Pure Storage engineered FlashArray to be Evergreen™, which means that your migration to Pure will be the last one you’ll need to do. The FlashArray//X supports non-disruptive upgrades of any part of the array with no downtime or performance impact, no re-buy of capacity, and no data migrations (i.e., upgrade with data in place). Pure product upgrades do NOT require planned downtime. As a result, an increasing number of Pure customers perform regular maintenance and upgrades during production hours with confidence that there will be no negative performance impacts or risk to data availability. We all know that legacy data migrations are risky, costly and inconvenient when performed outside business hours or on weekends.

Dell EMC’s Future-Proof Loyalty program offers Never Worry Migrations for PowerMax based on SRDF/Metro.¹ This adds substantial complexity to the data-migration process, and doesn’t meet Pure’s definition of “nondisruptive.” With the launch of Dell EMC PowerStore, Dell EMC is claiming² no forklift upgrades, yet time will tell if migrating to their next generation will in fact be nondisruptive with no data migration. In contrast, you can upgrade FlashArray//X across generations with data in place at full performance. This eliminates forklift migrations, which in turn eliminates risk, cost, and complexity associated with legacy migrations. Now you can get your nights and weekends back!

Only the FlashArray//X has proven six-9’s (99.9999%) availability. Our availability metrics include all upgrades, even across generational upgrades. To match our availability, Dell EMC requires two PowerMax arrays running SRDF with a third site for Witness,³ or a pair of VPLEXs, also requiring a third site. Dell EMC claims⁴ PowerStore as being able to achieve six-9’s (99.9999%) availability, yet the footnote on that claim states “Actual System Availability may vary”. With Pure and the FlashArray//X, you can maintain (or improve) your storage availability with far less equipment, cost, and complexity.

The FlashArray//X delivers measured average total efficiency over 10:1 across the entire fleet of deployed FlashArray devices. Dell EMC guarantees only 4:1 in data reduction ratio and uses a combination of technologies including compression, deduplication, thin provisioning, and snapshots to achieve that data efficiency ratio.⁵ While your results will vary based on your type of data, Pure almost always provides better data reduction than Dell EMC, thus reducing your CAPEX. Augmented with our Evergreen™ subscription to innovation, Pure can reduce your total cost of ownership (TCO) significantly compared to Dell EMC.

Pure’s Evergreen Storage ownership model provides a radically better experience at a lower TCO than Dell EMC. Keeping your Pure storage modern via our included, data-in-place, nondisruptive controller upgrades drives much of this savings—and Pure can prove it. Using a leading industry analyst’s own “street” pricing data for both vendors, Pure delivers six-year lifecycle TCO savings of up to 60% versus Dell EMC. And these savings improve even more once you factor in Dell EMC’s higher costs to manage its storage and the complex data migrations involved with upgrades. But compare and judge for yourself: Use our TCO calculators to model your exact needs and show your custom TCO savings.

Pure engineered the FlashArray//X specifically for NVMe flash and Evergreen. Dell EMC, by contrast, originally designed most of its portfolio for magnetic hard disk drives, in some cases retrofitted with flash. PowerStore is still based on legacy Unity XT design. Pure’s FlashArray//X family does not carry the legacy of supporting disk drives. Rather than using commercial NVMe SSDs that require garbage collection and a flash translation layer on every SSD, Pure DirectFlash™ Modules (DFM) allow you to address the NVMe flash directly. The result: fewer CPU cycles required per IO. Finally, multiple queues connect the native parallelism of NVMe flash with modern multicore CPUs. This makes Pure’s NVMe-enabled solutions not only fast but extremely efficient for demanding applications. We further extend our solution capabilities and capacity with DirectFlash shelf, which allows FlashArray//X to grow capacity beyond a single chassis with additional NVM-connected chassis via NVMe-over-Fabric (NVMe-oF) using the RoCEv2 protocol. FlashArray//X90 (with a single DirectFlash shelf) reduces your footprint for 3.3PB of effective capacity to only 6U.

From our very first product sold, Pure customers have benefited from our engineered-for-Evergreen Architecture. We provide the latest and best hardware and software technologies with full investment protection, without ever requiring you to migrate data. Compare that to Dell EMC’s PowerStore-only Anytime Upgrades offer. Dell promises one-time upgrades, either to a next-generation, or next-level controller model, but not both -- and not necessarily to the latest generation controller, either. And this brand-new offering has no track record, so you’ll just have to take their word for it. It requires extra support and additional services be purchased, too.⁶

With Pure, even the first customers who purchased our original FA-300 series and maintained their Evergreen subscription have received upgrades to our //X family without additional cost, and with no data migration. But why wait three years to modernize? Most Pure customers utilize Upgrade Flex (part of the Evergreen Gold subscription) to upgrade their controllers -- to the latest generation or higher-level model, or both -- whenever they need as part of qualifying capacity expansions. They get full trade-in credit, and there are no limits on how many times they upgrade. Pure has delivered well over 3000 Evergreen controller upgrades through the years, keeping thousands of arrays modern and agile. That’s a record unmatched by any other vendor. And because we include all our array software with our subscriptions, all our Evergreen customers (even the earliest ones) receive all our new array features at no additional cost.

Pure includes ActiveCluster™, our active-active multisite business-continuity solution, at no additional cost with our storage as part of the Evergreen subscription. With ActiveCluster, you don’t need special hardware or a third site to implement a multisite cluster. Dell EMC tries to match the synchronous replication capabilities of ActiveCluster with SRDF/Metro or VPLEX/Metro offerings. But both solutions require additional software licenses (likely at a substantial cost) and professional services to implement.⁷ Both Dell EMC solutions also require an independent third site, which means you have to maintain, upgrade, and support that third site, resulting in additional cost in terms of operations and overhead.⁸ In contrast, setting up ActiveCluster requires only four steps (not hundreds of pages of Dell manuals), and no professional services. With ActiveCluster, you can easily add multisite active-active resiliency to any workload, thereby providing business continuity and improving beyond our already industry-leading 99.9999% proven availability.

Pure FlashArray//X is a self-driving storage solution that is simple to operate. We believe that you’re more interested in creating value for your organization than spending time tuning a storage system. That’s why we designed FlashArray to deliver always-on data deduplication, compression, encryption, QoS, and more without performance penalties. This means you get all these benefits with no downsides. Compare this to any of Dell EMC’s portfolio of all-flash arrays, which require you to individually configure volumes and make tradeoffs between redundancy, efficiency, and performance.⁹ Pure was also the first to take a machine learning/AI approach to tuning and support. Pure1®, our SaaS-based monitoring and analytics platform, and our predictive and proactive support (powered by Pure1 Meta™) give you a better understanding of not just the array, but the environment in which it operates. For example, Pure1 provides predictive analytics on performance, load, and even on the VM level.

Pure Storage customers are some of the happiest anywhere. So much so that they go out of their way to recommend us to their peers. How do we know? We have an independently Certified Owen CX Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 82 as of March 2020, putting us in the top 1% of B2B vendors and ahead of many leading B2C companies. No other storage company comes close. FlashArray has been in the Gartner “Leaders” quadrant for the last six years, including in the latest 2019 Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage.

Most OPEX models are essentially flexible leases. Unfortunately, changes in accounting standards have essentially eliminated the benefits of operating leases. Our Evergreen//One™ offering complies with the new accounting standards¹⁰ and delivers OPEX storage as a service (STaaS) for private and hybrid clouds.

Get the effortless, efficient, and Evergreen Pure Storage experience on-demand, with dramatically lower TCO. Evergreen//One is now free for the first three months for new customers with a 12-month contract term of 50 TiB. With Evergreen//One, you pay only for used effective capacity (measured daily), not provisioned capacity. This gives you up to twice the cost-efficiency based on typical over-provisioning rates, versus on-premises storage, because Evergreen//One ensures you never pay for the storage you’re not actually using. Gain the ability to scale—up, out, and even down—as your needs continue to change, without additional CAPEX spend or staggered leases. CAPEX or OPEX, the choice is yours.