Future-Proof Storage Programs – Know the Facts!
- December 15, 2017
With our newly expanded Future-Proof Storage Loyalty Program (see blog) Dell EMC continues to raise the bar across the industry. The Dell EMC Future-Proof Storage Loyalty Program gives customers additional peace of mind with guaranteed satisfaction and investment protection for future technology changes. This program not only provides longer coverage terms than other similar programs, it also has the fewest restrictions. Quite simply, we believe it’s the best program in the industry and we aren’t done enhancing it yet!
We encourage everyone reading this to fully examine similar competitive programs to ensure you really understand what you’re getting and how much you are paying for it. Specifically, in recent years, Pure Storage has dramatically modified its “Evergreen Storage” program and many customers tell us they are not happy with what they’ve seen.
To help you uncover the not-so-obvious details of some key elements of Pure Storage’s current Evergreen Storage program we’d like to provide some simple questions you can ask Pure Storage when reviewing their Evergreen Storage program. Let’s focus on the three program benefits that require the higher priced Evergreen Gold subscription, and are not included in the Evergreen Silver subscription.
Free Every Three – This is Pure’s Evergreen Gold offering that claims you get upgraded controllers for free every three years.
Questions to ask:
From what we’ve seen and heard from customers the six years of required Evergreen Gold more than pays for the two new controllers. So, ‘Free Every Three’ is really just a ‘Pre-Pay’ program! It’s a trade-in program you need to pre-pay for, even if you never use it.
Upgrade Flex Controllers – This is Pure’s Evergreen Gold offering for upgrading your controllers before they are three years old.
Questions to ask:
Upgrade Flex appears to force customers to buy additional capacity, at a significant price premium, if they want to upgrade their controllers within the three years of purchasing their FlashArray. Pure tries to make it sound attractive by highlighting that you get trade-in credits for your old controllers but look carefully at the price of the additional capacity you are forced to purchase in order to trade in your old controllers for new ones. In total the customer ends up paying for all this to get the new controllers:
Capacity Consolidation – This is Pure’s Evergreen Gold offering for trading in existing installed flash drives for newer higher capacity flash drives, or flash modules.
Questions to ask:
Due to the use of an Active-Passive (backend) controller architecture Pure’s FlashArray products have a limited amount of drives that can be installed without affecting overall performance, which limits their overall scalability. To overcome this they need a program (Capacity Consolidation) that allows customers to swap in newer higher capacity drives for older smaller capacity drives. Unfortunately for Pure’s customers, like all the Evergreen Gold specific features, this comes at a price premium.
In contrast to Pure’s Evergreen Storage program, now a profit center for Pure, Dell EMC offers our recently expanded and enhanced Future-Proof Storage Loyalty Program to provide customers with the peace of mind and investment protection they need to make educated decisions today. There are no hidden fees additional purchases required to take advantage of the benefits!
Dell EMC’s Future-Proof Storage Loyalty Program is comprised of seven industry-leading benefits:
Our Future-Proof program now also includes our Storage and Data Protection platforms!
Click HERE for details on the Dell EMC Future-Proof Storage Loyalty Program
See what Analysts are already saying about the Future-Proof program here.
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TERMS AND CONDITIONS APPLY. Valid only on direct purchases or through participating Channel Partners who offer reciprocal program benefits to their customers. See your Dell EMC sales representative or Channel Partner for details.