Thanks for this AMA Donald, Sean, and Rob! As a long time Pure customer I wanted to make two quick comments about upgrades to those who may be Pure Storage prospective customers or new Pure array administrators. First -in support of your comments on being comfortable with both the hardware AND software upgrade process in general, and particularly the self-service software upgrade process. I have performed more than 200 software upgrades across a fleet of 5 arrays dating back to 2016; in the early years of course these were the scheduled white glove upgrades driven by Pure Support - and we always performed them off-hours due to less-than-ideal upgrade experiences with other storage vendors. Over time and repetition, we grew to have such confidence in the the transparency and success of the Pure upgrade process that we began regularly performing both hardware NDU and software upgrades in the middle of the businees day without even giving it a second thought - the robustness of the process really does allow you to do it! Of course, your particular business requirements may differ, and you must have all connected hosts configured per best practices - but it's true, NDU is short for Non-Disruptive-Upgrade, and that's exactly what it is.
Second, I want to bring some attention to a very cool feature in Pure1, under Assets > Appliance Genology. This is how I could state definitlvely above that I've performed 200+ upgrades on our arrays - it's an awesome summary and visual timeline of your fleet's hardware and software upgrades - VERY helpful if you need to reference back in time to answer the question "Hey, when did we upgrade the controllers on that array from //R2 to //R3?" or "When did we upgrade from Purity//FA 6.5.10 to 6.5.12 on that array?"
Keep up the great work!
