Pure Storage Announces PX-Backup Free Forever Tier

Pure Storage has announced a ‘free forever' tier of its Portworx Backup offering.

While there are no feature limitations on the offer, customers are limited to 1 TB of backup storage, which seems small for a backup offering. This capacity limit indicates that the free tier is designed for testing the service rather than protecting production data. You if you have less than 1 TB of data you want to back up, it would work fine.

Customers can upgrade to a paid service any time, which will ease transitions to production after verifying things are working for free. If you reach the 1 TB threshold, you'll have 30 days to decide if you want to convert to the paid service or not, but you won't be able to use more than 1 TB unless you start paying.

“Customers will not be auto charged, or converted to paid customers, if they exhaust their free capacity,” according to a Pure Storage spokesperson after I questioned them about this. “Their data will stay protected forever, even after the 30 day period post reaching the capacity limit,” they said. You just won't be able to use more than 1 TB of storage on the free tier.

It's handy to know that you can safely test things without the risk of a surprise cloud bill. It's a bitter lesson for those of us who were foolish enough to let certain other cloud vendors have our credit card number when signing up for an allegedly ‘free' tier to test things.

Disclosure: Pure Storage is a PivotNine client.