>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 2020, virtual. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and ecosystem partners. >> Hi, I'm Joep Piscaer. Welcome to theCUBEs coverage of KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2020. So I'm joined today by Matt Kixmoeller, he's VP of strategy at Pure Storage, as well as Michael Ferranti, he's the senior director of product marketing at Portworx now acquired by Pure Storage. Fellows, welcome to the show. >> Thanks here. >> I want to start out with you know , how about the lay of the land of storage in the Cloud Native space in the Kubernetes space. You know, what's hard? what's happening? What are the trends that you see going on? Matt, if you could shed some light on that for me? >> Yeah, I think you know, from a Pure point of view obviously we just told customers will they maturing their comprehensive deployments and particularly leaning towards persistant, you know applications and so you know we noticed within our customer base that there was quite a lot of deployments of a Portworx on Pure Storage. And that inspired us to start talking to one another you know, almost six plus months ago that eventually ended in us bringing the two companies together. So it's been a great journey from the Pure point of view, bringing Portworx into the Pure family. And, you know, we're working through now with our joint customers, integration strategies and how to really broaden the use of the technology. So that's quite exciting times for us. >> And of course, it's good to hear that the match goes beyond just the marketing color, like the brand color. >> Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, the fact that both companies were orange and you know, their logo looked like kind of a folded up version of ours, just started things off on the right foot >> A match made in heaven, right? So I want to talk a little bit about you know, the acquisition, what's happened there and especially, you know looking at Portworx as a company, and as a product set, it's fairly popular in the cloud community. A lot of traction with customers. So I want to zoom in on the acquisition itself and kind of the roadmap going forward merging the two companies and adding Portworx to that Pure portfolio. Matt, if you could shed some light on that as well. >> Yeah. Why don't I start and then Michael can jump in as well? So, you know, we at Pure had been really working for years now to outfit our all flash storage arrays for the container use case and shipped a piece of software that we call PSO. That was really a super CSI driver that allowed us to do intelligent placement of you know, persistent volumes on Pure arrays. But the more time we spent in the market, the more we just started to engage with customers and realized that there were a whole number of use cases that didn't really want a hardware based solution, you know. They either wanted to run completely in the cloud, hybrid between on-prem and cloud and leverage bare metal hardware. And so you know, we came to the conclusion that you know, first off, although positioning arrays for the market was the right thing to do, we wouldn't really be able to serve the broader needs restoratively for containers, if you did that. And then, you know, the second thing I think was that we heard from customers that they wanted a much richer data management stack. You know, it's not just about providing the business versus the volume for the container, but you know, all the capabilities around snapshoting and replication and mobilization and mobility between on-prem and cloud were necessary. And so, you know, Portworx we bought to bear not only a software based solution into our portfolio, but really that full data management stack platform in addition to just storage. And so as we look to integrate our product lines you know, we're looking to deliver a consistent experience for data management, for Kubernetes whatever infrastructure customer would like to, whether they want to run on all flash arrays, white box servers, bare metal, VMs or on cloud storage as well. You know, all of that can have a consistent experience with the Portworx platform. >> Yeah, and because you know, data management especially in this world of containers is you know, it's a little more difficult it's definitely more fragmented across you know, multiple clouds, multiple cloud vendors, multiple cloud services, multiple instances of a service. So the fragmentation has you know, given IT departments quite the headache in operationally managing all that. So Michael you know, what's kind of the use case for Portworx in this fragmented cloud storage space. >> Yeah. It's a great question. You know, the used cases are many and varied, you know to put it in a little bit of historical perspective you know, I've been attending coupons either (indistinct) for about five or six years now, kind of losing count. And we really started seeing Kubernetes as kind of an agile way to run CI/CD environments and other test dev environments. And there were just a handful of customers that were really running production workloads at the very, very beginning. If you fast forward to today, Kubernetes is being used to tackle some of the biggest central board level problems that enterprises face, because they need that scale and they need that agility. So you know, COVID's accelerated that. So we see customers say in the retail space, who are having to cope with a massive increase in traffic on their website. People searching for kind of you know, the products that they can't find anywhere else. Are they available? Can I buy them online? And so they're re-architecting those web services to use often open source databases in this case Elasticsearch, in order to create a great user experiences. And they're managing that across clouds and across environments using Kubernetes. Another customer that I would say kind of a very different use case but also one that matches that scale would be Esri which unfortunately the circumstances of becoming a household name are a lot of the covert tracking ArcGIS system to keep track of, tracing and outbreaks. They're running that service in the cloud using Portworx. And again, it's all about how do we reliably and agilely deploy applications that are always available and create that experience that our customers need. And so we see kind of you know, financial services doing similar things healthcare, pharmaceutical, doing similar things. Again, the theme is it's the biggest business problems that we're using now, not just the kind of the low hanging fruit as we used to talk about. >> Yeah exactly. Because you know storage, is it a lot of the times it's kind of a boiler plate functionality you know, it's there it works. And if it doesn't, you know, the problem with storage in a cloud data space is that fragmentation right? Is that enormous you know, on the one hand that you don't have a scale on the other hand, the tons of different services that can hold data that need protecting as well as data management. So I want to zoom in on a recent development in the Portworx portfolio where the PX backup product has spun out its own little product. You know, what's the strategy there, Michael? >> Yeah, so I think, you know fundamentally data protection needs to change in a Kubernetes context. The way in which we protected applications in the past was very closely related to the way in which we protected servers. Because we would run one app per server. So if we protected the server our application was protected. Kubernetes breaks that model now an individual application is made up of dozens or hundreds of components that are spread across multiple servers. And you have container images, you have configuration I mean you have data, and it's very difficult for any one person to understand where any of that is in the cluster at any given moment. And so you need to leverage automation and the ability for Kubernetes to understand where a particular set of components is deployed and use that Kubernetes native functionality to take what we call application aware backups. So what PX backup provides is data protection engineered from the ground up for this new application delivery model that we see within Kubernetes. So unlike traditional backup and recovery solutions that were very machine focused, we can allow a team to back up a single application within their Kubernetes cluster, all of the applications in a namespace or the entire cluster all at once, and do so in a self-service manner where integrated with your corporate identity systems individuals can be responsible for protecting their own applications. So we marry kind of a couple of really important concepts. One is kind of the application specific nature of Kubernetes the self service desire of DevOps teams, as well as with the page you go model, where you can have this flexible consumption model, where as you grow, you can pay more. You don't have to do an upfront payment in order to protect your Kubernetes applications. >> Yeah. I think one key thing that Michael hit on was just how this obligation is designed to fit like a glove with the Kubernetes admin. I see a lot of parallels to what happened over a decade ago in the VMware space when you know, VMware came about they needed to be backed up differently. And a little company called Veem built a tool that was purpose-built for it. And it just had a really warm embrace by the VMware community because it really felt like it was built for them, not some legacy enterprise backup application that was forced to fit into this new use case. And you know, we think that the opportunity is very similar on Kubernetes backup and perhaps the difference of the environment is even more profound than on the VMware side where you know, the Kubernetes admin really wants something that fits in their operational model, deploys within the cluster itself, backs up to object storage. Is just perfect purpose-built for this use case. And so we see a huge opportunity for that, and we believe that for a lot of customers, this might be the easiest place for them to start trying to Portworx portfolio. You know, you've got an existing competitors cluster download this, give it a shot, it'll work on any instructions you've got going with Kubernetes today. >> And especially because, you know, looking at the kind of breakdown of Kubernetes in a way data is, you know, infrastructure is provisioned. Data is placing in cloud services. It's no longer the cluster admin necessarily, that gets to decide where data goes, what application has access to it, you know, that's in the hands of the developers. And that's a pretty big shift you know, it used to be the VI admin the virtualization admin that did that, had control over where data was living, where data was accessed out, how it was accessed. But now we see developers kind of taking control over their infrastructure resources. They get to decide where it runs, how it runs what services to use, what applications to tie it into. So I'm curious, you know, how our Portworx and PX backup kind of help the developer stay in control and still have that freedom of choice. >> Yeah, we think of it in terms of data services. So I have a database and I needed to be highly available. I needed to be encrypted, backed up. I might need a DR. An off site DR schedule. And with Portworx, you can think about adding these services HA, security, backup, capacity management as really just I want to check a box and now I have this service available. My database is now highly available. It's backed up, it's encrypted. I can migrate it. I can attach a backup schedule to it. So 'cause within a Kubernetes cluster some apps are going to need that entire menu of services. And some apps might not need any of those services because we're only in Testa phage, everything is multiplexed into a single cluster. And so being able to turn off and turn on these various data services is how we empower a developer, a DevOps team to take an application all the way from test dev, into production, without having to really change anything about their Kubernetes deployments besides, you know, a flag within their YAML file. It makes it really, really easy to get the performance and the security and the availability that we were used to with VM based applications via that admin now within Kubernetes. >> So Matt, I want to spend the last couple of minutes talking about the bigger picture, right? We've talked about Portworx, PX backup. I want to take a look at the broader storage picture of cloud native and kind of look at the Pure angle on the trends on what you see happening in this space. >> Yeah absolutely. You know, a couple of high-level things I would, you know, kind of talk about, you know, the first buzz that I think, you know hybrid cloud deployments are the de facto now. And so when people are picking storage, whether they be you know, a storage for a traditional database application or next gen application, cloud native application, the thought from the beginning is how do I architect for hybrid? And so you know, within the Pure portfolio, we've really thought about how we build solutions that work with cloud native apps like Portworx, but also traditional applications. And our cloud block store allows you know, those to be mobilized to the cloud without, with minimal re-architecture. Another big trend that we see is the growth of object storage. And, you know if you look at the first generation of object storage, object storage is what? 15 plus years old and many of the first deployments were characterized by really low costs low performance, kind of the last retention layer if you will, for unimportant content. But then this web application thing happens and people started to build web apps that used object storage as their primary storage. And so now, as people try to bring those cloud native applications on-prem and build them in a multicloud way there's a real growth in the need for you know, high-performance kind of applications object storage. And so we see this real change to the needs and requirements on the object storage landscape. And it's one that in particular, we're trying to serve with our FlashBlade product that provides a unified file and object access, because many of those applications are kind of graduating from file or moving towards object, but they can't do that overnight. And so being able to provide a high-performance way to deliver unstructured data (indistinct) object files solve is very strategic right now. >> Well, that's insightful. Thanks. So I want to thank you both for being here. And, you know, I look forward to hearing about Portworx and Pure in the future as is acquisition. You know, it integrates and new products and new developments come out from the Pure side. So thanks both for being here and thank you at home for watching. I'm Joep Piscaer, thanks for watching the theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2020. Thanks. >> Yeah. Thanks too. >> Yeah. Thank you. (gentle music)