John Colgrove, Pure Storage | Pure Accelerate 2019
(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From Austin, Texas it's theCUBE, covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2019. Brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante is my co-host. I'm at Pure accelerate 2019 in Austin, Texas and Dave and I are really pleased to welcome to theCUBE, for the first time, John Colgrove, Coz, CTO and founder of Pure Storage, Coz, welcome to theCUBE. >> Ah, I'm glad to be here thanks for having me. >> And happy 10th anniversary. So, 10 years ago I'm sure you couldn't have envisioned 3, 000 people, Austin being taken over by a sea of orange. But let's go back 10 years, Why did you found Pure Storage? >> Why did I found it? Well, I wasn't really ready to be retired yet. Flash, I started have seen from when I worked at Amdahl many years ago all the way through Veritas, I saw disks continuing to get bigger and bigger and effectively slower and slower. Cause when they don't get any faster and they get bigger, they get slower from by their data. And flash was a catalyst that was going to to change that. But it was the catalyst. What we really wanted to do was to completely change the storage industry. Everything that had annoyed me about the storage industries through all the years in Veritas, All the complexity, all the bad customer practices that the industry forced on people, I wanted to change all that. think of what you demand from your personal tech from your iphone or your laptop or your tablet. Customers should demand that kind of quality, service ability, ease of use from their enterprise IT gear. >> When I started my career in the early '80s I was at IDC and they didn't have a storage analyst. And I started following mainframes and I learned a lot about channel command words and IO subsystems and I came to the conclusion that this is a really hard thing, hard problem to solve. And, so, I got interested in it. You obviously did as well. I'm interested in when you went from Amdahl to Veritas, you had to do some unnatural acts with software to make IO better, 'cause of the spinning disk and understanding the latencies and the scatty chatty protocols and everything else. When you went and thought about Pure and when you think about great architects and I've obviously put you in that category, you chose flash, others like another great architect, Moshe have said you know what I can even squeeze more out of spinning disks. What led you to flash versus trying to squeeze more blood from the spinning disk stone? If I can phrase it that way. >> I think I tend to be more of an extremist on things like that. And I think that's been the key to Pure's success. We were not the first all flash startup. We were the first to focus on affordable flash. Right, if you're going to change the world you have to make something for everyone not for an elite few. But the other thing was we were all flash. There were a lot of other startups that were hybrids that were squeezing more out of the disk and we just went all flash from the beginning. Everything about us is all flash. So, as the future goes more and more towards all flash, we're in a stronger and stronger position. >> And you think that was the game changer that led Pure to be that unicorn that IPO'd four years ago versus those other startups who are trying to do similar things with flash? >> So, that focus helped us a lot with that. The biggest thing that, as I said before flash was a catalyst. The biggest thing we brought to the industry is the simplicity and the evergreen business model. And it's really cool to see all the big companies that we've competed against all these years mimicking a lot of that, but that's the differentiator. Flash was the catalyst that lets you do that. >> Well, so, I'm interested as a little bit of an industry historian and some of the factors that led to your ability to achieve escape velocity which used to be defined as an IPO. I mean, I would argue the 3PAR achieved its escape velocity, I was a $250 million company before it got acquired for 2.5 billion or whatever it was, never reached a billion never even came close. You were the first storage company since NetApp to achieve billion dollar revenue. And you're well on your way to 2 billion, you'll do probably 1.7 this year. In addition to what you've said are there other factors that we should consider in our B school case study on Pure? >> I think one of the things we've tried to do is we've tried to build a company that's going to be in it for that long term. So, we never wanted to settle for an acquisition. We want to build a long term enduring great brand and part of that you have to build more of a partnership with your customers. You have to be a good partner to your partners. Right, if you are short-term focused if you try to squeeze every dollar you can out of people, they don't like you, they don't want to come back. If you build something great and you partner well with the environment around you you can build something long lasting. And we wanted to do that from the beginning, we focused a lot on culture and things like that to help us do that. >> Well it's impressive, congratulations are in order, 'cause 3PAR couldn't do it, Compelling couldn't do it, Isilon, on and on and on. And and EMC at the time was really about EMC that's how you went after. They were able to do virtualization and freeze the market on 3PAR . They were able to do a low cost call it the compellant killer. They were never able to figure out, now maybe they got distracted with elliot management and everything else, but they were never able to figure out how to squash you guys. And that's impressive that you're able to live through that. >> Well, thanks. I mean one of the things we've always tried to do is be supremely disruptive, and that does make it harder for them. >> So, I got to ask I got to challenge you on a couple of things that have come out largely from your competitors but I want to get your take on it. The first one is scale out how come Pure doesn't scale out? I'll leave it there. I have my own thoughts that I've shared with Lisa but. Two controller design. >> Yeah one thing I'd point out is well, FLashBlade, one of our products, is scale out. Flash array, our first product, is not scale out. Scale out isn't a capability for a customer, it's an architecture in how you build the product. When I scale out I have more complicated software. I have more components. More components lead to more failures. Right, if I have a piece of memory and it's going to fail at a certain annual failure rate and I have 10 pieces of memory, I'm going to fail it 10 times that same rate. So, scale out introduces complexity, it introduces more components. And then you have to say what do you get from it. So, if our customers needed a lot more performance than we're delivering, if they needed a lot more scale than we're delivering in the flash array product, we'd then react to that and go build scale out. Where the flash array sells, we don't see that as a major market need, it's more of a niche. Where FlashBlade sells, then there is much more of a need for that and that's why FlashBlade was scale out from day one. >> Well my correct to that the other thing you get from scale out is non disruptive controller swaps but you've solved that in other ways right? >> You say you get non disruptive controller swaps, I will point out that if you look at these scale out architectures out there there's a set of them that do provide that, but actually the larger set of them don't provide it. Because what they're doing is they're making what they view and what the customer views as one monolithic array built from a set of scale out components. So, in those architectures you can't swap out one part of the scale out, you have to swap out the whole thing. >> The other thing I heard, I love this analogy is you don't really see planes anymore. You see them but you really don't want to fly 'em cause they're old with four engines versus two engines 'cause the two engine planes are so, much more reliable. All right the other question is on proprietary flash modules. You guys have chosen your philosophies, do things that you can't do with just off the shelf components. So, you've gone proprietary and this history there, I mean 3PAR with Custom ASICs but I'd like you to share with us your philosophy on what you're doing there. >> So, kind of, there's a couple dimensions to that. Number one, we have gone with proprietary flash modules but in our flash array, we could plug in off-the-shelf drives any time we want. And in fact today our XR2 line, the lower end models use off the shelf flash and the higher end models use the proprietary. What we get with the proprietary is our own firmware on there. Right, it's the same nanochips, the same nanocontrollers, it's all the same components but it's our firmware. And our firmware only has to support one application, our purity operating system. However the customer reads and writes data into the array, we write it the same way down to the flash. We read it back the same way from the flash. So, by making simpler firmware that only has to solve that one problem, we get better performance out of the flash. We get longer life out of the flash and we get order less that one third of the failures of flash drives. Now the flash drives we were using were already failing, a lot less than disk drives. But we've gotten better than three times the reliability by going to our own flash modules. >> Tiering, your philosophy on tiering. Five, 10 years ago there was a big thing on automated tiering, we're going to put the hot data on the high performance either disk or flash and the slow data on the cheap stuff. Your philosophy on tiering, I think I infer you don't believe in tiering. Why not? Or maybe I don't want to put words in our mouth. >> Well so, tiering is another thing that it adds complexity. So, why do you tier? You tier because you say oh I can't afford all of the better things so, I'm going to layer it in with something that's a little cheaper. If you can get by without tiering that's a better solution it's a simpler solution. >> Simplicity is a theme here. The copy of your acquisition your a file system guru to my knowledge what I've read about them, strong file system. What do you intend to do with that? it's concerned about it forking your existing products. How do you respond? >> So, the compuverde file system, we're going to put that on top of our flash array line and make that a unified architecture where you can support block in file. Compuverde is a very complete file protocol stack. And file protocols are a lot more complex than block protocols. Implementing all of the SMB protocol is not an easy thing it takes a bunch of time. So, it's a way to accelerate that and get a very complete protocol stack for that product. Flash blade will continue on with its own scale out file protocols, file and object protocols independent of that. >> Last question I had is on, there's some criticism that's been laid on you guys on the evergreen. The controller, performance of controller upgrades which I we have not heard, we didn't hear that from customers, we've asked some customers that, but I'd love to get your take on, why is there no guarantee of performance improvements as you go to subsequent controller swap outs. Your thoughts? >> So, what we guarantee is you'll get the like or better. So, you might get a new set of controllers that are perform about the same, you might get one a little better. Generally speaking every time we've done it so far it's moved to better. It doesn't move to radically better, but it moves to the better. So, we are guaranteeing that, it's just a question of how much do you chose to deliver with that. What you're doing is you're keeping the array new. It's not so much about making huge strides in the performance it's about keeping the array new. >> But there's another nuance there that I want to test I mean, just conceptionally it seems to me, because the way you ship software constantly that you're making incremental improvements throughout that three year period. First of all is that an accurate assertion? >> it's actually very accurate. The first time we started really looking at how much better we realized that we had moved the needle on the old gear about, I think it was about 60% up during the time period so, yeah there was sort of a little less gains. >> Okay, so, the proper measurement is okay from what's the performance from day one delta to the controller upgrade? That is more significant versus the controller swap day, whatever and plus one if that makes sense. >> Well, I think both are valid ways to look at it. The biggest thing is the customer doesn't have to migrate and the migrations are the most horrible event in storage. Right it's like moving your house for everyone who has moved, you got to pack everything up. Things could get broken things could get lost, it's just a mess. You don't have to do that and the array just gets bigger, denser, more power efficient it gets better and better over time. And you're on that forever, we are happy to do controller swaps after three years, six years, nine years, 12 years. We will continue to do that as long as customers are paying for that it's our job to keep improving it and to keep making it better. >> We've done a lot of research on array migrations. At a minimum, your anti to do a array migration is $50,000. That's what our data shows. We talk to a very large practitioner last night he said, "When I'm doing an array migration I start six "to eight months ahead of time because it takes that long "to do an array migration, array migrations are horrendous "and anything you can do to avoid those is worth it." So, that's all I had that awesome. Thank you for addressing those questions. >> So, the acceleration, pun intended, that Pure has achieved in its first 10 years we talk about customers all the time we've had a number on yesterday from law firms to utilities to F1, we'll have more on today. But in order to achieve what Pure has, you have had to build a culture that's pretty unique. One, this vibrant orange color that just screams energy, boldness too, we're in Austin, Texas, Dell Technology's backyard. Give us a little bit as we wrap here about how you and your co-founders have developed and really fostered this culture of passion that is delivering more than your competitors would like to see. >> Well, so, one of the things that was a key part of the culture is we didn't just hire a bunch of storage people. We had a few early on cause you need some experience in the history but an awful lot of the people we hired came from other backgrounds. Other engineers, marketing people, et cetera, they did not come from storage. And what we challenge people to do when they come in the door is we're hiring them because of their brain power, right. We don't own minimal rights somewhere, we don't have buildings we don't have a lot of assets. Our asset is our people and what they can produce. And obviously if you think back, well, when I was the only employee, right, I was doing every job. Ideally everyone we've hired since can do whatever we've hired them to do a lot better than I could do it. And that's a philosophy you want to keep going. Every person in Pure should be focused on using their brains, using their creativity to deliver the most value possible to disrupt things where they can, to always look for how we do things better, and to always be looking to hire better than them. >> So, it kind of gets into the next 10 years. Don't hate me for saying this but in retrospect the first 10 years you had it kind of easy. You caught EMC off guard, you drove a truck through their install base, NetApp miss flash. You guys executed obviously, we talked about that billion dollar company. Next 10 years, a little different. Where's the TAM expansion come from in the next 10 years? It's Multicloud, it's new AI workloads, it's lower cost solutions that get you more of the market, it's partnering with backup. But you got cloud, you got competitors that are starting to figure it out. How do you see the next 10 years to go from beyond where you are and that next pike. >> Well, so, I'll start by saying when you start a company, you dream of success and the first 10 years have been as good as you could possibly have dreamt. So, A, hopefully the next 10 years will continue that way. I think you touched upon one thing is the cloud. People have been through the hype cycle of saying the entire world is going to be cloud, there's only going to be three data centers in the world and it's going to be Amazon, Microsoft and Google. They now understand the cloud is a tool and you need to use it properly. So, one of the focuses we're going to be working on over the next several years is making sure that someone can have their data, their application on prem. They can decide I want to put it in the cloud. Move there seamlessly. Move there as easily as you move from one of your cell phones to the next model. Move from one cloud to another cloud. Move from that cloud back on prem. Whether you want to move the data, the applications, both and get the same kind of service, the same kind of experience. That's going to be a big thing. >> You got a lot of work to do there, but yeah. But there's an opportunity isn't there? >> It's the way everybody wants to run, it's the way everybody should run. Running an IT service to deliver value to your company, value to your organization should not be rocket science. And our job at Pure is to make that accessible to everybody so, everybody can deliver that kind of quality experience to their organization. >> And it's an obvious question but you see that as technically feasible over the next five to 10 years? >> Yeah it is technically feasible. This goes back to one of the things that I was mentioning before with flash as a catalyst. One of the thing flash helps do to make this simpler is it frees you from the geometry constraints of disk. You don't have to care as much. Another thing that's making it possible, is faster networking, right. And better networking. And then again you have all the compute and GPUs and co-processors and things pushing things. As you get to where resources are more plentiful, then you have the ability to trade off some of the I've got to get like every microsecond out of this thing for the simplicity, for that ease of use. And that lets you deliver something better in the long run. Right, if I perfectly tune something I might be able to do a little bit better but I'm not going to be able to keep it in tune and I'm going to spend my whole life retuning it and retuning it and finding it out of sync. Simplicity, that drives so much efficiency. Agility, that drives so, much value. >> Well, Coz, thank you so, much for joining Dave and me on theCUBE this morning from Accelerate day two. You talked about flash being a catalyst that sounds to me like Coz has been one of the major catalysts of Pure's success. Happy 10th anniversary, we look forward to the next 10. >> Thanks a lot and thanks for having me. >> For Coz and Dave Vellante, I am Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE from Pure Accelerate, 2019. (techno music)
SUMMARY :
Brought to you by Pure Storage. and Dave and I are really pleased to welcome So, 10 years ago I'm sure you couldn't have envisioned Everything that had annoyed me about the storage industries to Veritas, you had to do some unnatural acts But the other thing was we were all flash. And it's really cool to see all the big companies and some of the factors that led to your ability and part of that you have to build more of a partnership And and EMC at the time I mean one of the things we've always tried to do So, I got to ask I got to challenge you And then you have to say what do you get from it. that if you look at these scale out architectures out there but I'd like you to share with us your philosophy Now the flash drives we were using were already failing, I think I infer you don't believe in tiering. all of the better things so, I'm going to What do you intend to do with that? Implementing all of the SMB protocol is not an easy thing as you go to subsequent controller swap outs. of how much do you chose to deliver with that. because the way you ship software constantly on the old gear about, I think it was about 60% up Okay, so, the proper measurement is okay from and the migrations are the most horrible event in storage. "and anything you can do to avoid those is worth it." about how you and your co-founders have developed of the culture is we didn't just hire a bunch the first 10 years you had it kind of easy. and you need to use it properly. You got a lot of work to do there, but yeah. And our job at Pure is to make that accessible to everybody to make this simpler is it frees you of the major catalysts of Pure's success. For Coz and Dave Vellante, I am Lisa Martin,
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Day 2 Kick off | Pure Accelerate 2019
>> Announcer: From Austin, Texas it's The Cube covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2019, brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Good morning. From Austin, Texas, Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante at Pure Accelerate 2019. This is our second day. We just came from a very cool, interesting, keynote, Dave whenever there's astronauts my inner NASA geek from the early 2000s. She just comes right back up Leland Melvin was on >> Amazing, right? >> With a phenomenal story. Talking about technology and the feeling of innovation but also a great story of inspiration from a steam perspective science, technology, engineering, arts, math, I loved that and, >> Dave: And fun >> Very fun. But also... >> One of the better talks I've ever seen >> It really was. It had so many elements that I think you didn't have to be a NASA fan or a NASA geek or a space geek to appreciate the all of the lessons that Leland Melvin learned along the way that he really is inspiring, everybody the audience to take note of. It was I thought it was... >> And incredibly accomplished, right? I mean scientist, MIT engineer, played in the NFL, went to space, he had some really fun stuff when they were, you know, messing around with with gravity. >> Lisa: Yes. >> I never knew you could do that. He had like this water. >> Lisa: Water, yeah. >> Bubble. >> I'd never seen that before and they were throwing M&M's inside (laughter) and he, you know consumed it choked on it, which is pretty funny. >> Yeah, well it was near and dear to me. I worked with NASA my first job out of grad school. >> Dave: Really? >> I did, and managed biological pilots that flew on the space shuttle and the mission that the he talked about that didn't land, Colombia. That was the mission that I worked on. So when he talked about that countdown clock going positive. I was there on the runway with that. So for me, it just struck a chord of, >> Dave: so this is of course the 50th anniversary of the moonwalk. And you know I have this thing about watches, kind of like what you have with shoes (chuckles) >> Lisa: Hey, handbags. >> Is that not true? Oh, It's handbags for you? (laughing) >> Dave: I know this really that was a terrible thing for me to say. >> That's okay. >> Dave: You have great shoes so I just I just assumed that not good to make assumptions. So I bought a moon watch this year which was the watch that Neil Armstrong used to not the exact one but similar one, right? >> Lisa: Yeah. And it actually has an acrylic face because they're afraid if it cracked in space you'd have glass all over the place. [Lisa] Right. So that's a little nostalgia there. >> Well one of the main things too as you look at the mission that President John F. Kennedy established in the 60's for getting a man in space in that 10-year period. That being accomplished and kind of a parallel with what Pure Storage has done in its first 10 years of tremendous innovation. This keynote again Day 2, standing room only at least about 3000 people or so here. Storage as James Governor said, your friend and also who keynoted after Leland this morning you know, (mumbles) Software's eating the world storage is eating the world we have to have secure locations to store all this data so that we can extract maximum value from it. So nice parallel between the space program and Pure Storage. >> James is really good, isn't he? I mean he had to follow Leland and I mean again one of the better talks I've ever heard, but James is very strong, he's funny, he's witty he's he cuts to the chase. >> Lisa: Yes. >> He always tells it like it is. He's a very Monkchips is very focused on developers and they do a really good job there, one of the things he talked about was S3 and how Amazon uses this working backwards methodology which maybe a lot of people don't know about but what they do is they write and rewrite and rewrite and vet and rewrite the press release before they announce the product and even before they develop the products they write the press release and then they work backwards from there. So this is the outcome that we are trying to achieve, and it's very disciplined process that they use and as he said they may revise it hundreds and hundreds of times and he put up Andy Jassy's quote from 2004, around S3. That actually surprised me. 2000...Maybe I read it wrong. >> Lisa: No, it was 2004. >> Because S3 came out after EC2 which was 2006 so I don't know. Maybe I'm getting my dates wrong or I think James actually got his dates wrong but who knows, maybe you know what? Maybe he got a copy of that from the internal working document, working backwards doc that could be what it was but again the point being they envisioned this simple storage that developers didn't have to think about >> Lisa: Right. >> That was virtually unlimited in capacity, highly available and you know, dirt cheap which is what people want and so he talked about that and then he gave a little history of the Dell technology families and I tweeted out this in a funny little you know basically pivotal VM ware EMC and Dell and their history Dell was basically IPO 1984 and then today. There was a few things in between I know but he's got a great perspective on things and I think it resonated with the audience then he talked a lot about Kubernetes jokingly tongue-in-cheek how Kubernetes everybody thought was going to kill VMware but his big takeaway was look you got all these skills of (mumbles) Skills, core database skills, I would even add to that you know understanding how storage works and I always joke if your career is based on managing lawns you might want to rethink your career. But his point was which I liked was look all those skills you've learned are valuable but you now have to step up your game and learn new skills. You have to build on top of those skills so the history you have and the knowledge that you've built up is very valuable but it's not going to propel you to the next decade and so I thought that was a good takeaway and it was an excellent talk. >> So looking back at the conversations yesterday the press releases that came out the advancements of what Pure is doing, with AWS, with Nvidia, with the AI data-hub for example, delivering more of their portfolio as a service to allow businesses whether it's a law-firm like we talked to yesterday utility or Mercedes AMG Petronas Motor-sport, to be able to access data securely, incredibly quickly, recover it restore it absolutely critical and really can be game-changing depending on the type of organization. I want to get your perspectives on some of the things you heard anecdotally yesterday after we wrapped in terms of the atmosphere, the vibe, the thoughts on Pure's next 10 years. >> Yeah, so several things, just some commentary so it's always good at night you go around you get a lot of data we sometimes call it metadata. I think one of the more interesting announcements to me was the block-storage on AWS. I don't necessarily think that this is going to be a huge product near term for Pure in terms of meaningful revenue, but I think it's interesting that they're embracing the trend of the Cloud and are actually architecting Cloud solutions using Amazon services and blending in their own super gluing their own, I mean it's not really superglue but blending in their own software for their customers to extend. Now, you know some of the nuances I don't think they are going to have they have better right performance I think they'll have better read performance clearly they have better availability I think it's going to be a little bit more expensive. All these things are TBD that's just my take based on looking at what I've seen and talking to some people but to me the important thing is that Pure's embracing that Cloud model. Historically, companies that are trying to defend an existing business, they retreat. You know, they denigrate they don't embrace. We know that Pure's going to make more money on pram than it does in the Cloud. At least I think. And so it's to their advantage for companies to stay on-prem but at the same time they understand that trend is your friend and they're embracing that so that was kind of one thing. The second thing I learned is Charlie Giancarlo spent a lot of time with them last night as did you. He's a bit of a policy wonk in very certain narrow areas. He shared with me some of the policy work that he's done around IP protection and not necessarily though on the side that you would think. You would think that okay IP protection that's a good thing but a lot of the laws that were trying to be promoted for IP protection were there to help big companies essentially crush small companies so he fought against that. He shared with me some things around net neutrality. You would think you know you think you know which side of net neutrality he'd be on not necessarily so he had some really interesting perspectives on that. We also talked to and I won't share the name of the company but a very large financial institution that's that's betting a lot on Pure was very interesting to me. This is one of the brand names everybody would know it if you heard it. And their head of storage infrastructure was here, at the show. Now I know this individual and this person doesn't go to a lot of shows >> Maybe a couple a year. >> This person chose to come to this show because they're making an investment in Pure. In a fairly big way and they spent a lot of time with Pure management, expressing their desires as part of an executive form that Pure holds they didn't really market that a lot they didn't really tell us too much about it because it was a little private thing but I happen to know this individual and and I learned several things. They like Pure a lot, they use it for a lot of their workloads, but they have a lot of other storage, they can't necessarily get rid of that other storage for a lot of reasons. Inertia, technical debt, good tickets at the baseball game, all kinds of politics going on there. I also asked specifically about some hybrid companies products where the the cost structure's a little bit better so this gets me to flash array C and we talked to Charlie Giancarlo about this about his flash prices come down and it and opens up new markets. I got some other data yesterday and today that you know that flash array C is not going to be quite priced we don't think as well as hybrid arrays closing the gap it's between one and one and a quarter, one and a half dollars per gigabyte whereas hybrid arrays you are seeing half that, 70 cents a gigabyte. Sometimes as low as 60 cents a gigabyte. Sometimes higher, sometimes high as a dollar but the average around 65-70 cents a gigabyte so there's still a gap there. Flash prices have to come down further. Another thing I learned I'm going to just keep going. >> Lisa: Go ahead! >> The other thing I learned is that China is really building a lot of fab capacity in NAND to try to take out the thumb-drive market-place so they are going to go after the low-end. So companies like Samsung and Toshiba, Toshiba just renamed the company, I can't remember the name of the company but Micron and the NAND flash NAND manufacturers are going to have to now go use their capacity and go after the enterprise because China fab is going to crush the low-end and bomb the low-end pricing. Somebody else told me about a third of flash consumption is in China now. So interesting things going on there. So near term, flash array C is not going to just crush spinning disk and hybrid, it's going to get closer and it's going to slowly eat away at that as NAND prices come down it really could more rapidly eat away at that. So I just learned some other stuff too but I'll take a breath. (laughter) >> So one of the things I think we are resounding with it we heard not just yesterday on the program day but even last night at the executive event we were at is that from this large financial services company that you mentioned, Pure storage is a strategic partner to many organizations from small to large that is incredibly valued to your point the Shuttleman only goes to maybe a couple of events a year and this is one of them? >> Dave: Right. >> This is a company that in its first 10 years has embraced competition head on and I loved how you talked about yesterday 10 years ago they just drove a truck through EMC's market and sort of ripping and replacing. They're bold but they're also doing it in a way that's very methodical. They're working on bringing you know changing companies' perspectives of even backup data as becoming an asset to put it on flash. Because if you can't rapidly restore that, if there's an outage whether it is an attack or it's unintentional human related, that data can't be recovered quickly, you're in a big big problem. And so them as a strategic component of this isn't in any industry I think it was a very resounding sentiment that I heard and felt yesterday. >> Yeah, this ties into tam expansion of what we talked to Charlie Giancarlo about new workloads with AI as an example flash or AC lowering prices will open up those some of those new workloads data protection backup is clearly an opportunity and I think it's interesting, you're seeing a lot of companies now announce a lot of vendors announce flash based recovery systems I'll call them recovery systems because I don't even consider them backup anymore it's not about backup, it's about recovery. Oracle was actually one of the first to use that kind of concept with the zero data loss recovery appliance they call it recovery. So it's all about fast and near instantaneous recovery. Why is that important? It's because it's companies move toward a digital transformation and what does that mean? And what is a digital business? Digital business is all about how you use data and leveraging data in new ways to create new value to monetise or cut cost. And so being able to have access to that data and recover from any inaccess to that data in a split-second is crucial. So Pure can participate in that, now Pure's not alone You know, it's no coincidence that Veritas and Veeam and Cohesity and Rubrik they work with Pure, they work with HPE. They work with a lot of the big players and so but so Pure has to you know, has some work to do to win its fair share. Staying on backup for a moment, you know it's interesting to see, behind us, Veritas and Veeam have the biggest sort of presence here. Rubrik has a presence here. I'm sure Cohesity is here maybe someway, somehow but I haven't seen them >> I haven't either. >> Maybe they're not here. I'll have to check that up, but you know Veeam is actually doing very well particularly with lower ASPs we know that about Veeam. They've always come at it from the mid-market and SMB. Whereas Cohesity and Rubrik and Veritas traditionally are coming at it from a higher-end. Certainly Cohesity and Rubrik on higher ASPs. Veeam's doing very well with Pure. They're also doing very well with HPE which is interesting. Cohesity announced a deal with HPE recently I don't know, about six months ago somebody thought "Oh maybe Veeaam's on the outs." No, Veeam's doing very well with HPE. It's different parts of the organization. One works with the server group, one works with the storage group and both companies are actually doing quite well I actually think Veeam is ahead of the curve 'cause they've been working with HPE for quite some time and they're doing very well in the Pure base. By partnering with companies, Pure is able to enter that market much in the same way that NetApp did in the early days. They have a very tight relationship for example with Commvault. So, the other thing I was talking to Keith Townsend last night totally not secretor but he's talking about Outpost and how Amazon is going to be challenged to service Outpost Outpost is the on-prem Amazon stack, that VMware and Amazon announced that they're co-marketing. So who is going to service outpost? It's not going to be Amazon, that's not their game in professional service. It's going to have to be the ecosystem, the large SIs or the Vars the partners, VMware partners 'cause that's not Vmwares play either. So Keith Townsend's premise, I'd love to have him on The Cube to talk about this, is they're going to have trouble scaling Outpost because of that service issue. Believe it or not when we come to these conferences, we talk about other things than just, Pure. There's a lot of stuff going on. New Relic is happening this week. Oracle open world is going on this week. John Furrier just got back from AWS Bahrain, and of course we're here at Pure Accelerate. >> We are and this is our second day of two days of coverage. We've got Coz on next who I think has never been on The Cube. >> Dave: Not to my knowledge. >> We've got Kix on later. A great lineup, more customers Rob Lee is going to be on. So we're going to be digging more into Pure's Cloud strategy, the next ten years, how they're going to accelerate that and pack it into the next couple of years. >> I'll tell you one of the things I want to do, Lisa. I'll just call it out. An individual from Dell EMC wrote a blog ahead of Pure Accelerate I think it was last week, about four or five days ago and this individual called out like one, two, three, four.... five things that we should ask Pure so we should ask them, we should ask Coz we should ask Kix. There was criticism, of course they're biased. These guys they always fight. >> Lisa: Naturally. >> They have these internecine wars. >> Lisa: Yep. >> Sometimes I like to call them... no I won't say it. So scale out, question mark there we want to ask Coz about that and Kix. Pure uses proprietary flash modules. They do that because it allows them to do things that you can't do with off-the-shelf flash. I want to ask and challenge them that. I want to ask about their philosophy on tiering. They don't really believe in tiering, why not? I want to understand that better. They've made some acquisitions, Compuverde is one acquisition, it's a file system. What does that mean for flash play? >> Now we didn't hear anything about that yesterday, so that's a good point that we should dig into that. >> Yeah, so we'll bring that up. And then the Evergreen competitors hate Evergreen because Pure was first with it they caught everybody off guard. I said it yesterday, competitors hate Evergreen because competitors live off of maintenance and if you're not on their maintenance they just keep jacking up the maintenance prices and if you don't move to the new system, maintenance just keeps getting more and more and more and more expensive and so they force you, you're locked in. Force you to move. Pure introduced this different model. You pay for the CapEx up front and then, you know, after three years you get a controller swap. You know, so... >> To your point competitors hate it, customers love it. We heard a lot about that yesterday, we've got a couple more customers on our packed program today, Dave so let's get right to it! >> Great. >> Let's wrap up so we can get Coz on stage. >> Dave: Alright, awesome. >> Alright, for Dave Vellante. I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching The Cube from Pure Accelerate 2019, day two. Stick around 'Coz' John Colgrove, CTO, founder of Pure, will be on next. (upbeat music)
SUMMARY :
brought to you by Pure Storage. my inner NASA geek from the early 2000s. Talking about technology and the feeling of innovation But also... is inspiring, everybody the audience to take note of. played in the NFL, went to space, I never knew you could do that. and he, you know consumed it choked on it, I worked with NASA my first job out of grad school. that flew on the space shuttle and kind of like what you have with shoes Dave: I know this really that was a Dave: You have great shoes so I just I just assumed that So that's a little nostalgia there. Well one of the main things too as you look I mean he had to follow Leland and I mean again one of the things he talked about was S3 and how Amazon Maybe he got a copy of that from the internal so the history you have and the knowledge that you've So looking back at the conversations yesterday I don't necessarily think that this is going to be array C is not going to be quite priced market-place so they are going to go after the low-end. as becoming an asset to put it on flash. but so Pure has to and how Amazon is going to be challenged to service Outpost We are and this is our second day and pack it into the next couple of years. I think it was last week, about four or five days ago They do that because it allows them to do things so that's a good point that we should dig into that. and if you don't move to the new system, so let's get right to it! CTO, founder of Pure, will be on next.
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