There is a paid feature Prakash Darji, general manager for the Digital Experience Business Unit at Pure Storage, tells us why “the SaaS -ify company is trying to put storage behind SLAs” – and why some competitor offers are as a service in name only.
Blocks & Files: How was Pure as-a-Service formed? What are the drivers for this?
Prakash Darji: So we’ve been collecting how people have been using storage through data and AIOps for almost seven years now. And we use that for support. But what if we said we could simplify customer operations by offering SLAs? Because if you know the performance and the capacity and the expansion that everyone uses, you can really go further than just sending someone a box. You can send them a result that says we can guarantee you some IOPS, and it’s up to us to run, operate and manage that from the cloud.
The origins of our Pure as-a-Service business begin with Pure1, in terms of how we operate, operate, and monitor landscapes from a support perspective. But we even took that to say if the storage outcome is performance, capacity, availability, what SLAs (service-level agreements) do you want? What if we could offer you SLAs of protection? What if we could offer you a rebalancing SLA. Eliminating labor through vendor-managed SLAs is the future.
B&F: Can you say what Pure as-a-Service stands for in terms of hardware and software?
Darji: When you think about as-a-service, is it on-prem, is it cloud, or-as in our case-anywhere you want it. The approach we took was to determine the primary value proposition was this data -driven SLA, which we run and operate. So where can we offer that?
So, we can offer that to the premises in a customer’s data center, where you get a reserved commitment, you pay on demand, so it crosses the box, maybe one box or maybe three boxes. And you’re just making a commitment for one level of service – it’s a lot of IOPS, it’s your level of service. It can be with a managed service provider, it can be on-prem in your own data center, it can also be included with our cloud block store product in the public cloud, on AWS and Azure.
With this service -driven approach, Pure can run and operate where customers need, But hardware and software and our cloud SLAs and data give us the ability to deliver it.
The baseline we use to deliver that SLA is Evergreen, and we think it’s a big difference. Our Evergreen architecture at Pure as-a-Service means that if someone needs to upgrade service tiers-can go to the next service tier, more IOP, or increase capacity-we measure upgrades of the controller by Evergreen without interruption, as well as scale capacity without interruption.
Customers can increase capacity and performance because of the underlying assets we operate. So let’s say you make a service level upgrade, our resources will come and replace the controller to deliver the service care upgrade, wherever it is.
B&F: So wherever customer applications run, in their own place, a colocation center, or in the public cloud, Pure can showcase Pure as-a-Service in that location. And as far as the customer is concerned, is this the same Pure storage service as before, with some part of the SLA, and can they increase or decrease, as dictated by their business?
Darji: That’s right, one hundred percent.
B&F: How is it different to a subscription deal?
Darji: Well, the good news is that the subscription economy has been around for a very long time. So you can decide if you want to buy a capital purchase box, or you buy a subscription to that box, and transfer it to Opex.
However, that is a financial model: I buy Capex versus I buy Opex. Now, as people try to make subscriptions sell like services, we see the competitive landscape that is primarily being the packaging of financial services for the conversion of Capex to that Opex.
So there is a range of competitors trying to offer storage-as-a-service with a combination of financial services and professional services to do just that. It’s labor intensive and it’s actually pretty low margin because you’re repacking the professional services behind it. Also your mileage can vary in terms of what you get, because when you use someone to deliver something, it depends on how well trained and trained that person is, and how fast they get that capacity there.
On the other hand, if you look at the alternative approach of what a SaaS company would do, they would say, we wrote software to automate it, based on data. And we will make that SLA available to you. So if you sign up for ServiceNow, for example, you’re just getting a service management solution. Someone else runs it, someone else runs it, and they just make it available to you.
In the same way, we try to SaaS-ify the storage behind SLAs to give you that capability, so you don’t have to worry about those things. For example, you as a developer can provide API endpoints and start using and providing volumes. That’s the approach we’re trying to drive with a SaaS-like application.
B&F: Do you give customers the ability to see how the service is performing against the SLAs they have contracted?
Darji: Well, we had that kind of capability in Pure1, before we even had as-a-service. We collect data and use it internally, but because Pure1 is our customer -facing SaaS monitoring and management platform, customers can log in and see their performance usage, they’ll see it not just against the asset , like the box, but we’ve built a subscription management where you can track your commitment reserves, you can say, hey, this is how much I use on demand.
But we have come farther than we can see. Pure1 also has AIOps for projecting and forecasting. So we’ve now done an application load classification, where it’s an SAP application, it’s an Oracle application. And you might ask, I’m going to add three more Oracle Applications to my landscape, what does this mean for the expected trajectory? And what do I need to do from a subscription perspective, to stay in line with that workload?
B&F: Does this mean that from a customer’s perspective, the costs and effort required to manage a storage facility are less than required to purchase a storage service?
Darji: What we deliver is storage-as-a-service. So when we deliver that, against them having to run and run it itself? Absolutely.
Sponsored by Pure Storage.