Pure Storage’s Evergreen//Forever Subscription Ushers in New FlashBlade//S as a Premier Platform

Since its introduction in 2015, Pure Storage’s Evergreen Storage has helped deliver a stellar customer experience and been a much-valued differentiator for the vendor by its customers. Among other things, Evergreen set the stage for nondisruptive multi-generational technology upgrades with investment preservation that is still the gold standard for the enterprise storage industry today.

There are two platforms in the vendor’s all-flash enterprise storage portfolio: FlashArray and FlashBlade. FlashArray uses a scale-up design, whereas FlashBlade uses a scale-out design. Because of the architectural differences between these two platforms, there were some differences in the value proposition Evergreen offered for each. With the FlashBlade//S introduction in June 2022, changes to the FlashBlade architecture bring the full-blown value proposition of the Evergreen//Forever subscription (which has been available in different formats on FlashArray since 2015) to that platform as well.

Compared with the prior FlashBlade, FlashBlade//S improves performance, storage density, and overall capacity by 2.5x and improves the power, capacity, and overall total cost of ownership (TCO) efficiency by introducing denser, less expensive quad-level cell (QLC) NAND flash media. While there are many advancements with the FlashBlade//S, the move to disaggregate storage processor and storage capacity resources while retaining the same highly scalable “blade” architecture made the difference on the Evergreen//Forever subscription value proposition. FlashBlade//S customers will be able to nondisruptively upgrade storage processor and/or storage capacity resources independently, giving them the ability to either scale them within a technology generation or upgrade them to newer generations. The FlashBlade//S offers more configuration options than the prior platform and enables more efficient resource allocation, a factor that can save significant budget as configurations scale.

This document takes a closer look at the changes that brought all the advantages of the Evergreen//Forever subscription (formerly called Evergreen Gold) to Pure Storage’s FlashBlade fast file and object storage platform.