Pure Storage offers on-demand storage service

Pure Storage, the all-flash array storage provider, has expanded its Pure-as-a-Service offering to include flexible, pay-as-you-go options for bridging public and private clouds.

The company launched Pure-as-a-Service late last year, but it was based on its previous Evergreen service, which had a per-use model for clients looking to move from capex to opex economics. It provides block, file, and object data management capabilities under a single unified subscription.

First stage Pure-as-a-Service was formally known as Evergreen Storage Service (ES2), which was launched out of a pilot program begun in 2016. The company notes that one of the challenges facing the industry is that “products on subscription” is often used interchangeably with true services, the difference being the former is a financial model while the latter is more of a cloud economic, operational, and customer experience model. 

After adding Cloud Block Store to the portfolio for cloud workloads and taking a cue from hyperscalers, Pure’s Storage-as-a-Service evolved to become far more comprehensive than just “products on subscription”. It can provide multiple options with benefits beyond a pay-as-you-go financial structure, whether on-premises or in the cloud.

In addition to providing storage-as-a-service on-premises and in the cloud like Amazon Web Services’ Marketplace, Pure-as-a-Service offers a service catalog that provides  granular service selections and breaks down the costs per gigabyte. This is significant because other storage services are often unclear about pricing.

Pure-as-a-Service is reducing the minimum capacity required to use Pure-as-a-Service to as low as 50TiB, or tebibytes. A tebibyte is equal to 2⁴⁰ bytes.

Pure offers four tiers of block storage: new Block Capacity Service Tiers with lower minimum block capacity; new Block Ultra Service Tier for in-memory databases; a new Block Premium Tier to support new specialized workloads including test/dev and containers; and a new Block Performance tier for hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments.

Also new is Full Stack-as-a-Service, which is based on the FlashStack converged infrastructure Pure Storage jointly developed with Cisco. This allows partners to offer multiple versions of Pure-as-a-Service with FlashStack while benefiting from Cisco Validated Designs.

Pure-as-a-Service is available now.