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34:22 Video

Customer Panel: How Evergreen//Forever Solves Storage Headaches

In this panel of longtime Pure users, we'll break down the advantages, agility, and expert best practices that organizations have gained through their Evergreen subscriptions.
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00:01
Mm Welcome. And this is the evergreen customer panel segment of your tech fest base camp with me today are a couple of very uh, luminary users of pure hardware and software. Um, that is James kelly, who's the senior systems administrator of research at chapman University and ERic
00:32
Cornwell, senior network engineer all aboard America Holdings. I'm kevin Richardson, the Director of portfolio marketing. It Pure and what we're gonna be focusing in on is the real world example of how Evergreen forever solves storage headaches. Uh, so before we get into our panel discussion, just wanted to give a brief level set on,
00:55
you know, sort of what is evergreen forever, What is it is a subscription and especially what kind of headaches when we talk about those, um, that it is trying to solve. I think the easiest way to describe that are the two biggest pain points that we've heard from users time and time again about their legacy storage. Um, you know, basically it's very difficult to upgrade and so therefore what happens,
01:21
you know, the first day that you buy your legacy storage, that tends to be the best day that it runs, you know, all the features are working. Uh, you've got great performance, you've got all the capacity you need. The trouble is, you know, it doesn't really expand or especially modernize very well over time and so eventually three or four years out, sometimes even a couple of years out you're
01:43
faced with a dilemma. You know, you either need to just keep paying higher and higher maintenance rates to keep that older and older storage or you are then forced to re buy everything what we call the forklift upgrade, basically bring that forklift in junk and everything that you had bringing in entirely brand new gear. You know, it's very wasteful,
02:06
it not just in terms of money but in terms of time because those migration projects are are are really crazy but there's lots of other little headaches too in storage. And you know, the question that we always like to pose is what would you be able to do if you didn't have to worry about all these things, not just those disruptive upgrades and the, you know, maintenance extortion and paying more and more maintenance but you know,
02:29
doing without key features, things like data protection against ransomware or you know, having the right kind of synchronous replication and snapshots and everything so that you can make sure your data is secure. Um you know, what happens when um, you actually do need to do those upgrades even if it's just a software upgrade many times you have to take those systems offline so you wind up working if you
02:56
are, you know, in the data center nights and weekends because that has to be done at off hours um dealing with constant user complaints because of slower and slower storage performance um you know, it just becomes a real litany of things that those were the things that we set out to solve at pure storage, not just from the standpoint of the upgrades and everything that we have in the Evergreen Forever program,
03:24
but even more importantly from the standpoint of just simplifying all of storage together and with the promise of whatever green in terms of the architecture that we built into the product and then the subscription that we call evergreen forever you might have known in the past is evergreen storage or evergreen gold. Um you can buy your storage once and then run it for 10 plus years virtually
03:51
forever because of the non disruptive upgrade capabilities there. And then also everything that's included within the subscription, not just software that keeps getting better and better over time, but the hardware itself. In fact controller upgrades are included at a regular interval if nothing else. Just to make sure that you keep your storage
04:12
modern. And then there's also on demand upgrades at any time um always improving data services, that's what the software really delivers. And then what that means for you as a user is you have the agility to respond to those changes in your business and your investments are protected and you have predictable costs going forward. What the evergreen storage forever subscription
04:35
does is for those of you who want to just purchase your storage um in the, you know, traditional way you get a lot of the benefits of an as a service subscription. Even with that traditional um with that traditional purchase, basically what you get is the software subscription always improving data services and that's not just what comes with the array when you first buy it.
05:00
But even major features that we release over time for instance, active cluster or synchronous replication feature, um, that was delivered absolutely at no extra charge and we have backwards compatibility where new features can work with our previous versions. So again, you just keep getting better and better data services experience as you go.
05:21
That includes tools like pier one. Um, even a poor works license for kubernetes, um, you know, persistent data is included, always modern infrastructure, the hardware keeps getting better. Those controller upgrades that I talked about our ever modern included controller upgrades every three years on renewal and the ever agile one which is very popular because that means you can upgrade whenever the need arises,
05:50
you can trade in your flash both for capacity consolidation and to move to later generations and every single component in your system uh, is guaranteed as long as you maintain that evergreen forever. Um, you know, subscription. So that means even if a particular component, let's say a shelf or an interconnect or something like that ages out you'll get it
06:15
replaced with whatever the latest and greatest one is and then all the world class customer experience um, features things like the guarantees we were the first, You know, storage vendor to come out with any sort of guarantee around satisfaction around the capacity and data reduction that you get. But even more importantly, it's that support experience you get true proactive support fully,
06:38
70% of the tickets. Support tickets are generated by pure ourselves. We are reaching out proactively to you the user instead of waiting for you to recognize a problem and then call us. Um, and then we also have our flat and fair subscription renewals as well. So again that maintenance extortion is just gone forever.
07:02
Okay with that all as background. What I'd like to do now is reintroduce our two guests, eric and James and we're gonna have a little free form discussion around what it's actually like to not only run pure storage arrays and some of the, you know, benefits that they get from them, but especially around those evergreen upgrades and what the evergreen forever subscription
07:31
can can deliver. So, James, let's start with you. Um welcome again. It's always great to see you here, my friend, We've spent a little bit of time at a few different events talking about your experiences. Um why don't you tell us a little bit about chapman University and some of the issues that you were were trying to solve with your legacy
07:54
storage in the first place. Thank you for inviting me again. I'm always happy to be here chapman University is a, I call it a medium small, traditional brick and mortar, nonprofit university focused on liberal arts business education and increasingly now stem and graduate research. So we're located in the city of orange in California, which is basically one city south
08:20
of Disney. It's a landmark everybody seems to to recognize. Um and The university has been around since 1861 and were mostly known for our film school these days, although we do have a world class physical therapy school also. Um, so we've been pure users for, we've been pure customers for about six years, a little bit more these days. So we're actually going to our second round of
08:48
evergreen upgrades or at least planning that second round as we speak prior to the introduction of pure storage into our environment. The main challenges we faced were all of the traditional issues with legacy spinning disk arrays, huge power consumption, lots of space being taken up in our data center with you know, rack after rack of spinning disk and
09:18
and performance limitations. We were looking to upgrade our central management system for our entire environment and we didn't think that the performance that we were getting out of our legacy systems could sustain the new complexity that we were introducing. The new product was built around an oracle database cluster and just very demanding environment.
09:41
So we went looking and after some shopping, we we decided to purchase our first puree and it was night and day as soon as we introduced it, we went from two cabinets, two racks full of spinning disk to a device that was a single, I believe for you array right. And the migration was could not have been simpler. We just copied everything in And the benefits
10:11
were tremendous. The our power consumption went away. And what we found was that the performance overhead available in the all flash technologies that Pierre uses allowed us to consider doing things that were previously not even on our radar. Things like putting all of our production oracle database servers into virtual machines and gaining huge benefits in terms
10:41
of maintain ability, uh disaster recovery, flexibility, um performance management, um and later on replication into the cloud either at the storage level, which is what we ended up doing using pure storage is built in replication technology or at the VM ware level. There's a tremendous number of solutions for managing servers once you virtualized them.
11:10
That that just, you know, made my life as an oracle dB a and storage administrator. We're a small place, we wear lots of hats, um Made, made my life completely different. Um so yeah, we're has been a we've had a great experience as a pure customer.
11:34
Well, that's great and you know, you touched on a lot of the different themes, the complexity that you were facing um certainly, you know, especially with the new application that you're bringing in that was database based, you needed more performance and the existing systems were very difficult to upgrade. So, you know, you would have had to move to a new vendor anyway and it sounds like you know
11:57
from a simplicity standpoint pure was definitely there from a performance standpoint. Uh and you know I loved how you said that it really helped you think about things that you could do with your data in different ways and the different automation and everything that you were able to bring in. That certainly sounds like it saved you because I know you don't have a very large staff there, you know,
12:20
a tremendous amount of time and that way you can focus on on other things and in fact that's a nice pivot because I know you know you don't necessarily work on the same things today that you did back then and I think that it sounds like it that's uh you know impartial way with some of the automation and other things that you were able to introduce with your with your pure solution. Can you tell me more about about the new role
12:45
that you have? No, absolutely, I I do have a new role um within the university that was opened up a couple of years ago. But what allowed me to be allowed my bosses to consider moving me to that new position was when when you're an oracle database administrator you basically spend most of your time copying databases, making clones of clones of clones.
13:12
Uh Just as an example in our environment we have four production actual databases but when you consider our entire development and testing and validation environment, we have, You know, 4-600 databases. So those four databases unfold into hundreds and hundreds of different copies and versions. And so you're always you're always responding to requests from developers saying things like
13:42
oh, can I have a copy of the production financials database so I can test out a bunch of code. Well, those clone processes when we started we were Using Oracle's built in technologies and typically they would take 12 business hours, you know, basically would start the process and sort of maintain it, watch it and it would be done sometime the next business day.
14:06
Um we there's only the two of us on the database administration team and storage administration team and the load was too much. So we went looking for ways to automate and optimize that. And because of the fact that we could virtually see our database servers, we ended up using a combination of pure automation with VM ware layer automation. V realize orchestrator and be realized automate
14:35
er that we built a custom solution where we could eventually just type in five parameters, press start And and clone the database in in 15 minutes or less, essentially the speed of the cloning became completely separate from the size of the database. So if I had a large database, it cloned exactly the same amount of time as the a small one.
15:00
Well, what that did was I found out that my boss is basically considered that that I I more or less uh put myself out of a job. I thought I turned my own job into a shell script. Um And and replaced myself so that that freed them up to create a new position to support computational research within the university as part of our movement into graduate stem research.
15:27
And so now I'm systems senior system administrator for computational research support and having more fun playing with. Exactly. And I think that's a great example of where you know a lot a lot of folks who work in I. T. Sometimes worry about automation thinking exactly what you said is going to put you out of a job.
15:46
But what it often does is you know they're the punch list is so long with I. T. There's there's always plenty to do. You know I think the key thing is rather than having to manage storage on a day to day basis. You know there's lots of other value that can be added and I think that's a perfect example of it. Especially moving into research the analytics
16:05
and everything you've been working on there. Well let's get to the punchline then. Evergreen you've gone through a couple of different upgrades. What's it actually like? I mean obviously we claim here at pure that it's so simple and non disruptive. What was it like to go you know from an M. Two and X. Or from you know, 11 model to the next as you
16:28
needed to what was really involved, like, like the rest of using our pure arrays. It was so smooth that it was almost invisible um historically, if you said to a storage administrator, oh, I want to upgrade the Os on your production array, that would be weeks of planning and months of perhaps of negotiation of all the downtime that you'd have to arrange for.
16:53
It took us a while to persuade our our change management team that we were serious, but we said, no, we just want to do this on a Tuesday afternoon just in the middle of the day and they said, but you're replacing your upgrading hardware? Like, aren't, aren't you like, isn't this like one of the really cool upgrades where you get a whole new level of technology? And we said,
17:13
yeah, but we've done this 2 3 times and you never noticed. So we just scheduled it in the middle of the week are uh, you know, engineers showed up with the replacement hardware unscrewed a couple of screws popped in, the first one, waited for the environment to settle unscrewed two more screws popped in, the second one, screwed it all back together and no one ever noticed.
17:35
Like there weren't, weren't we were watching graphs, there weren't even any latency, uh, changes on the database activity. Um, so we've gone through it to two of those now, two different arrays and I just could not be happier. It's invisible, you know, the best thing about pure is is that you forget that they're there. Exactly.
17:53
So in that case, you know, that's a perfect example of the architecture is built for it. You know, the, the, the, you know, the machine won't let you down in the sense that you still have the performance, not only is it upgradable, but it's feasible to do that. And then with the evergreen subscription that you have that allowed you economically, you know, to be able to cost justify that instead of either a repurchase or then going
18:19
out and you need to get a lot of, you know, Capex budget to buy, you know, more of the same or incremental or whatever it was u at at a minimum had trading credit for the old controllers and if it was a ever modern, you know, on the regular schedule, then there really was very little cost associated with it, correct? Yeah. Yeah. The, I mean, another thing that was really
18:44
wonderful about this is because it's built into the support cost that we're already paying, assuming, you know, we like other organizations like us uh said, you know, added that, that forever upgrade to our support agreement, which I would highly recommend. It. It meant that we didn't have to argue about the money, like there was no running things up
19:07
flagpoles and trying to convince, you know, one leader that yeah, this is a good idea. It's it's already built in so it just runs on a rail and that the other, the other great thing is that since it's all in place, the other human challenge with upgrading things for us in the past was if you're changing the mount points, if you're changing the paths that all the departments access their data at
19:32
getting the departments to change their behavior is even worse. Even worse than arguing about money. And so in in this in this case with the Pure A's, there's no changes, it's all in place and so it's invisible to everyone and that could just not be better. That's a great point. You know, change management is hard. We're going through a few changes here.
19:53
I mean obviously we just renamed evergreen evergreen forever. Uh you know, and in I. T. It's even more so not just because of the things that are within your control, but the people side of things outside of it and great, great, great story, really appreciate that eric welcome. I know this is your first time on one of these virtual events.
20:14
We really appreciate you stepping outside your comfort zone and joining us here today and showing us that amazing beard that you have welcome welcome all aboard America Holdings I believe is the actual, you know, holding company that you work for. But of course the banner asset there is all aboard America, which is very, very large, I think fourth largest motor coach operator,
20:40
I'm sure we've all seen them as we've been rolling down the road at different times. Uh so tell us a little bit about, you know you actually have a really interesting story in the standpoint that all America wasn't the first company that you were at where you were able to bring Pure in. So um before we go into all America, give us a little bit of that background of how how long have you actually been using Pure and
21:05
then how many different companies? So I actually started, we purchased our first puree when Pure had been shipping production hardware for about one year. Was an F A f A 300 I believe. And it was it was quite the quite the experience, right new company, you know everybody sees the startups, what do you do?
21:27
Do you trust all your data to this new startup company? But the features were out there, the price was in line with what were quoted from the big guys at the time and um it was the best decision I think I've ever made in my I. T. Career. Uh I've been bleeding orange ever since then. It's my 5th array, the one here from my 4th company.
21:49
So I've kind of deposited him along as I as I. Yeah I think he used the term the johnny Appleseed of orange in this case johnny orange seed. Right. That's great. Well so yeah tell us a little bit then about, well, you know, for, I'm dying to know, do you know and you keep in touch with any of the folks at that
22:11
first company. Is that are those 2013 arrays still still running? I reached out and sent a couple of texts. I only know people that are kind of like the staff levels. Nobody at the I. T. Just trying to figure out if they, if they've kept them. I know most of the other companies that were at,
22:28
they were in fact, one of them is going through an evergreen storage upgrade. It was either this week or next week. So they're pretty excited about that. Um, so it's just, yeah, I would like to ask that question. Any time we run into. Yeah. Anyone that, you know,
22:46
cause it's, we do have, we have seven documented customers that have been running raised for 10 years or more that bought in the first year in 2012. You know, you at least waited a year, made sure some of the kinks were worked out. But that was still the first product because I think it was later that year with that we came out with the 400 then the M and the Acts and we were on our,
23:09
You know, third generation of the ex model right now. So, you know, when we say 10 plus years, it's not an idle boast. I mean, we actually have people have been using that but that's that's a side note tell us more about all America and especially some of the challenges you have because this is a holding company which means they're buying other companies and then you get the lovely job of
23:32
trying to make sure all the I. T. Systems work together. So tell us tell us about some of those challenges you faced when we were brought on myself and my manager to kind of take over and and really kind of centralize everything. There was just the data center in the broom closet, right Small family companies. Um you know I. T. Wasn't you know it was whoever knew the most
23:54
about computers was the I. T. Person. So thankfully when we started out we had a green field because of my previous experience with pure it was a no brainer right? And thankfully that I have a similar management team, they had had the experience. So it was an afterthought at that point it's like okay what are we know what we're doing for storage without even talking about it?
24:16
What do we do next? Uh And it's was put in place in order to allow us to double our size before the first service renewal. Right? So we were trying to do three year service renewal's so we had planned to double that and not have any additional cost occurred. What ended up happening is covid hit and slowed things down a little bit.
24:37
But we uh, we got new controllers put in and it was just a piece of cake. It was a non event. It was probably more difficult to get into the data center than it was to actually get the, the upgrade accomplished. I hear that so well because it's funny we were actually trying to get some,
24:59
you know, video of folks going through upgrades during Covid and yeah, the there was no way to put all the logistics together because it was so impossible to get, you know, you really needed the, the, the act of that company's congress to get the I. T. Which makes sense. Um, but tell me, so that was an evergreen upgrade then.
25:20
So what uh, you know, what was the, what was that process like for you? And especially from a financial standpoint, I basically signed the renewal for another maintenance extension and got an email like, hey, you're eligible for upgrade, would you like it? Yes please. Uh, here's the process you need to follow ship the hardware.
25:42
Um, my coworker actually let the people into the data center, she's local to the data center. I'm remote. And literally it was, we, we didn't even have to be on site. We did just because it made the process of getting into the data center easier. Um, but Tuesday afternoon started the process, no one outside of I.
26:02
T really knew anything was happening just from a planning standpoint went in top that time that it took and then done, nobody had a clue anything was happening. Yeah and that that that ever modern included uh you know controller upgrade. I know you know, almost all of our customers take advantage of it if they're on the forever gold um you know, subscription and then again there's the ability,
26:30
you know, you mentioned not wanting to incur unforeseen costs based on growth, but in your back pocket you've always got the average agile motion where if nothing else you can you can get full value trade in for the controllers. You have um to upgrade to next level or next generation whatever it is that's going to give you more performance, more capacity. Headroom, we're actually doing a data pack
26:53
upgrade next week. Great, Excellent. Yeah. And you know, and that, have you done one of those before, is that okay? Alright. Well good. Um so then I know some of the other things was you know, just being able to pull everything together.
27:13
Do you see things being more simple now um that you've got everything centralized and centralized your data stores together. Oh absolutely. I mean we were running on some old I scuzzy uh very popular low end legacy sands and the performance of the applications. They just lived with it. They didn't know any better.
27:35
We centralized everything got to build a new environment from the ground up added of huge layer of security to it that just didn't exist and we're able to do that and increased performance at the same time, which is usually not true. So it was just you know, change is hard, you know, James mentioned that just you don't and in that case you centralize, you have to change things but we were able to get it done
28:03
and it's nice when you don't have to worry about your storage right, working for a small company, wear lots of hats, I don't worry about the pier, I don't log into the interface unless I have to like there's just the performance, is there the reliability is there I go chase the other problems and you know, and I love both of you have mentioned that I mean and simplicity is obviously a huge boon to
28:29
anyone who's got a complex job but you know, I also appreciate the fact that it's simplicity that you've been able to depend on for years. It wasn't just a one and done. Oh we really simplified one particular model in one year, you know, and then we complicated things later on whether it was at multiple companies in your case erIC or you know, as a long term customer James at chapman speed round here,
28:56
I'm gonna throw one out at you. Is there is there one piece of advice that you have for other people in your position um about you know, making their storage simpler going forward James, let's start with you nowadays, I would tell people it is easy to think you're getting a good deal buying a really cheap white box, all flash storage array, but what you're not getting is an entire
29:25
ecosystem of experience and functionality and just personality that pure storage can provide that just because something is all flash doesn't mean that it's all flash being used to accomplish all the things you really need it to accomplish, Some of which you don't even know you need yet, like automatic replication into a cloud array using automation that you built for on premise stuff.
29:53
You know, I mean you can't anticipate everything you need a partner, you need somebody who's building something that's real, not just a white box full of envy, M E S S D. S great point. ErIC Somebody once told me that if sales provides you 50% of what they promised you've made out. And my experience with pure is I always get
30:15
100%. There's, I've never been let down. I mean I've, I've had quite, I've always worked for smaller companies a lot of times, any kind of hardware justification. It's hard, right? Especially if it, if there's any kind of expense to it and every time I've got in I've been able to build the case and the dividends
30:34
that that pure pays not just from the overall reliability but the little performance things you get from even just clicking through virtual machines or the, this the side stuff that you don't ever really consider. Right, my, my storage is there, it's reliable and all that, but when it's, when it's truly fast that adds exponentially and and really helps create
30:59
a better user experience and a lot of time that's lost when you go through the process. So it's, it's realizing those small little gains incrementally help out tremendously in the long run rate points. Well gentlemen, I really appreciate all your time. This was a fantastic discussion. I really appreciate the real world perspective
31:20
that you're both able to bring from again, slightly different industries and, and professions. I mean, you know, private university, uh, major holding company and transportation couldn't be any different if we picked it and yet such similar statements of experience and especially your dependence on evergreen. So I really do appreciate all that. And um, let me uh,
31:42
just move on and underscore some of the things that we were talking about as far as what the evergreen subscription delivers. Um, you know, erIC and James are not corner cases. Uh, we didn't have to scour wide and far to get to people who were very positive on pure and have had, you know, been able to depend on it for years and you know,
32:07
I think the, the, the best example of the software subscription is the fact that fully one third of the folks who are using that active cluster synchronous replication feature, uh, they're running it on gear that they bought before we even released the feature, you know, so again, this idea of the longevity and the fact that you can keep upgrading systems Only through buying it once um, is true on the software as well as the hardware.
32:36
Both Eric and James have gone through the controller upgrade feature. We have upgraded over 10,000 controller pairs, that's 10,000 arrays that didn't have to go through forklift upgrades to get more performance to get higher capacity ceilings to get the latest and greatest, you know, features available, all that kind of stuff. Um, and as further proof of that, 97% of the arrays that are five plus years old,
33:03
pure arrays are still in service today and these are things that we know none of the legacy storage vendors can claim because their products aren't built that way and they don't have a subscription that can deliver the kind of value that James and ERIC were talking about. Um, so again, just in recap lots of great benefits behind if you want to buy as we've been talking about your storage in the traditional way,
33:30
then the evergreen forever and especially if you're going with pure in our architecture is really going to be unmatched in terms of the experience that you're going to get, ending those storage headaches forever. Um, I challenge you all to uh, you know, find out more and you can do that at pure storage dot com evergreen dash forever. Um, also just google pure evergreen.
33:53
It will definitely take you right there. You'll probably see some pop ups from some of our competitors because they really don't like evergreen, but our users do and that's the most important thing. So again, Eric and James, we thank you so much for your time for being here. It was a real pleasure and thank you all for attending this session of accelerate tech fest
34:15
22. Thanks all.
  • Video
  • Evergreen//Forever
  • Pure//Accelerate

Thousands of Pure customers rely on their Evergreen subscriptions to keep their purchased storage modern and performing, and eliminate storage end-of-life and rebuys. In this panel of longtime Pure users, we'll break down the advantages, agility, and expert best practices that organizations have gained through their Evergreen subscriptions. 

Whether taking advantage of new features from always-improving software, or avoiding forklift upgrades via always-modern hardware, these users will share what works and what doesn't.

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