Right, welcome to the studios here in Palo Alto. I'm John Three cohost in the queue. We here for Special News Conversation with Prakash, dodgy general manager of the flash array business at pure storage, some exciting cloud news for pure storage. Great to see you prakash. Thanks for coming in. Thanks for having us. So you guys got some big news. So I'm excited by this because I've been ranting and raving about how cloud native has been impacting the enterprise. It's pretty well documented that everyone's going going cloud operations. You guys are announcing a kind of a historic milestone for pure storage in that you guys had been doing great on the storage side within covering new since inception, but now as you guys continue to grow, you now have a new offering that's in the cloud. This is new for you guys. Talk about this announcement. What does it mean? You're an on premises storage, has done great to grow. Has Been Amazing gun public that now with the cloud growth you have a cloud offering. What's going on? Well, interestingly people were looking at storage for performance, cost and reliability reasons. That's kind of the three holy grails that you know, everyone expects out of storage. We added a fourth dimension in simplicity. Storage didn't need to be hard, and that's kind of the brand of pier and as we took a look, there was a fifth dimension that we realized was somewhat missing. While we made things simple. We didn't have the agility that public cloud offered. So as we were taking a liquid like, okay, public cloud brings to this instant available capacity, agility model, but do you have to trade off on the other dimensions? Performance costs for liability or simplicity, and our goal to bring customer value was to avoid tradeoffs. So why would you have to trade off on any of those dimensions? And then the second piece was why do you have to choose? Why do you have to choose between on premises or public cloud? And if you make the wrong choice, how do you have freedom to move? So the problem set that we were trying to address was that unification across all those dimensions, the onboarding of agility and frankly the ability to avoid people having to choose between them and use the best of what's available. Where know, I think you nailed something important that I want to get into the why you guys are doing this little bit deeper, but this notion of tradeoffs is an old it kind of philosophy. I got to trade this off to get that. Whether it's, you know, I want compute and stability or flexibility, agility, but with cloud and cloud operations, the operating model now is you choose, as you said, so this cloud operations on premises and cloud has to look the same. This is what we're hearing from Ceos and practitioners, cloud architects, they're re architecting their enterprises now because you know, the, the three main of it, storage, networking and compute never go away. It's just changing. This is a critical, fundamental piece of the architecture of it operations. Why now? Why cloud was the customer demand? Was it a natural progression for you guys? Explain. Explaining the why now. Well, I'll start with not the storage computer networking, but what they're used for and fundamentally the world's using those three dimensions for long, one of two sites, either building applications or building automation. That's kind of the two major trends in the industry. Now if we take a look, if you are running an application, primarily you would choose am I running it on premises or in the public cloud and as as the journeys emerged like public cloud probably introduction of as around 15 years ago, but initially there was this enamored. Everything's going there and then people settled down to some things will go here and some things will go here, but we believe that's a middle state where people are actually trying to do is deliver applications that solve problems and we believe that future is a hybrid application. Now, what is a hybrid application today? If you've got an on premises finance system, should you be able to use ai algorithms from Google's cloud? They book journal Entries for month end close. Let me, because it's now not a choice of am I using pads for the. That doesn't mean the whole application needs to sit in platform as a service. You should be able to use the best capabilities of what's available, where the same way today, anyone who is selling anything and using salesforce crm needs to ensure that what you've sold is booked in a finance system. That could be an sap finance system on premises, so what is the APP? It's an APP without borders now and these are modern day hybrid applications now coming and bringing that down to compute storage and networking. Trying to bring that together and actually deliver that in a consistent and operational way is difficult. It's a difficult across your application architectures. There are different. It's different across your management, even your consumption and how you bill cap ex versus Opex, but the big difference is that the storage layer, because the application architecture on premises relies on your storage for your reliability, but in the cloud they've actually moved that reliability characteristic to the middle tier. You're sharding and doing scaleout distributed application because you can't rely on the same characteristics out of your storage and we found this as an opportunity to bring these two worlds together. We call it the cloud divide. Talk about the cloud device. I think that's important because one of the things we talked with a lot of the end user customers, your customers and others, their challenges again, to focus on the outcomes that they want, the application that's going to drive their and and the value, not so much what the infrastructure, they have them create an infrastructure to enable that. What is this cloud divide when it comes to storage? In your mind, what did you guys discover? What were the key pain points? What were the, what was the customer's telling you around what and what is the cloud divide? No. Uh, the cloud divided, coming back to it is how you deal with applications, how you deal with management and how you deal with storage different between the enterprise in the cloud. We like to say the enterprise is not very cloudy, meaning you don't have instant available capacity in the cloud is not very enterprisey. Now what does that mean? What do we call enterprise? And there's a how it works with the rest of my landscape, what the API is our, uh, what the reliability characteristics, our performance and cost characteristics are also different. So if you want to adopt public cloud, you have to go ahead and say, I got to do a hard left, right? Because you're kind of going down this way and you got to choose a different path. And if you choose that hard left, you're now stuck on that road. It's a one way road. And we're trying to do is say, you know what, what if we could bridge these environments, like let's dig into the application architecture on the cloud divide. Pretty much people are using scale up or scale out as application architectures and then they're deciding, you know, vms or containers yet a, that those are common application development paradigms. What if you could use either one anywhere, right? Those technologies. Now, if you look at what vm ware is doing with Vm ware cloud and you look at what kubernetes is doing across on premise and cloud, there is now a unification happening at application architecture across management. What if you could have a seamless api in a seamless pane of glass around how you manage your applications? That's emerging, but as we looked around, no one was unifying the storage paradigm and actually that was the hardest we we thought that to unify the hardware or the storage paradigm, you have to build a data centric architecture and that's what we've been focused on doing. We've introduced our concept of data centric architecture a year ago and we're now extending that concept to the public cloud. What I like about what you guys are doing here, and I want to get your thoughts on this because this is. I think the trend that's really big in here is that you guys have been great storage provider since again, since inception can been following you guys and you have hardware and hardware has been a rack and stack kind of enterprise paradigm enterprises. We've got gear, we protected, we secure, but now with public cloud becoming more secure and more mainstream and with the Dev ops application environment developing. You mentioned the ems, the containers and Guth Coobernetti's. You're now having an operating model that's changing. You guys are doing software, so it's not a boxer. You're not shipped boxes to Amazon. They have stores. You got s three right out of the services. You're now extending the software component of your business. I want you to take a minute to explain for the people that might not know the extent of the software business at pure and specifically the cloud component software piece. It's not hardware and software, but it works with on premises. Talk about that dynamic of software in the cloud and the impact of the on premise piece of it. Well, I'll rewind a little back intel. What peers been known for peers been known as kind of this all flash company, but if you unwind that. When I took a look at it as I've joined pier actually about six months ago, what I realized is the unique skill that peer has is software engineering. To get the best out of any infrastructure that you give it. The medium happened to be flash initially, so what we've built with our direct flash and NBME and a lot of the advancements in our software has been to deal with the flash medium, but the core skill in Ip we have is software development to get the best out of a medium. What we've introduced is another medium. This medium is infrastructure as a service. We treat that as another medium and we believe that we're uniquely qualified to get the most out of that medium, which is the cloud. Alright, so I want to get into the infrastructure piece. You guys are well known for being a cloud, a data infrastructure component or data infrastructure. You mentioned the history of flash storage has been a great place to store data on premises. When you get into the cloud, you guys call this cloud data services and I'm going to get in another video on that, on the details of that, but when you hear about cloud data services, but pops in my mind is more is coming. You need to store it somewhere. You have to manage that data for applications, hybrid applications. You need to store the protect that data. You need to make that data available. They'll be able to recover all the same things that get done with data in the past on storage has to happen at a whole nother level. Describe what is cloud data services mean? What does that mean to you guys at pure and what does it mean to your customers? If you back up a little bit where we started and where a lot of our initial customers were at where sas customers and what we delivered to them was what we called cloud data infrastructure. That cloud data infrastructure allowed some of the largest sas companies, either consumer or enterprise to go ahead and use peer to build their sass applications. Companies like service now workday, those types of companies, but what was missing was how do you get that same value on infrastructure as a service environments, aws, Azure and GCP. So what we realized was the consistency model was not the same. The apis were not the same and you had to choose or not. And so our cloud data services are a set of services that give you, for example, the same block storage that you had on premises in the public cloud, gives you the same Api. And from a management and operations standpoint, we have pure one which is a cloud data management solution where all of your data, wherever it sits, because as you said, data is growing. You can see all of your Ras. It was interesting as we built the software, uh, when we first built it internally, we realized that hey, we went into pier one and we see all these storage volumes, but we didn't know which ones were on premises or cloud because our software is the same. We actually had to do some engineering to make it look different. Like, Hey, let's color the cloud volumes different. Or we had to actually think about that because we started from the place of driving consistency. And then we've extended the cloud data services dead. Go ahead and say not only can we allow you to run in either place, but how do you extend that to data protection? Because today, as you mentioned earlier on premises, people have workflows for backup and data protection and initially those workflows could have been disk to disk to tape to truck and we see that there's now a more modern way where you can do flash to flash to cloud where you can have your primary mission critical applications and flash and if you want one hop for backup, people looked at backup as an insurance policy. What happens if something goes wrong, but what's really important is when something goes wrong, how quickly can you recover? So providing flash in that second medium and then third, extending the step for cost optimization by leveraging public cloud in s three allows us to drive a consistency model and we can drive that same workflow on premises or in the public cloud. So the consistency to me, I should maybe put you on the spot here. So and consistency. Are we talking about if I'm a pure customer and I'm running pure on premises and I'm using, I'm using all the management something pure one, all this other great stuff and I want to use cloud. Does my job change at all? Does it look the same? So as a dashboard into the storage and the data because I want, I want, I want persistent data, I want ai and I want analytics now. Now I've got cloud going on. There's a lot of things out there, sage maker, tensorflow on the AI side. Lot of things. Goodness out there. What changes for me or does it change and how do you guys solve that problem? Because what I don't want is I don't want to have to hire developers to go do an integration with Amazon and Azure and Google cloud. I want to have a single consistent environment. Do you guys provide that from a data standpoint? We do. So this is a journey because when you start, you need to ensure that your data consistency and management across all of those environments, aws, azure and Google and on premises is the same. So we're introducing our solution cloud data services on Amazon first, but we are planning on extending that to the azure and Google environments in the cloud standpoint. So let's take Amazon. So I said, hey, I want to use some of that cloud. I just go to Amazon. It's extensible, fully extensible as if I'm using pure cloud formation template on Amazon. You just go in, it's there, you can pick it up, you could choose it, use it, and then what really is the difference is your platform services at a higher layer, maybe a little bit different because some of the things you mentioned and the pads are Amazon specific. Yeah. So if you start using pads services, it could impact your application development architecture, but the good news is if your goal is to drive the ability to use, what's the best thing that's available where as you take a look at evolutions in Vm ware, cloud and Coobernetti's combined with our cloud data services, you're now able to put together a use. Best of what available wherever you guys. I mean that's the. That's the application side. So you guys are providing a consistent layer for the data and the storage. Absolutely. That's going to. If I'm building an Amazon as a developer, I'm going to use those anyway. So it's not like it's a dependency per se, it's just you're going to allow for those hybrid apps to run across premises and in cloud and all the data takes care of itself. Right? It's like they get that, right? Yeah, and what's great about it is we've learned some things along the way. For example, we've been trying to get the best out of the flash medium in the past by enhancing performance characteristics or efficiency characteristics for cost optimization. We can bring some of those same value props to the Amazon world. So if you need to aggregate iops, we can do that. If you need to go ahead and drive efficiency, we have techniques to drive efficiency around thin provisioning. Those types of opens up more use cases for the customer to add more policy based things to their application. It makes data programmable. Well, it's interesting. There was one customer that we were speaking to a as part of our alpha usage and it's a online education company. They do curriculum development and that type of thing and they brought this use case to us. They have their APP that they've built for their curriculum on Amazon and then they want to take a lot of snapshots. So what they. One of the technologies, we have his space saving snapshots so they're like, oh, that'd be great if I could use your cloud block store data service on Amazon that way. But then they thought about it and they're like, well, every time we develop a new curriculum we have to send a snapshot out to a different location and site and what we could do is set up a your hardware in a direct attached way to Amazon because your software is the same. And we have active synchronous replication technology where we can now synchronously replicated between the public cloud and this private hosted direct attached diversion. And then they can do work here or even take snapshots from here. And the reason they were doing it was go ahead and say, use that space saving snapshot to reduce their overall cost profile on exports. That's a great example of cloudifying being cloudified, but more options. This brings up the question about competition. How do you guys compare to the competition? So you guys are. It's the first move for you guys in the cloud, within this operating model, which is consistent, you know, pure on premises and the cloud, get the consistency, loved the agility of the ability for applications and get all that goodness. What about the competition? How do you guys stand versus the competition? Well, when we take a look at what was going on, I think a lot of people wanted to check the box on cloud. So let's throw something out there and you know, see how people use. As we've done this market introduction, we've been very careful about that because peer has a certain brand reputation around when we say we're going to deliver some of these characteristics, we deliver and deliver those characteristics. And we didn't want to lose the value proposition of simplicity and agility. So as we launched this, we didn't just say let's throw it out there and see what happens. We did it with the deliberate intent of saying we want to provide agility is a characteristic that people could use and we want to deliver that agility with the same simplicity that they've come to know and love with peer. So those are the principles that we're focused on and as we take a look at the competition, you know, they've thrown their software out there but we don't see that it's been broadly adopted and then they're still the tradeoffs of should I go on premises or public cloud so they're stuck in the divide and that they're in the storage or the cloud, divide on premise, different operating models. And our goal is to really enable that replicates those guys are stuck on the divide. Yeah, and if you think about these hybrid applications that we see the world moving to think about it this way, the world's evolving where you're going to have more application to application integration. Gone is the days where you're going to have one monolithic application doing everything. So what's evolved is the application to application integration is exponentially growing. Now, if you assume that if you need to do a production to Dev test copy, do you need to do it for one app or for that entire set of apps that you treat as one monolithic entity because now they're all connected. He otherwise you have to decide, okay, I'm snapshotting this one and then I got to choose this one and I got to choose that one. So you, there's now a need to go ahead and consolidate a lot of application workloads and treat the management and operations of that as a unique entity. So hybrid apps are actually making you rethink how you deal with management of compute networking and storage. Yeah, I think that's a great example. I think application to application integration and totally agree with you is going to be happening at a much accelerated rate, but it changed the role of data. The role of data is central to that because as you mentioned, that other example, if you're doing a financial app and you want to use some ai from a cloud over here, the best tool for the job needs to be integrated in seamlessly and storage. Should they be part of that conversation? It should just be stored somewhere. That's what you guys are doing with this announcement and you guys are bringing that to the table. Um, so I got to get. I guess I'll ask you the final question here because it's exciting news. You guys are cloudified it made it. He bridged the divide on the storage cloud storage divide. What's the bottom line for this announcement? As you look at this impact to customers, what's the impact to pure customers and what does it mean for prospects that aren't yet your customers? What's the bottom line? This announcement? Well, I'll give it to you. For me, each perspective for our existing customers, this adds the agility tool set to their bag of tricks they've got and it does it in a way where they can start, get that instant available capacity and if they want, they can go ahead and now start benchmarking across both environments without having to re architect because the kpis are the same and for net new customers and prospects. It's interesting. As we speak to customers, we find that people are on a different educated education journey in the public cloud. Some are already using the public cloud and as we've been discussing this with them, they're like, hey, this could improve on some of these characteristics. Either I have performance challenges, cost challenges, reliability or manageability challenges. So we find that the customers or the prospects that are most educated or the ones that have already leaped, right? They've jumped in the pool and now they realize, hey, you know what? The water's cold and I need something, and there's another set of customers that are still haven't jumped in that pool. And what we're saying is for those customers, you have to make a choice. Right now you have to decide between multiple public clouds, you have to decide between on premise and what we're doing is we're de-risking that choice by allowing them to get the best of what's available where and most importantly ensuring that if they've chosen, if they've chosen something but one of the other choices evolves or matures to be a better option for them, they have the ability to move and I think also the focus we hear from the practitioners that they are investing more and more of their time and energy on building applications, hybrid applications as you're calling them, ones that are going to be a in the cloud or on premises, but solving a problem. They want to shift their resources and attention from mundane storage admin like maintenance problems and make the storage invisible to them. So the developer that they said, I know my thing's working great in the cloud. One of my apps are productive. My developers are programming and the storage resources are invisible and it's never a headache. That's kind of what you guys are getting at here. You're making storage pervasive and important to the developers and the it so that it kind of goes away in their mind, isn't it the sleep better at night, Kinda well, take Kubernetes, for example, um, a lot of application developers using it, but storage is not necessarily transparent. We, six months ago we introduced a pure service orchestrator that made storage transparent, so you have a block file object interface you, you just call and use storage, spin it up, use it as you need and let go, but you should not have to worry about, let me go phone someone creative volume decider either. So you need that transparent and elasticity and we've been focused on delivering that and now few modernize were kind of application development is going, we can provide that. It's always on. It always works. It's globally consistent, it shared, and it's easy to manage from wherever you're saying progress. Thanks for coming in and sharing the news on the new hybrid cloud applications that are hitting the market. Of course, having the right solutions and having the cloud data services available from pure storage. I'm here percussion, just general manager of the flash of rapists and pure storage. This is a special cube conversation. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.