>> from Austin, Texas. It's Theo Cube, covering pure storage. Accelerate 2019. Brought to you by pure storage. >> Welcome back to the Cube, The leader and live tech coverage. I'm Lisa Martin with David Dante. We got a pretty cool guests coming up next, guys, you may have seen him here on the Q before. He has back Matt Harris, the head of I T for Mercedes AMG, Petronas Motor Sport. Matt, Welcome back. >> Often a >> way got the car over there with excitement. One of the coolest sports I've ever become involved with. Formula One is this incredible mix of technology strategy. All these crazy things you guys that Mercedes have been partners, customers a cure for about what? 45 years? >> 2015. As a customer, we became partners in 2016. >> I wonder if they like to save Mercedes AMG Petunias Motor Sport has had five consecutive years of both constructors championships driver's championships. You're a great position on both for 2019. It was a little bit of a history about the product that you put out on truck every other week and how pure storage is a facilitator of that. >> Yeah, okay, so it's an interest in a story for those that are interested in Formula One, because what you see on the track looks the same. But realistically, every time he goes out, the guarantee will be different. That level of difference could be a simple wing change or configuration, always based on data that we're learning from during a race again. But every week we also have a different car dependent on the track we're going to. So we have two different worlds that basically were to rate on a minute by minute, hour by hour and day by day at the track. But in the factory, that could be the same sort of it oration. But it could also be into weekly or monthly or year for a car. So all of that is based on data. So everything we do is that businesses revolves around data. We never make a change to the car without me now to back it up with empirical knowledge. Even if the driver turns around and tells us they feel something called, they believe something, we will always make sure we have data to back up that decision, So access to data is critical. Compute performance whether it's high performance, compute for our safety, for instance, whether it's for you as an end user, access to data is critical across everything that we do is time critical Time is our currency really as a business if we slow down your job? Generally, that probably means that you've got less time to make the correct decision. Or maybe you have to turn into a guess or a hunch, which that's never a good place to be in our sport. >> No, I would think not. >> I've I recall, from our conversation last year their rules that say, How many people you can have in your entourage like 60. I think it was yes, and at the time I think you said you got, like, 15 Allocated to data. Is that ratio kind of still holding? I >> still exactly the same in our tracks. On environment, they're still the same in the factory. We have more than that, depending on how many people on what time of day, what day of the week. So on a Friday race day, practice day, we can have a minimum. There'll be 30 people in our race support room will be looking at data along with those other 15. But you can have the whole Aargh department or design department or logistics. Whoever could still be looking at data from the track real time, so we can have as many as 4 to 500 looking at data if they want to. And if that's the right thing going on earlier in the season, you generally get more people looking As the season goes on. It's probably more aargh focused, maybe mechanically if we got something new, or maybe the engine division again in a completely separate building in the U. K 40 miles apart, they've got another set of people that will be looking and trolling through data riel time from the but looking really at the power unit rather than the chassis side. >> And you're generating, like roughly half a terabyte a weekend on a race weekend. Is that still about the same? Or is that growing a car >> perspective? It's just under half a terabyte, but we produce up to another half a terabyte of other supporting data with that GPS data, weather data, video, audio, whatever it would be other information to help with the strategy side of things So we're around 77 50 to 1 terabyte for race weekend, >> and each car has about 300 sensors. I think when we spoke with you last year, or maybe you're half ago is about 200 so that's increasing in terms of all the data being captured every race weekend. But one of the things that I love that matter sizes, you know, we're idea at Mercedes is not that unlike I t at other groups who really rely on high performance systems. But you do put out a new product every two weeks and this really extreme range of conditions, your product is extremely expensive as pretty sexy. Like the portability factor. You have to set up a tea shop, have any 20 weekends a year and set it up in what, 36 hours and take it down in six. >> And a nine year old joke about the taking it down in six is a bit like a Benny Hill sketch. It's obviously choreographed and, well, well rehearsed, but we have all the same systems as any normal business would have the tracks. That environment is very different, though we don't have air conditioning in so all the IittIe equipment has to work at the natural ambient air temperature of the country. We're in this year. Believe it or not, Germany and hungry have been our biggest challenge. We've had for the last 43 to 4 years because they had 45 degree air ambient air temperature. So forget humidity for a minute, which is Another kettle of fish probably affects us a bit more, maybe, than the systems, but we're only chucking that air as fast as we can across the components. So we're not putting any cooling into what is probably around the tolerance of most I T systems. So we have to rely basically on air throughput to terminate. Keep kit. Cool. Now the benefit with pure is actually doesn't create any heat, either. There's no riel heat generation, so it's quite tolerant, which helps us get it doesn't create Maur, but the environment we put it into is quite special. But what we're doing is what any business would want to do. Access toe email file systems. What we're trying to do is give it in a performance fashion. People need to make a decision. So in qualifying, for instance, those 300 sensors. That information that we've got from the car, we've got minutes to make a decision based on data. If it takes you too long to get the data off, you can't then look at the data to make a decision. So we have to make sure data in just from the car and then basically multi access from everybody in the factory or the track side is performance enough to make a decision before the car goes back out again. Otherwise, we're wasting track time. >> So you've always had data in this business. Early days was all analog, and it obviously progressed and thinking about what you want to do, Going forward with data. What kind of information or capabilities don't you have? Where that technology in the future could address >> s so interesting. One is technology of the future. If you know what it is, let me know with what we know right now, I think a lot of it's gonna be about having the ability to have persistent storage. But actually the dynamic of the compute resource eso looking at things like kubernetes or anything like that to turn around and have dynamic resource spin up as and when required to do high performance computer calculations based on the data, maybe to start giving us some automated information, I'm gonna be careful of the M l A. I is for our businesses, it's not quite as simple as others because our senior management very technically capable, and they just see it as advanced statistical analysis. So unless you program, it is not gonna give you an answer. Now we've started to see some things this year were actually the computer is teaching us things we didn't ask it to. So we have got some areas where we're beginning to learn that. That's not necessarily the case now, but for us that access to data moving forward, it's probably gonna be compute. Combined with that underlying storage platform, there's going to be critical onstage. You you heard Robin people talking about the ability to have that always present storage layer with the right computer. That's something for us is going to be critical, because otherwise we're gonna waste money and have resource sat doing nothing. >> Is security >> an issue for you? I mean, it's an issue for everybody, but there isn't a game of honor because you got this, you know, little community that you guys trying to hack each other systems. >> So it's an interesting one inside the sport, Actually, no. Because a few years ago there was a very high profile case where data went between two teams and there was £100 million fine's exclusion from the sport for a season. So that's that's >> too big. You don't mess with that. >> But also, if you think of that from our perspective, we've got the Daimler star on here. We cannot afford to have any of that Brenda brand reputational rubbing off on Damon's. So that's a no no other teams I can't talk for. But we're all fairly sensible between ourselves. What will be interesting moving forward is what technologies air in our sport, but actually of the whether their motor manufacturers or not, is their technology in there that they're interested in. Maybe the battery technology from the power unit side of things is that the power unit itself. So are other things actually more interesting to those other >> places. It legal for you, you know, by the rules of sports, a monitor, just data or captured data, whether it's visual, whatever from your competitors. Eso anything, >> this public? Yes, it's fair game. Okay, so we get given all the teams. Actually, we get a standard set of three or four different streams of information around GPS timing on some video feeds and audio feeds on their publicly consumable by the team's. When I say public for a second on those feeds, we can do what we like. You know that there for us to infer information, which we do a lot off, is what helps our strategy team to turn around and actually predict what we might or might not need to do as far as a pit stop or tire degradation. >> And that's where the human element must come into understanding the competent, like to football coaches who who know each other right? >> Well, yes. And now, if you think if you add to that the human element off Well, what happens if one team strategy person changes? Are they gonna make a different call based on the same data? Is their hunch different? Do they think they know better within a team? You can have that discussion. So what happens in another team where they're cars, not as performance so their mindset. Maybe they're thinking differently. Or maybe a team's got the most performance car of the moment and they think that they're going to do X. And we're like, Well, we're gonna do something different than to try and actually catch them out. So do we. Now don't do the normal thing. >> So let's hope >> Gamification I love it. >> Let's look at all. Make a prediction. 2019 is gonna be another Mercedes AMG way. So at the end of the season, all of the data that you have collected from the cars, all the sensors, all the weather data, GPS, et cetera how does pure facilitate in the off season the design of the 2020 car, for example, Where does where does things like computational fluid dynamics? >> Okay, so all of our production data is on pure, whether it's on a ray or blade somewhere, it's on pure storage across the site. So they're involved. Whether you're talking about design, whether you're talking about final element analysis for hyper a ll, the C f. D. Using high performance computer systems, everything some pure so from that point of view, is making sure we're using the right resource in the right place to get the best performance. Now, see if he's an interesting one because we're regulated by the F A a. About the amount of compute that weaken you. He's now. Because of that, you want it to be as efficient as you possibly can. It's not speed but the efficient use off CPU time. So if a CPU is waiting for data, that's wasted, Okay, so for us, it's trying to make sure that whole ecosystem is as efficient as we can. That's obviously an integral part of everything we do, so whether we're wind tunnel testing, whether we're in the dino, the simulators, but everything basically comes back to trying to understand and correlate the six or seven different places we generate data, trying to make sure that when there's a change in the simulator, we understand that change in the real world or in a diner or in safety. So all of that, what pure do is allow us to have that single place to go and look how I perform and always available. And for me, I don't have to have a story. Jasmine. Yeah, we've got a team of people that actually are thinking about that for us at Pure, You know, there is invested in us these days. Yeah, I walk around here, I'm very fortunate. I get to see all of the senior guys here and there. They are asking me what's going on and how's things with sequel Oracle Because they know exactly what we're doing and they're they're trying to say what's coming. So things like object engine Pierre So we've been talking to pure about using that over the coming months. But what? We're not having it at the moment. Go out and learn it. Actually, they coming in and they're telling us all about it. So they become a virtual extension to my team, which is just amazing. >> Yeah, far more efficient. You're able to focus on a much more things that drive value for the business. As we look at some of the things like the Evergreen business model. What were some of the big ah ha we hear is the right solution for us back in 2015. Is that >> so? Evergreen and love. Your stories were two things at the time that we're just incredible for us because love your storage was basically you could have an array and basically you could use it. And there was no commitment, no anything. But if you like that, you could keep it, obviously, paying for it. Ah, nde. When we did that in the factory, basically, within a week of being in there that the team were like, Whoa, hang on, that's going nowhere. So that was That was a nice, easy one. But Evergreen was an interesting one, which has only really, truly for me. I've always bought into it. But the last probably 18 months we've used it time and time and time again because the improvements with the speed of light x 90 coming envy Emmy drives. When we were looking at capacity, what we did was we turned round and said, Well, actually, we can buy more dense units in the next 90 so we're only buying the extra capacity, but we were getting new technology. So nations, all the innovation that you're putting into their products were getting it. So today, when they were talking about the memory based access, and if your things always sat there going, I can use that. Oh, and there's no there's no work for me, there's no effort. The only thing I gotta worry about is whether I've got capacity for that. Those modules to go in. So Evergreen has worked several times because I don't have to go back to the cap export and go. Could I have another x £1,000,000 please? Why? I need some more storage. Yeah, but you bought some of the other day. Yeah, well, that one. I need to get rid of it because I need a bigger one. And I don't have to do that. Now. I just go in. I'm telling them what the increases for which actually, they can choose Then if they want to increase, they know what the business benefit is rather than just I t has got to turn around and either replace it because of age or the new version doesn't support is not an uplift, not upgrade from the old. One >> I've seen was looking at some of your stats and the case study that's currently online on. Imagine these numbers have gone up 68% reduction in data center Rackspace and saving £100,000 a year and operating costs >> those that would have been probably two years ago. Ish roughly those figures. And the operating cost is a huge improvement for us. Cap Ex is probably the biggest one for me. They were moving forward with cost caps coming into Formula One. That type of thing is gonna be invaluable. Does not happen to do a forklift upgrade of your storage. Well, I wouldn't know what I would do if I had to upgrade what I now own from pure I can't even imagine what? I don't want to turn around town my bosses what that's >> gonna cost. Well, it sounds like you really attacked the op X side with R and D with pure r and D. I kind of like that shifting, you know, labor toe are Andy because you don't want to spend labour on managing storage a raise, make no sense for your business. Okay. What do you want? Pure toe spend? R and D are now, what problem can they saw for? You mean >> so racy is gonna help If I'm really honest, that's actually is gonna help fill a whole quite well for us because we weren't really sure what to put some of that less hot data we were like, Well, where we going to start to put this now? Because we were beginning to fill up the array and the blades. Actually, with a racy no, we can actually use that different class of storage actually, to keep it still online. Still be out to do some machine learning A. I in the future when that comes around. But actually I can now have Maur longevity out of my existing array and blades. So that's brilliant and coming, I think, having I need to be careful, I know some things that are coming. Uh, the active sinking array is brilliant, and we've been using that since it came out. Having that similar or same ability in Blade when it comes will be a very advantageous having those played enclosures. We've gone to multi chassis flash played over the last six weeks, so that for us is great. Once we can start to synchronize between those two, then that's ah, that's another big one for us, for resiliency, for fault, tolerance, but also workload movement. That thing I said about persistent stories, layer, I'm not gonna need to care where it is, and it will be worked out by the storage in the orchestration layer so it can have the storage in the computer in the right place. >> Wow. Great story, Matt, as always. And I think it's Pierre calls this the unfair advantage coming to life. Best of luck for the rest of the 2019 season. >> I'll take it. >> All right, We'll see you next time. >> Thank you. >> Keep before >> for David Dante. I am Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube from Cure Accelerate in Austin, Texas.

>> 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)

>> from Austin, Texas. It's Theo Cube, covering pure storage. Accelerate 2019. Brought to you by pure storage. >> Welcome back to the Cube. The leader in live tech coverage. Lisa Martin and David Lantz wrapping up day one of our coverage of pure accelerate. 2019. Howdy. How do y'all Hey, I >> think I started a trend. >> I think you did. So, Dave, this has been a dice shot out of a cannon. I think, as only you know, pure does. Well, we had lots of conversations. Lots of news this morning, Which was nice to hear. As pure welcomes their 10th anniversary in a couple of weeks. We talked with customers. We talked in many different industries partners, Puritans. Lots of innovation has occurred in their 1st 10 years. Charlie got up on stage this morning. Then he came to the Cube and talked about this modern data experience and the 10 X improvements and many things that they're gonna deliver. Not in the next 10 years. In the next few years. >> Yes. So we're seeing a story of growth here. It's a theme. If you look read yours press releases, they start The first line is the only storage company that's growing, which is true, at least the storage company of size of a billion dollar plus storage company and talking a lot about modern storage. To me, it's a story of entering new markets their second decade tam expansion into new ai ai workloads. Certainly the cloud trying to make the cloud of a tailwind. We have just heard from Carrie Stanton of'em Data protection is an area. You know, years ago, Uh, I remember talking to executive at Netapp Tom George and saying, Hey, we're gonna buy ah, storage backup cos you know, we're gonna preserve our partnerships with whomever con vault and Veritas in vino, whoever they're working with time and you see pure taking a similar strategy E M. C at the time did something different. They vertically integrated. They they bought a company called Llegado. They integrated into compete. And of course, now they're that sort of their stack. And so, if you were small enough now still close to $2 billion at the at the end of this fiscal year that they don't have to necessarily vertically integrate, we'll see 10 Next 10. That's the third decade, what happens there and in the customer input you're seeing. Customers are continuing to invest in pure. They're very happy. What you've seen, Lisa is customers look at pure is shifting. And I said this on the Cube earlier shifting labor in tow. Pure czar and D. Now the hyper scale is like Amazon. They'll spend time of engineering time to save money. I t practitioners of the enterprise. They'll spend money to save time and so they will happily spend money on on products if they can lower the IittIe labor costs. So totally different mindsets and you're you're seeing that's taking hold and pure really has done a great job of that. Now, as I said in my my breaking analysis, you know, a couple weeks ago, analyzing the vendors pure, clearly growing. But these things go in cycles, right? There's hard compares. You're going to see. I guarantee you're going to see these other companies, you know, chewing their models. They're big, pure talks about 10 X. The reality is, you know, Delhi emcees 10 x the size of pure right, so they throw a farm or cash on. So if you're a big whale with a big install base, that's what you do, You mind it If you're pure and you're smaller, you're 1.51 point seven billion. You go hunting. And that's the dynamic worse we're seeing. I don't see that changing dramatically for quite some time until the economy shifts and in the mindset shifts and when. Then we'll see how pure adjusts its business model from, perhaps growth to more profitability. >> And speaking of growth, they're just coming off a very successful second quarter where they announced last month in August, 28% year on year, both adding about seven that new customers a day. A lot of that attributed to innovation and the channel. They did a good job in the last 18 months or so of pivoting. They're smaller medium customer business to the channel, allowing peer to focus on much more enterprise focus. And they actually I think, even in queue to close 50% more multi $1,000,000 deals this last quarter >> and well, and while those seem like great numbers, they actually the stock got hit after the quarter. Why? Because they lowered guidance. Why, Because of this NAND pricing confusion, Nan pricing drops so fast in the quarter faster. They expected it sort of hurt revenues a little bit. They expect that that softness that continue. So they've been conservative going for it. You know, who knows of this smart to be conservative cause I wouldn't say that they're sandbagging. I say they're being conservative, you know, makes a bigger question. You know, it's storage kind of a crappy business, and we'll see. I say, that is, if you're gonna win in storage right these days, you have to gain share. Pure is gaining share della. 0% growth appears to be gaining share 0% growth. It's not a great market. So what's happening, we don't really know is cloud siphoning off demand for the traditional on Prem surgeon Could be. Can these companies make cloud a tailwind or is cloud a zero sum game? I tend to think long term, the Maur cloud, the worse it is for on Prem. So that's why everybody's scrambling for this multi cloud strategy, which is very, very early days. Multi cloud today is largely a a symptom of multi vendor versus you know, a coherent user strategy with right we're management's. Now the Big Five are trying to change that pure is playing its role. Companies like Veum and others are playing their role, so we'll see how that plays out. I do think there's a clear opportunity and multi cloud, but, um, it you know, it's unclear how large that is or whether it's just going to be a series of horses for courses. In other words, the right strategic fit for the right workload. >> So your thoughts on the evolution of their AWS partnership really looking at what they're now doing with eight of us as this bridge toe hybrid cloud customers of choice on from hosted, you know, as a service public cloud your take on this forcing function of bringing pure and AWS together of the customer base. >> Yeah, I think it's actually pretty clever. Move by pure take their engineering. It's okay. We're gonna settle, do all the heavy lifting set up AWS with e c two priority E. C. Two instances networking we're gonna mirror. We're gonna the architect of the basically block storage inside of eight of its front ending s three, which is the cheap object store? Pretty innovative. What it does is it gives customers an option for hire availability block storage that looks like pure but runs on AWS in the cloud. Very clever. And so all the advantages of OPEC's versus cap ex. You know the cloud experience, but it's the pure management experience. Eso very clever. Give pure customers who were happy. An option is there. I'm sure they're hearing from the customers. Hey, we want to go to the cloud where we heard it from the the eight of us Speaker today. Gardner Data. 88% of customers have a cloud first strategy, but 86 continue to spend on print. Right? Okay. So smart by pure to do that, I don't know how big a business that's gonna be, but it's a nice hedge. In case that really, that trend takes off >> and your thoughts on one of the other announcements today. Another first rip your We've talked about that the number of times they have there been first in a lot of things in the last 10 years transitioning offering most of their portfolio as a service and your perspective against the other competitors that you mentioned. How do you see that? >> Yeah, you know, the first your lips, they're bigger than the small companies that people have never heard of, like Zadar, a storage who actually were probably one of the first. But but they're the first again $1,000,000,000 plus company to do this. That's what customers want Customers want. The cloud experience in a big part of that cloud experience is a pricing model in the utility model. That's cloud like when AWS announced outposts, it was a clear sign that the industry had had to respond. I'm not saying this is a response to Outpost, but it's clearly a response to the cloud model so paid by the drink. You know, Op X versus cap packs of being able to have that cloud pricing model and experience across the portfolio is goodness. >> So Charlie, their CEO, talked about this morning, this modern data experience going into the next decade, it's gonna be three. Us is simple, seamless, sustainable. We all want that. I think for anything in life, your take on that from marketing to reality >> I see is anything but simple. Let's be honest. It's seamless is probably the most overused word in a >> knot. I think in future proof >> it's the chance to say that and sustainable >> eh? Well >> sustained from the standpoint, what I love about the model is way. Heard this in the customer today. Well, you know, the five year TCO was kind of a wash, but then beyond five years, it was a no brainer because we're now in that subscription model. So I guess that's that's the sort of sustainability you think its sustainability in different ways. You know, green, I t >> right >> again. I t is not really green. So, you know, good marketing. >> Well, we heard from I think we had three or four customers on today with four to legal firms, one in New Zealand, one in the States we heard from a utility company out of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and then Mercedes AMG, Petunias Motor Sport. Formula One free, very different industries, similar stories in terms of the management simplicity of pure the evergreen model of being able to swap out and take advantage of those innovations and the things that Piers is doing the r and d on from a cost perspective. But I think those were three kind of common business and I t benefits that I heard articulated by three very different industries of very different sizes. >> I mean, I think it's important. Remember, you get a really effusive commentary from the pure customers, and I'm not trying to B B negative on that. They're very, very clear that companies like pure Nutanix cohesive the rubric wien. They have great customer experiences, and they're different than what companies air used to buying very often. Having said that, when we get these, when we get into these, you know, benefit, cost benefit discussions Typically you're you're you're comparing a modern, you know, circa 2019 platform with something that's, you know, five years old, so you better have a significantly better metrics again. Having said that, you're seeing a different experience, and that's clearly coming through in the customers that you talk to with pure. They started with a clean sheet of paper, didn't have a lot of technical debt, not a lot of baggage, that alone some really smart people that, you know, in Silicon Valley, you know, inundated with all this cloud stuff, and then they brought it forth very hard to build a billion dollar storage company. Pure was the 1st 1 since Netapp. So >> that was a couple of guys going >> to do it compelling couldn't do it. Equal logic couldn't do it after you've never heard of half of these companies, right? It's been it's been many, many years, decades since you saw a billion dollar storage company. That's how hard it is and to achieve escape velocity and fewer did it, which is quite a feat. And now that now the challenge is their market cap. It's so large that four and 1/2 1,000,000,000 and growing right ostensibly that they may be become acquisition proof. Okay, that's a good thing on the one hand, cause we love independent companies. On the other hand, at some point, the Tam Tam expansion within that little niche gets very difficult. That's why, for example, e M. C. Had to go out and buy a company like Llegado, and it made some actually, you know, some other crappy Apple acquisitions that didn't work out. And then they stumbled into VM, where it was gonna part of a TAM expansion strategy, and they lucked out because they the greatest acquisition in the history of I T. But I guess my point is at some point, a billion dollar company becomes a $2 billion company. Maybe give becomes a $5 billion company, and then it's like, OK, what do we do next? How do and you're seeing that app is in there now. Netapp is a growth challenge, Um, and a Tam expansion challenge. But it's too big to get acquired. There were years for their. For years. There were rumors about Cisco required, kept the stock up. It never happened. So stock buybacks tuck in acquisitions, you know, refresh of the portfolio, squeezing out a little bit of growth, some bad quarters. You know, that's That's the nature of the big company so pure at some point we'll hit that, but I think we're a couple of 1,000,000,000 away. >> They have also done a robust job of building a robust partner ecosystem. We talked to a number of them today, Cisco in video we had on the team. Tomorrow's Blanc is on in terms of this growth that you talked about, How well positioned are they with with the strategic and technology partnerships that they are not only building but evolving quite quickly? Where does that factor into your thoughts about their future in the next decade? >> I think, um, I think the key to that is their architecture. In terms of their AP, I, uh, framework. It makes it easy to integrate. Wait, Um and to the extent that they continue to grow, the customers buy their products, loved their products. The high end p s scores all that stuff, it's easier to have a NPS score when you're a billion dollar company is when you're, you know, $50 billion company. But are you with a big portfolio? But customers, clearly you're has momentum. People want to be with a winner. If yours a winner there. Architectures easy to integrate. Relatively speaking. Thio, You know the legacy vendors and it's clean across the portfolio. And so that's that's why I think the ecosystem continues to grow. I'd like to see more growth, you know, I remember service now when they were a billion dollar company and thinking, Wow, it was about this size, you know? Now you go to service now. I mean, you see the big, uh s eyes. You see a lot of niche players bumping into him or jumping up. I'd like to see that here, and I think it will continue. >> Well, this is certainly ah good chunk larger than last year's accelerate, which was about a year and 1/2 ago. And look where we are, Dave, We're in Austin. This is Dell's backyard. This is a bold company. I was telling you earlier today when I was doing some research for our guests, something that catches my attention as a marketer that many companies cannot d'oh and that is very bold and very direct against their competitors and tell customers this is why you should be buying us. I applaud that as a marketer, and as somebody who gets to interview folks on the Q, because it's hard to do. They have this bullish culture that they've always had, and they have grown in the last 10 years. We're seeing expansion, and we're seeing them not afraid to tackle anybody that their customers are looking at. >> So I want to talk about some of the industry dynamics as well. The I T industry loves a vacuum, and I think in some respects the acquisition of the EMS see by Del created a vacuum and pure is taking advantage of that now. For a while, Gel took its eye off the ball and was storage business was affected, and then they got their act together. And now it's 0% growth. It's it's Yeah, okay, I'd like to see better growth there, but they've been doing a lot of work, and pure is referenced this and some of the pressure. This is Dallas consolidating its portfolio, which is exactly the right thing to do. Deli emcees Portfolio is way too complicated, but you have to be careful. You can't just consolidate overnight because you're alienating your customers. So there's still some of that going on. The linchpin of Del strategy is VM wear. That is the key. That's where the future is for those guys. So when AMC was an independent storage company, it would fight tooth and nail. You know, Jeremy Burton was gonna take out net app, and he didn't do it. You have all these crazy videos and they, you know, they were focused, competitive oriented company that loved its customers and was very customer focused in many respects. I mean, they're still competitive, very competitive, but they're not that independent, pure play anymore. It's now it's netapp and pure, and I feel like net episode distracted, you know, with some of the struggles that pure is really, you know, has an opportunity. You know, I I remember Scott decent years and years and years ago told me when they were nobody said We think we could be the next TMC in storage. And I was like, Really? That's a amazingly bold statement when it appeared that the storage industry was kind of disappearing and everybody was getting acquired and it was becoming this vertically integrated converged infrastructure player with storage and networking and service. And that still may happen. A cloud, everything else, Um, but, you know, if you're has an opportunity to really become the leader in in this business in, you know, has an opportunity become the number one storage company takes some time, Uh, for a while. I question is, it doesn't really make sense to have independent stores, But you still see a lot of innovation. Certainly the backup vendors startups, you know, you see smaller companies, VC money still coming in back to something you said earlier. I t generally, and storage specifically really isn't simple. It's very complicated, and it's very hard. >> Well, Dave, we have had a great first day. I'm excited to work with you tomorrow. We've got cause coming on. Kicks coming on some more customers. Lots of good stuff in store for day two. >> All right, Cool. >> Likewise for David. Dante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube, the leader in live coverage.

>> Narrator: Live from the Bill Graham Auditorium in San Francisco, it's The Cube. Covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2018. Brought to you by Pure Storage. (techno music) >> Back to The Cube, we are live at Pure Storage Accelerate 2018. We are in San Francisco at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium. This is a really cool building built in 1915, loads of history with artists. I'm with Dave Vellante. I'm wearing prints today in honor of the venue and we're excited to be joined by longtime Pure Storage customer Mercedes AMG Petronas Motorsport head of IT Matt Harris. Matt, it's great to see you again. >> Hey, good up, good morning I should say. >> I think it is still morning somewhere. (laughter) >> So, Matt, you know, for folks who aren't that familiar with Formula One one of the things, you know I'm a fan. It's such a data intense sport. You've got to set up a data center 21 times a year, across the globe, with dramatically different weather conditions, humidity, etc. Give our viewers an idea of your role as head of IT and what it is that your team needs to enable the drivers to do? >> Okay, so in general terms, we're but like any other normal business around the world. Yeah we have huge amounts of data created depending on what your company is doing. Ours comes from two cars going around the track. That is the lifeblood of our of our work, our day work, and all that data is always analyzed to work out how we can improve the car. But what we really have is an infrastructure the same as many other companies. We have some slight differences as you say. We go to 21 countries. In those countries we turn around and we have 36 hours roughly to put everything together in a different world, different place and then everybody turns up and uses it as though it's a branch office. A hundred people roughly sat there working in the normal environment. We use it for five days and then we take it apart in six hours, put it in two boxes, take it to another country, and we do the same thing again. We do that 21 times. Sometimes back-to-back, sometimes with a week in between. Week in between is quite easy. Back to back sometimes we go from Canada maybe all the way across the world from Monaco within the space of a week so if we've got the flights in the way and everything else and we also end up having to an engineer a car, run a car around the track, and hopefully win races. >> So, you basically got a data kit that you take around with you. >> Yeah. >> And then what did you do before you had this capability? Was it just gut feel? Was it finger in the wind? >> Um, so. For about 15 years, we've been running what everybody's classes and Internet of Things we've been doing for about 15-20 years the car. It's got around these days around 300 sensors on it. Without those sensors realistically we'll be running the car blind and we probably couldn't even start the car let alone actually run it these days or improve things. We turn around and we're always ingesting data from the cars real-time. That real-time data actually we transfer to the garage. That's no problem at all but we also bring it back to the factory because we're limited on the number of people that are allowed to travel with the team. So, we're physically only allowed to take 60 people. Rules tell us we can only take 60 people to work on the car. Now of those, around about 15 are probably looking at data. We're generating around about half a terabyte per race weekend these days and 15 people, it's not enough eyes realistically to turn around and look at all that data all the time. So we take it back to the UK and in the UK, again, we have anywhere between another 30 and maybe 800 staff will be looking at that data to help analyze particularly on a Friday. Friday is about running the car and learning. We discussed a few minutes ago, what's the weather like? What are the tires like? What's the track like? Has there been any change in track? Has it been resurfaced? What's going on with the car compared to what we think is its optimum? And on a Friday's iterative change and learning about tire degradation, tire life, tire wear, the weather conditions, how they're going to interact with the car, all based on data. The interesting thing for me has always been that we have all this data but the two drivers in the car are the biggest sensor for us. They turn around and tell us how they felt. When they were going round corners, Was it good, bad, indifferent? But as soon as they tell us something, we always go to data. We've taken their interpretation of how their body felt, we turn around and then look at the data to prove what they've told us. So, an interesting anecdote very quickly. last year in Singapore, Valtteri was going across the bridge and he said he could feel that the throttle felt like it was cutting and we couldn't see in data and we were looking and looking and eventually he said, "No, it absolutely happens every time I cross the bridge." and they found a 20 millisecond gap in throttle application basically because there was a magnetic field that the bridge was creating so a sensor was actually cutting the throttle. he could feel it. we could fit that eventually see in data, shielded the sensor, everybody's happy. so you go from the human being could feel a 20th, a 20 millisecond gap in throttle application for us finding in data, engineering a solution, and changing things. >> So, the human's still a critical part of? (crosstalk) >> So, where does Pure Storage fit into this whole thing? and give us the before and after on that. >> So, three years ago we started working with Pure because I have two different solutions. one in the track and one in the factory. one in the track realistically I have some constraints around space, power, heat. that most people would love to take the racks as we were talking about we take around the world, they would love to leave in a nice air-conditioned computer room and just leave it there all year. we move it around but that rack of information we have to spend $298 per kilo to transport IT equipment around, well any equipment, around the world. So, we've got tons of equipment that we take around the world. it's thousands and thousands of pounds of freight cost. So, we went from forty U of old-school spinning disk, lots of complexity in cabling, administration, down to 2-3 U and 20 arrays. Now, they're more heat tolerant. I have two power cables in each and two network cables so complexity is gone. it just works. It's heat tolerant. it doesn't create a lot of heat so I haven't got the added issue of that. it's not using a huge amount of power so my UPS solution has to be smaller. so everything just got smaller, cheaper. really simply at the track, we improve the performance for everybody. from an IT point of view, we got very, very simple. incredibly easy to look after and manage but it's very reliable and performant at the same time. we then went to the factory where I've got 800 people looking at data. the problem is when a car goes round and we offload it, there's one single file. we haven't got this distributed amount of data that everybody. so you got one file that everybody's trying to open, old-school discs, you've now got contention for that one file that everybody's opening. So, people would come back from the track and go, "Why is it so slow to open information in the factory compared to at the track?" Trying to explain to them contention of data in those days was a little bit difficult but now we have 800 people that don't need to care and why that matters for us is decision making. So, if you think about qualifying, those that don't understand Formula One, we have three sessions of qualifying and the car goes out roughly two times in each qualifying session with around about a couple of minute gap in between the times the car goes out. that couple of minutes is about changing the car to be optimal for the next run. if it takes you minutes and minutes to offload data, open the data, review the information that the driver told you, and make a change, you can't go back out a second time. So, everything is about optimal performance for those engineers to optimize the performance of the car. what we are able to do now is to turn around and make sure that we're making correct decisions because rather than data taking two or three minutes to open, it's in seconds instead. So, you can look at the data, make an informed decision, change the car, hopefully improve every time the car goes out. >> One of the things, Matt, that Charlie Giancarlo, the CEO of Pure Storage, said this morning during the keynote was that less than half a percent of data in the world is analyzed. talk to us about what Pure Storage is able to facilitate for your team to be able to analyze that data. how much of that data are you able to analyze? and talk to us about the speed criticality. >> Yeah, okay, so, and quite a lot of the work over the previous probably 10 or 15 years has been very human centric. So, it's what data I know I need to go and look at to understand to be able to compute, to turn around and maybe infer information from to be able to make a better decision. So, strategy is probably one of the best places these days where the data that we're learning all the time. we have data about ourselves but we also have data about the other teams. those teams have the same data about us as well, your GPS data, timing data, so we know what's going on so we can infer information on a competitor as well as ourselves. tire degradation, tire wear, tire life, all things that you can infer that mean that you were mentioning earlier on about a pit stop. if a safety car comes out should you pick, shouldn't you pick. those decisions are now based on accurate data about whether we think competitor will pit, whether we think the competitors tires will last, can we overtake that competitor? because actually the track does or doesn't allow overtaking. So, lots of decisions made real-time based on exactly what's happening now but inferred from previous races and we're always learning all the time. everything is about the previous races. information we're learning every time. >> and how much of that heavy lifting of that data is machines versus humans. Are the machines increasingly, I don't want to say making the decisions, but helping? >> Yes, so, we're not in a position at the moment where the machines are making decisions. they're helping us to be informed, to visualize. Yeah, we work with the likes of TIBCO as well as Pure and other partners or sponsors that we have where they turn around and actually they help us to visualize that data. the problem we've got at the moment is we're still looking at all the data. where we really want to get to is looking at exceptions. So, actually the norm, don't show us that data. we don't need to know, don't need to care. >> Want the outliers. >> we want the outliers that. our problem though is that our car changes every time it goes out. So, an outlier could be because we've made a change. So, now you've got to still have some human that's helping at moto. we're trying to understand how we can use machine learning techniques. in certain places we can so image recognition and another bits and piece like that we can actually start to take advantage of but decisions necessarily around configuration and the next change to the car at the moment it's still indicators given to us by simulation and then a human at the end of the day is making the decision. >> and the data that you talked about that is on your competitors, is that a shared data source or is that but it is. >> Yeah. >> everybody shares the same data. >> every car has a transponder on it. basically it's GPS with longitude, latitude, and all sorts but incredibly accurate. if you consider the cars are doing 200 mile-an-hour, we have an accuracy of around about it's less than 10 centimeters accuracy at 200 miles per hour. Now, if you think of your GPS on your phone, you struggle to know whether you're on the right street sometimes. >> but your differentiation there is your your speed at which you can analyze the data, your algorithms, your skill sets you're telling. and then obviously we're here at Pure there's a component of that speed which is Pure. aren't you worried that your competitors are going to get your secrets or is everybody in the track use Pure Storage? >> everybody is turning around and using their own methodologies, their main, their own software. the thing for us at the moment is to make sure that we keep the really secret things ourselves, our IP sensitive, keep those to ourselves. So, what we do with our storage people know about and other teams are copying and seeing the advantages of Pure as well as some of the other tools and partners we partner with. the benefit of us though is that we have a partnership with Pure not just a purchasing so we work, we've known about some of the products. So, flash blade we knew about a long time before it was released. Yeah, we work with the team on what's coming. we know some of the advances in the technology before it's live and that's critical for us because we can get a stick, a march on everybody else even if we're six months ahead of somebody else on a technology or a way of doing something, six months is a long time in F1. >> Yeah. >> sorry Dave, I was going to say, Pure calls this the unfair advantage. (laughter) and you are, Mercedes has last fall won the fourth consecutive Constructors Championship. Coincidence, I don't know, but talk to us about this symbiotic relationship. are you also able to help influence the design of the technologies at Pure? >> Yeah, so, and I wouldn't say that we help design necessarily but they'll take into consideration our requirements and our wishes. like a number of other people that will be here, you've heard other people talking on stage and we'll always be talking about what we would like to be doing, what we could be doing if we had, I don't know, some new technology whether it's s3 connectivity to the flash blade, s whether it's NFS, whether it's SIF, whatever that would be, the containerization of them, the storage front end, whatever that would be we're always talking about how we can work with the Pure Storage to improve what we're doing. so that ideally I take out the way of the business. my ideal is that IT's not seen, it's not heard, and it just works. obviously in IT that's not always the case but. >> I want to unpack something you said earlier. you said it was I believe two or three years ago, three years ago that you brought in Pure and you had substantial performance improvement. I talk to a lot of customers and what they'll typically do in that situation is they'll compare what they saw in 2015 with what they replaced which was probably a five or eight year old array. true in your case or not? if it is true, which I suspect it is, it had to be something else that led you to Pure because you could have bought the incumbents all flash array and got you know much better performance. What, first of all true or not? and what was it that led you to Pure to switch from the incumbent which is not trivial? >> So quickly and was it five or eight year old hardware? in some places yes, some places no. So, it wasn't, we took a decision to take a step back and look at storage from a different standpoint because we just kept adding more discs to try and get around an issue, you know, and we've got a fairly strange data model to compute. we don't need much compute, we need lots of storage. so some of the models that were talked about on stage where I need, you know, Matt Baer was talking about the fact of I want some more storage, you need to buy some more compute and that was just so annoying for us. so there was different reasons but the end goal, you're quite right, performance. Yeah, we could have got it probably from anywhere and being brutally honest lots of other technologies could give the performance 'cause we don't give that level of performance maybe if your a service now or a big financial institution, we've got data, it's important. we've got critical time scales to open and save data, okay critical to us as far as erasing, but what was important for me was simplicity. Absolutely, now we got other benefits. the Evergreen model was brilliant for us but simplicity was critical. we had a storage guy that was spending his life managing storage. nobody manages storage now. they turn around and they go into Vmware. they want a new VMware server, they just spin it up, and the disk is associated. we don't have to think about it. you don't have that storage specialist any longer. Yeah, we started working with other partners, you know, Rubric for instance, integration with them, the Pure arrays as well, again enabling us to get out the way and not having to worry about backup. traditionally or we'd headed a guy that was always changing tape. I saw on the slide several time today about tape archive, I'm going I never want to see a tape archive. I just don't care about it any longer. I just want to be able to turn around and give the business, the SLAs they want on the their data and then not care about it. Also, can I then still turn around and mine that data in those archive or backup, not back up bin, the archive location? So, there's huge differences but simple is the best thing for me. we could have a small IT team that we have to look after a huge amount of kit and if it's complex it's just I can't employ the right people. >> Simplicity, performance, portability, you mentioned integration. you've got a big partner ecosystem here that. >> Yeah. >> So, having the ability to integrate seamlessly with Rubric, TIBCO, Satirize Key. >> and yeah for us, the partners are extension of the team. my team in particular because I can't turn around and just keep adding staff. we have to look after the day-to-day and keep the lights on but I can't just keep adding staff to look after a new technology. it needs to look after itself so the simplicity is absolutely. performance was a sort of a no-brainer. evergreen was a brilliant one for us because just not having to do those forklift upgrades. I think in the three years, we've gone from M450s to M70s, we've gone from M20s to M50s, M50R2s. we've done all of these. I've been stood on stage before in a day when we've been doing an upgrade during the time I've been stood on stage. You know and so people talk about the forklift upgrade, I don't have to worry about it, it doesn't happen. >> totally non-disruptive. >> Yeah, yeah. >> you do change out the controllers right? >> Yeah, so we change out controllers. we've done all sorts, we've gone from capacity upgrade so complete shells of discs and completely different on from I can't remember the exact size from two terabyte to three terabyte drives, new controllers to give us the new functionality with the nvme and all during the day. we don't do it out of hours. there's a lot of the business a scared stiff when we turn around the wisp and they go oh no no no but we're running the winds on low. we're doing this CFD, we go doesn't matter zero downtime no matter zero no planned. obviously no one play it's planned? >> Yes, it's planned downtime but the user doesn't see it they no performance no downtime no nothing that's Nevada for RIT. Yeah, well it means I don't have to keep asking people to do long shifts through the night to do a simple upgrade what should be a simple your weekends are nice back hopefully we end up with we end up racing those unfortunately okay but that's the fun stuff yeah for those who aren't that familiar was Formula One I encourage you to check it out it's one of the coolest strategic sports that is really fueled by technology it's amazing without technology honestly the cars wouldn't be anywhere near their what they are today and IT systems go we underpin everything that the company does nobody really wants to say that I t's the lifeblood of the company they don't but we need to be able to deliver and actually let the business actually take on new technologies new techniques and get out the way so we've got a huge amount of work a lot of what Charlie said on stage earlier on I've been having conversations with the guys here about autonomous data centers immutable infrastructure it's critical for us to go out the way and allow business to if they want some new VMs new storage it just happens not not need a person to be in the way make it sound so simple well you one of your primary sensors Lewis Hamilton is currently in in the number one position battery talked to us in third Monaco coming up this weekend introduction of a new hyper soft tire some pretty exciting stuff yeah so the hope of soft tires going to be interesting first race with it before the Monaco track yeah so and they originally designed it for Monaco I believe it will go to another race as well in the short term but we didn't even run it in winter testing earlier in the year so the first time we ran it was actually Barcelona test last week I've actually heard nothing about it so I don't know whether it's good bad or indifferent I don't know what's going to happen but it's going to be an interesting week because it's a very different track to where we've been to so far traditionally some of the other teams are quite strong there so the this weekend's going to be an interesting one to see where we end up Monica is always exciting grace Matt thanks so much for stopping by the cube and sharing with us what you're doing and how you're enabling technology to drive the Sportage no comatose again I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Volante live at pure storage accelerate 2018 we were at the Bill Graham Civic I'm Prince for the day stick around Dave and I will be right back with our next guest

>> Announcer: Live from the Bill Graham Auditorium in San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2018, brought to you by Pure Storage. (bright music) >> Welcome to theCUBE. We are live at Pure Storage Accelerate 2018. I'm Lisa Martin also known as Prince for today with Dave Vellante. We're at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, really cool, unique venue. Dave, you've been following Pure for a long time. Today's May 23rd, they just announced FY19 Q1 earnings a couple days ago. Revenue up 40% year over year, added 300 new customers this last quarter including the Department of Energy, Paige.ai, bringing their customer tally now up to about 4800. We just came from the keynote. What are some of the things that you've observed over the last few years of following Pure that excite you about today? >> Well Lisa, Pure's always been a company that is trying to differentiate itself from the pack, the pack largely being EMC at the time. And what Pure talked about today, Matt Kixmoeller talked about, that in 2009, if you go back there, Fusion-io was all the rage, and they were going after the tip of the pyramid, and everybody saw flash, as he said, his words, as the tip of the pyramid. Now of course back then David Floyer in 2008 called that flash was going to change the world, that is was going to dominate. He'd forecast that flash was going to be cheaper than disk over the long term, and that is playing out in many market segments. So he was one of the few that didn't fall into that trap. But the point is that Pure has always said, "We're going to make flash cheaper than "or as cheap as spinning disk, "and we're going to drive performance, "and we're going to differentiate from the market, "and we're going to be first." And you heard that today with this company. This company is accelerated to a billion dollars, the first company to hit a billion dollars since NetApp. Eight years ago I questioned if any company would do that. If you look at the companies that exited the storage market, that entered and exited the storage market that supposedly hit escape velocity, 10 years ago it was 3PAR hit $250 million. Isilon, Data Domain, Compellent, these companies sold for between $1 and $2.5 billion. None of them hit a billion dollars. Pure is the first to do that. Nutanix, which is really not a storage company, they're hyper-converged infrastructure, they got networking and compute, sort of, hit a billion, but Pure is the the first pure play, no pun intended, storage company to do that. They've got a $5 billion evaluation. They're growing, as you said, at 40% a year. They just announced their earnings they beat. But the street reacted poorly because it interpreted their guidance as lower. Now Pure will say that we know we raised (laughs) our guidance, but they're lowering the guidance in terms of growth rates. So that freaks the street out. I personally think it's pure conservativism and I think that they'll continue to beat those expectations so the stock's going to take a hit. They say, "Okay, if you want to guide lower growth, "you're going to take the hit," and I think that's smart play by Pure because if and when they beat they'll get that updraft. But so that's what you saw today. They're finally free cash flow positive. They've got about a billion dollars in cash on the balance sheet. Now half a billion of that was from a convertible note that they just did, so it's really not coming from a ton of free cash flow, but they've hit that milestone. Now the last point I want to make, Lisa, and we talked about this, is Pure Storage at growing at 40% a year, it's like Amazon can grow even though they make small profit. The stock price keeps going up. Pure has experienced that. You're certainly seeing that with companies like Workday, certainly Salesforce and its ascendancy, ServiceNow and its ascendancy. These companies are all about growth. The street is rewarding growth. Very hard for a company like IBM or HPE or EMC when it was public, when they're not growing to actually have the stock price continue to rise even though they're throwing off way more cash than a company like Pure. >> Also today we saw for the first time the new CEO's been Charlie Giancarlo, been the CEO since August of 2017, sort of did a little introduction to himself, and they talked about going all in on shared accelerated storage, this category that Gartner's created. Big, big focus there. >> Yeah, so it's interesting. When I look at so-called shared accelerated storage it's 2018, Gartner finally came up with a new category. Again, I got to give credit to the Wikibon guys. I think David Floyer in 2009 created the category. He called it Server SAN. You don't know if that's David, but I think maybe shared accelerated storage's a better name. Maybe Gartner has a better V.P. of Naming than they do at Wikibon, but he forecast this notion of Server SAN which really it's not DAS, it's not SAN, it's this new class of accelerated storage that's flash-based, that's NVMe-based, eliminates the horrible storage stack. It's exactly what Pure was talking about. Again, Floyer forecast that in 2009, and if you look at the charts that he produced back then it looks like you see the market like this going shoom, the existing market and the new market just exploding. So Pure, I think, is right on. They're targeting that wide market. Now what they announced today is this notion of their flash array for all workloads, bringing NVMe to virtually their entire portfolio. So they're aiming their platform at the big market. Remember, Pure's ascendancy to a billion really came at the expense of EMC's VMAX and VNX business. They aimed at that and they hit it hard. They positioned flash relative to EMC's either spinning disk or flash-based systems as better, easier, cheaper, et cetera, et cetera, and they won that battle even though they were small. Pure's a billion, EMC at the time was $23, $24 billion, but they gained share very rapidly when you see the numbers. So what they're doing is basically staking a claim, Lisa, saying, "We can point our platform "at the entire $30, $40, $50 billion storage TAM," and their intention, we're going to ask Charlie Giancarlo and company, their aspiration is to really continue to gain share in that marketplace and grow significantly faster than the overall market. >> So they also talked about the data-centric architecture today and gave some great examples of customers. I loved the Domino's Pizza example that they talked about, I think he was here last year, and how they're actually using AI at Domino's to analyze the phone calls using this AI engine to identify accurate order information and get you your pizza as quickly as you want. So not only do we have pizza but we were showered with confetti. Lot of momentum there. What is your opinion of Pure, what they're doing to enable companies to utilize and maximize AI-based applications with this data-centric architecture? >> So Pure started in the what's called block storage, really going after the high-volume, the transaction OLTP business. In the early days of Pure you'd see them at Oracle OpenWorld. That's where the high-volume transactions are taking place. They were the first really, by my recollection, to do file-based flash storage. Back in the day it was you would buy EMC for a block, you'd buy NetApp for file. What Pure did is said, "Okay, let's go after "the biggest market player, EMC, "which we'll gain share there in block, "and then now let's go after NetApp space and file." They were again the first to do that. And now they're extending that to AI. Now AI is a small but growing market, so they want to be the infrastructure for artificial intelligence and machine intelligence. They've struck a partnership with Nvidia, they're using the example of Domino's. It's clearly not a majority of their business today, but they're doing some clever things in marketing, getting ahead of the game. This is Pure's game. Be first, get out in the lead, market it hard, and then let everybody else look like they're following which essentially they are and then claim leadership position. So they are able to punch above their weight class by doing that, and that's what you're seeing with the Domino's example. >> You think they're setting the bar? >> Do I think they're setting the bar? Yeah, in many respects they are because they are forcing these larger incumbents to respond and react because they're in virtually all accounts now. The IT practitioners, they look at the Gartner Magic Quadrant, who's in the upper right, I got to call them in for the RFP. They get a seat at that table. I would say it was interesting hearing Charlie speak today and the rest of the executives. These guys are hardcore storage geeks, and I mean that with all due respect. They love storage. It kind of reminds me of the early days of EMC. They are into this stuff. Their messaging is really toward that storage practitioner, that administrator. They're below the line but those are the guys that are actually making the decisions and affecting transactions. They're touching above the line with AI messages and data growth and things like that, but it's really not a hardcore CIO, CFO, CEO message yet. I think that will come later. They see a big enough market selling to those IT practitioners. So I think they are setting the bar in that IT space, I do. >> One of the things I thought that they did well is kind of position the power of data where, you know people talk about data as fuel. Data's really a business catalyst that needs to be analyzed across multiple areas of a business simultaneously to really be able to extract value. They talked about the gold rush, oh gee, of 1849 and now kind of in this new gold rush enabling IT with the tools. And interestingly they also talked about a survey that they did with the SEE Suite who really believe that analyzing data is going to be key to driving businesses forward, identifying new business models, new products, new services. Conversely, IT concern do we have the right tools to actually be able to evaluate all of these data to extract the value from it? Because if you can't extract the value from the data, is it, it's not useful. >> Yeah, and I think again, I mean to, we give Pure great marketing, and a lot of what they're doing, (laughs) it's technology, it's off-the-shelf technology, it's open source components. So what's their differentiation? Their differentiation is clearly their software. Pure has done a great job of simplifying the experience for the customer, no question, much in the same way that 3PAR did 10 or 15 years ago. They've clearly set the bar on simplicity, so check. The other piece that they've done really well is marketing, and marketing is how companies differentiate (laughs) today. There's no question about it that they've done a great job of that. Now having said that I don't think, Lisa, that storage, I think storage is going to be table stakes for AI. Storage infrastructure for AI is going to have to be there, and they talked about the gold rush of 1849. The guys who made all the money were the guys with the picks and the axes and the shovels supplying them, and that's really what Pure Storage is. They're a infrastructure company. They're providing the pickaxes and the shovels and the basic tools to build on top of that AI infrastructure. But the real challenges of AI are where do I apply and how do I infuse it into applications, how do I get ROI, and then how do I actually have a data model where I can apply machine intelligence and how do I get the skillsets applied to that data? So is Pure playing a fundamental catalyst to that? Yes, in the sense that I need good, fast, reliable, simple-to-use storage so that I don't have to waste a bunch of time provisioning LUNs and doing all kinds of heavy lifting that's nondifferentiated. But I do see that as table stakes in the AI game, but that's the game that Pure has to play. They are an infrastructure company. They're not shy about it, and it's a great business for them because it's a huge market where they're gaining share. >> Partners are also key for them. There's a global partner summit going on. We're going to be speaking, you mentioned Nvidia. We're going to be talking with them. They also announced the AIRI Mini today. I got to get a look at that box. It looks pretty blinged out. (laughing) So we're going to be having conversations with partners from Nvidia, from Cisco as well, and they have a really diverse customer base. We've got Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport Formula One, we've got UCLA on the CIO of UCLA Medicine. So that diversity is really interesting to see how data is being, value, rather, from data is being extracted and applied to solve so many different challenges whether it's hitting a race car around a track at 200 kilometers an hour to being able to extract value out of data to advance health care. They talked about Paige.ai, a new customer that they added in Q1 of FY19 who was able to take analog cancer pathology looking at slides and digitize that to advance cancer research. So a really cool kind of variety of use cases we're going to see on this show today. >> Yeah, I think, so a couple thoughts there. One is this, again I keep coming back to Pure's marketing. When you talk to customers, they cite, as I said before, the simplicity. Pure's also done a really clever thing and not a trivial thing with regard to their Evergreen model. So what that means is you can add capacity and upgrade your software and move to the next generation nondisruptively. Why is this a big deal? For decades you would have to actually shut down the storage array, have planned downtime to do an upgrade. It was a disaster for the business. Oftentimes it turned into a disaster because you couldn't really test or if you didn't test properly and then you tried to go live you would actually lose application availability or worse, you'd lose data. So Pure solved that problem with its Evergreen model and its software capability. So its simplicity, the Evergreen model. Now the reality is typically you don't have to bring in new controllers but you probably should to upgrade the power, so there are some nuances there. If you're mixing and matching different types of devices in terms of protocols there's not really tiering, so there's some nuances there. But again it's both great marketing and it simplifies the customer experience to know that I can go back to serial number 00001 and actually have an Evergreen upgrade is very compelling for customers. And again Pure was one of the first if not the first to put that stake in the ground. Here's how I know it's working, because their competitors all complain about it. When the competitors are complaining, "Wow, Pure Storage, they're just doing X, Y, and Z, "and we can do that too," and it's like, "Hey, look at me, look at me! "I do that too!" And Pure tends to get out in front so that they can point and say, "That's everybody following us, we're the leader." And that resonates with customers. >> It does, in fact. And before we wrap things up here a lot of the customer use cases that I read in prepping for this show all talked about this simplicity, how it simplified the portability, the Evergreen model, to make things much easier to eliminate downtime so that the business can keep running as expected. So we have a variety of use cases, a variety of Puritans on the program today as well as partners who are going to be probably articulating that value. >> You know what, I really didn't address the partner issue. Again, having a platform that's API-friendly, that's simple makes it easier to bring in partners, to integrate into new environments. We heard today about integration with Red Hat. I think they took AIRI. I think Cisco's a part of that partnership. Obviously the Nvidia stuff which was kind of rushed together at the last minute and had got it in before the big Nvidia customer show, but they, again, they were the first. Really made competitors mad. "Oh, we can do that too, it's no big deal." Well, it is a big deal from the standpoint of Pure was first, right? There's value in being first and from a standpoint of brand and mindshare. And if it's easier for you to integrate with partners like Cisco and other go-to-market partners like the backup guys you see, Cohesity and Veeam and guys like Catalogic are here. If it's easier to integrate you're going to have more integration partners and the go-to-market is going to be more facile, and that's where a lot of the friction is today, especially in the channel. >> The last thing I'll end with is we got a rain of confetti on us during the main general session today. The culture of Pure is one that is pervasive. You feel it when you walk into a Pure event. The Puritans are very proud of what they've done, of how they're enabling so many, 4800+ customers globally, to really transform their businesses. And that's one of the things that I think is cool about this event, is not just the plethora of orange everywhere but the value and the pride in the value of what they're delivering to their customers. >> Yeah, I think you're right. It is orange everywhere, they're fun. It's a fun company, and as I say they're alpha geeks when it comes to storage. And they love to be first. They're in your face. The confetti came down and the big firecracker boom when they announced that NVMe was going to be available across the board for zero incremental cost. Normally you would expect it to be a 15 to 20% premium. Again, a first that Pure Storage is laying down the gauntlet. They're setting the bar and saying hey guys, we're going to "give" this value away. You're going to have to respond. Everybody will respond. Again, this is great marketing by Pure because they're >> Shock and awe. going to do it and everybody's going to follow suit and they're going to say, "See, we were first. "Everybody's following, we're the leader. "Buy from us," very smart. >> There's that buy. Another first, this is the first time I have actually been given an outfit to wear by a vendor. I'm the symbol of Prince today. I won't reveal who you are underneath that Superman... >> Okay. >> Exterior. Stick around, you won't want to miss the reveal of the concert tee that Dave is wearing. >> Dave: Very apropos of course for Bill Graham auditorium. >> Exactly, we both said it was very hard to choose which we got a list of to pick from and it was very hard to choose, but I'm happy to represent Prince today. So stick around, Dave and I are going to be here all day talking with Puritans from Charlie Giancarlo, David Hatfield. We've also got partners from Cisco, from Nvidia, and a whole bunch of great customer stories. We're going to be right back with our first guest from the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport F1 team. I'm Lisa "Prince" Martin, Dave Vellante. We'll be here all day, Pure Storage Accelerate. (bright music)