>>We're back with the Cube's coverage of Von 2022 from the aria in Las Vegas, we're talking pure data protection and nobody better to talk you about that than pure storage. You can't miss these guys when they're around because the orange crush is here. Dave ante for Dave Nicholson, Michael Sonic is here. He is the vice president of global alliances at pure storage. Michael. Good to see you again. Thanks for the little golf. Appreciate joy Lee. Yeah, appreciate that. Hopefully you get out there my back and, uh, be seen. So how you doing, man? I'm doing face to face. >>It's wonderful to be face to face with the cube. It's, uh, always a pleasure to have the opportunity to spend some time with you. Good to meet you. Good to meet. You have the opportunity to get, spend some time together. You guys, um, it's just great being at a show my first one back. And so I'm, uh, you know, just feeling the energy from the room and, uh, just great to come in here and see the cube all lit >>Up. Yeah. Accelerate 2019 in Austin was an awesome event. And, and one of the last ones that we did before, you know, the pandemic for all of us, um, we did some obviously support for, for virtual. You guys are having another show finally face to face in June. So look forward to that. Got it. >>20 days, 21 days, >>We'll see you there. Right. So tell us about what's going on with Veeam. Give us the update. Yeah, >>Look, we're thrilled to be here as a sponsor for Veeam and for Veeam on, uh, this is a longstanding partnership, you know, us, right. So found in 2009 start shipping product in 2012, um, really disrupted the block storage space with an all flash solution. Yeah. And you know, it's, it's a success story in terms of company going from single product to multi-product to portfolio, to solution. And along that way, the data protection use case and workload has really come into the, you know, kind of center focus for us first with flash blade in the market, which is our unified fast file and object solution. And more recently with flash array C, which is our capacity optimized flash array for block storage, which is a great relationship with Veeam and an area where we've done some, um, significant, you know, joint engineering and the FAC, which is what we refer to it as. >>And the Veeam selling motion is extremely strong. Um, and you know, it's, it's solving a real problem and that is, you know, customers are increasingly being faced with these, um, tighter and tighter SLAs to ensure the availability of their data is there. And then there's also, you know, the, the security element. And I think a term that VES using here was cyber resiliency, which I like, right. I mean, you know, the, um, safe mode integration, which is our solution for IM mutability and, and for, um, anti ransomware or, or one step to take, to, to safeguard yourself in a, against a ransomware event. Um, you know, that those are great complimentary parts of us. And indeed, >>You know, Michael, I, I, I want to ask you about your shared vision with, with Veeam. I remember I was talking to cause on the cube. Um, it might have been a 2019. I can't remember. Might have been the year before that. No, I >>Think shorts or pants. >>Sorry. >>Was he in shorts or pants? He was in pants. >>Ah, okay. So I was pushing him on, well, why don't you do it this way? Why don't you do that? Why don't you do tiering all this stuff? And it just always came back to simplicity. He said, we optimize for simplicity over all this complexity and you know, we'll get the, the function through the ecosystem partnership. So is that the shared vision with Veeam? I mean, that, it's kind of, it's just work. It just works is their mantra. But, but talk about that shared vision as particularly as it relates to data protection and cyber resiliency. >>Yeah. Thanks so much for, for recalling that Dave, cuz it, it, we hear it constantly. It's it's in the, now that we're coming back to the office, it's in the hallways, it's out in front of conference rooms, you know, the, the elegance and, and the, and the, um, value and simplicity is everywhere inside of pure. Um, I would say it's part of our shared vision. I think it's customer centricity is at the core of what Veeam and pure, you know, has really fused us together. We're both global, you know, their history is European based and grew up out of there and then have succeeded in north America. Ours is absolutely north America based first on the west coast, then across the country. And then finally into Europe, more recently globally and, and, and a lot of growth internationally, including APJ. So it's customer centricity, it's global, it's the way we go to the customer. So a partner centric go to market motion is live and well in both organizations, uh, solution providers, MSPs, GSIs, you know, range of different ways to get to that customer. Um, and without a doubt, the customer experience is, is part of the, is part of the piece. And, and that's where our simplicity is, um, front and center. And, and I know vem is the same >>Dig, dig it into it. Go ahead. >>Yeah. Yeah, no. So, so out in the real world, are the conversations still about flash for backup and recovery convincing people that that makes sense or, or have we moved on to where now it's the pure flash value proposition BEC because people accept that flash makes sense. Where, where are we in the real world? >>Yeah, I, I think it's, it's different in different industries, different use cases, different workloads, different environments, and it's, um, part of a bigger story. But I think what, what is happening now is, um, we were before the inevitability of flash as the data center, primary storage solution, but now, like, I don't think anyone would debate that. Right. And, and I think now in data protection flash as a component to a robust, secure data protection, both as a target for backup and as a source of recovery is an inevitability to be part of that conversation. Flash is >>There, you guys like to be first at a lot of things, you know, gives you bragging rights, but it also gives you market momentum. Again, I'll pull it. My, my bag of pure memories. I remember meeting Scott Deason, who was the first CEO of, of pure, it's only been two to my knowledge, right. Scott was first Charlie G Carlo now, um, in, in, it was early days, it was 2009, like in an Oracle open world or something. And he was telling me about this startup that he's doing. And, and one of the things that struck me is the vision around the API economy, which was new at the time. It was like, well, okay, what's that? And that's really, what's, what's happened here. It's part of simplicity. It's part about ecosystem. We were talking about products versus platforms. You can't really have a platform unless you have an ecosystem. So where are we at today? How does that relate to your partnership with, with Veeam? Yeah. >>It, it's such a great recall on your part, you know, cause I think, um, we are a storage company. We do provide a raise in the wild, you know, over 10,000 customer, tens of thousands of arrays now. And you know, but at the core, it's the software that matters and, and that's really what drives the user experience. And we're proud to be, you know, the development partner on the universal storage API, the us API for Veeam, that is a essential ingredient to success for the joint pure and vem customer experience. It gives them that single pane of glass, that administrative view, where they're able to get the information they need on what's happening within their environment and be able to take corrective action. And, you know, we're very proud of all the tools that we provide our storage customers, but in a da in a data protection use case and workload, they want to put, you know, they want to go right to Veeam and, and have that be the source of truth. And that's where that API is so important. >>What, what's the story to customers, Michael, in terms of particularly cyber resilience, you've got obviously got a TCO play, simple equals lower cost. Um, you got really much tighter service level agreements and requirements now, um, the security, the storage and data protection and security space are kind of coming together. So what's the narrative for customers. Give me the pitch. Yeah, >>Look, I think, I think every customer today has an obligation to include security as a must have within their solution anywhere in the data center. And for us, it's, you know, simply put the combination of Veeam for data protection, with pure for FlashRay C or flash blade with safe mode, you know, which provides that imutability provides that customer with a safeguarded copy against bad actors externally to their organization, or was jointly developed with a customer to prevent the risk of bad actors inside of the organization. Um, city of new Orleans is one of the customer references that's up on, you know, the pure storage website, just a, a great, um, you know, story in terms of the city's ability to defend against ransomware attack, continue, you know, with continuity of essential services, police, ambulances, fire departments, um, all on the combination of pure and deem. And so, you know, a good, you know, example to pull that thread all the way through in terms of what the value proposition is. And then what's the experience for the customer when they are find themselves on the other side of that event. >>What's the nature of the partnership, um, with, with Veeam, obviously there's a go to market, um, are there, you know, solutions that you guys are doing together, engineering work that you're doing together? Can you explain that? Yeah, >>You bet. I mean, you know, these are two of, uh, I think high profile adjacencies in the data center, you've got your primary storage and then secondary tertiary, and you've got your data protection use case and workload. Um, with Veeam, we've got dedicated engineering to the Veeam partnership on the pure side, as a development partner for the us API, um, you know, is a, is a key piece we're integrated into what the support experience is like for the customer. And really trying, starting to challenge ourselves now with some of the leadership changes that beam's taken on and the opportunity to sit down and, and spend some time, you know, with the non and, and John, and really say, Hey, like we're at the core here, we've got an opportunity. Let's, let's open up some strategic doors and see what could be next. >>Well, Veeam Ising, there's no question it's kind of early Veeam was the wild west that's right. Course big parties are still, you know, the reputational, but, but as you think about these joint engineering and joint go to market and you talk to, to joint customers, where do you see sort of the future? I mean, I, I, you know, the ransomware stuff, obviously the pandemic was impossible to predict. I, I shouldn't say that a lot of people did predict it, but now that we see it, but now that you have some visibility on these permanent changes that are affecting CSO, buying strategies, data protection, storage, buying strategies, how do you see the future of this relationship? >>Yeah, look, I think, I think the, um, at the core we do what we do and we're focused on continuing to innovate and do it with excellence in everything that we do. Um, we measure ourselves rigorously against a net promoter score. It's a certified net promoter score. We're at 85.2 top 1% of all B2B. So >>Head of V even >>At the core, >>Barely at the >>Core it's, it's about that customer experience and customer satisfaction. Um, and, and so that's a, maybe a, a different way of saying we trust that our partners do what they do with excellence. And in the case of Veeam, you know, partnering around the data protection, use case and workload, looking at how that's evolving into holistic data management and hybrid cloud environment. Um, we see rich opportunity for us to continue the partnerships, strengthen it, learn and listen from our customers and our partners. And, uh, and maybe challenge ourselves to, to do some things a little differently uniquely along the way I talked >>To them. Oh, good. >>Yeah, no, yeah. You, you mentioned, uh, you mentioned something at the outset that lends a lot of cred, credibility to the pure story anywhere you seek to play. Um, you mentioned that he, uh, you know, founded in 2009 product shipping in 2012. Um, I remember that Dave's not old enough to remember that period of time <laugh>, but, uh, if you remember, um, violent memory was the king, they, they were, they were the ones to be. Yep. And you guys were quietly toiling in a bit of obscurity and people were asking, well, come on, come on, come on, come on, give us something, but you didn't until you were ready. So I've seen that methodical approach in every, in every step of the way as you've transformed from being a product into solution focus and partnership focus. Um, so what does that look like? Moving forward? You, you mentioned kind of getting ahead of the game in terms of all backups and recovery, uh, volumes being on flash. What does that addressable market look like to you guys in the future? How, how are you looking at that? Yeah. Is this just the beginning of a new thing that's gonna develop over time? >>Yeah, I think, I think it's a, is a great question. It's an insightful question. It's also a great way for me to plug accelerate in, in 20, you know, 20 days or so. Um, it's a great backdrop for pure to make some announcements in terms of what's next and, and, you know, and when we're ready to make them, you know, it's a good example. Um, but, but in direct answer to your question, you know, without a doubt, you know, the adjacencies between data protection, primary storage, secondary storage, the blurring that's happening within that, you know, based on the ransomware threats, based on, you know, other environments around cloud and, and how customers have learned from cloud experiences early on and applying those learnings, not just to demanding simplicity in their solutions, but demanding the ability for, you know, kind of the storage is code and, and to have that cloud operating model across everything that they do. And so, you know, I think those are at the core, some of the things that we think about in terms of what's next and, and, uh, and to do it with partners like beam at the forefront, as well as the voice of our customer at >>The forefront. And that's why I wanted to ask you that's great setup. Thank you, David. Um, so the port works acquisition was really interesting. We're at, um, in Valencia Spain, the cube is, uh, our, our colleagues are over there. Unfortunately, John furier couldn't make the trip, the vid hit him. Uh, but one of the conversations, the topic of conversations over there is, you know, shift left with the solar winds, hack the sensitivity around the software supply chain. We certainly talked about it last week at red hat summit. I haven't heard a lot about DevOps here, but it's sort of intrinsic that, that whole shift left component, that idea of not bolting on data protection at the tail end, actually shifting left means doing it in the development cycle, not throwing it over the fence, you know, to, to the operations people. What's that conversation like subsequent to the port works acquisition, which was very interesting. A small lever can go a long way. Can you give us the update there? >>Yeah. And first and foremost, I hope John's okay. Right? >>He is. He's doing well. Good, Mr. John, >>We do. And so, you know, I think the, um, the, the future of applications is really on center stage when you put port works into the conversation mm-hmm <affirmative>. And so as companies move like no, one's gonna develop applications today without a container strategy right related to that. And that's gonna allow for the applications to move and data gravity to really play a bigger role and pure feels confident in our ability to play a big role in that. And as those applications mature up the containerized curve, they're definitely gonna have data protection, data management, other fundamental things built into it in that shift left context that we're gonna be prepared to take advantage of based on the assets. We have >>The two hardcore engineering cultures, uh, that, that have momentum, uh, pure and, and Veeam. Michael. It's great to see you again. Thanks so much for coming to the cube. >>Uh, it's always a pleasure to be with you gentlemen, and, uh, great to meet you for the first time. Good to meet you, Michael. Look forward to seeing you the next time and, and thanks again. >>All right. You bet. All right, keep it right there, everybody. Thanks for watching. This is the Cube's coverage of vem on 2022. We're at the area in Las Vegas, and we'll be right back right after the short break.

(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to The Great Cloud Debate. I'm your moderator Rachel Dines. I'm joined by two debaters today Corey Quinn, Cloud Economist at the Duckbill Group and Stu Miniman, Senior Analyst and Host of theCube. Welcome Corey and Stu, this when you can say hello. >> Hey Rachel, great to talk to you. >> And it's better to talk to me. It's always a pleasure to talk to the fine folks over at CloudHealth at by VMware and less of the pleasure to talk to Stu. >> Smack talk is scheduled for later in the agenda gentlemen, so please keep it to a minimum now to keep us on schedule. So here's how today is going to work. I'm going to introduce a debate topic and assign Corey and Stu each to a side. Remember, their assignments are what I decide and they might not actually match their true feelings about a topic, and it definitely does not represent the feelings of their employer or my employer, importantly. Each debater is going to have two minutes to state their opening arguments, then we'll have rebuttals. And each round you the audience gets to vote of who you think is winning. And at the end of the debate, I'll announce the winner. The prize is bragging rights of course, but then also we're having each debater play to win lunch for their local hospital, which is really exciting. So Stu, which hospital are you playing for? >> Yeah, so Rachel, I'm choosing Brigham Women's Hospital. I get a little bit of a home vote for the Boston audience here and was actually my wife's first job out of school. >> Great hospital. Very, very good. All right, Corey, what about you? >> My neighbor winds up being as specialist in infectious diseases as a doctor, and that was always one of those weird things you learn over a cocktail party until this year became incredibly relevant. So I will absolutely be sending the lunch to his department. >> Wonderful! All right. Well, is everyone ready? Any last words? This is your moment for smack talk. >> I think I'll say that for once we can apply it to a specific technology area. Otherwise, it was insulting his appearance and that's too easy. >> All right, let's get going. The first topic is multicloud. Corey, you'll be arguing that companies are better off standardizing on a single cloud. While Stu, you're going to argue the companies are better off with a multicloud strategy. Corey, you're up first, two minutes on the clock and go. >> All right. As a general rule, picking a single provider and going all in leads to the better outcome. Otherwise, you're trying to build every workload to run seamlessly on other providers on a moment's notice. You don't ever actually do it and all you're giving up in return is the ability to leverage whatever your primary cloud provider is letting you build. Now you're suddenly trying to make two differently behaving load balancers work together in the same way, you're using terraform or as I like to call it multicloud formation in the worst of all possible ways. Because now you're having to only really build on one provider, but all the work you're putting in to make that scale to other providers, you might theoretically want to go to at some point, it slows you down, you're never going to be able to move as quickly trying to build for everyone as you are for one particular provider. And I don't care which provider you pick, you probably care which one you pick, I don't care which one. The point is, you've got to pick what's right for your business. And in almost every case, that means start on a single platform. And if you need to migrate down the road years from now, great, that means A you've survived that long, and B you now have the longevity as a business to understand what migrating looks like. Otherwise you're not able to take care of any of the higher level offerings these providers offer that are even slightly differentiated from each other. And even managed database services behave differently. You've got to become a master of all the different ways these things can fail and unfortunate and displeasing ways. It just leaves you in a position where you're not able to specialize, and of course, makes hiring that much harder. Stu, fight me! >> Tough words there. All right, Stu, your turn. Why are companies better off if they go with a multicloud strategy? Got two minutes? >> Yeah, well first of all Corey, I'm really glad that I didn't have to whip out the AWS guidelines, you were not sticking strictly to it and saying that you could not use the words multicloud, cross-cloud, any cloud or every cloud so thank you for saving me that argument. But I want you to kind of come into the real world a little bit. We want access to innovation, we want flexibility, and well, we used to say I would have loved to have a single provider, in the real world we understand that people end up using multiple solutions. If you look at the AI world today, there's not a provider that is a clear leader in every environment that I have. So there's a reason why I might want to use a lot of clouds. Most companies I talked to, Corey, they still have some of their own servers. They're working in a data center, we've seen huge explosion in the service provider world connecting to multiple clouds. So well, a couple of years ago, multicloud was a complete mess. Now, it's only a little bit of a mess, Corey. So absolutely, there's work that we need to do as an industry to make these solutions better. I've been pining for a couple years to say that multicloud needs to be stronger than the sum of its pieces. And we might not yet be there but limiting yourself to a single cloud is reducing your access to innovation, it's reducing your flexibility. And when you start looking at things like edge computing and AI, I'm going to need to access services from multiple providers. So single cloud is a lovely ideal, but in the real world, we understand that teams come with certain skill sets. We end up in many industries, we have mergers and acquisitions. And it's not as easy to just rip out all of your cloud, like you would have 20 years ago, if you said, "Oh, well, they have a phone system or a router "that didn't match what our corporate guidelines is." Cloud is what we're doing. There's lots of solutions out there. And therefore, multicloud is the reality today, and will be the reality going forward for many years to come. >> Strong words from you, Stu. Corey, you've got 60 seconds for rebuttal. I mostly agree with what you just said. I think that having different workloads in different clouds makes an awful lot of sense. Data gravity becomes a bit of a bear. But if you acquire a company that's running on a different cloud than the one that you've picked, you'd be ridiculous to view migrating as anything approaching a strategic priority. Now, this also gets into the question of what is cloud? Our G Suite stuff counts as cloud, but no one really views it in that way. Similarly, when you have an AI specific workload, that's great. As long as it isn't you seriously expensive to move data between providers. That workload doesn't need to live in the same place as your marketing website does. I think that the idea of having a specific cloud provider that you go all in on for every use case, well, at some point that leads to ridiculous things like pretending that Amazon WorkDocs has customers, it does not. But for things that matter to your business and looking at specific workloads, I think that you're going to find a primary provider with secondary workloads here and they're scattered elsewhere to be the strategy that people are getting at when they use the word multicloud badly. >> Time's up for you Corey, Stu we've got time for rebuttal and remember, for those of you in the audience, you can vote at any time and who you think is winning this round. Stu, 60 seconds for a rebuttal. >> Yeah, absolutely Corey. Look, you just gave the Andy Jassy of what multicloud should be 70 to 80% goes to a single provider. And it does make sense we know nobody ever said multicloud equals the same amount in multiple environments but you made a clear case as to why multicloud leveraging multi providers is likely what most companies are going to do. So thank you so much for making a clear case as to why multicloud not equal cloud, across multiple providers is the way to go. So thank you for conceding the victory. >> Last Words, Corey. >> If that's what you took from it Stu, I can't get any closer to it than you have. >> All right, let's move on to the next topic then. The next topic is serverless versus containers which technology is going to be used in, let's say, five to 10 years time? And as a reminder, I'm going to assign each of the debaters these topics, their assignments may or may not match their true feelings about this topic, and they definitely don't represent the topics of my employer, CloudHealth by VMware. Stu, you're going to argue for containers. Corey you're going to argue for start serverless. Stu, you're up first. Two minutes on the clock and go. >> All right, so with all respect to my friends in the serverless community, We need to have a reality check as to how things work. We all know that serverless is a ridiculous name because underneath we do need to worry about all of the infrastructure underneath. So containers today are the de facto building block for cloud native architectures, just as the VM defined the ecosystem for an entire generation of solutions. Containers are the way we build things today. It is the way Google has architected their entire solution and underneath it is often something that's used with serverless. So yes, if you're, building an Alexa service, serverless make what's good for you. But for the vast majority of solutions, I need to have flexibility, I need to understand how things work underneath it. We know in IT that it's great when things work, but we need to understand how to fix them when they break. So containerization gets us to that atomic level, really close to having the same thing as the application. And therefore, we saw the millions of users that deploy Docker, we saw the huge wave of container orchestration led by Kubernetes. And the entire ecosystem and millions of customers are now on board with this way of designing and architecting and breaking down the silos between the infrastructure world and the application developer world. So containers, here to stay growing fast. >> All right, Corey, what do you think? Why is serverless the future? >> I think that you're right in that containers are the way you get from where you were to something that runs effectively in a cloud environment. That is why Google is so strongly behind Kubernetes it helps get the entire industry to write code the way that Google might write code. And that's great. But if you're looking at effectively rewriting something from scratch, or building something that new, the idea of not having to think about infrastructure in the traditional sense of being able to just here, take this code and run it in a given provider that takes whatever it is that you need to do and could loose all these other services together, saves an awful lot of time. As that continues to move up the stack towards the idea of no code or low code. And suddenly, you're now able to build these applications in ways that require just a little bit of code that tie together everything else. We're closer than ever to that old trope of the only code you write is business logic. Serverless gives a much clearer shot of getting there, if you can divorce yourself from the past of legacy workloads. Legacy, of course meaning older than 18 months and makes money. >> Stu, do you have a rebuttal, 60 seconds? >> Yeah. So Corey, we've been talking about this Nirvana in many ways. It's the discussion that we had for paths for over a decade now. I want to be able to write my code once not worry about where it lives, and do all this. But sometimes, there's a reason why we keep trying the same thing over and over again, but never reaching it. So serverless is great for some application If you talked about, okay, if you're some brand new webby thing there and I don't want to have to do this team, that's awesome. I've talked to some wonderful people that don't know anything about coding that have built some cool stuff with serverless. But cool stuff isn't what most business runs on, and therefore containerization is, as you said, it's a bridge to where I need to go, it lives in these cloud environments, and it is the present and it is the future. >> Corey, your response. >> I agree that it's the present, I doubt that it's the future in quite the same way. Right now Kubernetes is really scratching a major itch, which is how all of these companies who are moving to public cloud still I can have their infrastructure teams be able to cosplay as cloud providers themselves. And over time, that becomes simpler and I think on some level, you might even see a convergence of things that are container workloads begin to look a lot more like serverless workloads. Remember, we're aiming at something that is five years away in the context of this question. I think that the serverless and container landscape will look very different. The serverless landscape will be bright and exciting and new, whereas unfortunately the container landscape is going to be represented by people like you Stu. >> Hoarse words from Corey. Stu, any last words or rebuttals? >> Yeah, and look Corey absolutely just like we don't really think about the underlying server or VM, we won't think about the containers you won't think about Kubernetes in the future, but, the question is, which technology will be used in five to 10 years, it'll still be there. It will be the fabric of our lives underneath there for containerization. So, that is what we were talking about. Serverless I think will be useful in pockets of places but will not be the predominant technology, five years from now. >> All right, tough to say who won that one? I'm glad I don't have to decide. I hope everyone out there is voting, last chance to vote on this question before we move on to the next. Next topic is cloud wars. I'm going to give a statement and then I'm going to assign each of you a pro or a con, Google will never be an actual contender in the cloud wars always a far third, we're going to have Corey arguing that Google is never going to be an actual contender. And Stu, you're going to argue that Google is eventually going to overtake the top two AWS and Azure. As a constant reminder, I'm assigning these topics, it's my decision and also they don't match the opinions of me, my employer, or likely Stu or Corey. This is all just for fun and games. But I really want to hear what everyone has to say. So Corey, you're up first two minutes. Why is Google never going to be an actual contender and go. >> The biggest problem Google has in the time of cloud is their ability to forecast longer term on anything that isn't their advertising business, and their ability to talk to human beings long enough to meet people where they are. We're replacing their entire culture is what it's going to take to succeed in the time of cloud and with respect, Thomas Kurian is a spectacular leader internally but look at where he's come from. He spent 22 years at Oracle and now has been transplanted into Google. If we take a look at Satya Nadella's cloud transformation at Microsoft, he was able to pull that off as an insider, after having known intimately every aspect of that company, and he grew organically with it and was perfectly positioned to make that change. You can't instill that kind of culture change by dropping someone externally, on top of an organization and expecting anything to go with this magic one day wake up and everything's going to work out super well. Google has a tremendous amount of strengths, and I don't see that providing common denominator cloud computing services to a number of workloads that from a Google perspective are horrifying, is necessarily in their wheelhouse. It feels like their entire focus on this is well, there's money over there. We should go get some of that too. It comes down to the traditional Google lack of focus. >> Stu, rebuttal? Why do you think Google has a shaft? >> Yeah, so first of all, Corey, I think we'd agree Google is a powerhouse in the world today. My background is networking, when they first came out with with Google Cloud, I said, Google has the best network, second to none in the world. They are ubiquitous today. If you talk about the impact they have on the world, Android phones, you mentioned Kubernetes, everybody uses G Suite maps, YouTube, and the like. That does not mean that they are necessarily going to become the clear leader in cloud but, Corey, they've got really, really smart people. If you're not familiar with that talk to them. They'll tell you how smart they are. And they have built phenomenal solutions, who's going to be able to solve, the challenge every day of, true distributed systems, that a global database that can handle the clock down to the atomic level, Google's the one that does that we've all read the white papers on that. They've set the tone for Hadoop, and various solutions that are all over the place, and their secret weapon is not the advertising, of course, that is a big concern for them, but is that if you talk about, the consumer adoption, everyone uses Google. My kids have all had Chromebooks growing up. It isn't their favorite thing, but they get, indoctrinated with Google technology. And as they go out and leverage technologies in the world, Google is one that is known. Google has the strength of technology and a lot of positioning and partnerships to move them forward. Everybody wants a strong ecosystem in cloud, we don't want a single provider. We already discussed this before, but just from a competitive nature standpoint, if there is a clear counterbalance to AWS, I would say that it is Google, not Microsoft, that is positioned to be that clear and opportune. >> Interesting, very interesting Stu. So your argument is the Gen Zers will of ultimately when they come of age become the big Google proponents. Some strong words that as well but they're the better foil to AWS, Corey rebuttal? >> I think that Stu is one t-shirt change away from a pitch perfect reenactment of Charlie Brown. In this case with Google playing the part of Lucy yanking the football away every time. We've seen it with inbox, Google Reader, Google Maps, API pricing, GKE's pricing for control plane. And when your argument comes down to a suddenly Google is going to change their entire nature and become something that it is as proven as constitutionally incapable of being, namely supporting something that its customers want that it doesn't itself enjoy working on. And to the exclusion of being able to get distracted and focused on other things. Even their own conferences called Next because Google is more interested in what they're shipping than what they're building, than what they're currently shipping. I think that it is a fantasy to pretend that that is somehow going to change without a complete cultural transformation, which again, I don't see the seeds being planted for. >> Some sick burns in there Stu, rebuttal? >> Yeah. So the final word that I'll give you on this is, one of the most important pieces of what we need today. And we need to tomorrow is our data. Now, there are some concerns when we talk about Google and data, but Google also has strong strength in data, understanding data, helping customers leverage data. So while I agree to your points about the cultural shift, they have the opportunity to take the services that they have, and enable customers to be able to take their data to move forward to the wonderful world of AI, cloud, edge computing, and all of those pieces and solve the solution with data. >> Strong words there. All right, that's a tough one. Again, I hope you're all out there voting for who you think won that round. Let's move on to the last round before we start hitting the lightning questions. I put a call out on several channels and social media for people to have questions that they want you to debate. And this one comes from Og-AWS Slack member, Angelo. Angelo asks, "What about IBM Cloud?" Stu you're pro, Corey you're con. Let's have Stu you're up first. The question is, what about IBM Cloud? >> All right, so great question, Angelo. I think when you look at the cloud providers, first of all, you have to understand that they're not all playing the same game. We talked about AWS and they are the elephant in the room that moves nimbly as a cheetah. Every other provider plays a little bit of a different game. Google has strength in data. Microsoft, of course, has their, business productivity applications. IBM has a strong legacy. Now, Corey is going to say that they are just legacy and you need to think about them but IBM has strong innovation. They are a player in really what we call chapter two of the cloud. So when we start talking about multicloud, when we start talking about living in many environments, IBM was the first one to partner with VMware for VMware cloud before the mega VMware AWS announcement, there was IBM up on stage and if I remember right, they actually have more VMware customers on IBM Cloud than they do in the AWS cloud. So over my shoulder here, there's of course, the Red Hat $34 billion to bet on that multicloud solution. So as we talk about containerization, and Kubernetes, Red Hat is strongly positioned in open-source, and flexibility. So you really need a company that understands both the infrastructure side and the application side. IBM has database, IBM has infrastructure, IBM has long been the leader in middleware, and therefore IBM has a real chance to be a strong player in this next generation of platforms. Doesn't mean that they're necessarily going to go attack Amazon, they're partnering across the board. So I think you will see a kinder, gentler IBM and they are leveraging open source and Red Hat and I think we've let the dogs out on the IBM solution. >> Indeed. >> So before Corey goes, I feel the need to remind everyone that the views expressed here are not the views of my employer nor myself, nor necessarily of Corey or Stu. I have Corey. >> I haven't even said anything yet. And you're disclaiming what I'm about to say. >> I'm just warning the audience, 'cause I can't wait to hear what you're going to say next. >> Sounds like I have to go for the high score. All right. IBM's best days are behind it. And that is pretty clear. They like to get angry when people talk about how making the jokes about a homogenous looking group of guys in blue suits as being all IBM has to offer. They say that hasn't been true since the '80s. But that was the last time people cared about IBM in any meaningful sense and no one has bothered to update the relevance since then. Now, credit where due, I am seeing an awful lot of promoted tweets from IBM into my timeline, all talking about how amazing their IBM blockchain technology is. And yes, that is absolutely the phrasing of someone who's about to turn it all around and win the game. I don't see it happening. >> Stu, rebuttal? >> Look, Corey, IBM was the company that brought us the UPC code. They understand Mac manufacturing and blockchain actually shows strong presence in supply chain management. So maybe you're not quite aware of some of the industries that IBM is an expert in. So that is one of the big strengths of IBM, they really understand verticals quite well. And, at the IBM things show, I saw a lot in the healthcare world, had very large customers that were leveraging those solutions. So while you might dismiss things when they say, Oh, well, one of the largest telecom providers in India are leveraging OpenStack and you kind of go with them, well, they've got 300 million customers, and they're thrilled with the solution that they're doing with IBM, so it is easy to scoff at them, but IBM is a reliable, trusted provider out there and still very strong financially and by the way, really excited with the new leadership in place there, Arvind Krishna knows product, Jim Whitehurst came from the Red Hat side. So don't be sleeping on IBM. >> Corey, any last words? >> I think that they're subject to massive disruption as soon as they release the AWS 400 mainframe in the cloud. And I think that before we, it's easy to forget this, but before Google was turning off Reader, IBM stopped making the model M buckling spring keyboards. Those things were masterpieces and that was one of the original disappointments that we learned that we can't fall in love with companies, because companies in turn will not love us back. IBM has demonstrated that. Lastly, I think I'm thrilled to be working with IBM is exactly the kind of statement one makes only at gunpoint. >> Hey, Corey, by the way, I think you're spending too much time looking at all titles of AWS services, 'cause you don't know the difference between your mainframe Z series and the AS/400 which of course is heavily pending. >> Also the i series. Oh yes. >> The i series. So you're conflating your system, which still do billions of dollars a year, by the way. >> Oh, absolutely. But that's not we're not seeing new banks launching and then building on top of IBM mainframe technology. I'm not disputing that mainframes were phenomenal. They were, I just don't see them as the future and I don't see a cloud story. >> Only a cloud live your mainframe related smack talk. That's the important thing that we're getting to here. All right, we move-- >> I'm hoping there's an announcement from CloudHealth by VMware that they also will now support mainframe analytics as well as traditional cloud. >> I'll look into that. >> Excellent. >> We're moving on to the lightning rounds. Each debater in this round is only going to get 60 seconds for their opening argument and then 30 seconds for a rebuttal. We're going to hit some really, really big important questions here like this first one, which is who deserves to sit on the Iron Throne at the end of "Game of Thrones?" I've been told that Corey has never seen this TV show so I'm very interested to hear him argue for Sansa. But let's Sansa Stark, let's hear Stu go first with his argument for Jon Snow. Stu one minute on the clock, go. >> All right audience let's hear it from the king of the north first of all. Nothing better than Jon Snow. He made the ultimate sacrifice. He killed his love to save Westeros from clear destruction because Khaleesi had gone mad. So Corey is going to say something like it's time for the women to do this but it was a woman she went mad. She started burning the place down and Jon Snow saved it so it only makes sense that he should have done it. Everyone knows it was a travesty that he was sent back to the Wall, and to just wander the wild. So absolutely Jon Snow vote for King of the North. >> Compelling arguments. Corey, why should Sansa Stark sit on the throne? Never having seen the show I've just heard bits and pieces about it and all involves things like bloody slaughters, for example, the AWS partner Expo right before the keynote is best known as AWS red wedding. We take a look at that across the board and not having seen it, I don't know the answer to this question, but how many of the folks who are in positions of power we're in fact mediocre white dudes and here we have Stu advocating for yet another one. Sure, this is a lightning round of a fun event but yes, we should continue to wind up selecting this mediocre white person has many parallels in terms of power, et cetera, politics, current tech industry as a whole. I think she's right we absolutely should give someone with a look like this a potential opportunity to see what they can do instead. >> Ouch, Stu 30 seconds rebuttal. >> Look, I would just give a call out to the women in the audience and say, don't you want Jon Snow to be king? >> I also think it's quite bold of Corey to say that he looks like Kit Harington. Corey, any last words? >> I think that it sad you think Stu was running for office at this point because he's become everyone's least favorite animal, a panda bear. >> Fire. All right, so on to the next question. This one also very important near and dear to my heart personally, is a hot dog a sandwich. Corey you'll be arguing no, Stu will be arguing yes. I must also add this important disclaimer that these assignments are made by me and might not reflect the actual views of the debaters here so Corey, you're up first. Why is a hot dog not a sandwich? >> Because you'll get punched in the face if you go to a deli of any renown and order a hot dog. That is not what they serve there. They wind up having these famous delicatessen in New York they have different sandwiches named after different celebrities. I shudder to think of the deadly insult that naming a hot dog after a celebrity would be to that not only celebrity in some cases also the hot dog too. If you take a look and you want to get sandwiches for lunch? Sure. What are we having catered for this event? Sandwiches. You show up and you see a hot dog, you're looking around the hot dog to find the rest of the sandwich. Now while it may check all of the boxes for a technical definition of what a sandwich is, as I'm sure Stu will boringly get into, it's not what people expect, there's a matter of checking the actual boxes, and then delivering what customers actually want. It's why you can let your product roadmap be guided by cart by customers or by Gartner but rarely both. >> Wow, that one hurts. Stu, why is the hot dog a sandwich? >> Yeah so like Corey, I'm sorry that you must not have done some decent traveling 'cause I'm glad you brought up the definition because I'm not going to bore you with yes, there's bread and there's meat and there's toppings and everything else like that but there are some phenomenal hot dogs out there. I traveled to Iceland a few years ago, and there's a little hot dog stand out there that's been there for over 40 or 50 years. And it's one of the top 10 culinary experience I put in. And I've been to Michelin star restaurants. You go to Chicago and any local will be absolutely have to try our creation. There are regional hot dogs. There are lots of solutions there and so yeah, of course you don't go to a deli. Of course if you're going to the deli for takeout and you're buying meats, they do sell hot dogs, Corey, it's just not the first thing that you're going to order on the menu. So I think you're underselling the hot dog. Whether you are a child and grew up and like eating nothing more than the mustard or ketchup, wherever you ate on it, or if you're a world traveler, and have tried some of the worst options out there. There are a lot of options for hot dogs so hot dog, sandwich, culinary delight. >> Stu, don't think we didn't hear that pun. I'm not sure if that counts for or against you, but Corey 30 seconds rebuttal. >> In the last question, you were agitating for putting a white guy back in power. Now you're sitting here arguing that, "Oh some of my best friend slash meals or hot dogs." Yeah, I think we see what you're putting down Stu and it's not pretty, it's really not pretty and I think people are just going to start having to ask some very pointed, delicate questions. >> Tough words to hear Stu. Close this out or rebuttal. >> I'm going to take the high road, Rachel and leave that where it stands. >> I think that is smart. All right, next question. Tabs versus spaces. Stu, you're going to argue for tabs, Corey, you're going to argue for spaces just to make this fun. Stu, 60 seconds on the clock, you're up first. Why are tabs the correct approach? >> First of all, my competitor here really isn't into pop culture. So he's probably not familiar with the epic Silicon Valley argument over this discussion. So, Corey, if you could explain the middle of algorithm, we will be quite impressed but since you don't, we'll just have to go with some of the technology first. Looks, developers, we want to make things simple on you. Tabs, they're faster to do they take up less memory. Yes, they aren't quite as particular as using spaces but absolutely, they get the job done and it is important to just, focus on productivity, I believe that the conversation as always, the less code you can write, the better and therefore, if you don't have to focus on exactly how many spaces and you can just simplify with the tabs, you're gona get close enough for most of the job. And it is easier to move forward and focus on the real work rather than some pedantic discussion as to whether one thing is slightly more efficient than the other. >> Great points Stu. Corey, why is your pedantic approach better? >> No one is suggesting you sit there and whack the spacebar four times or eight times you hit the Tab key, but your editor should be reasonably intelligent enough to expand that. At that point, you have now set up a precedent where in other cases, other parts of your codebase you're using spaces because everyone always does. And that winds up in turn, causing a weird dissonance you'll see a bunch of linters throwing issues if you use tabs as a direct result. Now the wrong answer is, of course, and I think Steve will agree with me both in the same line. No one is ever in favor of that. But I also want to argue with Stu over his argument about "Oh, it saves a little bit of space "is the reason one should go with tabs instead." Sorry, that argument said bye bye a long time ago, and that time was the introduction of JavaScript, where it takes many hundreds of Meg's of data to wind up building hello world. Yeah, at that point optimization around small character changes are completely irrelevant. >> Stu, rebuttal? >> Yeah, I didn't know that Corey did not try to defend that he had any idea what Silicon Valley was, or any of the references in there. So Rachel, we might have to avoid any other pop culture references. We know Corey just looks at very specific cloud services and can't have fun with some of the broader themes there. >> You're right my mistake Stu. Corey, any last words? >> It's been suggested that whole middle out seen on the whiteboard was came from a number of conversations I used to have with my co-workers as in people who were sitting in the room with me watching that episode said, Oh my God, I've been in the room while you had this debate with your friend and I will not name here because they at least still strive to remain employable. Yeah, it's, I understand the value in the picking these fights, we could have gone just as easily with vi versus Emacs, AWS versus Azure, or anything else that you really care to pick a fight with. But yeah, this is exactly the kind of pedantic fight that everyone loves to get involved with, which is why I walked a different path and pick other ridiculous arguments. >> Speaking of those ridiculous arguments that brings us to our last debate topic of the day, Corey you are probably best known for your strong feelings about the pronunciation of the acronym for Amazon Machine Image. I will not be saying how I think it is pronounced. We're going to have you argue each. Stu, you're going to argue that the acronym Amazon Machine Image should be pronounced to rhyme with butterfly. Corey, you'll be arguing that it rhymes with mommy. Stu, rhymes with butterfly. Let's hear it, 60 seconds on the clock. >> All right, well, Rachel, first of all, I wish I could go to the videotape because I have clear video evidence from a certain Corey Quinn many times arguing why AMI is the proper way to pronounce this, but it is one of these pedantic arguments, is it GIF or GIF? Sometimes you go back and you say, Okay, well, there's the way that the community did it. And the way that oh wait, the founder said it was a certain way. So the only argument against AMI, Jeff Barr, when he wrote about the history of all of the blogging that he's done from AWS said, I wish when I had launched the service that I pointed out the correct pronunciation, which I won't even deem to talk it because the community has agreed by and large that AMI is the proper way to pronounce it. And boy, the tech industry is rific on this kind of thing. Is it SQL and no SQL and you there's various ways that we butcher these constantly. So AMI, almost everyone agrees and the lead champion for this argument, of course is none other than Corey Quinn. >> Well, unfortunately today Corey needs to argue the opposite. So Corey, why does Amazon Machine Image when pronounce as an acronym rhyme with mommy? >> Because the people who built it at Amazon say that it is and an appeal to authorities generally correct when the folks built this. AWS has said repeatedly that they're willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time. And this is one of those areas in which they have been misunderstood by virtually the entire industry, but they are sticking to their guns and continuing to wind up advocating for AMI as the correct pronunciation. But I'll take it a step further. Let's take a look at the ecosystem companies. Whenever Erica Brescia, who is now the COO and GitHub, but before she wound up there, she was the founder of Bitnami. And whenever I call it Bitn AMI she looks like she is barely successfully restraining herself from punching me right in the mouth for that pronunciation of the company. Clearly, it's Bitnami named after the original source AMI, which is what the proper term pronunciation of the three letter acronym becomes. Fight me Stu. >> Interesting. Interesting argument, Stu 30 seconds, rebuttal. >> Oh, the only thing he can come up with is that, you take the word Bitnami and because it has that we know that things sound very different if you put a prefix or a suffix, if you talk to the Kubernetes founders, Kubernetes should be coop con but the people that run the conference, say it cube con so there are lots of debates between the people that create it and the community. I in general, I'm going to vote with the community most of the time. Corey, last words on this topic 'cause I know you have very strong feelings about it. >> I'm sorry, did Stu just say Kubernetes and its community as bastions of truth when it comes to pronouncing anything correctly? Half of that entire conference is correcting people's pronunciation of Kubernetes, Kubernetes, Kubernetes, Kubernetes and 15 other mispronunciations that they will of course yell at you for but somehow they're right on this one. All right. >> All right, everyone, I hope you've been voting all along for who you think is winning each round, 'cause this has been a tough call. But I would like to say that's a wrap for today. big thank you to our debaters. You've been very good sports, even when I've made you argue for against things that clearly are hurting you deep down inside, we're going to take a quick break and tally all the votes. And we're going to announce a winner up on the Zoom Q and A. So go to the top of your screen, Click on Zoom Q and A to join us and hear the winner announced and also get a couple minutes to chat live with Corey and Stu. Thanks again for attending this session. And thank you again, Corey and Stu. It's been The Great Cloud Debate. All right, so each round I will announce the winner and then we're going to announce the overall winner. Remember that Corey and Stu are playing not just for bragging rights and ownership of all of the internet for the next 24 hours, but also for lunch to be donated to their local hospital. Corey is having lunch donated to the California Pacific Medical Centre. And Stu is having lunch donated to Boston Medical Centre. All right, first up round one multicloud versus monocloud. Stu, you were arguing for multicloud, Corey, you were arguing for one cloud. Stu won that one by 64% of the vote. >> The vendor fix was in. >> Yeah, well, look, CloudHealth started all in AWS by supporting customers across those environments. So and Corey you basically conceded it because we said multicloud does not mean we evenly split things up. So you got to work on those two skills, buddy, 'cause, absolutely you just handed the victory my way. So thank you so much and thank you to the audience for understanding multicloud is where we are today, and unfortunately, it's where we're gonnao be in the future. So as a whole, we're going to try to make it better 'cause it is, as Corey and I both agree, a bit of a mess right now. >> Don't get too cocky. >> One of those days the world is going to catch up with me and realize that ad hominem is not a logical fallacy so much as it is an excellent debating skill. >> Well, yeah, I was going to say, Stu, don't get too cocky because round two serverless versus containers. Stu you argued for containers, Corey you argued for serverless. Corey you won that one with 65, 66 or most percent of the vote. >> You can't fight the future. >> Yeah, and as you know Rachel I'm a big fan of serverless. I've been to the serverless comp, I actually just published an excellent interview with Liberty Mutual and what they're doing with serverless. So love the future, it's got a lot of maturity to deliver on the promise that it has today but containers isn't going anyway or either so. >> So, you're not sad that you lost that one. Got it, good concession speech. Next one up was cloud wars specifically Google. is Google a real contender in the clouds? Stu, you were arguing yes they are. Corey, you were arguing no they aren't. Corey also won this round was 72% of the votes. >> Yeah, it's one of those things where at some point, it's sort of embarrassing if you miss a six inch pot. So it's nice that that didn't happen in this case. >> Yeah, so Corey, is this the last week that we have any competitors to AWS? Is that what we're saying? And we all accept our new overlords. Thank you so much, Corey. >> Well I hope not, my God, I don't know what to be an Amazonian monoculture anymore than I do anyone else. Competition makes all of us better. But again, we're seeing a lot of anti competitive behaviour. For example, took until this year for Microsoft to finally make calculator uninstallable and I trust concerned took a long time to work its way of course. >> Yeah, and Corey, I think everyone is listening to what you've been saying about what Google's doing with Google Meet and forcing that us when we make our pieces there. So definitely there's some things that Google culture, we'd love them to clean up. And that's one of the things that's really held back Google's enterprise budget is that advertised advertising driven culture. So we will see. We are working hand-- >> That was already opted out of Hangouts, how do we fix it? We call it something else that they haven't opted out of yet. >> Hey, but Corey, I know you're looking forward to at least two months of weekly Google live stuff starting this summer. So we'll have a lot of time to talk about google. >> Let's not kid ourselves they're going to cancel it halfway through. (Stu laughs) >> Boys, I thought we didn't have any more smack talk left in you but clearly you do. So, all right, moving on. Next slide. This is the last question that we did in the main part of the debate. IBM Cloud. What about IBM Cloud was the question, Stu, you were pro, Corey you were con. Corey, you won this one again with 62% of the vote and for the main. >> It wasn't just me, IBM Cloud also won. The problem is that competition was oxymoron of the day. >> I don't know Rachel, I thought this one had a real shot as to putting where IBM fits. I thought we had a good discussion there. It seemed like some of the early voting was going my way but it just went otherwise. >> It did. We had some last minute swings in these polls. They were going one direction they rapidly swung another it's a fickle crowd today. So right now we've got Corey with three points Stu with one but really the lightning round anyone's game. They got very close here. The next question, lightning round question one, was "Game of Thrones" who deserves to sit on the Iron Throne? Stu was arguing for Jon Snow, Corey was arguing for Sansa Stark also Corey has never seen Game of Thrones. This was shockingly close with Stu at 51.5% of the vote took the crown on this King of the North Stu. >> Well, I'm thrilled and excited that King of the North pulled things out because it would have been just a complete embarrassment if I lost to Corey on this question. >> It would. >> It was the right answer, and as you said, he had no idea what he's talking about, which, unfortunately is how he is on most of the rest of it. You just don't realize that he doesn't know what he's talking about. 'Cause he uses all those fast words and discussion points. >> Well, thank you for saying the quiet part out loud. Now, I am completely crestfallen as to the results of this question about a thing I've never seen and could not possibly care less about not going in my favor. I will someday managed to get over this. >> I'm glad you can really pull yourself together and keep on going with life, Corey it's inspiring. All right, next question. Was the lightning round question two is a hot dog a sandwich? Stu, you were arguing yes. Corey, you were arguing no. Corey landslide, you won this 75% of the vote. >> It all comes down to customer expectations. >> Yeah. >> Just disappointment. Disappointment. >> All right, next question tabs versus spaces. Another very close one. Stu, what were you arguing for Stu? >> I was voting tabs. >> Tabs, yeah. And Corey, you were arguing spaces. This did not turn out the way I expected. So Stu you lost this by slim margin Corey 53% of the vote. You won with spaces. >> Yep. And I use spaces in my day to day life. So that's a position I can actually believe in. >> See, I thought I was giving you the opposite point of view there. I mistook you for the correct answer, in my opinion, which is tabs. >> Well, it is funnier to stalk me on Twitter and look what I have to there than on GitHub where I just completely commit different kinds of atrocities. So I don't blame you. >> Caught that pun there. All right, the last rounds. Speaking of atrocities, AMI, Amazon Machine Image is it pronounced AMI or AMI? >> I better not have won this one. >> So Stu you were arguing that this is pronounced AMI rhymes with butterfly. Corey, you were arguing that it's pronounced AMI like mommy. Any guesses under who won this? >> It better be Stu. >> It was a 50, 50 split complete tie. So no points to anyone. >> For your complete and utterly failed on this because I should have won in a landslide. My entire argument was based on every discussion you've had on this. So, Corey I think they're just voting for you. So I'm really surprised-- >> I think at this point it shows I'm such a skilled debater that I could have also probably brought you to a standstill taking the position that gravity doesn't exist. >> You're a master of few things, Corey. Usually it's when you were dressed up nicely and I think they like the t-shirt. It's a nice t-shirt but not how we're usually hiding behind the attire. >> Truly >> Well. >> Clothes don't always make a demand. >> Gentlemen, I would like to say overall our winner today with five points is Corey. Congratulations, Corey. >> Thank you very much. It's always a pleasure to mop the floor with you Stu. >> Actually I was going to ask Stu to give the acceptance speech for you, Corey and, Corey, if you could give a few words of concession, >> Oh, that's a different direction. Stu, we'll start with you, I suppose. >> Yeah, well, thank you to the audience. Obviously, you voted for me without really understanding that I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm a loudmouth on Twitter. I just create a bunch of arguments out there. I'm influential for reasons I don't really understand. But once again, thank you for your votes so much. >> Yeah, it's always unfortunate to wind up losing a discussion with someone and you wouldn't consider it losing 'cause most of the time, my entire shtick is that I sit around and talk to people who know what they're talking about. And I look smart just by osmosis sitting next to them. Video has been rough on me. So I was sort of hoping that I'd be able to parlay that into something approaching a victory. But sadly, that hasn't worked out quite so well. This is just yet another production brought to you by theCube which shut down my original idea of calling it a bunch of squares. (Rachael laughs) >> All right, well, on that note, I would like to say thank you both Stu and Corey. I think we can close out officially the debate, but we can all stick around for a couple more minutes in case any fans have questions for either of them or want to get them-- >> Find us a real life? Yeah. >> Yeah, have a quick Zoom fight. So thanks, everyone, for attending. And thank you Stu, thank you Corey. This has been The Great Cloud Debate.

>> From Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE, covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2019, brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. We are in Austin, Texas for Pure Accelerate '19. And we're excited to be talking with another one of Pure's happy successful customers. We've got Scott Pedram, the storage architect from One Gas. Scott, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me. >> So One Gas. Give our audience a little bit of an overview of what One Gas is, what regions you serve, and then dig into your role as a storage architect. >> Of course. So One Gas, we're a natural gas utility company. So we're the downstream, the inline. So we actually deliver the natural gas to our customers, residential and commercial. We operate across Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, and various regions including Austin. In my role as storage architect, I help, I mean, basically a one-man show. So design the storage, implement the storage, run the storage. And I also help out in other areas such as the servers, the DBAs, networking, kind of a little bit of everything. >> So you've been a Pure customer for about three years. We were talking before we went live. Give us an overview of your storage infrastructure, your IT environment three years ago, and what the impetus was to evaluate Pure. >> Sure. So we were previously an IBM storage shop. I had IBM SAN volume controller backed by DS 8000, FlashSystem 820s, Storwize V7000s, so different tiers of storage all being managed by VSPC. As is common, the warranty runs out on the DS 8000. So it's time to look at a forklift upgrade or whatever the case may be. I had a plan all in place to replace it with IBM, but we are a fully regulated utility company. So I did my due diligence and brought in some competitors. EMT and Pure Storage. Heard Pure's story, especially the Evergreen storage model, and the five and six year total cost of ownership was actually pretty close, but once you went beyond that, there was no contest. Pure won hands down. And again, as a utility company, we like predictable, flat costs. So the fact that we could do that and not have to have this multi-million dollar expense again in just another three or four years. >> So I got to ask you, so TCO, done a lot of TCO studies, and the biggest component of total cost of ownership is labor, humans. So presumably, you did a full TCO, you looked at it. I'm surprised to hear you say that the five-year TCO was about comparable because Pure is, the Kool-Aid injection says it's simpler. It's more modern. Wouldn't that save head count or at least FTE? >> It could if we were a more complex environment, but as it stood, there's me and one other guy kind of as my backup. So, you still have to have somebody to run it, right? >> So that's what I asked so sometimes CFO's will go, Wait a minute. If we're not going to reduce head count, I'm not going to accept that as part of the cost reduction. Is that what's going on here? Because we're going to shift labor to more high value activity so, oftentimes the CFO doesn't count that in his or her business case. Was that the case or did you find that because you're so small it really didn't matter in terms of the management complexity? I'm interested in your thoughts on that. >> We didn't background management complexity when we were calculating TCO. It was purely the cost to acquire the storage and then the maintenance. >> Oh, so there was no management cost? No human capital, okay. >> No. >> And so it's you and somebody else. >> Scott: Correct. >> Have you now spent less time managing the Pure than you did previously with the IBM? >> Oh, for sure. >> Okay. >> And when I first got it I was afraid, am I going to work myself out of a job? >> The Pure? >> 'Cause it was so easy. >> Okay, so, you had two FTE's managing storage. >> Scott: Yeah. >> What percent of your time, prior to Pure, did you spend managing storage versus doing other stuff? (Scott sighs) I mean a rough ballpark. >> Yeah, rough ballpark. >> Dave: Was it 50/50? >> I would say, I was maybe doing 60 to 70% doing just Pure storage before. And now it's 20? >> So you've gone from 60 to 70, let's call it 65% of your time was spent managing storage tuning, troubleshooting, provisioning LANs, provisioning more capacity, planning, all those things that, we love it. Down to 20%. >> Probably. >> Roughly. I'm not going to hold you to it, but. Well I guess we're live TV, so I will hold you to it. (Scott laughing) But that's a significant savings. You can calculate that over five years, right? Take your fully loaded costs and boom, that adds up. What have you done with that time? What are you now doing? I presume you're not just hanging out. >> No, my boss is watching. >> Publicly traded, regulated utility, somebody's watching right? >> No, of course not. No I've been able to be a lot more proactive. So helping out, like I said, with the server teams, the inward teams. Consulting them on looking further. What is our longterm goal or strategy? What's the five year plan, type of thing. Instead of just fighting fires all day. Or, you know, next week we have to deal with this performance issue that's going to be coming up. >> Dave: So you've been able to be more strategic. >> For sure. >> And one more question on this whole, there's intangibles there that everybody always overlooks, but actually when you live them they make a big difference. Has there been a quality effect? In other words, instead of putting out fires you're doing thing that are more strategic. Do you feel like you have better quality infrastructure? And does that affect your business? >> I would say better quality in the fact that it's more consistent. So we ended up sweeping the entire floor with all Pure Storage. So all of production and non-production, in our case, is all on Pure. So the consistency of the latency and the response times and the performance that you get out of the storage. There is no more performance problems. It doesn't exist. >> And in terms of workloads, I know you're running Splunk on FlashArray. Give us some picture of that infrastructure, the workloads that you're running on it. And the stakeholders I can imagine them in different departments and different functions within One Gas that are using this system and not even realizing it because it's just available, it's there. >> Before Splunk, real quick, we had one application, we went to Flash. They thought their processing was broken because it completed so quickly. (Lisa laughing) >> That's a good thought to have. >> Yeah. So they finished so fast they came back to us, it's broken, I'm like, no it's not. (he laughs) >> What's your use case with Splunk? >> With Splunk it started out as cybersecurity and that's kind of what brought it in, but it has since expanded to monitoring, analytics. We actually use it when we roll out our trucks to the field to ensure that we're meeting the SLAs. There's so many different areas where we use Splunk, I'd have to refer to my notes. >> So infrastructure ops has become this big thing, right? And automation and things of that nature? Or not quite there? >> Not so much automation yet. But we do have a plan, a project to start doing more automation. >> And other analytics, I presume? I mean, they're all about analytics, right? >> A lot of our application teams, like our web development team, they use Splunk a lot for their application monitoring and trying to be proactive on that. >> Thinking about the security use case. Security practitioners often tell us, well, we get inundated with incidents. We don't have the time to sort through them all. Does having Splunk on an all FlashArray, high performance all FlashArray, does it affect the response of the security team? Or how does it affect the business, the security side of the business? >> I'm not able to answer that directly, but I can say that I have seen them do a lot of select all type queries, where they're just searching for a needle in a haystack, type of thing. And previously when we had multi-tiered storage those queries took forever, but now that it's all Flash, it's really quick. >> So they spent more time waiting than they do now. I mean that could be a two edge sword. Maybe they more stuff to sift through now. (he laughs) That's somebody else's problem. >> Well the data security is critical because your dealing with customers' data, right? And almost every month we hear about data breaches in the public. Whether it's a bank, or it's a social media platform. Unfortunately they're becoming quite common. But when you're dealing with personal customer data that's a big concern. Some of the things we're hearing Pure talk about is what they're doing with data protection and data security. And also kind of this sift from not looking at data protection as an insurance policy as much as it's an asset because you have so much information, you're storing it for longer, more and more customers, more data. How is that that being reflected up the chain, even up your chain of command and to the executive folks in terms of being confident that what they have your customers data running on in those three states that you talked about, is on a very solid secure platform? >> Well, security, it requires multiple layers. So Pure having always-on encryption is a big help. So if we do have, you know, a failed module that has to be replaced. I don't have to worry about making sure that it's securely erased, destroyed, and all that. 'Cause without the encryption key it's virtually crypto erased. And then of course we have all the security agents on the servers and the applications and our security cyber team managers, all of that. >> And what about cloud? What do you do in cloud? What's the strategy? >> We do cloud where it makes sense. For instance ServiceNow and O365 we're customers to both of those. >> Dave: So SaaS stuff. >> And mostly SaaS. In my opinion doing cloud is doing a lift and shift. And using cloud as infrastructure as a service doesn't make a whole lot of sense. For us anyway. As a utility company we're very pro-capital. So if we just shift that to another provider that's all operational. >> Whereas, take ServiceNow for example and change the operational model. Right? And you had a clear business impact where it wasn't a lift an shift. It was a transformation really. >> Exactly. >> Where do you want to go with Pure and storage infrastructure? It's just like, I just want it to work. I want it to be rock solid, dirt cheap, highly available, you know, high performance, or are there things that you would like to see Pure do that can help drive your business? >> Well I think the announcement today of the FlashArray//C is what I'm probably most exited about, in that I've already asked my business partners to get me some pricing, some quotes on, can I use that for my backups as a back up target? Instead of, you know, the underlying SaaS datadisks. So that's exciting for me. The fact that it's going to be the same software that I'm used to, that's all a plus. >> How are you protecting your Flash arrays today? >> We're implementing Commvault right now So we do leverage Commvault. It's called IntelliSnap. So basically it does a Pure level snapshot and then we can mount that on our media agents. >> Okay, so, using FlashArray//C, that's the right model number, I think. So obviously you want to use Flash, if it's cost effective, for everything. If it's cheaper than spinning Disk why not use it? Do you see any advantage, in theory, for recovery speed? For sure, yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you need to do a fast recovery, I mean, it's on Flash. But with what I'm looking most forward to though is even the ingest of the data, the initial backups. If there's a lot of, you know querying and trying to figure out what's changed and what's not, that can be a lot of disk thrashing on traditional spindle drives. >> So let's look into the future a little bit before we wrap here. You've been a Pure customer for three years now. Presuming you've done some upgrades and swap outs of controllers in that time? >> Not quite yet. In the coming months we will have our first ever green controller swap. I've actually had a failed controller. So effectively the same process. Where one controller's down and didn't have any issues with performance or, >> No downtime, no disruption. >> No downtime. Absolutely not. Even upgrades where they, you know, take one controller down and upgrade it. I'll do those during business hours. >> Are you comfortable with the, go ahead, sorry. >> Just because there's no performance degradation whatsoever. >> So you're obviously comfortable with the architecture. You seem like a pretty happy customer. Some of the critics will say, it's a duel controller architecture, that doesn't bother you? >> No, not at all. (he laughs) >> I had to ask with a straight face. What would you like to see Pure do? If Charlie G. and Carl are sitting right here, what's the one thing that I could do to make your life easier, what would it be? Besides cutting price, you can't say cut price. >> Yeah. You know what, that's a great question. I think what I would have been asking for, top of mind, would have been the lower tier, what they came out with today, the C. >> You know, another criticism from some of the competitors is they don't have tiering. And when you talk to Pure about it they go, oh, we don't need tiering, we don't believe in tiering. What are your thoughts as a practitioner? Would you want to have a tiered array, like high performance Flash, lower in the same array? Or is this not something that is necessary? >> I don't think so. I go back to the consistency. You know we have all of production on Flash now and it's, I don't have to worry about performance. Whereas before I was constantly having to monitor and manage you know, is all the right stuff on the right tier, and it was a headache. >> So automated tiering wasn't so automated? Is that a fair statement? >> It worked fairly well, but there were some cases where it didn't. >> Yeah. So you're better just throwing it at Flash and it'll take care of itself. >> Yeah. >> Dave: Cool. >> So you've got a foundation now that's going to allow One Gas to evolve continually and we look forward to hearing in the next year or so when you go through that first big evergreen upgrade, how that goes. But it sounds like you've made the right choice and the foundation that you've got is pretty strong. And so many other layers of the business are benefiting and they don't even know it. Because as you said before, on of the constituents thought something was broken, it was that fast. >> Correct. >> So well done on your decision. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much, Scott, for stopping by theCUBE and talking with Dave and me about what One Gas has been doing how you're succeeding and we look forward to hearing more of your success. >> Thank you. >> Dave: Great to have you, thanks. >> Scott: Appreciate it. >> For Dave Vellante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, from Pure Accelerate '19. (upbeat electronic music)