market both inside South Africa and into rest of Africa.
Across the Middle East region, Pure Storage works with distributor Global Distribution for datacentre focused channel partners. Pure Storage works with distributor Spectrami for datacentre and cloud security focused channel partners. The third area where Pure Storage is looking at expanding its engagement with channel partners is in the analytics application ecosystem. About the penetration of flash based storage solutions, Savage remarks, “I think in terms of the adoption in the region, it is clearly not as widely adopted as it is in the other regions.” Inside the Middle East region, education and insurance are important market segments.
With the arrival of flash storage, mainstream storage vendors have been on a path to redefine their storage strategies. Hybrid storage product offerings are helping their customer base to move towards flash storage and is less risky both for end users and channel partners. “The growth for all vendors is in flash and for our competition their strategy is hybrid,” summarises Savage.
Engaging with Data Sciences in South Africa
Data Sciences Corporation aims to provide next generation solutions along with supporting customer service. Rui de Oliveira, Sales Director at Data Sciences, considers Pure Storage to be the catalyst of mainstream adoption of all-flash arrays. According to him, Pure Storage has revolutionised the way in which organisations purchase, manage and dispose of storage investments and is considered to be the thought-leader in this market. Pure Storage has its strengths in providing solutions for structured and unstructured data storage; its channel model which is built on long term, value partnership; and its customer first approach.
“Within Data Sciences rich history in the enterprise storage market, Data Sciences has not seen a technology change in the datacentre so radically within such a short period of time,” stresses de Oliveira.
Pure Storage’s Evergreen and Forever Flash programmes are a significant shift in the acquisition, maintenance and total cost of ownership of storage in the industry. In order to build an understanding of these programmes, Data Sciences provides a consultative engagement including assessing challenges, requirements and future objectives of its customers.
To compete with converged infrastructure solutions making inroads as enabling platforms for digital transformation, Pure Storage has recently launched Flash Blade. This is an SSD based, scale-out, file and object storage with de-duplication and compression scaling to PetaBytes of capacity. Financial institutions, manufacturing, telecom, ISPs, mining sectors, are potential target segments that can benefit as they scale in terms of demand for converged data storage.
“Due to the simplicity of how Pure Storage integrates with hypervisors such as Openstack, Hyper-V, VMWare, customers can enjoy the same levels of simplicity, but avoid being locked into a single platform vendor and hypervisor, while having the ability to leverage existing server investments,” explains de Oliveira.
Synergies between Pure Storage and Data Sciences have helped to create their partnership. These include similar business philosophy and readiness to bring in market disruption. As a vendor, Pure Storage promotes Data Sciences as an extension of its business, culture and customer centric engagement model across South Africa.
Pure Storage has called for an end to the industry’s longstanding practice of maintenance extortion with its expanded Forever Flash programme. The improved Forever Flash programme extends the useable life of all Pure Storage FlashArrays indefinitely, for both new and existing customers with current maintenance contracts. This includes consistently flat or better maintenance and service pricing with no out year increases; free controller upgrades with every three year maintenance and service contract renewal to ensure storage investments benefit from Moore’s Law, delivering consistent performance advantages and the latest software features; and no-cost proactive replacement of equivalent or better hardware components when needed, including flash in the event of wear.
Customers are getting a raw deal today from big storage vendors. Dramatic escalation in out-year maintenance fees are used to force them into purchasing replacement storage arrays that require moving equipment in and out of their data center every few years, and necessitate complex data migrations and costly downtime. In many cases customers have to repurchase the same array software they just wrote off. Pure Storage is committed to better serving its customers by offering storage that lives productively forever, without compromises, forced migrations or price hikes. Pure Storage is moving customers from legacy disk era business practices with the introduction of perpetual storage.
Forever Flash turns the prevailing storage industry business model on its head. Pure Storage is now expanding the advantages of Forever Flash. All of the programme’s benefits are now fully extended to every FlashArray customer. Total cost of ownership is further reduced, and maintenance has been permanently flattened and simplified in all array usage scenarios.
The new Forever Flash programme is comprised of three components:
#1 Flat and fair, forever
This offers guaranteed flat or better maintenance and service pricing rates forever. Customers will never be subjected to increased out year maintenance fees, and will typically see a reduction in per TB maintenance rates over time. When a customer’s maintenance renewal is processed, any maintenance and service contracts arising from new capacity upgrades will be consolidated into a single, simple contract, just as if they had purchased a new array, with the same maintenance and service rate they received at the time of their original, or better.
#2 Forever maintenance
This ensures proactive repair or replacement of any hardware components when needed, including flash devices, with components of equal or greater functionality for customers with active maintenance and support contracts.
#3 Free every three year controller upgrades, forever
In addition to Flat and fair maintenance pricing and Forever maintenance, every customer also receives free controller upgrades with every three year maintenance contract renewal. Customers can now keep their storage current in performance, scale and features, without complexity, risk, inconvenience or costs associated with traditional storage migrations and forklift upgrades.
The prevailing enterprise storage business model of planned obsolescence continues to force customers to either pay for new storage they may not need, or face hefty year three and four maintenance penalties, ensuring vendors continue to profit while customers get squeezed.
Revised Evergreen Storage model
The new Capacity Consolidation programme helps customers expanding their storage capacity to simultaneously consolidate older, less dense flash storage and receive trade-in credit for that older storage. This means customers can break free of the cycle of constantly re-buying storage they already own during upgrades. Additionally, with the new Right-Size Guarantee, customers can bypass the risk and guesswork of buying storage with data reduction and instead purchase directly on an effective capacity basis, just as their requirements indicate.
Pure Storage uses cloud-based workload intelligence to size the right array for the job. This eliminates worries about data reduction and undersizing for unique data, even if it is non-reducible. Pure will size an efficient array and guarantee the effective capacity result – backed by a six-month written guarantee to make it right with non-disruptive, free additional flash to meet the customer’s specified needs.
With Capacity Consolidation, Pure Storage customers can rest assured that their infrastructure can scale to handle exploding data growth by periodically upgrading to denser, more modern flash without paying for the same terabyte twice. Compared to traditional solutions, Capacity Consolidation eliminates periodic and disruptive capacity re-buys by expanding and modernising the media in an existing array, online and with trade-in credit.
Capacity Consolidation eliminates scale-up forklift re-buys, and scale-out re-buys associated with aging nodes removed from their cluster. Customers install new capacity into their FlashArray, while the data on the older, consolidated capacity is automatically and non-disruptively migrated into the newer, denser capacity.
Evergreen Storage can deliver significant and ongoing savings of 33% or more, even assuming the same initial purchase price for competitive arrays – which can accelerate innovation across customer organisations. The underlying technology feature is called Shelf Evacuation, and is another example of how Evergreen Storage combines purpose-built technology and business model innovation to deliver much simpler, easier, and more cost efficient storage.
