21:38 Video
FlashBlade: Get the Most From Your Evergreen Subscription
In this session, you'll learn the latest techniques to leverage your Evergreen Subscription to keep your FlashBlade system modern and agile.
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Here. You okay? All right? Thank you brian. Welcome everyone. We're going to get started with how flash blade and evergreen worked together and by evergreen, I mean evergreen forever and by flash blade, I mean flash blade?
S, we can actually say that now that we've actually launched both products we weren't able to pre, so that's why you see these very generic descriptors. My name is kevin Rixon. I'm a director of portfolio marketing here at Pure and with me is Justin Brass field, I'm the senior storage architect and um Justin is going to be helping me out a little bit later talking about not only his
experience using the evergreen subscription to keep their storage up and running, but uh, and modern, but also how that might work with the new flash blade as well. So if we could go to the next slide, do I have a clicker or someone? Oh have it?
Oh okay. And I'm guessing There we go. Okay, so just real quickly and I'm sure if you've been working with pure at all, you're familiar with us telling this story. This has been pretty much our story on evergreen from day one. And the reason is because it really resonates with most people that there's this vine that
they're put in by legacy storage companies who have a planned obsolescence model and are basically forcing either a look, we're going to keep raising and raising the rates on maintenance and support for you to keep this outdated gear you have or what we're really trying to drive you toward? Re buying everything from scratch and we always knew that there was a better way,
you know, and what we tried to solve for were a lot of the things that you see here on screen, you know, not just the rising maintenance rates, not just the budget, that would be used in re buying your storage, but all those little hidden costs. And you know, how much work is it gonna take to go back into all the applications and make sure that the new storage is being pointed to correctly and you know,
it just goes on and on and on. But aside from that, just simplifying storage in general, our new tagline of a simplifying storage forever. It sounds, I mean legal really came at us with forever. But when you're able to demonstrate it for 10 plus years in this industry and still be
considered, you know, one of the leaders in terms of technology and innovation that really says something. So what we've been able to do with Evergreen and we now officially call it evergreen forever. That subscription was designed not only to solve, not having to re buy your storage, but truly to be able to keep it modern over time.
You know, certainly with the evergreen architecture that we have, um you can expand your storage at any time, grow it and run it for 10 plus years. And again, not an idle boast because we actually have More than a handful of customers who purchased the original FA 320 and are now on flash array excess. Okay. And without any downtime without having to re
buy their storage, um it's it truly is storage that you can just keep running forever. And that's again by design and that is the approach that we took with flash blade? S. How can we create a system that like flash array can be upgraded not just through the normal scale up motion as the original flash blade did, but you know what if we just aggregated the compute and the storage to the
point where you know now we can truly have not only next gen all flash hardware but really have evergreen play a role in there where individual components can be swapped out in an ongoing hardware subscription like Evergreen forever. There are two models of this new flash blade? S as you heard earlier. There is one that is designed more for capacity and efficiency,
a capacity optimized model, that's the S 200 then one that is, shall I say the hot rod of the of the line designed for maximum performance and which really just stretches the envelope with the kind of workloads that you can do and of course you can have high capacity within that same model as well. So you really get to titrate the type of storage that you need and
because it has the disaggregated flash and blade, that means that you can move between the models and you can upgrade the performance similarly to upgrading controllers within the flash array world independently of the flash. And so with that motion now, you get all those same benefits that we've talked about with flash array, you know, from the very beginning, the fact that not only,
you know, we've always had a no planned downtime, um, you can expand and grow in the flash blade world, but now, you know, you want to go to higher density flash, you can do that non disruptive lee and with your investment protected, You want to move from the S 200 to the S 500, you can do that non disruptive lee and have your investment be protected.
We come out with a next generation version of the blade later on. Um, just as in the flash array world now, you're going to be able to upgrade to the latest and greatest blade technology to get all that performance. So what um, what that really delivers in the flash blade world, this idea of a subscription to innovation, you know, is um,
not just the always improving services that we have and the software subscription, which we've always had before and the world class customer experience, everybody knows our tech support experience the proactive and predictive. I say this, not just because my good friend chris is in the audience today, but it's, it's one of the main drivers that we hear all the time for very high nPS score Um,
support is always getting rave reviews and it's basically because we have a, you know, don't call us, we'll call you, but we mean it in the right way, 70% of our support tickets are actually generated by pure letting you know about problems before we even realize their potential problems. But now with the always modern infrastructure hardware subscription fully applying to flash
blade, that means, you know, being able to upgrade blades um, in the same, you know, always, um, what we call ever modern used to be called free every three motion just as part of your renewal cycle or the anytime upgrades, which used to be called upgrade flex, we now call it ever agile and that allows you to, as I said, move between one blade style and another very,
very easily. Okay, that's the backdrop how flash blade? S is going to work in this environment. I love competing with helicopters. This is we made the right choice doing the silent disco here because otherwise I'd be waiting for president biden or whoever, President of brazil or someone Justin brass field with net spend was kind enough to join us
here today. And you know, Justin you've been using the flash array product for quite some time and using the evergreen subscription to keep things modern. I'd love to get your perspective. You know, as a long time user. What it's like, is it like Renee from Delta said earlier, you know, it sounds like Bs,
but then you wind up thinking maybe it's true for sure. So my experience with pure and Evergreen is like, unlike any company that we've ever dealt with so much that we have like a line item when we purchase, make new purchases on whether or not a product is evergreen or not. Um, because it has made such an impact with inside how we make our purchasing decisions.
So when I go and ask about these things and, and uh, and I need a new array or I just need to buy something. There's a little bit of be like when, when are we next up for for our upgrade or something like that? And there's a little bit of like, can we hold out a little bit longer. You know,
there's always that little bit of pushback because I think we've gotten a little bit, I wouldn't want to say too comfortable with evergreen. I don't think you can, but uh, it's definitely a note when comparing it to other products because of the way we've rolled out our arrays, the way that um, the, it meets the needs of, when, when we start increasing our workloads and
how things are going to look for the future of our data center. And whether or not all those products are going to continue to be supported because we have a lot of legacy, uh, a raise and other things like that that sit there and are either fallen out of support or have uh or become more difficult over time And with Pierre that's that's not a that's a no brainer. It doesn't happen anymore right.
You know and and I'm so excited about all this, I jumped right into hey what does evergreen mean to you, tell us a little bit about net spend and some of the I. T. Challenges that you face that you know it sounds like you've been able to get at least some relief by using pure technology. Sure were work hard payments company. So we have millions of transactions a day which
keeps our eye OHI we we handle all of our infrastructure so anything that is storage that goes through Net spin comes through me and anything that anything that involves disk, anything involves nFS, anything that evolves saying all I have planning in the architecture and have a small little small little team that I delegate to. But for the most part we uh it's all in my head on where when I go to the future and then
responsibility falls on me to go to my VP when the company has a need for storage and as well as when we get asked about things by our parent company, global payments on handing out that data or collaborating with them. So that's that's my role. And so you know with what you've heard about Flash Blade?
S you know, does it sound like not putting you on the spot, Hey, we've got a contract right back here for you to sign. Um you know, what, what about this? Um, you know, scale out architecture, you know, is appealing to you and, and do you think you would be able to make use of the always modern infrastructure
capabilities that it has? Sure. So I'm extremely excited for it for Flash blade. And the reason being I've already used this service and the way we kind of do these upgrades on flash array, it's, it's built into how we even conceive of the product on whether they're gonna get our heads upgraded whether or not we're gonna get our discs upgraded on how many of our entire fleet.
And we always felt that it wasn't exactly a weakness, but we handled it differently with the way we kind of looked at Flash blade as an asset, not our data center and now that the flash blade? S is out and it's module, er, I think that kind of puts it in the same class as our, as our flash array and not exactly treated separately because then the needs are different.
You use those, we use those types of storage for two separate things, but we can treat them in a class of their own that we kind of treat like a higher class of tier and our ability to meet different demands by how we build those systems, which makes me really excited because we have special arrays that we have dedicated certain workloads to and the way we use evergreen on them.
Whether or not when they get upgrades is a huge determining factor of those workloads. And now can now the same can be done with flash blade as and it's at the perfect timing because our flashlight demands are rising. It's it's not to our top tier of flash array yet, but the amount of demands we've got for uh right now we're using it for a lot of S three have have increased so much over the past year that I'm like,
we're gonna need more power and now I'm not worried about just getting as many stacks in there without needed capacity. Now I can focus on the performance aspect rather than the capacity aspect and then fill that in, filling the capacity aspect on the back end later when I want to or get a new array to handle other workloads.
Right? And thank you for um you preempted my question on what kind of workload? So S three, you know, and that's obviously a important one in the whole idea of file and unstructured um you know, and and as we heard in the launch this morning, this idea that we've now really expanded out the kinds of workloads and that, you know, I love what you said Justin about being able to
tailor the right storage to the right workload profile, but also not feel boxed in, you know that with um not only the growth capabilities that you have whether on flash array or flash blade, the fact that you realize if you head down a path, it's it's not meeting your needs, it's not like you have to start over from scratch, there are things that you could do to increase the performance or increase the capacity or
whatever. Yeah, that's all amen to that. That's I mean that's all I've seen over the past years as we've used as we've used flash array. So seeing it with flashlight now is just it's just the icing on the cake when it comes when it comes to it. What's the most difficult upgrade you've had on
flash array? Oh boy, there's a there's a handful so any just about any configuration you can have with the flash array? We've had it since 2014. So since then to now we've probably had it whether it's upgrading from the old ems to the excess to now the excels. we've we've done it also and we've moved in
between and we've gone in between our fleets and things like that, so expect no difference with when I, when I eventually upgrade to the series, like we, I think overall there's no specific call out of the, the hardest upgrade, uh mainly revolving around specific workloads and like how how how are we going to handle this, but I think the amount over those six years as we've grown our flat
file data since I have joined. Net spin has more than quadrupled. So our and block data as well, like our overall size has just ballooned. So having the product and the service that encapsulates all of that and I know that my needs are going to be met um without always having to worry about my checkbook is good peace of mind. That's a great point and I wasn't trying to put
you totally on the spot. But yes, that was a little bit of a trick question in the sense that you know, I've heard, you know, you and I talked before and it echoes what I've heard from so many other customers the night and day difference between migrations and upgrades if they were even, you know, available as upgrades. Normally it was the forklift style required so
much planning. It's not always just the um you know, the the capital outlay and getting that budget, which as you mentioned is not always easy and he's usually put off for another year and another year and hence the maintenance extortion um you know, all of those things go away when you're on an evergreen forever subscription. And of course that is also true with evergreen
flex and evergreen one. Um evergreen one being the ultimate in terms of, you know, having um everything managed for you. So you really don't even have to worry about the upgrade process but with flex it has all the same features of forever on a site wide basis, um with a flexible payment schedule etcetera and of course all three of them are built on the same architecture. Um, you know,
which again is the reason why we wanted to bring everything under the evergreen umbrella. When I ask customers, what does evergreen mean to you? nine times out of 10 what they're saying is, I don't worry about it. It, it just keeps working. I can upgrade it. You know, I can beat it up. It lasts a long time secondary to that.
Yeah, it means I don't have to re buy the storage, you know that it's part of the subscription, but that's why we wanted to create this umbrella of evergreen subscriptions because again at the heart of it, it's the peace of mind that the architecture gives you coupled with however you want to consume that storage going forward. Of course, you know, it's proven not just by Justin or even by Renee at Delta
Airlines, but you know, we have delivered over 10,000 in the flash array world can't wait until we start getting brag numbers like this for flash blade. Over 10,000 controller pairs were not playing fast and loose here. You know, that means 10,000 arrays that didn't need to be purchased that were able to upgrade, on you know folks just like you on their timeline as opposed to having
to get that forklift out and re buy everything. Uh and then of course, you know, from the software perspective, um the fact that when we're able to launch new features, like whether it's active clusters, we talk about here or safe mode, you know, they're just available to anyone and one third of the customers or the arrays that are running
active cluster right now, those arrays were purchased before we even launched that as a feature. So either a one, we make sure there's backward compatibility on our features or be Um I literally just mix what I always hate to do. So one Um we have backward compatibility and two, we make sure that there's an upgrade path.
Okay, So if you want to be able to use those features, You're not locked out. It doesn't mean you have to re buy your storage to be able to do that. And the ultimate proof which you saw in the keynotes 97% and and it's actually gotten better. I don't know why in the keynote they used six years or older. It's actually five years.
Um so right at that point when the legacy storage vendors are usually saying, yep, time to get out the forklift and redo this 97% of pure raise that are five years or older are still in service today. So I mean that that's the ultimate testament. That's our experience for sure. The the some of the people who account our assets, still don't believe that Here
we we have our admin pier one is still the same admin Pier one that we put in there because of a competitor of yours that we used previously were always getting up into the, we were up into the teens before we started converting and they were like, are you sure this isn't gonna be uh the, the V series teen. And I'm like, no, this isn't, this isn't the same.
They're like this is still the same one. I'm like, well technically it's had all its parts changed out but it's still technically the same array, the same data still sitting on. We actually have a white paper that goes into that for the financial folks to help explain the fact that yes, it does remain the same asset.
Uh you can stay on your books that long. So you know, and and with flex that translates over there as well with evergreen flex because that is true ownership. Even in a cloud like consumption. I want to thank you very much Justin this was a great session. We've got plenty of time for questions and answers.
If you gotta run for any reason you can find out more at pure storage. Evergreen Obviously if you go on pure storage dot com today, you will see everything flash or a s everything the new and expanded evergreen portfolio. Um so you know, but anyway we are here for your questions. Yes, thank you
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