What is Storage as a Service?

Storage as a service (STaaS) is a data storage business model where a provider rents storage resources to a customer through a subscription. STaaS saves you money through operating expenditure (OpEx) agility—you only pay for the storage you need, when you need it.

Why Use Storage as a Service?

Buying new storage capacity can be an expensive capital expenditure (CapEx), especially if you aren’t sure how much capacity you’ll need in the future. You can try to predict the growth of your business and purchase with the future in mind, but it can tie up financial resources that might have more impact elsewhere in your business.

Fortunately, there’s no shortage of major tech companies with large data centers that are willing to sell their excess capacity. For these businesses, storage is just another service that’s part of their expansive product offerings, and they’re more than happy to absorb the expenses of managing, upgrading, and maintaining large-scale storage area networks (SANs). Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud are all examples of major cloud storage providers with STaaS subscription options.

STaaS lets you treat storage as OpEx. You sign a service level agreement (SLA) with your STaaS provider and pay for storage and data transfer rates (e.g., cost per gigabyte). Best of all, this whole process is automated, allowing you to scale your storage needs up and down as demand requires while maintaining performance and availability 24/7.

Benefits of Storage as a Service

To summarize, the benefits of STaaS include:

OpEx subscription model that lets you optimize your storage costs
Ability to quickly scale and provision storage resources to your apps as you grow
Always-on reliability of major cloud service providers
Simplified storage management environment

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How Pure Storage Delivers STaaS on-prem

When most people talk about STaaS, they’re usually thinking about cloud storage, but what if you could make your on-premises data storage as simple and agile as the cloud? Pure as-a-Service™ brings the operational agility of the cloud on premises with a single subscription to innovation. Pure as-a-service offers:

One subscription to all your file, object, and block storage needs (including maintenance and upgrades)
OpEx¹ all-flash STaaS for I/O-intensive applications—you get the physical flash arrays but only pay for the storage you actually use
AI-driven data storage management and predictive analytics with Purity and Pure1®
Support for a true hybrid cloud experience unifying your on-premises and cloud storage resources
Automated data protection through snapshots, high-availability clustering, and disaster recovery

¹ OPEX treatment is subject to customer’s auditor review

What is Storage as a Service?