Three key changes from Pure Storage during Accelerate 2022 conference

Vendor rebrands as-a-service offering under Evergreen umbrella and launches new FlashBlade S product

Pure Storage has made a swathe of changes to its portfolio during this year's Accelerate 2022 conference in Los Angeles today.

CRN runs through all the key announcements and changes from Pure Storage.

Pure as-a-service rebrands under Evergreen umbrella

Pure as-a-Service, which launched in 2018 as its consumption-based storage option, has been rebranded to Evergreen One.

The offering claims to give customers a "true consumption-based service model" for storage, including proactive monitoring and non-disruptive upgrades while meeting performance and usage SLAs.

Evergreen One will form part of Pure's expanded Evergreen Offering which now includes Evergreen Forever and Evergreen Flex.

Evergreen Forever is the new name for Evergreen Gold, which is Pure's subscription support service, in which the vendor will continue to update the product with new controllers, software upgrades and functionality.

Lastly, a new addition to Pure's Evergreen portfolio is Evergreen Flex. This allows customers to purchase hardware through a traditional capex model and then buy software through a pay-as-you-go subscription model.

Speaking to CRN, Wendy Stusrud, VP of global partner sales at Pure Storage, said the new Evergreen portfolio answers demands for more flexibility from customers and partners.

"I think partners being able to wrap their services around a lot of this will mean they can innovate and deliver new products and solutions under their services teams and to our customers and really delight our customers because of that flexibility," she said.

Softcat's field CTO, Dean Gardener, added that some customers don't want to go all in with as-a-service, so having options to mix and match is beneficial.

"The key thing is that flex piece. We're seeing a lot of customers not going full as-a-service and not being confident to do that," he said.

"Having that flex piece in the middle give's that choice to capex and then subscribe thereafter, which I think is a really good model and will fit a lot of our customer needs for that next cycle of investment when it comes to storage and their data strategy."

Launch of new FlashBlade S

Pure has made a new addition to its FlashBlade range -FlashBlade S. The vendor describes it as an "evolution" of its FlashBlade platform, now addressesing demands of unstructured data and modern applications.

FlashBlade S offers more than double the density, performance and power efficiency of previous versions, Pure claims, and can be upgraded flexibly and non-disruptively.

Stusrud said the new version can also help customers and partners achieve their sustainability goals, as it delivers a better performance in terms of capacity and bandwidth per wat as well as capacity per rack-unit, which it claims could enable customers to operate with a smaller datacentre footprint.

"The flexibility we're providing with FlashBlade S is going to lead into the future, where customers can upgrade either the compute or the storage when they need to," she said.

"Not only are we doubling the performance but we're also allowing them the flexibility."

Pure's Evergreen subscription model will also apply to FlashBlade S, Stusrud added.

She added that Pure's standard rewards and incentives will be applied to partner sales of FlashBlade S.

"Data is a priority for our customers, and understanding the structured and unstructured components of that," added Gardener.

"We're addressing that by upskilling the data literacy of our salesforce so they can have that conversation with our customers. I think Pure have got a really good roadmap. They're providing simplicity and choice but at the same time offering that increased capability to be able to scale.

"Most importantly, its looking at the next wave of that in terms of analytics and understanding the context around data, and Pure have got a really good roadmap for that."

Expanded partnership with Nvidia

Lastly, Pure announced the launch of AIRI S, which it describes as its next-generation AI-ready infrastructure offering.

AIRI S is the first solution to include Pure's new FlashBlade S platform, powered by Nvidia's DGX A100 systems and end-to-end networking based on Nvidia's Quantum and Spectrum networking platforms.

Developed in partnership with Nvidia, AIRI S claims to provide "simple, on-demand infrastructure" suitable "for all stages of the AI data pipeline".

Stusrud said the latest collaboration with Nvidia will be a "meet in the channel play" for resellers that have partnerships with both Pure and Nvidia.

"We will be able to work really closely with our partner community as they deliver this to their customers. And when it's a meeting the channel play, I think it gives the partners a very unique opportunity to demonstrate their value and the extra services that they can provide the customer."