(bright instrumental music) >> Hi everyone, I'm John Furrier. Here in the Cube Studios in Palo Alto, for a special Cube conversation on some big news from PureStorage. We're here with Chadd Kenney, who's the Vice President of Product and Solutions at PureStorage. Big Cloud news. A historic announcement from PureStorage. One of the fastest growing startups in the storage business. Went public, I've been following these guys since creation. Great success story in Silicon Valley and certainly innovative products. Now announcing a Cloud product. Cloud data services, now in market. Chadd, this is huge. >> It's exciting time. Thank you so much for having us. >> So you guys, obviously storage success story, but now the reality is changed. You know we've been saying in the Cube, nothing changes, you get storage computer networking, old way, new way in the Cloud. Game is still the same. Storage isn't going away. You got to store the data somewhere and the data tsunami is coming. Still coming with Edge and a bunch of other things. Cloud more important than ever. To get it right is super important. So, what is the announcement of Cloud Data Service. Explain what the product is, why you guys built it, why now. >> Awesome. So, a couple different innovations that are part of this launch to start with. We have Cloud Block Store which is taking Purity, which is our operating system found on-prem and actually moving it to AWS. And we spent a bunch of time optimizing these solutions to make it so that, we could actually take on tier one, mission critical applications. A key differentiator is that most folks were really chasing after test-dev and leveraging the Cloud for that type of use case. Whereas Cloud Block Storage, really kind of industry strength and ready for mission critical applications. We also took protection mechanisms from FlashArray on-premises and actually made it so that you could use CloudSnap and move and protect data into the public Cloud via portable snapshot technology. Which we can dig into a little bit later. And then the last part is, we thought it was really ripe to change data protection, just as a whole. Most people are doing kind of disc to disc, to tape, and then moving tape offsite. We believe the world has shifted. There's a big problem in data protection. Restoring data is not happening in the time frame that its needed, and SLAs aren't being met, and users are not happy with the overall solution as a whole. We believe that restorations from Flash are incredibly important to the business, but in order to get there you have to offset the economics. So what we're building is a Flash to Flash to Cloud solution which enables folks to be able to take the advantages of the economics of Cloud and be able to then have a caching mechanism of Flash on-premises. So that they can restore things relatively quickly for the predominant set of data that they have out there. >> And just so I get everything right here. You guys only been on-premises only, this is now a cloud solution. It's software. >> Correct. >> Why now? Why wait 'til now, is the timing right? What's the internal conversation? And why should customers know, is this the right time. >> So, the evolution of cloud has been pretty interesting as we've gone through it. Most customers went from kind of a 100% on-premises, the Cloud came out and said, hey, I'm going to move everything to the Cloud. They found that didn't work great for enterprise applications. And so they kind of moved back and realized that hybrid cloud was going to be a world with they wanted to leverage both. We're seeing a lot of other shifts in the market. VMware already having RDS in platform. Now it's true hybrid cloud kind of playing out there. Amazon running an AWS. It's a good mixture just to showcase where people really want to be able to leverage the capabilities of both. >> So it's a good time because the customers are re-architecting as well. >> It's all about- >> Hybrid applications are definitely what people want. >> 100% and the application stack, I think was the core focus that really shifted over time. Instead of just focusing on hybrid cloud infrastructure, it was really about how applications could leverage multiple types of clouds to be able to leverage the innovation and services that they could provide. >> You know, I've always been following the IT business for 30 years or so and it's always been an interesting trend. You buy something from a vendor and there's a trade-offs. And there's always the payback periods, but now I think with this announcement that's interesting is you got the product mix that allows customers to have choice and pick what they want. There's no more trade-offs. If they like cloud, they go to cloud. If they like on-premise, you go on-premises. >> It sounds like an easy concept, but the crazy part to this is the Cloud divide is real. They are very different environments. As we've talked to customers, they were very lost on how it was going to take and enterprise application and actually leverage the innovations within the Cloud. They wanted it, they needed it, but at the same time, they weren't able to deliver up on it. And so, we realized that the data layer, fundamentally was the area that could give them that bridge between those two environments. And we could add some core values to the Cloud for even the next generation developer who's developing in the Cloud to bring in, better overall resiliency. Management and all sorts of new features that they weren't able to take advantage of in traditional public cloud. >> You know Chugg wants to do minimal about the serviceless trend and how awesome that is. It's just, look at the resource pool as a serviceless pool of resource. So is this storageless? >> So it's still backed by storage, obviously. >> No, I was just making a joke. No wait, that you're looking at it as what serviceless is to the user. You guys are providing that same kind of storage pool, addressable through the application of, >> Correct >> as if it's storageless. And what's great about taking 100% software platform and moving it to the Cloud is, customer can spin this up in like minutes. And what's great about it is, they can spend many, many, many instances of these things for various different use cases that they have out there, and get true utility out of it. So they're getting the agility that they really want while not having to offset the values that they really come to love about PureStorage on-premises. Now they can actually get it all on the public cloud as well. >> I want to dig into the products a little bit. Before we get there, I want you to answer the question that's probably on people's minds. I know you've been at Pure, really from the beginning. So, you've seen the history. Most people look at you guys and say, well you're a hardware vendor. I have Pure boxes everywhere, you guys doing a great job. You've pioneered the Flash, speed game on storage. People want, kill latency as they say. You guys have done a great job. But wait a minute, this is software. Explain how you guys did this, why it's important. People might not know that this is a software solution. They might be know you for hardware. What's the difference? Is there a difference? Why should they care and what's the impact? >> So, great question. Since we sell hardware products, most people see us as a hardware company. But at the end of the day, the majority of vinge and dev is software. We're building software to make, originally, off the shelf components to be enterprise worthy. Over time we decided to optimize the hardware too, and that pairing between the software and hardware gets them inherently great values. And this is why we didn't just take our software and just kind of throw it into every cloud and say have it, to customers. Like a lot of folks did. We spent a lot of time, just like we did on our hardware platform, optimizing for AWS to start with. So that we could truly be able to leverage the inherent technologies that they have, but build software to make it even better. >> It's interesting, I interviewed Andy Bechtolsheim at VMworld, and he's a chairman of Arista. He's called, Les Peckgesem calls him the Rembrandt of motherboards. And he goes, "John, we're in the software business." And he goes, "Let me tell ya, hardware's easy. Software's hard." >> I agree. >> So everyone's pretty much in the software business. This is not a change for Pure. >> No, this is the same game we've been in. >> Great. Alright, let's get into the products. The first one is Cloud Block Store for AWS. Which is the way Amazon does the branch. So it's on Amazon, or for Amazon as they say. They use different words. So this is Pure software in the Cloud. Your company, technically Pure software. >> Yup. >> In the Cloud as software, no hardware. >> Yup. >> A 100% storage, API support, always encrypted, seamless management and orchestration, DR backup migration between clouds. >> Yup. >> That's kind of the core premise. So what does the product do, what's the purpose of the product. On the Amazon piece, if I'm a customer of Pure or a prospect for Pure, what does the product give me? What's the capabilities? >> Great. I would say that the biggest thing that customers get is just leverage for their application stack to be able to utilize the Cloud. And let me give you a couple of examples 'cause they're kind of fun. So first off, Cloud Block Storage is just software that sits in the Cloud that has many of the same utilities that run on-premises. Any by doing so, you get the ability to be able to do stuff like I want to replicate, as a DR target. So maybe I don't have a secondary site out there, and I want to have a DR target that spin up in the event of a disaster. You can easily set up bi-directional replication to the instance that you have running in the Cloud. It's the exact same experience. The exact same APIs and you get our cloud data management with Pure1 to be able to see both sites. One single pane of glass, and make sure everything is up and running and doing well. You could also though, leverage a test-dev environment. So let's saying I'm running production on-premises, I can then go ahead and replicate to the Cloud, spin up an instance for test-dev, and running reporting, run analytics. Run anything else that I wanted on top of that. And spin up compute relatively quickly. Maybe I don't have it on-prem. Next, we could focus on replicating for protection. Let's say for compliance, I want to have many instances to be able to restore back in the event of a disaster or in the event that I just want to look back during a period of time. The last part is, not just on-prem to the Cloud, but leveraging the Cloud for even better resiliency to take enterprise applications and actually move them without having to do massive re-architecture. If you look at what happens, Amazon recommends typically, that you have data in two different availability zones. So that when you put an application on top of it, it can be resilient to any sort of failures within an AZ. What we've done is we've taken our active cluster technology which is active-active replication between two instances, and made it so that you can actually replicate between two availability zones. And your application now doesn't need to be re-architected whatsoever. >> So you basically, if I get this right, you had core software that made all that Flash, on the box which is on-premise, which is a hardware solution. Which sounds like it was commodity boxes so this, components. >> Just like the Cloud. >> You take it to the Cloud as an amazing amount of boxes out there. They have tons of data centers. So you treat the Cloud as if it's a virtual device, so to speak. >> Correct. I mean the Cloud functionally is just compute and storage, and networking on the back end has been abstracted by some sort of layer in front of it. We're leveraging compute resources for our controllers and we're leveraging persistent storage media for our storage. But what we've done in software is optimize a bunch of things. An example just as one is, in the Cloud when you, procure storage, you pay for all of it, whether you leverage it or not. We incorporate de-dupe, compression, thin provisioning, AES 256 encryption on all data arrest. These are data services that are just embedded in that aren't traditionally found in a traditional cloud. >> This makes so much sense. If you're an application developer, you focus on building the app. Not worrying about where the storage is and how it's all managed. 'Cause you want persistent data and uni-managed state, and all this stuff going on. And I just need a dashboard, I just need to know where the storage is. Is it available and bring it to the table. >> And make it easy with the same APIs that you were potentially running on, on-premises. And that last part that I would say is that, the layered services that are built into Purity, like our snapshot technology and being able to refresh test-dev environments or create 10 sandboxes for 10 developers in the Cloud and add compute instances to them, is not only instantaneous, but it's space saving as you actually do it. Where as in the normal cloud offerings, you're paying for each one of those instances. >> And the agility is off the charts, it's amazing. Okay, final question on this one is, how much is it's going to cost? How does a customer consume it? Is it in the marketplace? Do I just click a button, spin up things? How's the interface? What's the customer interaction and engagement with the product? How they buy it, how much it costs? Can you share the interaction with the customer? >> So we're just jumping into beta, so a lot of this is still being worked out. But what I will tell you is it's the exact same experience that customers have come to love with Pure. You can go download the Cloud formation template into your catalog with an AWS. So you can spin up instances. The same kind of consumption models that we've built on-prem will be applied to cloud. So it will be a very similar consumption model, which has been super consumer friendly that customers have loved from us over the years. And it will be available in the mid part of next year, and so people will be able to beta it today, test it out, see how it works, and then put it into full production in mid part of next year. >> And operationally, in the work flows, the customers don't skip a beat. It's the same kind of format, languages and the words, the word flow. It feels like Pure all the way through. >> Correct. And not only are we a 100% built on a rest API, but all of the things we've built in with, Python libraries that automate this for developers, to PowerShell toolkits, to Ansible playbooks. All the stuff we've built on codeupyourstorage.com are all applicable to both sites and you get Pure1, our Cloud based management system to be able to see all of it in one single pane of glass. >> Okay, let's move on. So the next piece I think is interesting. I'll get your thoughts on this is that the whole protection piece. On-premises, really kind of held back from the Cloud, mainly to protect the data. So you guys got CloudSnap for AWS, what does this product do? Is this the protection piece? How does this work? What is the product? What's the features and what's the value? >> So, StorReduce was a recent acquisition that we did that enables de-duplication on top of an S3 target. And so it allows you to store an S3 de-duplicated into a smaller form factor and we're pairing that with both an on-premises addition which will have a flash plate behind it for super fast restores. So think of that as a caching tier for your backups, but then also be able to replicate that out to the public cloud and leverage store reduce natively in the public cloud as well. >> So that's the store reduce product. So store reduce on it is that piece. As an object store? >> It is, yes. And we pair that with CloudSnap which is natively integrated within FlashArray, so you can also do snapshots to a FlashBlade for fast restores for both NFS, and you can send it also to S3 in the public cloud. And so you get the inherent abilities to even do, VM level granularity or volume level granularity as well from a FlashArray directly, without needing to have any additional hardware. >> Okay so the data services are the; Block Storage, Store Reduce and CloudSnap on a four AWS. >> Correct. >> How would you encapsulate this from a product and solution standpoint? How would you describe that to a customer in an elevator or just a quick value statement? What's in it for them? >> Sure. So Pure's been seen by customers as innovation engine that optimized applications and allowed them to do, I would say, amazing things into the enterprise. What we're doing now, is we're evolving that solution out of just an on-premises solution and making it available in a very agile Cloud world. We know this world is evolving dramatically. We know people really want to be able to take advantage of the innovations within the Cloud, and so what we're doing is we're finally bridging the gap between on-premises and the Cloud. Giving them the same user experience that they've come to love with Pure and all of the Clouds that they potentially need to develop in. >> Okay so from the announcement standpoint, you guys got Cloud Block Storage limited public beta, right out of the gate. GA in mid 2019. CloudSnap is GA at announcement and Store Reduce is going into beta, first half of 2019. >> Correct, we're excited about it. >> So for the skeptics out there who are- Hey you know, Chadd, I got to tell ya. I love the Cloud, but I'm a little bit nervous. How do I test and get a feeling for- this is going to be simple, if I'm going to jump in and look at this. What should I look at first? What sequence, should I try this? Do you guys have a playbook, for them to either kick the tires or how should they explore to get proficient in the new solution. >> Good question. Right, so for one if you're a FlashArray customer, CloudSnap gives you the ability to be able to take this new entity, called a portable Snapshot. Which is data paired with metadata, and allow you to be able to move data off of a FlashArray. You can put it to an NFS target or you can send it to the Cloud. And so that's the most logical one that folks will probably leverage first because it's super exciting for them to be able to leverage the Cloud and spin up instances, if they'd like to. Or protect back to their own prem. Also, Cloud Block Storage, great because you can spin it up relatively quickly and test out applications between the two. One area that I think customers are going to be really excited about is you could run an analytics environment in the Cloud and spin up a bunch of compute from your production instance by just replicating it up into the Cloud. The last part is, I think backup is not super sexy. Nobody like to talk about it, but it's a significant pain point that's out there, and I think we can make some major in-roads in helping businesses get better SLAs. We're very, very interested to see the great solutions people bring with- >> So, I'm going to put you on the spot here and ask you, there's always the, love the cliche, is it a vitamin or is it an Asprin. Is there a pain point? So obviously backup, I would agree. Backup and recovery, certainly with the disaster, you see the wildfires going on here in California. You can't stop thinking about what the, disaster recovery plan and then you got top line growth with application developers. The kind of the vitamin, if you will. What are the use cases, low hanging fruit for someone to like test this out from a pain point standpoint. Is it backup and what's the growth angle? I wanted to test out this new solution, what should I look at first? What would you recommend? >> It's a very tough question. So, CloudSnap is obviously the easy one. I'd say Cloud Block Store is one that I think, people will. I look at my biggest, customers biggest challenges out there it's how do I get application portable. So I think Cloud Block Store really gives you the application portability. So I think it's finally achieving that whole, hybrid cloud world. But at the end of the day, backup is really big pain point that the enterprise deals with, like right this second. So there's areas where we believe we can add inherent values to them with being able to do fast restores from Flash. That meets SLA's very quickly and is an easy fix. >> And you guys feel good about the data protection aspect of this? >> Yes, very much so. >> Awesome. I want to get your personal take on this. You were early on in Pure. What's the vibe inside the company? This is Cloud and people love Cloud. There's benefits for Cloud, as well as on-premises. What's the mood like inside PureStorage? You've seen from the beginning, now you're a public company and growing up really, really fast. What's the vibe like inside PureStorage? >> It's funny, it hasn't really changed all that much, in the cultural side of the thing, of the business. I love where I work because of the people. The people bring so much fun to the business, so much innovation and we have a mindset that's heavily focused on customer first. And that's one of the things. I always tell this kind of story is, when we first started, we sat in a room on a whiteboard and wrote up, what is everything that sucks about storage. And instead of trying to figure out how we make a 2.0 version of some storage array, we actually figured out what are all the customer pain points that we needed to satisfy and then we built innovations to go do that. Not go chase the competition, but actually go alleviate customer challenges. And we just continue to kind of focus on customer first and so the whole company kind of, rallies around that. And I think you see a very different motion that what you do in most companies because we love hearing about customer results of our products. Engineering just will rally around when a customer shows up just to hear exactly their experience associated to it. And so with this, I think what they see is a continued evolution of the things we've been doing and they love seeing and providing customer solutions in areas that they were challenged to deal with in the past. >> What was some of the customer feedback when you guys started going, hey, you've got a new product, you're doing all of that early work. And you got to go talk to some people and knock on the, hey, what do you think, would you like the Cloud, a little bit of the Cloud. How would you like the Cloud to be implemented? What was some of the things you heard from customers? >> A lot of them said, if you can take your core tenets, which was simplicity, efficiency, reliability, and customer focus around consumption, and if you could give that to me in the Cloud, that would be the Nirvana. So, when we looked at this model, that's exactly what we did. We said, let's take what people love about us on-prem, and give 'em the exact same experience in the Cloud. >> That's great and that's what you guys have done. Congratulations. >> Thanks so much. >> Great to hear the Cloud story here Chadd Kenney, Vice President of Products and Solutions at PureStorage. Taking the formula of success on-premises with Flash and the success there, and bringing it to the Cloud. That's the big deal in this announcement. I'm John Furrier here in the Palo Alto studios, thanks for watching. (upbeat instrumental music)