(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Vegas. Lisa Martin and Dave Vellante here with theCUBE live on the Venetian Expo Hall Floor, talking all things AWS re:Invent 2022. This is the first full day of coverage. It is jam-packed here. People are back. They are ready to hear all the new innovations from AWS. Dave, how does it feel to be back yet again in Vegas? >> Yeah, Vegas. I think it's my 10th time in Vegas this year. So, whatever. >> This year alone. You must have a favorite steak restaurant then. >> There are several. The restaurants in Vegas are actually really good. >> You know? >> They are good. >> They used to be terrible. But I'll tell you. My favorite? The place that closed. >> Oh! >> Yeah, closed. In between where we are in the Wynn and the Venetian. Anyway. >> Was it CUT? >> No, I forget what the name was. >> Something else, okay. >> It was like a Greek sort of steak place. Anyway. >> Now, I'm hungry. >> We were at Pure Accelerate a couple years ago. >> Yes, we were. >> When they announced Cloud Block Store. >> That's right. >> Pure was the first- >> In Austin. >> To do that. >> Yup. >> And then they made the acquisition of Portworx which was pretty prescient given that containers have been going through the roof. >> Yeah. >> So I'm sort of excited to have these guys on and talk about that. >> We're going to unpack all of this. We've got one of our alumni back with us, Venkat Ramakrishna, VP of Product, Portworx by Pure Storage. And Dan Kogan joins us for the first time, VP of Product Management and Product Marketing, FlashArray at Pure Storage. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Thank you. >> Hey, guys. >> Dan: Thanks for having us. >> Do you have a favorite steak restaurant in Vegas? Dave said there's a lot of good choices. >> There's a lot of good steak restaurants here. >> I like SDK. >> Yeah, that's a good one. >> That's the good one. >> That's a good one. >> Which one? >> SDK. >> SDK. >> Where's that? >> It's, I think, in Cosmopolitan. >> Ooh. >> Yeah. >> Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. >> It's pretty good, yeah. >> There's one of the Western too that's pretty. >> I'm an Herbs and Rye guy. Have you ever been there? >> No. >> No. >> Herbs and Rye is off strip, but it's fantastic. It's kind of like a locals joint. >> I have to dig through all of this great stuff today and then check that out. Talk to me. This is our first day, obviously. First main day. I want to get both of your perspectives. Dan, we'll start with you since you're closest to me. How are you finding this year's event so far? Obviously, tons of people. >> Busy. >> Busy, yeah. >> Yeah, it is. It is old times. Bigger, right? Last re:Invent I was at was 2019 right before everything shut down and it's probably half the size of this which is a different trend than I feel like most other tech conferences have gone where they've come back, but a little bit smaller. re:Invent seems to be the IT show. >> It really does. Venkat, are you finding the same? In terms of what you're experiencing so far on day one of the events? >> Yeah, I mean... There's tremendous excitement. Overall, I think it's good to be back. Very good crowd, great turnout, lot of excitement around some of the new offerings we've announced. The booth traffic has been pretty good. And just the quality of the conversations, the customer meetings, have been really good. There's very interesting use cases shaping up and customers really looking to solve real large scale problems. Yeah, it's been a phenomenal first day. >> Venkat, talk a little bit about, and then we'll get to you Dan as well, the relationship that Portworx by Pure Storage has with AWS. Maybe some joint customers. >> Yeah, so we... Definitely, we have been a partner of AWS for quite some time, right? Earlier this year, we signed what is called a strategic investment letter with AWS where we kind of put some joint effort together like to better integrate our products. Plus, kind of get in front of our customers more together and educate them on how going to how they can deploy and build vision critical apps on EKS and EKS anywhere and Outpost. So that partnership has grown a lot over the last year. We have a lot of significant mutual customer wins together both on the public cloud on EKS as well as on EKS anywhere, right? And there are some exciting use cases around Edge and Edge deployments and different levels of Edge as well with EKS anywhere. And there are pretty good wins on the Outpost as well. So that partnership I think is kind of like growing across not just... We started off with the one product line. Now our Portworx backup as a service is also available on EKS and along with the Portworx Data Services. So, it is also expanded across the product lanes as well. >> And then Dan, you want to elaborate a bit on AWS Plus Pure? >> Yeah, it's for kind of what we'll call the core Pure business or the traditional Pure business. As Dave mentioned, Cloud Block Store is kind of where things started and we're seeing that move and evolve from predominantly being a DR site and kind of story into now more and more production applications being lifted and shifted and running now natively in AWS honor storage software. And then we have a new product called Pure Fusion which is our storage as code automation product essentially. It takes you from moving and managing of individual arrays, now obfuscates a fleet level allows you to build a very cloud-like backend and consume storage as code. Very, very similar to how you do with AWS, with an EBS. That product is built in AWS. So it's a SaaS product built in AWS, really allowing you to turn your traditional Pure storage into an AWS-like experience. >> Lisa: Got it. >> What changed with Cloud Block Store? 'Cause if I recall, am I right that you basically did it on S3 originally? >> S3 is a big... It's a number of components. >> And you had a high performance EC2 instances. >> Dan: Yup, that's right. >> On top of lower cost object store. Is that still the case? >> That's still the architecture. Yeah, at least for AWS. It's a different architecture in Azure where we leverage their disc storage more. But in AWS were just based on essentially that backend. >> And then what's the experience when you go from, say, on-prem to AWS to sort of a cross cloud? >> Yeah, very, very simple. It's our replication technology built in. So our sync rep, our async rep, our active cluster technology is essentially allowing you to move the data really, really seamlessly there and then again back to Fusion, now being that kind of master control plan. You can have availability zones, running Cloud Block Store instances in AWS. You can be running your own availability zones in your data centers wherever those may happen to be, and that's kind of a unification layer across it all. >> It looks the same to the customer. >> To the customer, at the end of the day, it's... What the customer sees is the purity operating system. We have FlashArray proprietary hardware on premises. We have AWS's hardware that we run it on here. But to the customer, it's just the FlashArray. >> That's a data super cloud actually. Yeah, it's a data super cloud. >> I'd agree. >> It spans multiple clouds- >> Multiple clouds on premises. >> It extracts all the complexity of the underlying muck and the primitives and presents a common experience. >> Yeah, and it's the same APIs, same management console. >> Dave: Yeah, awesome. >> Everything's the same. >> See? It's real. It's a thing, On containers, I have a question. So we're in this environment, everybody wants to be more efficient, what's happening with containers? Is there... The intersection of containers and serverless, right? You think about all the things you have to do to run containers in VMs, configure everything, configure the memory, et cetera, and then serverless simplifies all that. I guess Knative in between or I guess Fargate. What are you seeing with customers between stateless apps, stateful apps, and how it all relates to containers? >> That's a great question, right? I think that one of the things that what we are seeing is that as people run more and more workloads in the cloud, right? There's this huge movement towards being the ability to bring these applications to run anywhere, right? Not just in one public cloud, but in the data centers and sometimes the Edge clouds. So there's a lot of portability requirements for the applications, right? I mean, yesterday morning I was having breakfast with a customer who is a big AWS customer but has to go into an on-prem air gap deployment for one of their large customers and is kind of re-platforming some other apps into containers in Kubernetes because it makes it so much easier for them to deploy. So there is no longer the debate of, is it stateless versus it stateful, it's pretty much all applications are moving to containers, right? And in that, you see people are building on Kubernetes and containers is because they wanted multicloud portability for their applications. Now the other big aspect is cost, right? You can significantly run... You know, like lower cost by running with Kubernetes and Portworx and by on the public cloud or on a private cloud, right? Because it lets you get more out of your infrastructure. You're not all provisioning your infrastructure. You are like just deploying the just-enough infrastructure for your application to run with Kubernetes and scale it dynamically as your application load scales. So, customers are better able to manage costs. >> Does serverless play in here though? Right? Because if I'm running serverless, I'm not paying for the compute the whole time. >> Yeah. >> Right? But then stateless and stateful come into play. >> Serverless has a place, but it is more for like quick event-driven decision. >> Dave: The stateless apps. >> You know, stuff that needs to happen. The serverless has a place, but majority of the applications have need compute and more compute to run because there's like a ton of processing you have to do, you're serving a whole bunch of users, you're serving up media, right? Those are not typically good serverless apps, right? The several less apps do definitely have a place. There's a whole bunch of minor code snippets or events you need to process every now and then to make some decisions. In that, yeah, you see serverless. But majority of the apps are still requiring a lot of compute and scaling the compute and scaling storage requirements at a time. >> So what Venkat was talking about is cost. That is probably our biggest tailwind from a cloud adoption standpoint. I think initially for on-premises vendors like Pure Storage or historically on-premises vendors, the move to the cloud was a concern, right? In that we're getting out the data center business, we're going all in on the cloud, what are you going to do? That's kind of why we got ahead of that with Cloud Block Store. But as customers have matured in their adoption of cloud and actually moved more applications, they're becoming much more aware of the costs. And so anywhere you can help them save money seems to drive adoption. So they see that on the Kubernetes side, on our side, just by adding in things that we do really well: Data reduction, thin provisioning, low cost snaps. Those kind of things, massive cost savings. And so it's actually brought a lot of customers who thought they weren't going to be using our storage moving forward back into the fold. >> Dave: Got it. >> So cost saving is great, huge business outcomes potentially for customers. But what are some of the barriers that you're helping customers to overcome on the storage side and also in terms of moving applications to Kubernetes? What are some of those barriers that you could help us? >> Yeah, I mean, I can answer it simply from a core FlashArray side, it's enabling migration of applications without having to refactor them entirely, right? That's Kubernetes side is when they think about changing their applications and building them, we'll call quote unquote more cloud native, but there are a lot of customers that can't or won't or just aren't doing that, but they want to run those applications in the cloud. So the movement is easier back to your data super cloud kind of comment, and then also eliminating this high cost associated with it. >> I'm kind of not a huge fan of the whole repatriation narrative. You know, you look at the numbers and it's like, "Yeah, there's something going on." But the one use case that looks like it's actually valid is, "I'm going to test in the cloud and I'm going to deploy on-prem." Now, I dunno if that's even called repatriation, but I'm looking to help the repatriation narrative because- >> Venkat: I think it's- >> But that's a real thing, right? >> Yeah, it's more than repatriation, right? It's more about the ability to run your app, right? It's not just even test, right? I mean, you're going to have different kinds of governance and compliance and regulatory requirements have to run your apps in different kinds of cloud environments, right? There are certain... Certain regions may not have all of the compliance and regulatory requirements implemented in that cloud provider, right? So when you run with Kubernetes and containers, I mean, you kind of do the transformation. So now you can take that app and run an infrastructure that allows you to deliver under those requirements as well, right? So that portability is the major driver than repatriation. >> And you would do that for latency reasons? >> For latency, yeah. >> Or data sovereign? >> Data sovereignty. >> Data sovereignty. >> Control. >> I mean, yeah. Availability of your application and data just in that region, right? >> Okay, so if the capability is not there in the cloud region, you come in and say, "Hey, we can do that on-prem or in a colo and get you what you need to comply to your EDX." >> Yeah, or potentially moves to a different cloud provider. It's just a lot more control that you're providing on customer at the end of the day. >> What's that move like? I mean, now you're moving data and everybody's going to complain about egress fees. >> Well, you shouldn't be... I think it's more of a one-time move. You're probably not going to be moving data between cloud providers regularly. But if for whatever reasons you decide that I'm going to stop running in X Cloud and I'm going to move to this cloud, what's the most seamless way to do? >> So a customer might say, "Okay, that's certification's not going to be available in this region or gov cloud or whatever for a year, I need this now." >> Yeah, or various commercial. Whatever it might be. >> "And I'm going to make the call now, one-way door, and I'm going to keep it on-prem." And then worry about it down the road. Okay, makes sense. >> Dan, I got to talk to you about the sustainability element there because it's increasingly becoming a priority for organizations in every industry where they need to work with companies that really have established sustainability programs. What are some of the factors that you talk with customers about as they have choice in all FlashArray between Pure and competitors where sustainability- >> Yeah, I mean we've leaned very heavily into that from a marketing standpoint recently because it has become so top of mind for so many customers. But at the end of the day, sustainability was built into the core of the Purity operating system in FlashArray back before it was FlashArray, right? In our early generation of products. The things that drive that sustainability of high density, high data reduction, small footprint, we needed to build that for Pure to exist as a company. And we are maybe kind of the last all-flash vendor standing that came ground up all-flash, not just the disc vendor that's refactored, right? And so that's sort of engineering from the ground up that's deeply, deeply into our software as a huge sustainability payout now. And we see that and that message is really, really resonating with customers. >> I haven't thought about that in a while. You actually are. I don't think there's any other... Nobody else made it through the knothole. And you guys hit escape velocity and then some. >> So we hit escape velocity and it hasn't slowed down, right? Earnings will be tomorrow, but the last many quarters have been pretty good. >> Yeah, we follow you pretty closely. I mean, there was one little thing in the pandemic and then boom! It's just kept cranking since, so. >> So at the end of the day though, right? We needed that level to be economically viable as a flash bender going against disc. And now that's really paying off in a sustainability equation as well because we consume so much less footprint, power cooling, all those factors. >> And there's been some headwinds with none pricing up until recently too that you've kind of blown right through. You know, you dealt with the supply issues and- >> Yeah, 'cause the overall... One, we've been, again, one of the few vendors that's been able to navigate supply really well. We've had no major delays in disruptions, but the TCO argument's real. Like at the end of the day, when you look at the cost of running on Pure, it's very, very compelling. >> Adam Selipsky made the statement, "If you're looking to tighten your belt, the cloud is the place to do it." Yeah, okay. It might be that, but... Maybe. >> Maybe, but you can... So again, we are seeing cloud customers that are traditional Pure data center customers that a few years ago said, "We're moving these applications into the cloud. You know, it's been great working with you. We love Pure. We'll have some on-prem footprint, but most of everything we're going to do is in the cloud." Those customers are coming back to us to keep running in the cloud. Because again, when you start to factor in things like thin provisioning, data reduction, those don't exist in the cloud. >> So, it's not repatriation. >> It's not repatriation. >> It's we want Pure in the cloud. >> Correct. We want your software. So that's why we built CBS, and we're seeing that come all the way through. >> There's another cost savings is on the... You know, with what we are doing with Kubernetes and containers and Portworx Data Services, right? So when we run Portworx Data Services, typically customers spend a lot of money in running the cloud managed services, right? Where there is obviously a sprawl of those, right? And then they end up spending a lot of item costs. So when we move that, like when they run their data, like when they move their databases to Portworx Data Services on Kubernetes, because of all of the other cost savings we deliver plus the licensing costs are a lot lower, we deliver 5X to 10X savings to our customers. >> Lisa: Significant. >> You know, significant savings on cloud as well. >> The operational things he's talking about, too. My Fusion engineering team is one of his largest customers from Portworx Data Services. Because we don't have DBAs on that team, it's just developers. But they need databases. They need to run those databases. We turn to PDS. >> This is why he pays my bills. >> And that's why you guys have to come back 'cause we're out of time, but I do have one final question for each of you. Same question. We'll start with you Dan, the Venkat we'll go to you. Billboard. Billboard or a bumper sticker. We'll say they're going to put a billboard on Castor Street in Mountain View near the headquarters about Pure, what does it say? >> The best container for containers. (Dave and Lisa laugh) >> Venkat, Portworx, what's your bumper sticker? >> Well, I would just have one big billboard that goes and says, "Got PX?" With the question mark, right? And let people start thinking about, "What is PX?" >> I love that. >> Dave: Got Portworx, beautiful. >> You've got a side career in marketing, I can tell. >> I think they moved him out of the engineering. >> Ah, I see. We really appreciate you joining us on the program this afternoon talking about Pure, Portworx, AWS. Really compelling stories about how you're helping customers just really make big decisions and save considerable costs. We appreciate your insights. >> Awesome. Great. Thanks for having us. >> Thanks, guys. >> Thank you. >> For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(bright music) (logo whooshing) >> Welcome everyone to theCUBEs continuing coverage of AWS 2021. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. We are excited to be running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events of the year with AWS and its ecosystem partners. We have two live sets, two remote studios, we've got over a hundred guests on the program, and we're going to be talking about the next decade of cloud innovation. We are pleased to welcome back one of our alumni to the program, Rob Lee, the CTO of Pure Storage. Rob, thank you so much for joining us today. >> Good to see you again, Lisa, and thanks for having me. >> Likewise and I was stalking you on LinkedIn. Looks like you've got a promotion since I last saw you. Congratulations >> Thank you. >> on your appointment as a CTO. >> No, thank you very much. Very excited to be taking the reins and for all the great stuff that's ahead of us. >> Lot of great stuff, I'm sure. I also saw that once again, Pure has been named a leader in several gartner magic quadrants for primary storage, for distributed file storage, and object storage. Lots of great things continuing to go on from the orange side. Let's talk about hybrid. I've seen so much transformation and acceleration in the last 20 plus months, but I'd love to see what you guys are seeing with respect to your customers and their hybrid cloud strategies. What problems are they in this dynamic day and age are they looking to solve? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think, all in all, I think, you know, customers are definitely maturing in their understanding and approach to all things around cloud. And I think when it comes to their approach towards hybrid cloud, one of the things that we're seeing is that customers are really, you know, focusing extra hard and just trying to make sure that they're making the best use of all their IT tools. And what that means is, you know, not just looking at hybrid cloud as a way to connect from on-prem to the cloud, but really being able to make use of and make the most use out of each, you know, each of the services and capabilities of the environments that they're operating in. And so a lot of times that means, you know, commonality in how they're operating, whether it's on-premise or in cloud, it means the flexibility that that commonality allows them in terms of planning and optionality to move parts of their application or environments between premise and cloud. You know, and I think overall, you know, we look at this as, you know, really a couple specific forces that customers are looking for. One is, you know, I think they're looking for ways to bring a lot more of the operating model and what they're used to in the cloud, into their own data center. And at the same time, they're looking to be able to bridge more of how they operate the applications they're powering and running in their own data centers today and be able to bridge and bring those into the cloud environments. And then lastly, I'd say that, you know, as customers, I think, you know, today are kind of one foot in their more traditional application environments and the other foot largely planted in developing and building some of their newer applications built on cloud native technologies and architectures driven by containers and Kubernetes, you know, a big focus area for customers, whether it's on-prem or in cloud or increasingly hybrid is, you know, supporting and enabling those cloud native application development projects. And that's certainly an area that you've seen Pure focus in as well. And so I think it's really those three things. One is customers looking for ways to bring more of the cloud model into their data center, two is being able to bring more of what they're running in their data center into the cloud today, and then three is building their new stuff and increasingly planning to run that across multiple environments, prem, cloud, and across clouds. >> So, Rob, talk to me about where Pure fits in the hybrid cloud landscape that your customers are facing in this interesting time we're living in. >> Yeah, absolutely. You know, we're really focused on meeting customer's needs in all three of the areas that I just articulated and so this starts with bringing more of the cloud operating model into customers' data centers. And, you know, we start by focusing on, you know, automation, simplicity of management, delivering infrastructure as code, a lot of the attributes that customers are used to in a cloud environment. In many ways, as you know, this is a natural evolution of where Pure has been all along. We started by bringing a lot of the consumer-like simplicity into our products and enterprise data centers. And now, we're just kind of expanding that to bring more of the cloud simplicity in. You know, we're also, this is an area where we're working with our public cloud partners such as AWS in embracing their management models. And so you saw, you know, you saw us do this as a storage launch partner for AWS Outposts and that activity is certainly continuing on. So customers that are looking for cloud-like management, whether they want to build that themselves and customize it to their needs or whether they want to simply use cloud providers management plans and extend those onto their premise, have both options to do that. You know, we're also, as you know, very committed to helping customers be able to move or bridge their traditional applications from their data center into the public cloud environments through products like Cloud Block Store. This is an area where we've helped numerous customers, you know, take the existing applications and more importantly, the processes and how the environments are set up and run that they're used to running in their data center production environments bridge those now into public cloud environments. And whether that's in AWS or in Microsoft Azure as well. And then thirdly with Portworx, right? This is where, you know, we're really focused on helping customers, not just by providing them with the infrastructure they need to build their containerized cloud native applications on, but then also marrying with that infrastructure, that storage infrastructure, the data flow operations such as backup, TR, migration that go along with that storage infrastructure, as well as now application management capabilities, which we recently announced during our launch event in September with Portworx Data Services. So really a lot of activities going on across the board, but I would say definitely focused on those three key areas that we see customers really looking to crack as they, I would say balance the cloud environments and their data center environments in this hybrid world. >> And I'm curious what you're saying, you know, the focus being on data. >> Customers, you know, definitely recognize the data is their lifeblood is kind of, you know, contains a lot of the, you know, the value that they're looking to extract, whether it's in a competitive advantage, whether it's in better understanding their customers, you know, and or whether it's in product development, faster time to market. I think that, you know, we're definitely seeing more of an elevated realization and appreciation for not just how valuable that it is, but, you know, how much gravity it holds, right? You know, customers that are realizing, "Hey, if I'm collecting all this data in my on-prem location, maybe it's not quite that feasible or sensible to ship all that data into a public cloud environment to process. Maybe I need to kind of look at how I build my hybrid strategy around data being generated here, services living over here, and how do I bridge those two, you know, two locations." I think you add on top of that, you know, newer, I would say realization of security and data governance, data privacy concerns. And that certainly has customers, I think, you know, thinking a lot more intently about, you know, their data management, not just their data collection and data processing and analysis strategy, but their overall data managements, governance, and security strategies. >> Yeah, we've talked a lot about security in this interesting time that we're living in. The threat landscape has changed massively. Ransomware is a household word and it's a matter of when versus if. As customers are looking at these challenges that they're combating, how are you helping them address those data security concerns as they know that, you know, we've got this work from anywhere that's hybrid work environment, that's going to process for probably some time, but that security and ensuring that the data that's driving the revenue chain is secure and accessible, but protected no matter where it is? >> Yeah, absolutely. And I think you said it best when you said it's a matter of when, not if, right? And I think, you know, we're really focused on helping customers plan for and have, you know, plan for it and have a very quick reaction remediation strategy, right? So, you know, customers that I would say historically have focused on perimeter security have focused on preventing an attack, and that's great, and you need to do that, but you also need to plan for, hey, if something happens where, you know, as we just said, when something happens, what is your strategy for remediating that, what is your strategy for getting back online very quickly? And so this is an area where, you know, we've helped countless customers, you know, form robust strategies for, you know, true disaster recovery from a security or ransomware since. We do this by through our safe mode features, which are available across all of our products. And, you know, quite simply, this is our capability to take read-only snapshots and then couple them with a heightened level of security that effectively locks these snapshots down and takes the control of the snapshots away from not just customer admins, but potential ransomware or malware, right? You know, if you look at the most recent ransomware attacks that have hit the industry, they've gotten more and more sophisticated where the first action, a lot of these ransomware pieces of software taking are going after the backups. They go after the backups first and they take down the production environment. Well, we stopped that chain or in the security world what's called the kill chain, we stopped that chain right at the first step by protecting those backups in a way that, you know, no customer admin, whether it's a true admin, a malicious admin, or a piece of software, a malware that's acting as an admin, has the ability to remove that backup. And, you know, that's a capability that's actually become one of our most popular and most quickly adopted features across the portfolio. >> That's key. I saw that. I was reading some reports recently about the focus of ransomware on backups and the fact that you talked about it, it's becoming more sophisticated. It's also becoming more personal. So as data volumes continue to grow and companies continue to depend on data as competitive advantage differentiators and, of course, a source of driving revenue, ensuring that the backups are protected, and the ability to recover quickly is there is that is table stakes, I imagine for any organization, regardless of industry. >> Absolutely, and I think, you know, I think overall, if we look at just the state of data protection, whether it's protecting against security threats or whether it's protecting against, you know, infrastructure failures or whatnot, I would say that the state of data protection has evolved considerably over the last five years, right? You go back 5, 10 years and people are really fixated on, "Hey, how quickly can I back here? How quickly can I back this environment up, and how can I do it in a most cost-effective manner?" Now people are much more focused on, "Hey, when something goes wrong, whether it's a ransomware attack, whether it's a hurricane that takes out a data center, I don't really care what it is." When something goes wrong, how quickly can I get back online because chances are, you know, every customer now is running an online service, right? Chances are, you've got customers waiting for you. You've got SLAs, you've got transactions that can't complete if you don't get this environment back up. And we've seen this, you know, throughout the industry over the last couple of years. And so, you know, I think that maturing understanding of what true data protection is is something that has A, driven, you know, a new approach from customers to and a new focus on this area of their infrastructure. And B I think it is also, you know, found a new place for, you know, performance and reliability, but really all of it, the properties of, you know, Pures products in this space. >> Last question, Rob, for you, give me an example, you can just mention it by industry or even by use case of a joint AWS Pure customer where you're really helping them create a very successful enterprise-grade hybrid cloud environment? >> Yeah, no, absolutely. You know, so we've got countless customers that, you know, I could point to. You know, I think one that I would or one space that we're particularly successful in that I would highlight are, you know, SAS companies, right? So companies that are, you know, are building modern SAS applications. And in one particular example I can think of is, you know, a gaming platform, right? So this is a company that is building out a scale-out environment, you know, is a very rapidly growing startup. And certainly is looking to AWS, looking to the public cloud environments, you know, as a great place to scale. But at the same time, you know, needs more capabilities than, you know, are available in the container storage for, you know, infrastructure that was available in the public cloud environment. They need more capabilities to be able to offer this global service. They need more capabilities to, you know, really provide the 24 by 7 by 365 around the world service that they have, especially dealing with high load bursts in different GEOS and just a very, very dynamic global environment. And so this is an area where, you know, we've been able to, you know, help the customer with Portworx. Be able to provide these capabilities by augmenting that AWS or the cloud environment is able to offer, you know, with the storage level replication and high availability and all of the enterprise capabilities, autoscaling, performance management, all the capabilities that they need to be able to bridge the service across multiple regions, multiple environments, and, you know, potentially over time, you know, on-premise data center locations as well. So that's just one of many examples, you know, but I think that's a great example where, you know, as customers are starting out, the public cloud is a great place to kind of get started. But then as you scale, whether it's because of bursty load, whether it's because of a data volume, whether it's because of compute volume and capacity, you know, customers are looking for either more capabilities, you know, more connectivity to other sites, potentially other cloud environments or data center environments. And that's where a more environment or cloud agnostic infrastructure layer such as Portworx is able to provide comes in very handy. >> Got it. Rob, thanks so much for joining me on the program today at re:Invent, talking about the Pure AWS relationship, what's going on there and how you're helping customers navigate, and then a very fast-paced, accelerating hybrid world. We appreciate you coming back on the program. >> Great, thanks for having me. Good to see you again. >> Likewise. Good to see you too. Per Rob Lee, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBES continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. (calm music)

(upbeat introductory music) >> Welcome back to VMworld 2021. My name is Dave Vellante and right now we're going to talk to one of VMware's partners and unpack how containers and cloud native development processes and tools are changing the way we think about managing storage. And specifically, we're going to dig into the partnership between VMware and Portworx company acquired by Pure Storage last September. And with me is Michael Ferranti, who's a senior director of product marketing at Portworx, which as said, is now part of Pure Storage. Michael, welcome back to theCUBE. Good to see you again. >> Hey, great to be here. Thanks for having me. >> Now, Michael, if you're in storage, you got to partner with VMware. So that's always been an important relationship for Pure, and of course that's carried over to Portworx, but how does Portworx work with VMware? Where does it fit within the VMware ecosystem? And, and, you know, what's your point of view on, on VMware's Kubernetes play? We'll, we'll come back to that, but, but how do you fit in? >> How do we fit in yet? Yeah, that's a great question. So, you know, customers who are building modern applications are often doing it on Kubernetes platforms and VM-ware has a fantastic Kubernetes platform with Tansu and, you know, customers when they run applications that have data on Kubernetes, they have certain requirements around data protection around data security, data mobility, and Portworx has a platform that solves those problems for customers on any Kubernetes platform in regardless of infrastructure. So, so a VMware customer is saying, you know what? I love the idea of being able to run Tansu across my on-prem data center and my cloud footprint. And I want to move my databases, or between those environments, or, you know, maybe just make a backup of my database and put it in the cloud. Well, when they add Portworx into their Tansu environment, they get the ability to do those types of things, data protection, data mobility. And so we help customers expand their Tansu footprint by solving the requirements that come along with modern applications. >> Yeah. And that's important because as we've covered extensively in theCUBE in the early days of containers, well containers have been around forever, but the, the early days of modern containers, if you will, you know, the applications, the data was a femoral kind of throw away if you will, but, but over time it's become more, more stateful requiring better security and governance and recovery. And the like, so Michael, what's your point of view on VMware's Kubernete play, you talked about Tansu, it's a big part of the strategy. It's an ongoing topic of conversation in the community and there's other solutions of course, like OpenShift, which, which also runs on VMware. What's your perspective on VMware's progression? How they're innovating with Kubernetes orchestration specifically? >> Well, I think VMware is making a lot of smart moves and you know, other players on the market should not buy a discount. I think, you know, there's a lot of interest in Tansu and, you know, we're having conversations and we're kind of expanding our relationship with VMware to solve a broader swath of those use cases. So I think it's going to be a compelling offer in the market. That's what makes this ecosystem so fun is that there is, you know, there are multiple, there are multiple solutions from the cloud providers, from the kind of independent kind of non-cloud associated platform vendors like VMware or Red Hat, but that makes it really exciting. >> Let's back up a bit, maybe talk about some of the big picture trends and maybe some of the challenges. Portworx. You were early on in the management of storage for containers. And I got to say you personally, and I mean that, you created a new distribution channel through developers and dev-op teams who, they became really influential in storage decisions, which they never were before. >> Yep. >> That's a completely new dynamic. So maybe talk about the evolution of storage for containers that you've witnessed. Where do we come from? Where are we today and where are we headed? >> Yeah, I mean, what's interesting is that so on a certain level, what works is a storage, a storage solution for containers. In fact, don't call us the gold standard of Kubernetes storage, really proud of that. Love any time someone calls you a gold standard, but here's the thing, are the people that buy Portworx don't typically buy storage, these are platform, architects, they're dev-ops engineers, and what they need is they need to consume storage the same way that they needed to consume, compute in network, but they're not storage administrators. And so what Portworx did, and other companies in the ecosystem is they've given an API driven self-service experience or what were classically ticket based infrastructure of purchases. And that has accelerated developer's ability to, to build and run applications. And especially with Kubernetes, being able to orchestrate that. And I think now, even within the VMware ecosystem where VMware clearly has strong relationships with the typical infrastructure buyers, but now those infrastructure buyers are seeing what their, what their dev-ops peers are doing. And they're saying, "Hey, we want that too. We want API driven. We want self-service, we don't like tickets anymore than you do." And so being able to kind of solve enterprise level requirements on whether it's around data protection or data security, but in our model that that allows for self-service in, in API driven-ness, that's not a word, really opens up a lot of possibilities. And I think in some ways it's a self-fulfilling prophecy because when you can solve enterprise level requirements, but also provide agility, then people want as much of it as you can possibly provide them. >> So that, that dev-ops mindset that train has left the station. It's got a lot of momentum. It's not, we're not going to flip that. So what happens in your view to the role of that storage admin that you talk about this, he or she does it that they widened their scope? Does that, does their activities, does it evolve? Does there go away? Did they become, did they become ops-dev pros? How do you see that? >> Yeah, it's a, it's a great, it's a great question. And we've been thinking a lot about this. We actually have a new product out called Portworx Data Services. And what it is is it's a database as a service platform for Kubernetes. So imagine you're running Portworx on top of, on top of Tansu and what your, what your company wants to do, what IT wants to do, is provide a service catalog to developers internally, where they can click a button and have an elastic search cluster, or click a button and, you know, Postgres database, what now these storage administrators can actually become a SRES, which is kind of, you know, that's, that's what we call these really senior dev-ops engineers at places like Google and Twitter and Uber, where you're actually responsible for using code and software to run applications. And so with services like PDS there, those individuals can, can uplevel their value within the organization and provide a bigger impact. >> Yeah, I love that. So they're going from basically pulling tickets, you know, putting out fires, dealing with paper cuts to actually having a much more strategic role within the organization. >> Exactly. From infrastructure to applications. I mean, applications is where the business value always is, and you need agile infrastructure in order to run agile applications. But if you only solve, if you only have agile infrastructure, then you still haven't solved a business problem and PDS is enabling our customers to solve those real business problems. >> Well, that leads me into my next question, because a lot of organizations of course have renewed their focus on digital drive. Every organization has, has no choice if you're not digital business, you're out of business. But, but what I mean there is we were kind of forced into digital last year and, and now organizations are stepping back and they're being more planful. So there's an emphasis on modernizing infrastructure and applications. What's the role that you see of Kubernetes and VMs in that shift to modernizing the, the infrastructure apps and the business? >> Yeah. And so what we saw in the pandemic is companies that had to do more with less. And despite that those that adopted Kubernetes were able to accelerate application development, they were able to scale their applications faster. In fact, we have one customer, Roblox, a massively popular online gaming platform for kind of, you know, a tween age kids. They actually IPO-D during the pandemic in the first week that kind of that March timeframe, the beginning of the pandemic, they scaled in a single month, what they had scaled in the entire previous year. And the only way they were able to do that was with these modern architectures. So companies have had firsthand experience saying, okay, when we, when we build cloud native, when we use microservices, when we use Kubernetes, we can scale faster, we can get to the market quicker. And so let's keep those learnings and let's accelerate them. And so, you know, the reason we're doing a pure validated design with, with, with Tansu and Portworx is to help the VMware ecosystem take advantage as well of those modern architectures so that they can get the benefits, not just of the agile infrastructure stack provided by VMware, but also the, the applications here that goes along with it. >> So, I mean, you made the point before, it's all about the applications and take that further. It's all about the, the value that you, the time to value that you can get out of deploying applications. So based on what you just said about those with, versus those without, during the pandemic, that begs the question, why wouldn't everybody have done that? So the question is what are the biggest challenges that you're seeing in terms of adopting and deploying Kubernetes in production? >> Yeah. So actually I have some data that I can share on us. We just did a survey of 500 IT pros across the US and UK with significant knowledge of their company's Kubernetes strategy who are currently running data services on Kubernetes. And so we asked them, "how's that going for you?" And what they told us is basically what I, what I just said earlier that they're 55% can get apps to market faster. 50% of their developers are more, more efficient. And actually a third of those say in addition, we're actually able to reduce our, our IT infrastructure costs. But why? Why isn't everybody doing it? And as we ask those questions and they're struggling with business requirements around backup and recovery, data mobility, data security. And I think that is that's the missing piece, which is when you can figure it out. And, you know, if you're Uber or you're, you know, you're Facebook, you can hire engineers to figure anything out, right? Given enough time and budget, you can solve anything with computers, but for the vast majority of organizations, they need a solution to enable them to have the same outcomes as the companies who can build everything themselves. And so with, you know, with Portworx Data Services by, by adding Portworx into your Tansu environment, you actually get kind of quote unquote for free, a lot of those business requirements that are, that are holding back enterprise adoption of critical applications within the Kubernetes ecosystem. And as a result, then you can accelerate a larger portion of your application portfolio. >> Hey Michael, so one of the good things about virtual events, particularly VMworld, is you don't have to fly out on a Saturday, a Sunday and come back on a Friday. The flip side of that is you don't get the hallway track, you know, so it's an awesome event. It really kind of kicks off the fall season. So help the audience. What are you looking for at VMworld 2021 that's relevant to your space? >> Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, I'm interested in anything that really kind of, you know, helps customers figure out how to really embrace hybrid and multi-cloud. I mean, it feels a little bit like it's, it's the infrastructure week of the political world that it's all, we're always talking about it, but it's never happening, but I'm actually seeing a lot of, a lot of movement to suggest both in our own customer base as well on new products that are coming to market that are really helping customers take advantage of this multi and hybrid cloud world. So I think it's really happening. So I'm looking for announcements around that. I'm also always interested in security because I think, you know, the online world is just a more and more dangerous place every day, whether it's ransom ware attacks or other more traditional security threats. And so I think, you know, as a community, we need to figure out ways in which we can both enable customers to move faster, deliver apps more quickly, scale them more quickly, but also make them more secure. And that's why it was really hard to see on our survey that when people apply automation through platforms like Tansu or Kubernetes more broadly, that they actually get security benefits in addition to kind of the, you know, the scale and the productivity benefits. So I'm looking for more announcements to come out on that front as well. >> If I could follow up on that, because historically the more secure you are, the less flexibility you have, the reverse is true. The more flexibility you give users, the less secure they are. Now, I'm hearing that that may not apply in the case of, well, actually, probably the answer is it probably does apply in the case of Kubernetes and containers, but that's why they need Portworx. But, but square that circle for me, because. >> Yeah, so it, there is usually a trade-off it's, you know, we really value security, so we're going to slow down and we're going, going to take a very, you know, progressive approach to rolling out changes to securing access, to limiting, you know, who can have access to data, et cetera. The, the flip side is, you know, it's move fast and break things, kind of the mantra of Silicon valley, which, you know, you, you say that to a financial institution on the east coast, and they're going to kind of roll your eyes and say, "what are you smoking?" So I, there is a way to solve it and computers are, can, can take the very, very deliberate approach except they do it extremely fast. So it doesn't look as deliberate. So basically what I'm saying is you can build in security best practices, but then use fleets of servers to run all of those checks, to make sure that the person who is trying to access the system is the one in my enterprise off system that should be able to access that system. And so you can basically get manual people-based checks out of the way, because you're leveraging automation that is doing those tests. It's not like we're, we're, we're letting things be open. It's just, we're leveraging computers or the things that they're really good at. And that's how you square that circle, which automation enables you to put in place more checks than you can do manually, but they happen a lot faster. And so you end up getting the best of both worlds and kind of breaking this longstanding tension between agility and security. >> And in a key linchpin of that, I'm assuming is APIs that allow you to connect to whatever the best of breed, identity governance and access management system you want to use. >> Exactly. So we have one example is we have Key-X Secure. So this is all about role based access controls and encryption for your mission, critical data that's running on convenience. Well, we have APIs for that and we, and, you know, we build it into things like Portworx Data Services. And build it into things like our storage boxes. So all a dev-ops engineer has to do is say, yeah, I want this app to be secure, meaning encrypted, and that's going to follow my role based access controls that I'm defining in my corporate off system. And then it's automatically applied. That's really, the key is something is only secured if you actually do it. And a lot of times, because it's so cumbersome, either developers look for work-arounds, or they just, they basically don't do it. It gets bolted on at the end. The kind of phrase of art within the security shift left bring more of that stuff earlier. But I think it applies not just to security, but also to data protection, to data mobility. Let's build all of that stuff in right from the beginning. And that's one of the big design principles of Portworx. >> One of the discussions we're always having is, okay, we've seen this rapid shift to digital. This has so many ripple effects what's permanent. So what are the big changes or trends that you think are going to be permanent or will dominate not just VMworld this year, but, but the themes for the coming years. >> Yeah. So what genies are out of the bottle, and I think a big one is just from an architectural perspective, this new to microservices. I mean, it just, it makes so much sense for so many reasons. You know, how often do we, any of us get a maintenance notification anymore from a consumer service that we got, we use, whether it's, you know, restaurant delivery, whether it's, you know, streaming, whether it's even, you know, you know, health, a health app that we're using, we don't, but that's very common in the enterprise that you would shut down. You know, the ERP system for, you know, three days, you know, every six months to do an update. So that stuff is going away. And the way in which we no longer have to issue those notifications is we have microservices that can be independently updated that can use kind of specialized tooling. That makes sense for the job. So I have an app that really needs the indexing capabilities of elastic search. Versus I have an app that needs the very quiet, fast data processing of the Santra. And so the development teams can be more independent for one another, have less dependencies develop applications faster and get those products to market faster. And I think the, the pandemic has demonstrated how, you know, I'll say Amazon wasn't successful because of the pandemic. And a lot of people say, oh, well, of course they sell online. So this pandemic was a boom for them. Well, they actually created architectures that were able to withstand the massive increase in demand that they got. Our customer Roblox is another example. If they did not have those, those same, those architectures that enable them to scale at those levels, then I, you know, Roblox wouldn't have been able to IPO because they would've just been a story about everybody wanted to play Roblox, the website crashed. End of story. So it's about building architectures that allow you to take advantage of this movement towards digital. And I don't think that's going away, but this is where the solutions like Tansu come in, you know, folks don't know how to do it. And they need platforms that make it easy. They need platforms that enable them to secure their data, to make it available, to protect it. And so, you know, combinations of like, Portworx and Tansu really solve some of the issues that come up in this, this shift to microservices. >> Michael, great stuff, really appreciate your perspectives. And thanks for coming back on theCUBE. >> Yeah, my pleasure anytime. And hopefully we'll be able to do it in person one of these days. >> I hope so. All right. Hey, thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante. You're watching the continuous coverage of theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2021. Keep it right there. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)

(electronic music) >> The cloud is evolving. You know, it's no longer just a set of remote services accessed through a public cloud. Rather, it's expanding to on-premises, to multiple premises, across clouds, and eventually out to the edge. The challenge for customers is how to treat these locations as one. The opportunity for technology companies is to make that as simple as possible from an operational perspective. Welcome to this CUBE program where we're featuring Pure Storage in its latest innovations in bringing infrastructure and applications more closely together, fusing them, if you will. And today, we have a two-part program. First, we're going to hear from Rob Lee who's the CTO of Pure Storage and then my colleague John Walls is going to talk to Scott Sinclair of Enterprise Strategy Group. Scott will provide his expert analysis on infrastructure modernization and what to expect in today's changing world. So joining me right now is Rob Lee, CTO of Pure Storage. Welcome, Rob, good to see you. >> Good to see you again too, Dave. >> So take us through the announcements from today at a high level. What's most exciting about what you're delivering? >> Yeah, absolutely. So as you know, many announcement today, many things to discuss. But overall, I think what's most exciting is it's the expansion of our ability to help customers along the modern data journey. We've always thought of the journey to modern data as being formed by three pillars, if you will, certainly, modernizing infrastructure, modernizing operations and applications. And today's announcements are really in that kind of middle category of, like you said, bringing infrastructures and applications a lot more closely together. We've been modernizing infrastructure since day one, probably, people best know us for that and today's announcements are really about tackling that operations piece, bringing infrastructure and code and applications more closely together. So when we think about Pure Fusion, for example, that's really a huge step forward in how we're enabling our customers to manage large fleets of infrastructure, products, and components to deliver those services in a more automated, more tightly-integrated, seamlessly transparently delivered way to the applications that they serve, whether these services are being delivered by many different arrays in one location, many different arrays in different data center locations, or between the premise, on-premise environment and the cloud environment. Likewise, on the application front, when we think about today's announcements in Portworx Data Services, that's really all about how do we make the run and operate steps of a lot of the application building blocks that cloud-native developers are using and relying on, the database applications that are most poplar in open source, Cassandra, Mongo, so on and so forth, how dow we make the run and operate pieces of those applications a lot more intuitive, a lot more easily deployed, scaled, managed, monitored for those app developers? And so a ton of momentum. It's a big step forward on that front. And then right in the middle, when we think about today's announcements in Pure One, that's really all about how do we create more visibility, connecting the monitoring and management of the infrastructure running the apps and bring those closer together? So when we think about the visibility, we're now able to deliver for Portworx topologies allowing developers and DevOps teams to look at the entire tech stack, if you will, of a container environment from the application to the containers, to the Kubernetes cluster, to the compute nodes, all the way down to the storage, and be able to see everything that's going on, the root cause of any sort of problems that come up, that again, that's all in service of bringing infrastructure and applications a lot more closely together. So that's really how I view it and like I said, that's really the next step in our journey of helping customers modernize between infrastructure, operations, and their applications. >> Okay, so you got the control plane piece which is all about the operating model, you've got Pure One, you mentioned that which is for monitoring, you've got the Portworx piece which brings sort of development and deployment together in both infrastructure as code and better understanding of that full stack of, like you say, from applications through the clusters, the containers, all the way down to the storage. So I feel like it's not even the storage anymore. I mean, it's cloud. (chuckling) >> It is and you know, I chuckle a little bit because at the end of the day, we deliver storage but what customers are looking for is, and what they value and what they care about is their data. Now obviously, the storage is in service of the data and what we're doing with today's announcements is, again, just making it, extending our reach, helping customers work with their data a couple more steps down the road beyond just serving the bits and bytes of the storage but now getting into how do we connect the data that's sitting on our storage more quickly, get it, you know, in the hands of developers and the applications more seamlessly and more fluidly across these different environments. >> How does this news fit into Pure's evolution as a company? I mean, I don't see it as a pivot because a pivot's like, okay, we're going to go from here and now we're doin' this? >> Rob: Yeah, we were doing this, now we're doing that, right. >> And so it's more like a reinvention or a progression of the vision and the strategy. Can you talk to that? >> Absolutely. You know what, I think between those two words, I would say it's a progression, it's a next step in the journey as opposed to a reinvention. And again, I go back to, you know, I go back to the difference between storage and data and how customers are using data. We've been on a long-term path, long-term journey to continue to help customers modernize how they work with data, the results they're able to drive from the data. We got our start in infrastructure and just, you know, if you want to do bleeding edge things with data, you're not going to do it on decades-old infrastructure. So let's fix that component first, that's how we got our start. Today's announcement are really the next couple of steps along that journey. How do we make the core infrastructure more easily delivered, more flexible to operate, more automated in the hands of not just the DevOps teams, the IT teams, but the application developers? How do we deliver infrastructure more seamlessly as code? Well, why is that important? It's important because what customers are looking for out of their data is both speeds and feeds, the traditional kind of measures, bandwidth, iOps, latency, that sort of thing, but they're looking for speed of agility. You look at the modern application space around how data's being processed, it's a very, very fast-moving application space. The databases that are being used today may be different than the ones being used three months from now or six months from now. And so developers, application teams are looking for a ton more flexibility, a ton more agility than they were three, five, 10, 15 years ago. The other aspect is simplicity and reliability. As you know, that's a core component of everything we do. Our core products, you know, our arrays, our storage appliances, we're very well-known for the simplicity and reliability we drive at the individual product level. Well, as we scale and look at larger environments, as we look at customers' expectations for what they expect from a cloud-like service, there's the next level of scale and how we deliver that simplicity and reliability. And what do I mean by that? Well, a large enterprise customer who wants to operate like a cloud, wants to be able to manage large fleets of infrastructure resources, be able to package them up, deliver infrastructure services to their internal customers, they want to be able to do it in a self-service, policy-driven, easy to control, easy to manage way and that's the next level of fleet level simplicity and that's really what Pure Fusion is about is allowing operators that control plane to specify those attributes and how that service should be delivered. Same thing with Portworx, if we think about simplicity and reliability, containers, cloud-native applications, micro services, a lot of benefits there. A very fast-moving space, you can mix and match components, put them together very easily, but what goes hand in hand with that is now a need for a greater degree of simplicity 'cause you have more moving parts, and a greater need for reliability because, well now, you're not just serving one application but 30 or 40 working in unison. And that's really what we're after with Portworx and Portworx Data Services and the evolution of that family. So getting back to your original question, I really look at today's announcements as not a pivot, not a reinvention, but the next logical steps in our long-term journey to help customers modernize everything they do around data. >> Right, thanks for that, Rob. Hey, I want to switch topics. So virtually every infrastructure player now has an as-a-service offering and there're lots of claims out there about who was first, who's the best, et cetera. What's Pure's position on this topic? You claim you're ahead of the pack in delivering subscription and as-a-service offerings in the storage industry. You certainly were first with Evergreen. That was sort of a real change in how folks delivered. What about as-a-service and Pure as-a-service? What gives you confidence that you have the right approach and you're lead in the industry in this regard? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think of, first and foremost, we think of everything we do at Pure as a service and whether that's delivering products and helping customers to run and operate in an as-a-service model internally, or whether it's Pure taking on more of that run and operate as-a-service, ourselves, with Pure as a service. And so the second part of your question which is what is it that sets us apart, what are we doing differently, what gives us confidence that this is the right path, well, fundamentally, I think the difference is obviously this is a, you know, a hotter topic in the industry of late, but I think the difference is between us and the competitive set is we really look at this as a product and technology-led philosophy and strategy and we have since day one. And I think that's different than a lot of others in the industry who look at it as a little bit more of a packaging exercise between financial services, professional services, wrap it up in T(s) and C(s) and you call it a service. And what do I mean by that? So, you know, if you look internally at Pure, everything we do we think of as a service. We have a business unit organized around it, we have an engineering team, significant resources dedicated to it and building out service offerings. When we think about why this is technology-led, I think of a service. For something to be thought of as a service, it's got to be flexible, it's got to be adaptable. I've got to be able to grow as a customer and evolve as I need, whether that's changing needs in terms of performance and capacity, I've got to be able to do that without being locked into day-one, rigid kind of static some lands of having the capacity planned or plan out what my user's going to look like 18 months from now. I've got to be able to move and evolve and grow without disruption, right? You know, it's not a service if you're going to make me do a data migration or take a down time. And so when I net all that out, what are the things that you need the attributes that you need to be able to deliver a service? Well, you need a product set that is going to be able to be highly malleable, highly flexible, highly evolvable. You need something that's going to be able to cover the entire gamut of needs, whether it's price performance, tiers, you know, high performance capacity, lower cost, price points. You need something that's got a rich set of capabilities whether it's access protocols, file block object, whether it's data protection properties, you know, replications, snapshots, ransomware protection. So you need that full suite of capabilities but in order to deliver it as a service and enable me, as a customer, to seamlessly grow and change, that's got to be delivered on a very tight set of technology that can be repurposed and configured in different ways. You can't do this on 17 different products (chuckling) and expect me to change and move every single time that I have a service need change. And so when I net that out, that puts us in an absolutely differentiated position to be able to deliver this because again, everything we do is based on two core product families, Portworx adds a third. We're able to deliver all of the major storage protocols, all of the data protection capabilities across all of the price performance and service tiers, and we're able to do this on a very tight code base. And as you know, everything we do is completely non-disruptive so all of the elements really add up in our favor. And like I said, this is a huge area of a strategic focus for us. >> So these offerings, they're all part of the service-driven component of your portfolio, is that correct? >> Absolutely, yep. >> Great. You talk all the time about modern data experiences, modern application, the modern data changing the way customers think about infrastructure. What exactly does that mean and how are you driving that? >> Well, I think it means a couple of different things, but if I were to net it out, it's a greater demand for agility, a greater demand for flexibility and optionality. And if we look at why that is, you know, when I talk to customers, as they think about an infrastructure, largely, they think about their existing application demands and needs, what they're spending 90% of their time and budget dealing with today, and then the new stuff that they're getting more and more pressured to go off and build and support which is oftentimes the more strategic initiatives that they have to serve, so they're kind of balancing both worlds. And in the new world of modern applications, it's much more dynamic, meaning the application sets that are being deployed are changing all the time, the environments and what the infrastructure needs to deliver has to change more quickly in terms of scaling up, down, growing, it has to be a lot more elastic, and has much more variance. And what I mean by that is you look at a modern, cloud-native, micro services architecture-type application, it's really, you know, 20, 30, 40 different applications all working in concert with one another under the hood. This is a very different infrastructure demand than your more traditional application set. Back in the day, you have an Oracle application, you go design an environment for that. It's a big exercise, but once you put it in place, it has its own lifecycle. These days with modern applications, it's not just one application, it's 20 or 30, you've got to support all of them working in unison, you don't want to build separate infrastructures for each piece, and that set of 20 or 30 applications is changing very rapidly as open source ecosystem moves forward, as the application space moves forward. And so when customers think about the change in demands and infrastructure, this is kind of what they're thinking about and having to juggle. And so that, at the end of the day, drives them to demand much more flexibility in their infrastructure being able to use it for many different purposes, much more agility being able to adapt very, very quickly, and much more variance or dynamic range, the ability to support many different needs on the same set of infrastructure. And this is where we see very, very strong demand indicators and we're very invested in meeting these needs because they fit very well with our core product principles. >> Great, thank you for that. I really like that answer because it's not just a bunch of slideware mumbo-jumbo. You actually put some substance on it. Rob, we're going to have to leave it there. Thanks so much for joining us today. >> Thank you. >> And look forward to havin' you back soon. Now, in a moment, Scott Sinclair who's a senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group speaks with theCUBE's John Walls to give you the independent analyst's take. You're watching theCUBE, your global leader in high tech coverage. (techno music) >> Agility is what all digital organizations strive for, and for almost the entirety of the enterprise storage industry, agility and storage aren't words you'd often hear together. Since the founding of Pure Storage, we've been laser focused on taking what's painful about traditional enterprise storage and making it better. We imagined a world where consumers self-service the provisioning of their storage resources to match the performance and data protection capabilities that their applications require. No endless back and forth between application owners and storage teams, just true on-demand self-service. At the same time, imagine all of the complex storage management operations required to make this possible being automated through software. From the placement of the initial workload to storage adjusting with the unpredictable needs of an application and seamlessly migrating and rebalancing the fleet as needed, all with zero down time and no manual intervention. And finally, imagine almost limitless scale that adjusts to meet your business' data management needs over time. This is what we believe the future of enterprise storage looks like. >> Today, we are announcing Pure Fusion, a leap forward in enterprise storage, marrying the best parts of the public cloud with the storage experience and capabilities you've come to expect from Pure. By bringing the simplicity and scalability of the cloud operating model with on-demand consumption and automated provisioning, organizations can deliver an enterprise-grade managed, self-service storage model that unifies fleets of arrays and optimizes storage pulls on the fly. End users will be able to rapidly consume volumes, file systems, and advanced data services like replication without waiting for backend manual work making storage hardware truly invisible. And organizations will be able to scale seamlessly across block, file, and object workloads, leveraging the power of the entire Pure Storage family, including FlashArray, Pure Cloud Block Store, FlashBlade, and Portworx. (electronic music) >> It is time to take a look at what Pure's up to from a slightly different perspective. To help us do that is Scott Sinclair who's a senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group. And Scott, thanks for joining us here, on theCUBE. Good to see ya today. >> Great to see you. >> All right, so let's jump into this. First, we'll get to the announcement in just a little bit. First off, in terms of Pure's strategy, as you've been watching this company evolve over years now, how has it evolved? And then we'll go to the announcements and how that fits into the strategy. But first off, let's just take them from your point of view where have they been and how are they doin'? >> You know, many people know of Pure or maybe they don't know of their history as an all-Flash array. I think Pure has always been, ever since they entered the IT industry as a pioneer, they're one of the early ones that said look, we're going all in on the all-Flash array business and a focus on Flash technology. Then they were early pioneers in things like Evergreen and things like storage-as-a-service capabilities for on-premises storage. And the entire time, they've had a really almost streamline focus on ease of use which, you know, from the outside, I think everyone talks about ease of use and making things simple for IT, but Pure has really made that almost like core as part of not only their product and their design but also part of their culture. And one of the things, and we'll get into this a little bit as we talk about the announcements, but, you know, if you look at these announcements and where Pure's going, they're trying to expand that culture, that DNA around ease of use or simplicity, and expanding it beyond just storage or IT operations, and really trying to see okay, how do we make the entire digital initiative process or the larger IT operations journey simpler. And I think that's part of where Pure is going is not just storage but focusing more on apps, operations, and data, and making it easier for the entire experience. >> So how do the announcements we're talking about, well, there're three phases here, and again, we'll unpack those separately, but in general, how do the announcements then, you think, fit into that strategy and fit into their view and your view, really, of the market trends? >> I think one of the big trends is, you know, IT in terms for most businesses is, it's not just an enabler anymore. IT's actually in the driver's seat. We see in our research at ESGU, we just did this study and I'm going to glance over my notes as I'm kind of talking, but we see one of the things is more than half of businesses are identifying some portion of their revenue is coming from digital products or digital services. So data is part of the revenue chain for a majority of organizations according to what we're seeing in our research. And so what that does is it puts IT right in that core, you know, that core delivery model of where the faster IT can operate, the faster organizations can realize these revenues opportunities. So what is that doing to IT organizations? Well first off, it makes their life a lot harder, it makes demands continue to increase. But also, this old adage or this old narrative that IT's about availability, it's about resiliency, it's about keeping the lights on and ensuring that the business doesn't go down, well none of that goes away. But now, IT organizations are being measured on their ability to accelerate operations. And in this world where everything's becoming more, you know, more complex, there're more demands, organizations are becoming more distributed, application demands are becoming more diverse and they're growing in breadth. All of this means that more pressure is falling not only on the IT operations but also on the infrastructure providers like Pure Storage to step up and make things even simpler with things like automation and simplification which, you know, we're going to talk about, but to help accelerate those operations. >> Yeah, I mean, if you're DevOps these days, I mean, and you're talkin' about kind of these quandaries that people are in, but what are these specific challenges do you think, on the enterprise level here, that Pure is addressing? >> Well so for example, you talked about developers and driving into that in particular, I want to say let's see, glance at my notes here, about two-thirds of organizations say they're under pressure to accelerate IT initiatives due to pressures specifically from DevOps teams as well as line of business teams. So what does that mean? It means that as organizations build up and try to accelerate either their revenue creation via the creation of software or products, or things of that, that drive, that support a DevOps team, maybe it's improving customer experience for example, as well as other line of business teams such as analytics and trying to provide better insights and better decision making off of data, what that means is this traditional process of IT operations of where you submit a trouble ticket and then it takes, after a few days, something happens and they start doing analysis in terms of basically what ends up being multiple days or multiple weeks, to end up to basically provision storage, it just takes too long. And so in these announcements what we're seeing is Pure delivering solutions that are all about automating the backend services and delivering storage in a way that is designed to be easily and quickly consumed by the new consumers of IT, the developers, the line of business teams via APIs where you can write to a standard API and it goes across basically lots of different technologies and happens very quickly where a lot of the backend processes are automated, and essentially, making the storage invisible to these new consumers. And all of that just delivers value because what these groups are doing is now they can access and get the resources that they need and they don't have to know about what's happening behind the scenes which, candidly, they don't really know much about, right now, and they don't really care. >> Right. (chuckling) That's right. Yeah, what I don't see, what I don't know won't hurt me. And it can, as we know, it can. So let's look at the announcements. Pure Fusion, I think we were hearing about that just a little bit before, earlier in the interview that Dave was conducting, but let's talk about Pure Fusion and your thoughts on that. >> Pure Fusion is what I was talking about a little bit where they're abstracting a lot of the storage capabilities and presenting it as an API, a consistent API that allows developers to provision things very quickly and where a lot of the backend services are automated and, you know, essentially invisible to the developer. And that is, I mean, it addresses where, you know, I kind of talk about this with some of the data that we just, you know, some of our research stats that we just discussed, but it's where a lot of organizations are going. The bottom line is, we used to, in a world where IT services weren't growing as fast and where everything had to be resilient and available, you could put a lot of personnel power or personal hours focused on okay, making sure every box and everything was checked prior to doing a new implementation.and all that was designed to reduce risk and possibly optimize the environment and reduce cost. Now in this world of acceleration what we've seen is organizations need faster responsiveness from the IT organization. Well that's all well and good, but the problem is it's difficult to do all those backend processes and make sure that data's fully being protected or making sure that everything is happening behind the scenes the way it should be. And so this is, again, just mounting more and more pressure. So with things like Pure Fusion what they're doing is they're essentially automating a lot of that on the backend and really simplifying it and making it so storage, or IT administrators can provide access to their line of business, to development teams to leverage infrastructure a lot faster while still ensuring that all those backend services, all those operations still happen. Portworx Data Services also announced and we're hearing it from Dave, for that perspective may be a game-changer in terms of storage. So your take on that and Portworx? >> You know, I really like Portworx. I've been following them ever since prior to the acquisition. One of the things that they were very early on is understanding the impact of micro services on the industry and really, the importance of designing infrastructure around for that environment. I think what they're doing around data services is really intriguing. I think it's really intriguing, first off, for Pure as a company because it elevates their visibility to a new audience and a new persona that may not have been familiar with them. As organizations are looking at, you know, one of the things that they're doing with this data services is essentially delivering a database-as-a-service platform where you can go provision and stand up databases very quickly and again, similar to we talked about fusion, a lot of those backend processes are automated. Really fascinating, again, aligns directly with this acceleration need that we talked about. So, you know, a huge value, but it's really fascinating for Pure because it opens them up to, you know, hey, there's this whole new world of possible consumers that where they're, that they can get experience to really, the ease of use that Pure is known for a lot of the capabilities that Portworx is known for, but also just increase really the value that Pure is able to deliver to some of these modern enterprises. >> And just to add, briefly, on the enhancements that Pure One also being announced today. Your take on those? >> I like that as well. I think one of the things if I kind of go through the list is a lot of insights and intelligence in terms of new app, sizing applications for the environment if I remember correctly, and more, you know, better capabilities to help ensure that your environment is optimized which candidly is a top challenge around IT organizations. We talk about, again, I keep hitting on this need to move faster, faster, faster. One of the big disconnects that we've seen and we saw it very early when organizations were moving to, for example, public cloud services, is this disconnect towards for this individual app, how many resources do I really need and I think that's something that, you know, vendors like Pure need to start integrating more and more intelligence. And that's, my understanding is they're doing with Pure One which is really impressive. >> I hope it's all it takes. Scott, we appreciate the time. Thank you for your insights into what has been a big day for Pure Storage. But thank you again for the time. Scott Sinclair at the Enterprise Strategy Group, senior analyst, there. Let's go back to Dave Vellante now with more on theCUBE. (electronic music) >> Thanks for watching this CUBE program made possible by Pure Storage. I want to say in summary, you know, sometimes it's hard to squint through all the vendor noise on cloud and as-a-service, and all the buzz words, and acronyms in the marketplace. But as I said at the top, the cloud is changing, it's evolving, it's expanding to new locations. The operating model is increasingly defining the cloud. There's so much opportunity to build value on top of the massive infrastructure build-out from the hyperscalers to $100 billion in CapEx last year, alone. This is not just true for technology vendors, but organizations are building their own layer to take advantage of the cloud. Now, of course, technology's critical so when you're evaluating technology solutions, look for the following. First, the ability of the solution to simplify your life. Can it abstract the underlying complexity of a cloud, multiple clouds, connect to on-prem workloads in an experience that is substantially identical, irrespective of location? Does the solution leverage cloud-native technologies and innovations and primitives and APIs or is it just a hosted stack that's really not on the latest technology curve, whether that's processor technology or virtualization, or machine learning, streaming, open source tech, et cetera? Third, how programmable is the infrastructure? Does it make developers more productive? Does it accelerate time to value? Does it minimize rework and increase the quality of your output? And four, what's the business impact? Will customers stand up and talk about the solution and how it contributed to their digital transformation by flexibly supporting emerging data-intensive workloads and evolving as their business rapidly changed? These are some of the important markers that we would suggest you monitor. Pure is obviously driving hard to optimize these and other areas, so watch closely and make your own assessment as to how, what they and others are building will fit into your business. Now as always, this content is available on demand on theCUBE.net, so definitely check that out. This I Dave Vellante for John Walls and the entire CUBE team, thanks for watching, everybody. We'll see ya next time. (soft electronic music)