>> Announcer: LIVE from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Pure Accelerate 2017. Brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Welcome back to San Francisco everybody, this is Dave Vellante with David Floyer, and this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, we go out to the events, we Extract the Signal from the Noise, this is Pure Accelerate 2017. This is the second year of Pure Accelerate. Last year was a little north of here at, right outside AT&T Park. Pure, it's pretty funny, Pure chose this venue, it's like this old, rusted out, steel warehouse, where they used to make battleships, and they're going to tear this down after the show, so of course the metaphor is spinning rust, old legacy systems that Pure is essentially replacing, this is like a swan song, goodbye to the old days, welcome in the new. So very clever marketing by Pure. I mean they did a great job setting up this rusty old building-- >> It's bad. Nice, it's a nice building. >> Hopefully it doesn't fall down on our heads and, so, but let's get to the event. The messaging was very strong here. I mean, they pull no punches. >> You know, legacy, slow, expensive, not agile, we're fast and simple, come with us. Of course the narrative from the big guys is, "Oh Pure, they're small, they're losing money, "you know, they're in a little niche." But you see this company as I said earlier when Matt Kixmoeller was on. They've hit escape velocity. >> Absolutely. >> They're not going out of business-- >> Nope. Okay, there's a lot of companies you see them-- >> And they're making a profit. >> Yeah, you read their financials and you say ah oh, this company's in deep you know what. No, they're not making a profit yet, Pure. >> They are projecting to make a profit in the next six months. >> But they basically got you know, 500 and what, twenty-five million dollars in the balance sheet, their negative-free cash flow gets them through by my calculation, in the next nine or 10 years, because they have zero debt. They could easily take out debt if they wanted to, growing at 30% a year. They'll do a billion dollars this year, 2.4 billion dollar market cap. They didn't have a big brain drain six months after the IPO, which was really important, it was like, you know business as usual. They've maintained the core management team. I know Jonathan Martin's you know, moving on, but they're bringing in Todd Forsythe to run marketing. A very seasoned marketing executive so, you know, things are really pretty interesting. The fact is, we haven't seen a billion dollar storage company that's independent since NetApp, there's only one left, NetApp. EMC is now Dell EMC. 3PAR never made it even close to a billion outside of HPE. Isilon couldn't make it, Compellent couldn't make it, Data Domain you know, couldn't make it as a billion dollar company. None of those guys could ever reach that level of escape velocity, that it appears that Pure and Nutanix are both on. Your thoughts David Floyer. >> I couldn't agree more. They have made their whole mantra, simplicity. They've really brought in the same sort of simplicity as Nutanix is doing. Those are the companies that seem to have been really making it, because the fundamental value proposition to their customers is, "You don't need to put in lots of people "to manage this, it'll manage itself." And I think that's, they've stuck to that, and they are been very successful with that simple message. Obviously taking a flash product, and replacing old rusts with it is, makes it much simpler, they're starting off from a very good starting point. But they've extended that right the way up to a whole lot of Cloud services with Pure. They've extended it in the whole philosophy of how they put data services together. I'm very impressed with that. It reminds me of Ashley, the early days of-- >> Of NetApp. >> No, of NetApp and also of the 3PAR. >> Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely, simplicity, great storage services, Tier 1. When I say NetApp, I'm thinking, you know, simplicity in storage services as well. But you know, this is the joke that I been making all week is that you talk to a practitioner you say, "What's your storage strategy?" Oh, I buy EMC for block, I buy NetApp for file. At Pure it's sort of, not only challenging that convention, but they're trying to move the market to the big data, and analytics, and they also have a unique perspective on converge and hyper-converge. They count a deep position hyper-converge that's you know, okay for certain use cases, not really scalable, not really applicable to a lot of the things we're doing. You know, Nutanix could, might even reach a billion dollars before Pure, so it's going to be interesting. >> Well, I think they have a second strategy there, which is to be an OEM supplier. Their work with Cisco for example. They're an OEM supplier there. They are bending to the requirements of being an OEM supplier, and I think that's their way into the hyper-converge market is working with certain vendors, certain areas, providing the storage in the way that that integrator wants, and acting in that way, and I think that's a smart strategy. I think that's the way that they're going to survive in the traditional market. But what's, to me, interesting anyway, is that they are really starting to break out into different markets, into the AI market, into flash for big data, into that type of market, and with a very interesting approach, which is, you can't afford to take all the data from the edge to the center, so you need us, and you need to process that data using us, because it's in real time these days. You need that speed, and then you want to minimize the amount of data that you move up the stack to the center. I think it's a very interesting strategy. >> So their competing against, you know, a lot of massive companies I mean, and they're competing with this notion of simplicity, some speed and innovation in these new areas. I mean look at, compare this with you know, EMC's portfolio, now Dell, EMC's portfolio. It's never been more complicated right? But, they got one of everything. They've got a massive distribution channel. They can solve a lot of problems. HPE, a little bit more focused, then Dell EMC. Really going hard after the edge. So they bring some interesting competition there. >> And they bring their service side, which is-- >> As does Dell. So they got servers right? Which is something that Pure has to partner on. And then IBM it's like you know, they kind of still got their toe in infrastructure, but you know they're, Ginni Rometty's heart is not in it you know? But they, they have it, they can make money at it, and you know, they're making the software to find but... And then you get a lot of little guys kind of bubbling. Well, Nimble got taken out, SimpliVity, which of course was converged, hyper-converged. A lot of sort of new emerging guys, you got, you know guys like Datrium out there, Iguazio. Infinidat is another one, much, much smaller, growing pretty rapidly. You know, what are your thoughts, can any of these guys become a billion-dollar company, I mean we've talked for years David about... Remember we wrote a piece? Can EMC remain independent? Well, the answer was no, right? Can Pure remain independent in your view? >> I don't believe it could do it, it was, as just purely storage, except by taking the OEM route. But I think if they go after it as a data company, as a information company, information processing company, and focus on the software that's required to do that, along with the processes, I think they can, yes. I think there's room for somebody-- >> Well, you heard what Kix said. Matt Kixmoeller said, "We might have to take storage "out of the name." >> Out of the name, that's right. >> Maybe, right? >> Yes, I think they will, yeah. >> So they're playing in a big (mumbles), and the (mumbles) enormous, so let's talk about some of the stuff we've been working on. The True Private Cloud report is hot. I think it's very relevant here. On-Prem customers want to substantially mimic the Public Cloud. Not just virtualization, management, orchestration, simplified provisioning, a business model that provides elasticity, including pricing elasticity. HPE actually had some interesting commentary there, on their On-Demand Pricing. Not just the rental model, so they're doing some interesting things, I think you'll see others follow suit there. I find Pure to be very Cloud-like in that regard, in terms of Evergreen, I mean they essentially have a Sass subscription model for their appliance. >> And they're going after the stacked vendors as well, in this OEM mode. >> Yeah, they call it four to one thousand Cloud vendors, so you're True Private Cloud Report, what was significant about that was, to me anyway, was a hundred and fifty billion dollars approximately, is going to exit the market in terms of IT labor that's doing today, non-differentiated lifting of patching, provisioning, server provisioning, (mumbles) provisioning, storage management, performance management, tuning, all the stuff that adds no value to the business, it just keeps the lights on. That's going to go away, and it's going to shift into Public Cloud, and what we call True Private Cloud. Now True Private Cloud is going, in our view, to be larger than infrastructures that serve us in the Public Cloud, not as large as Sass, and it's the fastest growing part of the market today, from a smaller base. >> And also will deal with the edge. It will go down to the edge. >> So punctuate down, so also down to the edge so, what's driving that True Private Cloud market? >> What's driving it is (mumbles), to a large extent, because you need stuff to be low latency, and you need therefore, Private Clouds on the edge, in the center. Data has a high degree of gravity, it's difficult to move out. So you want to move the application to where that data is. So if data starts in the Cloud, it should keep stay in the Cloud, if it starts in the edge, you want to keep it there and let it die, most of it die there, and if it starts in headquarters again, no point in moving it just for the sake of moving it. So where possible, Private Cloud is going to be the better way of dealing with data at the edge, and data in headquarters, which is a lot of data. >> Okay, so a lot of announcements here today, NVMe, and NVMe Fabric you know, pushing hard, into file and object, which really they're the only ones with all-flash doing that. I think again, I think others will follow suit, once they have, start having some success there. What are some of the things that you are working on with the Wikibon Team these days? >> Well, the next thing we're doing is the update of the, well two things. We're doing a piece on what we call Unigrid, which is this new NVMe of a fabric architecture, which we think is going to be very, very important to all enterprise computing. The ability to merge the traditional state applications, applications of record with the large AI, and other big data applications. >> Relevations, what we've talking about here. >> Very relevant indeed, and that's the architecture that we believe will bring that together. And then after that we're doing our service end, and converged infrastructure report and the how, showing how the two of those are merging. >> Great, that's a report that's always been, been very highly anticipated. I think this is our third or fourth doing that right? >> Fourth year. >> Right, fourth year so great looking forward to that. Well David, thanks very much for co-hosting with me-- >> Your very welcome. >> And it's been a pleasure working with you. Okay that's it, we're one day here at Pure Accelerate. Tomorrow we're at Hortonworks, DataWorks Summit, we were there today actually as well, and Cloud Foundry Summit. Of course we're also at the AWS Public Sector, John Furrier is down there. So yeah, theCUBE is crazy busy. Next week we're in Munich at, IBM has an event, the Data Summit, and then the week after that we're at Nutanix dot next. There's a lot going on theCUBE, check out SiliconANGLE.tv, to find out where we're going to be next. Go to Wiki.com for all the research, and SiliconANGLE.com for all the news, thanks you guys, great job, thanks to Pure, we're out, this is theCUBE. See you next time. (retro music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's the CUBE covering Pure Accelerate 2017. (upbeat music) Brought to you by Pure Storage. (sparse percussion fading) >> Welcome back to San Francisco. We're at Pier 70, and this is Pure Accelerate. And this is the CUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host David Floyer. First segment of the day. Welcome! >> Thank you. >> Dave: Todd Graham is here. He's the Vice President of IT Infrastructure at ScanSource, Inc. >> Thank you. >> Dave: Axel Streichardt, who's the Director of Business Applications Solutions at Pure Storage. Gentlemen, welcome to the CUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thanks. >> Okay, so let's get right into it. Well, if we start with ScanSource, what does ScanSource do? Set up the interview with just a little background. >> Sure, so we are an international technology distribution company. We have been around since 1994, public since 1994. Today we're in the US, North, we're in Europe, Latin America, and we are quickly growing to 45 to 47 locations around the globe. We focus, very vertically focused, on technology such as telecommunications. Recently we bought a telecommunications services master agency, so we can deal with service and connectivity. Point of sale and barcode is our original business unit. And we do Voice over IP phone systems, videoconferencing, and those types of technologies today. >> You said you started in '94 and you been public since '94. So you started with an IPO? (panelists laughing) >> It was very early. That's correct. (panelists laughing) >> Wow, that's amazing. I'd love, I got to talk to you afterwards. (panelists laughing) >> That's right. That's right. >> That's like Bitcoin or something. Okay, and then maybe we could set up to the segment here. Axel, I saw you speaking here earlier to an audience. >> Axel: Right. >> Maybe describe the discussion that we're going to have here about cloud. >> We, of course, focusing a lot on the different flavors of cloud and the different deployment models that SAP customers are considering today, right? So it could be on premise. Do you want to do it in a hybrid cloud? Do you want it in a public cloud? And we see that, initially, a lot of customers were thinking and considering public cloud as the solution for SAP workloads. And it is interesting that, in recent months, we actually see that from this initial, let's say, movement we see a lot of customers actually reconsidering and coming back, right? And they're seeing that the economics, the flexibility, the agility that they were thinking about when moving certain SAP workloads to the cloud is actually not really the reality. And the reality caught up with them. And they see that the value that they get from Pure Storage actually to run SAP workloads on Pure Storage make way more sense from an economical and also from an agility perspective, right? And we also see that IDC and some other analysts, even SAP themselves, they are actually saying that probably 60%-70% of all SAP workloads will stay on premise. They will not go into a public cloud or cloud deployment. >> Okay, so, Todd. So tell us about, so you're a ERP customer, SAP customer. You decide to move into the cloud. Maybe tell us about that journey. You moved in, and the pendulum swung back. So add some color to. >> Yeah, we were migrating away from our legacy ERP environment and moving to SAP. It was a greenfield opportunity, so we felt like it was the right time to move into the cloud. We looked very heavily at our internal expertise from an applications standpoint as well as an infrastructure standpoint and felt that this would be the right opportunity to move to that infrastructure as a service, application as a service model. And then we could take time to take our center of excellence team around SAP and do knowledge transfer between the cloud organization, the managed organization, and use it as a ramp for us to educate ourselves more around SAP. Some of the other driving factors were simply. Why do we want to go to the cloud? The elasticity, the ease of deployment, the things that we firmly believed at the time were the right decision. And we felt like it could be done quicker by moving to the cloud to do that. >> Okay, so you moved to the cloud, and then it wasn't the experience that you thought it would be. It was >> Todd: Correct. >> Axel mentioned a bunch of factors. The agility wasn't there. The cost wasn't there. Maybe add some color to that as well. >> Yeah, absolutely, we felt like, with the growth of our company through acquisitions, that speed of deployment was going to be key in the future. And we quickly learned that that was not necessarily the case. Everything became request-driven, SLA-driven, versus actually worrying about what was happening within our application itself. And so we just became another customer that was submitting tickets, if you will, in that environment. Stability and performance, we saw some real impacts to the environment that were actually end-user-affecting, which really began to force us to look for some different solutions. >> Okay. So, David, you just participated in a study. We call it the True Private Cloud. >> David: Right. >> So what was happening was it was a lot of cloud washing going on. >> Right. >> And with Private Cloud, we said, "Well, you know, essentially what people want is "to be able to substantially mimic "the public cloud on private." So they can get back that control and address some of the problems. >> That's right. >> So maybe pick it up from there and talk a little bit about. >> Sure, so yes, this, this is reports that we've done on the amount of spend that'll go to hyper-converged types of products and bring it back in-house and offer the same sort of facilities to the end users as you get from a public cloud but in a private cloud itself. So is that how you've done it? Did you take a package, or how did you go, how did you take your work from the public cloud back into the private cloud? >> So part of that was, we did the initial cost analysis of where we were at. And that was one of the main drivers behind, we really can do this in-house ourselves. That's when we began looking at partners that could help us. It was a perfect time that it had set up within our refresh strategy around our traditional storage and compute environment for us to really look at what the cost factors were. Could we improve the performance and the stability of that environment and improve that service to our end users? And so those are the decisions that we made, right? And then we said, "It's time for us to bring that back in." We can have control. And one of the biggest things, and it was really more than control, it was that we understood our environment. And that was the biggest thing that we saw a challenge with, was trying to convey the importance of what was happening within our deployment of SAP to the managed services provider. >> So what led you to the Pure decision? Like David said, you got some kind of converged infrastructure, whatever, the metaphor for mimicking public cloud. What led you to Pure? And we could talk about what the solution was. >> Yeah, one of the things was just the simplicity of Pure. At first, when we heard the story, we weren't sure we really believed it. We were like, "This is, this is entirely too simple." The evergreen model was very intriguing to us at the time, because we had been in that traditional storage and compute environment where, every three years, we had a massive project and do a forklift upgrade with choose any of the providers. And it was, is what we were doing. We were looking to set ourselves up for SAP HANA in the future. We wanted to build an infrastructure that would allow us to get there. And in all of the due diligence that we did, Pure came out on top with that, with a lot of the story around their compression and dedupe capabilities. Performance around IO was just extremely compelling at the time. >> So you got to love this story. >> Absolutely. >> I mean, you hear this a lot from customers? Is this a unique situation maybe? >> Yeah, we see this a lot from customers. Actually by moving SAP workloads, mission-critical workloads, now to Pure Storage. And what really, it's not just about the evergreen and the simplicity, right? What also resonates very well with customers today is our story around the data platform, right? So that's not about storage anymore. It's really about providing a foundation for certain SAP workloads, and you can seamlessly go from, let's say, typical Oracle SAP deployment, and you can start with HANA deployments. Actually, by using our solution, you can actually reducing the cost by up to 75%, right? So these are all compelling reasons, and this all without any configuration changes or any setups that you need specifically for SAP workloads, right? It is so simple that you can run various SAP workloads on the same platform. And to move this, actually, to another angle is, What if in the future you want to do analytics, big data, internet of thing? Again, it's the same platform, it's the same foundation that you can run all these various SAP workloads on. And I think this is a very compelling story. >> And it's interesting for us. It's not just SAP workloads that are running in that environment. >> Oh, really? >> We're, it's, it's a mixed environment, so we're running everything else on top of that FlashStack today. >> Dave: Well, you've done a lot of work. >> Axel: Sure, yes. >> Well, I've got one other question I'd like to ask you about landscapes. See, you're a big international set of companies that you are servicing. So from a landscape point of view, did you want to centralize that onto one landscape or multiple landscapes? And I would have thought that's an area as well where using Flash was a great advantage that you could actually. >> It is centralized today. And then as we grow, we are giving consideration to, Will we have multiple instances across the globe. But today it is centralized and will be so probably for the next 24 months. >> But what you described earlier, Todd, was this horizontal infrastructure layer that could support mixed workloads. But there's got to be some kind of software, something in the middle that supports that as well. Did you have to write something to >> Orchestrate >> To support that >> Was it, yeah, some kind of orchestration or management, stack. >> No, today it was all, everything that we're doing today is within the Pure UI or within Wmware and UCS Manager today. >> Dave: Okay, well that'll get you pretty far. >> Yeah, yeah. Yeah. >> So where do you, what do you take away from this in terms of where this market's going? You talked about analysts generally say that most SAP workload's going to stay on prem. I think we would generally agree with that. >> Yes. Yeah. >> It's going to be a long slog before they're ready for the cloud. At least the core, mission-critical stuff, right? Okay, so that says there's real pressure on IT organizations to mimic substantially that public cloud experience. Are we there today? With a lot more work to be done? I'd like both of your inputs on that. >> Right, and that's the beauty of it. We're actually providing it, at Pure, the various flavors of cloud. So if customers want to actually go from physical to virtual, we are supporting this, because you can actually run your virtual SAP workloads seamlessly on our storage array. At the same time, if you're already then moving to the next level and you want to have a private cloud environment, right? So we have all the components and capabilities actually built into our product that you can do things like self-service, right? You can have chargeback. You can have all the deployment, right? So all of these features that actually make up a private cloud environment, so we have them in our mix already, right? So we more or less have everything ready for customers today. And if they want to actually go to a hybrid cloud, that's why I'm saying. 30%, maybe, to 40% of SAP workloads might go into a cloud, into a public cloud or a hybrid cloud environment. And we're actually also providing this hybrid cloud capability that you can move workloads seamlessly to an Azure, to an AWS, or to Google Cloud. So we just heard this morning we have this capability to move certain workloads seamlessly from on premise, from on premise Pure, onto AWS, for instance. So we have all the ingredients, so throughout this entire journey that the customer wants to go through, that they can actually move along with this one data platform, and that makes it. >> So, Todd, how do you decide now, knowing what you know, what goes where, what to put in the public cloud, what to put on prem, what's eventually going to be hybrid? >> Well, and we have adopted a strategy of Cloud First, which means, Will the workload or will the application fit in that as-a-service model? Does it necessarily mean that we're going to put everything there? We still believe that most mission-critical, anything around the RP, will most likely remain in-house. And one of the main differences that we saw was the availability in uptime that the Pure system gives us around what we could see that the manu-services providers could provide. And downtime is really not tolerated, and it's one of those things that we need. And when it's down, we've got to have things back up, and we need the availability to our end users. And as we expand across the globe, we're becoming more of a 7 by, maybe today we're a 6 by 20. We're not fully 7-by-24 shop yet. But we're getting to that, and so we're looking at the infrastructure that will help us achieve that goal. >> So you're looking at cloud as an operating model more so than a destination. Is that right? >> Todd: That's correct. That's correct. >> And of course, there's the destination aspect of it, which is a function of, what, performance and cost, and. What do you look at? What are the determinants there? >> Yeah, so performance is obviously key for us. Cost is always an important factor, but it's probably number 3 or 4 on the list, right? Availability, uptime, and performance are our key. And if we can get those, we can get the support and the availability that we need, then maybe it makes sense, right? If it's a web application, if it's something that's very straightforward, again, one of the biggest reasons that we go back to bringing it in-house is we truly understood the environment and how things fit together. Whereas in that manu-services environment, it was very difficult to do that. >> And what about security? We haven't talked much about security today. But where does that fit in in your cloud decision? >> David: Especially internationally, the different rules in different countries, for example. >> Yeah, internationally, it's a challenge with all of the data privacy laws and the things that are country-specific, and we're learning a lot of that in Latin America as well (David chuckling) as we begin to move into those markets. But security is absolutely top of mine. We will work with those cloud services providers, but we've talked to a lot of folks along the AWS and the Azure route. And we're comfortable with where the security around the cloud is going. We're talking to a lot of new cloud security brokers to understand what they can bring to the table as well. And it's not just an IT discussion. It's a legal discussion, right >> Right. >> We're having those legal teams come back to us and say, "Well, what does this mean?" Right? Where is the data going to live? And is it going to fit within our retention models and all of the things that we have in place today? >> Alright, good. Okay, we got to leave it there. But Axel, I'll give you the last word. >> The last word? Pure Accelerate. Give me the bumper sticker. >> So we are really excited to have, actually, a confirmation from a customer side to see that the strategy and the direction that we're going here at Pure is exactly on par with what customers are actually demanding and what they want when it comes to SAP or mission-critical workloads. So I'm really glad that we're hearing this now from a customer and get the confirmation from a customer. So I'm just really super duper excited to have Todd here with us to hear from, directly from a customer. >> Excellent. Alright, Cloud First. The CUBE, we hope you're first, we're first on your playlist. Gentlemen, thank you very much for coming on the CUBE. >> Thank you. Thank you. >> I appreciate it. Alright, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. (upbeat percussion music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Pure Accelerate 2017. Brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Welcome back to Pier 70 in San Francisco everybody. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Stu Miniman and this is theCube. We go out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. A lot going on here at Pure Accelerate 2017. Siva Sivakumar is here as the Senior Director of Data Center Solutions at Cisco, and Mayur Dewaikar is the Product Management Lead for Converge at Pure Storage. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Glad to be here. We've heard a lot this morning about Converge, the Cisco partnership. We just had a couple customers on that are doing FlashStack. So Siva, let's start with you. Thoughts on Accelerate? >> This is probably the coolest event I've been in many years. >> Different venue, right? >> The ambience, the venue, and the fact that Warriors won last night, it's just joy, it's awesome today. >> Dave: Oh, you want to talk hoops for a little bit? You know, we can do that if you guys. We're Patriots fans so we know. We're not just winning fans. Two out of the last three, it's good. It's good to be a winner, isn't it. >> Yep, absolutely. >> Well, Mayur, give us your thoughts on Converge. You guys are talking about Converge a lot today in FlashStack. We just heard from some customers. Talk about the strategy. What are you guys trying to accomplish there. >> Yeah, so we launched the FlashStack program about three years ago and what we were starting to see in the industry was that there was a very clear preference from customers to buy full stack solutions. So we thought that was an opportunity for us to take our storage business and move it into an adjacent market, which was Converge. And we thought we had really addressed a lot of the storage pain points that people were seeing with the existing Converge solution so with our flash performance and the simplicity that Pure brings to the table, we thought we had an opportunity really to team up with Cisco and build a solution that can be sufficiently differentiated and something that people would really love to try out. >> Mayur, I wonder if you could help clarify something. A lot of times people hear converge and they think coming together. When I think about the solutions that both Cisco, UCS, and Pure, there's lots of software and it's really a distributed-type scalable architecture so how am I both converged and scalable? >> So what we're basically doing is we are trying to, we're bringing best of breed solutions together, right. So I think there's a lot of synergy between the way UCS is architectured and Pure is architectured. So we're both stateless architectures on the compute side and the storage side and what we're doing as part of the Pure Storage for or FlashStack Converge program is that we're really doing these things together with a unified management platform, which really brings everything together. So it really simplifies the deployment, it simplifies the day-to-day management of the entire stack, which is really what people are looking for. >> Yeah, so Siva, we've heard a lot today about Converge, we heard some comments about hyper-converge. What's the difference between converged and hyper-converged? >> I think if you look at the evolution in the industry, these are big ships or the big ways customers want to consume. The genesis of all the work around convergence, if you will, that started it all was the customer started to realize, "I have bigger problems to solve from an IT perspective. "I would rather not solve infrastructure "problems all by myself. "I want the vendors to solve this. "I want the vendors to give me an experience "that is far more turnkey so I invest my time "and resource on higher artifacts" that are more in a business critical from their perspective. That truly allowed us to look into convergence as a strategy and bring together certain use cases and value propositions that is very critical to IT. High availability, scalability, multi-side deployment, which are all critical for an IT to solve. We solve it first ourself as a joint architecture. We validate that and then we provide blueprints that both our customers can choose in and our partners can choose. We had a very big channel partner community. Lot of our partners leverage the work we do to deliver great value to our customers. While Convergence was heavily centered around heavy-based storages that the market was absorbing, the evolution of storage to include more in the software-defined work, created another set of categories that allows customers to say, you know what, my interest is much more on the simplification and start small and those types of models, it propped a new industry at a new paradigm in the industry. From our perspective, there's a huge value in convergence. It's a 7 billion dollar business and IDC thinks it continues to grow. And we absolutely believe we have a purpose built on a ground-up platform that was built for Flash, that's the Pure Storage architecture, is truly here and truly is a big part of our strategy-building dive. And of course, as more use cases are coming to the compute side, we are here to embrace technologies like hyper-convergence because that's obviously something that's great for a software vendor to embrace as well. >> So from your standpoint, I think of you guys as software heavy, software led, but you're not participating in the so-called hyper-converge. Is that because you don't want to own that part of the stack, you'd rather partner for it. What's your point of view there? >> Yeah, so I think from our standpoint, we believe that there is basically use cases both for hyper-converge and converge infrastructure, right. We believe that with the program we have at Cisco, we can basically provide a very good, a very compelling solution of FlashStack. And Cisco already has a solution in hyperflex that addresses the hyper-converge use case and we really see both of these co-existing in a lot of customer environments that are use cases where NCI absolutely shines and then there are use cases where we believe FlashStack is really the right solution. >> But it's interesting you haven't sort of chased that trend, you're more focused on your areas and you're doing very well with it. Is that fundamental to the strategy or is it just sort of you guys are focused elsewhere. >> Yeah, so I think for us, for Pure Storage, I think we are looking at the Converged market really as there is a lot of existing business there that can be had. Which is really tied to legacy storage platforms coming up for refresh as part of the Converged infrastructure deployments people already have. So that in itself is a fairly large opportunity for us and we believe that with the messaging we have, which is you can consolidate a lot of your workloads on FlashStack. I think the platform that FlashStack is providing is really very well-suited for the use cases that Pure Storage has traditionally played in. Which is really the enterprise workloads, in my opinion. >> Is it fair to say that Convergence 1 data, and of course Cisco was heavily involved in Convergence 1.0, you kind of arguably created it along with some partners, but is it fair to say it was just too complex for a lot of customers? And are you trying to take that to the next level? Can you add some color to that? >> Yeah, I can answer that. I think Convergence 1.0 was truly about idea operational simplification. Because they truly wanted to consume these best-of-breed technologies without having to deal with so much of technology consumption itself but as a system-level consumption. But apparently what happened in the industry is obviously the evolution of cloud. Cloud brought a completely different paradigm of how you consume an infrastructure in itself. I mean, email is an infrastructure now because you buy from a cloud winner, you get your VM in an email. So that's a very different way of consumption model which created additionally requirements for more simplification. The turnkey experiences and things like that led to another category. But if you look at FlashStack, what we are doing is we are bringing this simplification model into FlashStack as well. We recognize, while building the best-of-breed is a great idea, and great market for itself, simplification is never lost. People love that as well. So we're looking at bringing together as close to a single pane of glass as possible with such strong technology play to deliver some of the simplification in this model as well. So you're truly trying to bridge the gap and offering something that customers really want to see. >> Yeah, simplification's definitely a big piece of that wave of both converged and hyper-converged. When I think back, when we launched all of these solutions, it was, okay, that Day Zero, I should be able to speed that up and the Day One, the stuff afterwards, we should be able to make that easier. How are you measuring that these days? Any customers you can speak to as to how they dramatically shift that, kind of keeping the lights on versus really being able to focus on the business. >> Yeah, so I think if you really look at a Converged stack, there is three distinct pieces in it, right. So there's compute, storage, networking. And I think Cisco did a phenomenal job with the UCS and UCS manager platforms in helping really put a cookie cutter approach on deploying compute. So if you look at what was remaining, networking was always kind of the low-hanging fruit. Storage was very complex. So with Pure coming in to the picture, we have really simplified the overall deployment and management of storage. So we were talking from days down to a few hours to get storage going and get the entire FlashStack infrastructure going as a result. And then what we're doing is, we're using a lot of existing tools that exist in the ecosystem. So great example of that is UCS Director which is being used very prominently by customers to deploy their entire data centers. We are integrating with that and in addition to that, we're also integrating with a lot of hypervisor level tools like Recenter or hyper v-level tools. And the benefit is that customers are getting to use the tools that they're already used to with the simplicity of UCS and Pure to really simplify the overall deployment and also management of the entire stack. >> So really, the problem you're solving is one of IT labor intensity, right. IT labor is too much IT labor, it's too non-differentiated, it's too expensive. Is that fair? >> Well, yeah. So fundamentally what we are solving is providing you a platform. A platform and an experience that IT wants, IT desires, but that also is optimized so that it can easily provide a platform experience but then the workload and the diversification you see in the market and the one side is an article database. You don't touch for four years kind of a thing. On the other hand, you have a container which you use for two seconds. So you really have a complete range of use cases. Each demand something different from a platform. Our strategy and our goal is to provide a single cohesive platform that uniformly works across all of these use cases from an IT operations and management standpoint. You realize the challenge is quite complex but the solution is a huge value for our customers and that's really our journey in solving this problem. >> Can you share any, what should we expect to see from a kind of joint-engineering deployment going forward. We heard in the keynote this morning, said some really you know, the cloud native, AI, ML type deployments. We're talking less about virtualization, more about containers and microservices. Where should we look to Cisco and Pure in the future? >> So, I think there's an interesting demo on the floor. It really talks about something that's cutting edge. NVMe over Fabric, so the next big innovation from Pure is NVMe, all NVMe, right. That is, obviously, no performance goals there. It's absolutely a screaming box. We have a Cisco adaptor technology that can deliver high performance, low-latency iO transport on top of a fabric, on top of an Ethernet fabric to talk ENVme from the host. Just the power of how much you can do iO subsystem from a compute perspective onto the network and talking to the storage and the ability to bring a superclass performance on a storage perspective is absolutely a next generation cutting edge and vendors like this coming together truly solves the industry's next big problem. Who better to solve a fabric, network, bandwidth issue than Cisco? Partnering with best-of-breed from the storage. Then that's one, just sort of a technology and architectural play if you will. But on a use-case workload type of scenarios, we've done a lot of the traditional use cases quite a bit in the databases and the VDIs of the world. But we are now looking at the next generation of use cases. Containers, microservices. How do I make the docker environment integrate seamlessly with the FlashStack? Now, this is already different, this is a very different paradigm. How do I enable FlashStack to be very simple to consume kubernetes. Because these are use cases where the developer who is much more focused on clouds does not really think there is an infrastructure underneath. He doesn't even care about it. So we need to give him that experience so that it's a seamless way of deploying and managing these DevOps environments as well. So that's the next wave of work we are doing is to provide that agility factor coming out of the FlashStack. and if conditional architecture is being built for this, it obviously helps. >> And you see NVMe over Fabric as kind of one of those foundational aspects, right. >> That'll be another architectural cog in the same context of what we are trying to do. >> Are you, with FlashStack, able to preserve that same experience for customers? The Evergreen experience, the never have to migrate your day, I mean all that wonderful stuff. Does that translate into the partnership? >> We are. So, we are taking a lot of the same goodness we have with the storage platform and we're extending that into FlashStack. So we have, very similar to Pure, you can almost non-disruptively upgrade pretty much everything in the UCS stack and we have special programs now with Cisco to which we can provide people the option to also get new gear every couple of years. Very similar to the Evergreen Storage Program we have through Pure Storage. >> So is it fair to say, well, first of all, is that unique to Pure or is that something that Cisco sort of has innovated on? >> It's, from a storage perspective, Pure, I think truly created the easy button for storage which is nonexistent. It's one of the hardest problems to solve. >> But what about the other pieces? >> And Cisco obviously pioneered the fabric-based stateless compute, which is still a standard in the industry of how to do the easy button for compute is truly what we brought to the table that really revolutionized the industry. I absolutely think that's where the architecture individually are building technology that are great. When you combine that and jointly engineer the solution and provide the turnkey value for the customer then the absolute value is manifested in a very big way. And I think that's our journey. We are hear, obviously we are hearing a lot of great customers coming in but the more customers we hear, the more we learn. >> But you've substantially sort of recreated that experience to a great degree. >> Siva: Absolutely, absolutely. >> I think that's a huge differentiator for Pure. You don't hear a lot of other companies talking about it and when you talk to your customers, they always point to that. You know, the migrations are just such a painful, horrible experience. >> Yep. >> So, good stuff. Alright, we have to leave it there, gents. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. >> Mayur: Thank you. >> Pleasure, thank you. >> Alright, take care. Keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from Pure Accelerate 2017. Be right back.

>> Voiceover: Live, from San Francisco. It's theCUBE. Covering Pure Accelerate 2017. Brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Welcome back to San Francisco, everybody. We're at Pier 70, one of the oldest piers in San Francisco which is not long for this place. It's going to be torn down after Pure Accelerate. I'm Dave Vellante and this is Stu Miniman, my co-host. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Kent Petzold this year is the enterprise storage manager at Intermountain Healthcare and Vic Nagjee is back. He's the CTO of Healthcare for Pure Storage. Gents, welcome to theCUBE. Good to have you. >> Kent: Thanks for having us. >> Dave: You're welcome. So Kent, let's start with you because we talked with Vic a little bit already but tell us a little bit about Intermountain and your role. >> So, Intermountain is the biggest healthcare provider in Utah. We've got 22 hospitals, 185 clinics. My role there is, I manage the storage team. We've got eight petabytes of usable storage that we manage. Do lots and lots of backups. You know, all things data protection is under my purview as well. >> Now, have you always been a healthcare you know, practitioner, or is this relatively new for you? >> I've been at Intermountain for 24 years. >> Okay, so that's enough... To qualify you as knowing a little bit about healthcare, and so, my question is, relative to sort of other industries what's unique about healthcare? I mean, obviously it's highly regulated. You've got serious privacy, but you're dealing with, you know, many businesses are dealing with dollars and cents. You deal with a lot of budget, but you also deal with lives. Talk about some of the differences of healthcare and the particular stresses that puts on I.T. >> One of the big things is just doing updates of your technology. Because we deal with people's lives we have to be careful about when we do updates. You know, we've got to be cognizant of you know, "Is the emergency room full?" things like that, so it puts an extra challenge on us for when we need to take systems down to do updates. >> So that means, yeah because updates means downtime. >> Yeah, in the past, yes. >> That's not the case with Pure? Tell us about that, Vic. >> Kent: (laughing) >> Okay, so. Maybe, actually tell us about that a little bit. So, if you guys make a big deal out of it, last segment I turned it into dollars and cents because, on average, a migration, a RAID migration is a minimum of $50,000, minimum. In healthcare, it could be lives. >> Yeah, I mean in healthcare it's definitely lives but it's also a little bit more expensive because this is specialty data. So, the minimum you're looking at is about $1,000 per gigabyte. >> Dave: Per gigabyte? >> Per gigabyte transitioned over. Depending on the kind of application you're dealing with. In this particular case, you know it's more than just the expenses like you mentioned. It's interruption of care, interruption of service, which is not acceptable. So, the technology that we have and the architecture that we have allows us to go in to healthcare organizations such as Intermountain and say "You know what? You can have an environment that's "going to get better with time, because we're going to be able "to come in and not only upgrade your software, "we're also going to be able to come in "and upgrade your hardware and keep you on the tock cycle "every three years, update your controllers, "and so on and so forth with zero downtime." And what we're seeing is this big shift in the healthcare industry where, you know, Kent can relate to this. Typically we have these updates all teed up and lined up for three o'clock in the morning on some obscure weekend day, right, where if something goes sideways the number of experts you can reach are very very low and now we're seeing a switch with this kind of technology to actually have people say "You know what, two o'clock in the afternoon on Tuesday? "I'm there. I'm doing it." >> Okay, so Kent. Take us through sort of your journey here. Sort of give us the before and after of Pure, what problem you're trying to solve, and how you solve that problem. >> So, we started down that with our insurance arm Select Health. We were getting calls pretty much every week. Sometimes two and three times a week for slow issues, and, you know, we're looking through logs. We're doing our monitoring and stuff and it was continuing and my architect was spending hours and hours every week >> Dave: Fun. >> trying to research this. So, we started looking at flash vendors. Pure was one of the only ones that came in, gave us the documentation we wanted, was able to answer the questions we had about our environment. It was a sybase database. AIX with some kind of weird settings, and we started testing it. We liked what we saw. We moved along, finally put it into production. They haven't called us about slows since we put it into production over there years ago. >> This is three years ago? >> Kent: Yeah. >> So it was really a performance issue you were having with your traditional apps, and you said you dropped in Pure Flash array and the problems just disappeared. >> Yeah, we haven't had any calls about slows since then. >> Dave: And if you had to sort of increase your capacity of the Pure system. >> We'd increase the capacity. In fact, because our three years was up we just did a head swap on them and added a little more capacity, and that went flawless. No outage for the business, and they were very happy about that. >> So as long-time storage practitioner... what's the difference in terms of... What difference does it make to you when you bring in a system like this? >> Some of the older systems to like do the head swap and get the new controller is weeks and weeks of planning and making sure you understand what's on their, what needs to move, what can take down times, what can't. I mean, there's a lot of planning that goes into that when you know there's going to be a disruption. So, with systems like Pure, we don't have to do as much planning. We still do a little bit so that we know what we're getting ourselves into and what's going to be at risk, but it's a lot less. There's no... >> So, Kent, how are you tracked by the business? What are kind of, do you have any measurements or KPI's that they look to you. We talked about uptime before, but, you know, how're you tracked, and how's that changed in say the last few years? >> It's changed quite a bit, cause we're not having to track, especially in our tier one apps that are on Pure we're not having to track the performance as much. So we're able to re-look at what our KPI's are, and come up with ones that are meaningful for us. And really, with the simplicity of it, it kind of helps us to become more of a trusted advisor to our business and be able to help them solve their problems instead of continually pulling knobs and fighting fires. >> Vik, I'm curious. How do you help the storage administrator today? I remember, Pure used to have streaming on its website. Certain data points from customers. What are you seeing today? What's helping them shift what they're working on, get more done with what they're doing? >> Kent: Yeah, absolutely. And just to come back to that and echo the point here Kent just made, essentially we're seeing the successful organizations in healthcare and possibly other verticals too, but I live and breath healthcare, right. So, healthcare. I.T. organizations that are able to make the transition to a trusted advisor, to a partner to the business are really making those leaps ahead. In terms of better patient care outcomes and also cost mitigation. Now, in terms of what we offer, right. So, it's the simplicity that's at the heart of everything. Once you set it up and you basically it's like Ron Popeil used to say. "You set it and forget it." Right? You have that experience. And then, it's not so much about having practitioners say "There's black magic going on "and we're going to just trust it." We have to build a transparency in there, and we have to demonstrate that at a glance, single pane there's answers to all of the questions and more that they might have. The telemetry that we're getting off of these systems allows us to do things with machine learning and AI and a lot of business intelligence the backend to be able to say "Hey, over eighty-some percent of all "of our problem tickets that are ever opened "are opened by Pure on behalf of our customers." And say "Hey, you have something that's demonstrating "a characteristic that is similar to what we've seen "across the world, somewhere else, "and you might run into a problem, "so let's just go resolve it." >> So, Kent, one of the things we've been poking at and they talked about in the key note this morning is how do you get more value out of your data? We talked about in an earlier segment with Vik. How do you look at your data? How are you sharing with other organizations or leveraging data internally better? >> Kent: Umm... >> Or are you? >> We've got quite a bit of data, and we're starting to go down the genomics road, and with that data we've got some good opportunities to be able to make some good advancements in healthcare and how different diseases are treated. So, we're kind of excited about that, and that's one of the areas my team's been really helping out, and being a trusted advisor to our genomics group. To get them set up with the things they need. >> You guys are talking on stage today about how backup and data protection is changing. It used to be kind of disk to disk to disk, and then sort of flash to disk to tape. Well, tape is still somewhere in there. You know, whatever, maybe it's the fourth level. You guys are talking flash to flash to cloud. We were talking off camera, Kent. You said "We're kind of looking at where to put "the right cloud workloads." Is backup one of those? >> Backup is possibly one of those. We talked a lot about how we off-site. Right now we still use a lot of tape. One of our key things that we think about when we're thinking about cloud and like off-siting stuff so we want to make sure we put it somewhere that, if we have a disaster, we can spin it up in that place. We're not trying to bring it back and bring it somewhere that is impossible during a disaster. So, we want to put it somewhere, and we want to be able to use it there and not just have it sit there and say "Yeah, we've got data protection. "It's right there, but we can't use it." >> Dave: Yeah, yeah. Can't recover. But, I mean, tape is still pretty prevalent in healthcare, right? It's a compliance issue,right? >> Vik: Very much so. >> I mean, your auditors aren't going to let you just throw away tape, right? >> Vik: Yes and no. I think it's just more of the "It's worked for so many years." Now, the problem that we run into is with the things, and we touched a little bit on this in the last segment. We talked about security, right? And sort of, in terms of insurance and protection against any of these threats that are malware et cetera, that are coming up, is getting more and more important for folks like Kent to prove to the business that "Hey, we're not only backing this data up "but we're restoring it. "We can restore it, and it's good." And we know how long this takes. So, all your iTell stuff comes into play. You have your SLO's. It's all back on. Try doing that with tape. Try doing that with tape that's been archived off-site. >> Dave: No, you can't. (laughing) >> And so this is why healthcare's actually moving in the direction of saying "You know what, let's just forget about that. "Let's just try to find different, better, faster "cheaper media if we can actually apply all of "the principals from today to do that." >> So you might still have tape, but you just never use it. Or you pray you never use it, just to have it there just in case. It's like that fire extinguisher in your barn that you don't know if it works or not but you have it there. >> Vik: It's there. It's good. It looks good, right? (laughing) >> Okay, and so, if you think about the experience that you've had with Pure. I told you I was going to put you on the spot, so are there things that you would do differently if you had to do it over again? Advice for your peers? Things that are on Pure's to-do list that you'd like them to do that'd make your life easier? >> I mean, yeah there's things that are on their to-do list. I mean, and I think they're announcing some of those today so that's probably pretty good. We want to do more with replication. Obviously, as a data protection, you need that. We'd like the price point of the M's to go down a little bit because there's kind of this misnomer about tier one storage and "Do I put my dev on tier one." Well, there's huge opportunities with cloning and things like that, and some of the partners that Pure has that we can actually bring up dev environments and not use as much storage as what we're using today. >> So that's a data sharing capability that you can give access to current data to your devs and not have to spin up multiple copies and separate infrastructure. And the use case that we talked about before was an enterprise data warehouse, right that you were trying to speed up. How about this, you heard from Scott Dietzen this morning the big push on analytics. Is that something, certainly your industry is pushing it. Is your organization there yet? Have you dipped your toe into the big data lake yet? >> Yeah. We've been doing analytics for a long time in one way or another. It's just, we're just getting more and more pressured to have the data available so they can continue to do that. >> Dave: Are you throwing Pure at that problem or is that... >> We hope to. Over time. We keep adding to our environment. >> Alright, Vik, we'll give you the last word. >> Pure and healthcare. What's the bumper sticker? >> Yeah, before you give me the last word I mean I think Kent's underselling what Intermountain's been doing in terms of analytics >> Yeah, add some color to it. >> over time, right? So, basically, they have been one of the pioneers in terms of really understanding drawing value from data. >> Really? >> Yes. It's been over time. It's been very much so of "I have this old data. I want to go run analytics on it. "Then I want to do some BI on it." And now we're getting to the real-time near real-time insight on data that really matters. And for that, we're hopeful that we're going to have an opportunity to actually participate and help build out those sorts of frameworks. And Intermountain's one of the organizations that's lead the way. A lot of the other organizations sort of following in the same footsteps. And, you know, right at the end, all I have to say is all of the benefits that we've talked about and we've talked about... We talked about across verticals and just horizontally in general that the Evergreen model brings to bare from Pure. I think they're really heightened, in terms of healthcare. So we talked about uptime. We talked about six ninths of uptime across our arrays And we're counting planned maintenance as part of your runtime. We're not saying exclude those, right? Very important. No data migrations. Super important. >> Dave: Downtime is downtime. >> Downtime is downtime. Exactly, thank you. Data migrations are super risky. Not only are they expensive, but they're risky. If you talk to any CMIO or CNIO and you say "Hey, how do you feel about your data being "picked up from here, put over there." See their reaction. >> Dave: It hurts. >> And they're expensive. And then the simplicity aspect of it. The simplicity is sort of at the function of the heart of everything. Its power is through simplicity, really is what it is. Giving him and his team and his organization time back to be able to go back and say to the business "How can we make your life better? "How can we make patient care better, "and how can we improve on resources?" >> Okay, good. Actually, Kent, we're going to give you the last word. Pure Accelerate 2017. Good event. What are you learning? Anything exciting? >> Kent: It's been a great event so far. Love the announcements. I just love being in this type of environment, because there's such a vibe here of wanting to help people do things and it's really great to be in a place like this. >> Dave: Yeah, it's fun too. We've got Snoop and... Snoop with the multi-cloud. That's an inside joke everyone. >> Vik: Multi-cloud. Are you sticking around? Are you sticking around for that tomorrow? >> Yeah, I'll be around. (laughing) Alright, good , we'll leave it there. Thanks you guys. We really appreciate you coming on. Okay, keep right there. This is theCube. We're live from Pure Accelerate 2017 in San Francisco. We'll be right back. (techno music)

(music) >> Announcer: Live, from San Francisco, it's The Cube. Covering Pure Accelerate 2017. Brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Welcome back to Pure Accelerate 2017. We're here at Pure70 in San Francisco. I'm Dave Vallente with my co-host Stu Miniman. We're switching things up a little bit. Scott Dietzen is still on stage wrapping up the Keynotes. We're about a half hour late. Buses were running late today, so we're going to adjust a little bit. Vik Nagjee is here. He's the CTO of healthcare for Pure Storage and he's with Sathya Sankaran, who is with Catalogic. Gents, welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you. >> Dave: Good to see you. >> Thank you for having us. >> So Vik, let's start with you. Healthcare, your title, interesting. I don't think I've, well, very rarely do you see a storage company, especially one that's slightly under a billion dollars, with healthcare in somebody's title. What's that all about? You guys obviously, strategy and healthcare and lifesciences, data driven industry, you guys are all about the data these days, but how'd you come to this and tell us about what's going on in the healthcare world. >> Absolutely, you're absolutely correct. Coming from healthcare IT over several years it's been slow comings in terms of infrastrucure companies in and of themselves saying, "Hey, let's get really serious about healthcare as a vertical," and bringing in people who are subject matter experts and have done healthcare for a very long period of time. I think the realization was an inflection point in terms of saying, "We've actually as an industry spent so much money on digitizing healthcare that we've actually gotten to a point where we need to start seeing some returns on that." The way to accomplish that is by putting data to work, right? So there's this wonderful hashtag on Twitter, if you go check it out, hashtag put data to work. And I love it. Basically, it's about saying, "We have all this data. It's growing." As soon as you try to fit a curve to it, the curve changes because it's kind of growing unbounded. The beauty is we want it to, because in that data lies better patient care and outcomes and in that data, once you actually understand and start to harness it, lies better financial success for the organization. That's what we're about here at Pure. >> Okay, and from Catalogic's perspective, Sathya, what's your angle here? What's the partnership all about? What do you guys bring to the table? >> Talking about data, snapshots are like gym memberships, right? You put data to work. Snapshots are like, everybody has access to one but very few actually use that, right? So we want to put the data to work. We want to put your copies to work and snapshots are the best way to take a copy of your production dataset and spin it up for PC environments, training environments, release, testing, development. All of these work can actually be done outside through snapshots of datasets that are sitting on Pure Storage. >> But, just to be clear, you guys are the catalog for the snapshots. It's your snapshots actually, right? >> Absolutely, and that's one key differentiator here in terms of the partnership that we have. It's all within the same data plane. All of he data is absolutely captured, stored, snapshoted and managed through Pure, right? Catalogic provides to us a very, very great catalog integration to say, "Okay, how do I actually deal with this data and what do I do with it?" And plus some more that we'll talk about here in a second. >> Okay, let's come back to the healthcare, if we can for a second Stu. >> Stu: Yeah. >> Because the healthcare, it's all about electronic medical records, meaningful use, HIPA compliance, you know, on and on and on. A lot of really not fun stuff but really important things, Obamacare, etc. Are we, sort of, primarily focused there, Vik, or are we starting to see this notion of data value coming to healthcare? >> Absolutely, we're starting to see notion of data value coming to healthcare. The way that I like to describe it is that over the past 30 something years, we have built an amazing library, or repository, for healthcare data. This is data that we're just putting in, right? When you go back to the hospital, or the doctor, they pull the data back out, they look at it for a few seconds, and they come and see you for a 15 minute visit, right? You've been waiting for 2 and a half hours at this point, right, so not great patient experience. We're trying to change that as well. >> Surfing the web. >> Vik: Right, right. >> See what's wrong with it (laughing). >> Exactly, right? But what we're finding now is that there lies so much meaning in data in terms of actionable intelligence, not only to provide you better care and to take care of you, but to also treat populations and say, "Okay let's, as a general population, make people healthier." Yes, we're learning from sensors in cars. We're learning from the internet of things all over the place and data, just in general, is central now to healthcare. Everybody has taken data now and finally put it on the pedestal that it deserves to be on and they're understanding that data matters in healthcare. All data matters. >> Sathya, I wonder if you could bring us inside some of these customers. I remember when object storage first rolled out. It was like healthcare, oh great. We're going to have metadata. We're going to be able to use this. It felt like it was, "Oh, well, we check the box on compliance and put some stuff places," but we hadn't really been transforming the way data got used for healthcare. What are you seeing in your customer base? Any stories you can tell us? >> A couple of things to point out is all of these have electronic health card systems, right? They actually sit on a lot of different databases. There's SQL, there's Oracle. There's also an intersystem cache database. Epic is one of the largest EHR environments and it runs on intersystems cache. What we've done at this point is to kind of treat the cache database as a first-grade citizen. You know Oracle and SQL have always been treated that way by all the other data management companies. We are elevating cache database, which is a huge player in the healthcare market and delivering options to snapshots of applications as well, not just on premise, but also allow the first lady to go into the cloud. You just saw Dietzen announce that you can actually now do snapshots and offload them to cloud as well. With us, you have the ability to orchestrate those snapshots and clear up consistent snapshots and have them hold on premise and on cloud as well. So we act as the orchestration layer for all these snapshots and application Pure already provides. Some people may use clips today, but owning Pure is like owning a family-owned car and having four bald tires with strips. We add the ability to actually create and manage all your datasets. As it changes, we keep up with it and run those orchestration for you. >> I'd like to add on thing there actually, and Sathya hit one some really great points. From the business standpoint, what we're seeing, what I'm personally seeing as an evolution over time, is that given the fact that everybody realizes that data's important, right? What they're doing is bringing data back in to centralize control within these IT organizations at healthcare organizations. Typically, it's very siloed and departmental. It's coming back in, so the CIO is really getting a purview over, and their arms around, all of the data. Now, this brings up additional challenges, right? You have X number of copies for your environments. You're copy data management is very important in healthcare. As we're growing the data and it's just going crazy, we can't also have multiple copies and just keep going crazy, right? There used to be a time, and I can speak personally about Epic, because I used to work at Epic for many years, right? At Epic, there used to be a time where we would basically come up with configuration in terms of trying to figure out how much storage you need for, not just for capacity, but for performance purposes. We'd end up with some ungodly number of copies, right, just to make sure you actually had your environments and also the performance. With data reduction technology, especially what we have at Pure here from a data reduction standpoint for digital application and compression along with the copy data management pieces, you're able to say, "Okay, I can bring some semblance to this entire house, right?" The last part is, in terms of security, right, cyber security, with all rants aware and everything else that's going on, you really want to have, in healthcare, peace of mind to say that not only do you have air gapped copies that you can actually bring back that are relevant, but you've gone through on a regular basis and proven organically that you can do this and you can do this within your SLAs and your SLOs. >> It also seems important to me that you can share many more copies, virtual copies, of data out of a single flash instance-- >> Absolutely. >> Yup, yup. >> And then catalogic obviously helps you manage that. Can you guys talk about the specific solution that you're sort of developing or partnering with others, database partners or whomever, for healthcare? >> Yeah, so I can start out and then you can take it from there, right Sathya? I think the way that we looked at this was to say, "Okay, what's the day in a life, right? What's the day in a life of storage and system administrators at these large healthcare organizations that actually touch data, be they snapshots, or backups, or clones, or integrity checks, or restoration tests, or what have you, right? Also, understanding the environment strategy that folks like Epic, and Allstrips, and Metattack, and Sherner, and whoever else used, right? Basically saying, "Okay, how can we take all of these things and apply a standard common framework to build the automation and orchestration and cataloging associated with it, plus the auditing associated with it, and provide that as a all in framework for our healthcare organizations to take advantage of, minimizing a significant amount of human intervention and interaction, which as we know, has issues. We run into these problems all the time. You hear from customers horror stories once a month across the country somewhere the other customer has an administrator who, with great intentions, has actually gone the wrong way and restored a snapshot of production from yesterday back on production instead of-- >> Whoops happens really fast. >> Whoops happens, right? >> And fast (laughing). >> That's all we can say, right, whoops. That's sort of our goal in terms of saying, "How can we actually take the burden away so that they can keep the main thing, the main thing. Focus on innovations and focus on partnering with your organization to help them accomplish their goals. So, Sathya? >> Yeah, and the other piece to it, we talked about ransomware. In healthcare space, what happened in Europe and UK was a huge thing. A lot of the other solutions that deliver copy data management use an appliance storage, right, so they want to actually move all your data set onto an appliance and want it off of there. What we deliver is basically in place copy data management. Basically the data sits on your storage, sits on the first-grade storage that you bought and using, and with the ability to drive back to a snapshot point in time, we can actually immediately come up and run. So this is, again, going back to the formula one analogy, right, you could run a spare tire, which is what all the appliances deliver. You have a problem, you could run a spare tire for a while, but at some point, you have to take a downtime and go back to it. With us, it's a formula one pit stop. You have a ready copy that is perfectly good, available for you to replace any time you get it down. We deliver the control and the orchestration layer and we give you the ability to go back to your old production state at any point and fairly quickly, and we allow you to exercise your data by creating testing environments for your developers. We met the systems team yesterday at Accelerate. They told us some of their UK customers are creating 40 copies of non-production datasets from their production datasets for their app dev purposes. >> I'd like to add on one thing there, it's very interesting about the InterSystems piece. I also worked at InterSystems for several years and have a really great relationship with them. One of the applications that they have is something that we're working on very closely with them, is InterSystems HealthShare, right? The unique challenge around HealthShare is that you have an environment that has multiple database instances that are loosely affiliated, but they still have logical consistency across them. The Holy Grail there, or the key there, is in terms of being able to provide copy data management and application consistency across these instances. That's kind of the work that we're doing together. >> Yeah, and at that point, the storage becomes your common compute layer, to some extent, right? Because if you want to take a snapshot across 40 different systems that are all in different volumes and storage, the only way you can take an app consistent snapshot is to take a consistency group, or PR calls it production groups. We have to be able to define that and take snapshots from the storage layer. >> That fundamentally changing the data access paradigm, really. Gentlemen, thanks so much for coming to The Cube and sharing your story in healthcare and best of luck. Really appreciate it. >> Vik: Thank you. >> Sathya: Thank you. >> You're welcome. >> Vik: Thanks, Dave. >> Sathya: Thank, too. >> All right, keep right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. This is Pure Accelerate. This is The Cube. (music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE! Covering Pure Accelerate 2017. Brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Welcome to Pier 70 in San Francisco, everybody. I'm Dave Vellante with my cohost Stu Miniman, and this is Pure Accelerate 2017. Pure Storage in 2009 started a big wave of flash migrations, and the company's strategy was to specifically go after the large EMC Install base of older Symmetrix, mainframe class storage, and even to a certain extent VNX and Clariion, if anyone remembers those terms, the Install base. Pure's ascendancy was really a function of shifting from spinning disk to flash. Fast forward seven, eight, nine years later, and Pure is talking about big data and AI and machine learning and IoT, and is really trying to completely transform not only the storage industry but itself as a leading player. The last time an independent storage company hit a billion dollars is about 20 years ago, a company called NetApp. Pure is trying to be the next to be a billion dollar company. Stu Miniman, lot of action goin' on here, used to be back in the day, I bought EMC for block, NetApp for file. Pure is trying to change that. >> Yeah, and Dave, you know storage, we've talked about it when Dell bought EMC. What did that mean to the whole storage industry? I wrote an article when it happened and said it's the end of the storage industry as we know it. When I came in here, it was like, oh, we're going to be talking about storage. You mentioned NetApp; I was at a NetApp event last week, and they said, "Storing is boring." It's really about the data, it's about the new applications. I really liked in the keynote they were talking about new use cases, new applications, how do they fit into that multi-cloud world, really interesting to hear Scott Dietzen, who we've known since this company was in stealth, laying out where the company is. They've got over 33 hundred customers, lot of SaaS applications, they're talking a lot about the machine learning and the AI pieces that are in here, but at the end of the day, I mean Dave, this is their primary business is a storage array replaces, as you said, the traditional EMC boxes that used to be sold. So how much of this is still kind of an update on what the legacy is doing, how much are they ready for the future? I'm excited to dig in with some real customers here. Pure has a good movement, good customer base, I've always had some good smart people with good tech, the Puritans as they call them, all wearing orange here. So, a cool venue and excited to dig in. >> Well, it's one of the fastest-growing companies in the storage business and in the IT business, and the way that Pure has gotten there isn't, you know, in its early days it never really talked much about so-called software-defined, it just did it. One of the problems that Pure attacks is the problem of migration. David Floyer and Wikibon have written extensively about the cost of migration, the pain of migration. It was almost just assumed, well you know, if I'm buying storage I'm going to have to migrate, and I'm going to spend 50, a hundred, sometimes many hundreds of thousands of dollars migrating my workloads from older arrays to newer arrays. Pure Storage has this Evergreen concept, where through the use of software and software-defined technologies, it's able to upgrade new customers quote-unquote seamlessly, there's that overused word again, but it's able to deliver essentially storage as a service even though you're putting an appliance on their site. So it's a radically different model. They've announced some things today, for instance like three site data replication, which is very very complicated. Trying to simplify that, so a lot of really novel ideas. Again I come back to their ascendancy. It was really based, Stu, upon attacking the slow, expensive spinning disk using its data reduction technology to create parity between the cost of spinning disk and the cost of flash, something David Floyer predicted back in 2009 would happen by 2014 for the high-spin speed. Now with FlashBlade, which is essentially the file-based system that Pure has, they're going after that same mantra with higher-capacity spinning disks, really going after the NetApp base. >> Yeah, and Dave, you mentioned that Pure could be the most recent billion dollar storage company. The company that might actually beat them to that is Nutanix. Now of course, Nutanix sells more than just storage. They're hyper-converged infrastructure, which means the compute that they're also selling, that's being used there, so it's not quite apples to apples, but the last quoter Nutanix had, about 10 million dollars more in revenue than Pure did; they also had IPOed. In that hyperconverge trend, one of the things that I saw early on on that, Dave, was attacking that migration cost. Hyperconverge, like what Pure does, a software layer, you create a pool of architectures, I can add in nodes, I can change configurations, I can update without the traditional way that we used to do it in storage, which was buy that box, take months to get it in there, load it up, transfer it over, retest it, you know all of those things that really kept your time-to-value on storage down, and that's something that Pure and all the hyper-converged players have been attacking, that kind of legacy mindset that we had in storage for so long. >> Yeah, and of course Pure's approach to converged is in partnership with Cisco and presumably others, I'm not actually sure about that, but Cisco's the main partner there with FlashStack, that's their converge play. They kind of do a knock on hyper-converged, kind of de-positioning it as sort of low-end, sort of contained, within small remote offices, whereas they're positioning FlashStack as the scalable internet infrastructure. Pure does very well with SaaS companies, they do, they're increasingly doing better with Fortune 500, they've still got a long way to go there. About 80% of their business is U.S., so there's a lot of upside internationally. We're talking about a company that'll be a billion dollars in their fiscal 2018, which is fundamentally the year we're in now, they've got about a 2.4 billion dollar market cap, they're growing at about 30% a year. And very interestingly, they had mid-60% gross margins at one point last year, they had like 69.6% gross margin, which is unheard of, you know, we haven't really seen this since back in the heydays of NetApp and EMC. The question is, is that sustainable? And of course the big question that we have today, and we're going to talk to Scott Dietzen, nickname Dietz, lot of nicknames here at Pure Storage, about is the concept of a large independent storage company. That concept is going away, it's like extinct except for one company really, NetApp is the only billion-dollar storage company left. It's been 20-plus years, maybe even 25 years since that's occurred. What are your thoughts on that, Stu? You know, I wrote a piece maybe eight years ago, Can EMC Remain Independent, recognizing that most of EMC's value was coming from Vmware and of course EMC could not remain independent. Do you think a company like Pure can unseat the leaders of Dell, EMC, HPE, IBM, and remain an independent storage company? >> Well, one of the things I always look at is what is, where are they going to hit their plateau? They're reaching towards billion dollars and they do continue to grow. I think that Pure still has plenty of headroom, but how long does it take them, Dave, to get to three or five billion dollars? The reason I throw out that number is that's probably how much storage Amazon's doing today. You know, look at Amazon, it's a 15 billion dollar company, somewhere between 15 and 30% of Amazon's business, and nobody in the storage business talks about that because it just ties to my applications. So I want to follow the applications, follow the data. It's good to hear that Pure is getting in with a lot of SaaS providers. From Wikibon data, 2/3 of the public cloud data, I'm sorry, of the public cloud revenue, is SaaS providers, so absolutely here come these like Pure, SolidFire sold, before when they were an independent company, sold to lots of service providers as well as SaaS providers. Kaminario, a Massachusetts-based flash company, sells to I believe it's about half of their business, is selling to the SaaS providers because these are companies that look at, okay I need to own how I scale my environment, own those economics, and need to grow that. And just one more piece on that economics, Dave. Look at that kind of multi- or hybrid cloud world. I bristle a little bit when I hear Scott Dietzen kind of almost say, public cloud, it's in the corner. about 20% of the use cases fit in that environment, yeah we'll do snaps to Amazon, we'll do some other things. But you don't put the public cloud in the corner and just say, oh, 20% of the market's there. 'Cause that's today, and it is still growing 50, 75, 100% depending on which public cloud you're talking about. We think that there's still plenty of upside, and when does that become a headwind that will slow the growth of what Pure's doing? You see a lot of the other software storage companies out there say how do they become software? When we were at the Veeam show, Dave, how did, they really were, we're going to live in Azure. We're going to partner with AWS, and they don't really care. Pure very much, their growth, their revenue, and their margins today are all built that they're going to be selling gear with that, yes they have the Purity 1 software and they have some cloud plays, but very much seems to be saying that public cloud's not the direction. I'm sure Scott will probably give us a little more nuance there, but you know, that legacy change to new distributed architectures has been a tailwind for Pure, and when will cloud be something that will push against their growth? >> Well, we're going to ask Scott Dietzen about that, and you're right on, I mean public cloud clearly is growing, I mean it's growing like crazy, particularly the SaaS component of that. Now of course, that can be a tailwind for Pure because they do sell to SaaS companies. They even, Scott even had a slide up there today showing Google, Uber, Facebook, AWS. Did you infer like I did that they were implying that they were selling to those companies, or? >> No, no no, I saw because in the last quarterly report they talked about basically the number four through a thousand. >> Dave: Four to a thousand. >> Dave: Right. >> So they're not selling to the top three, that they're clear on. >> So, okay, so the top three would be Amazon, Google, and Microsoft-- >> Right. >> But then there's Facebook, and Uber, possibly they could sell to those companies, Spotify is a SaaS company, so that SaaS part of the market is growing like crazy. Now the other point is, Wikibon released a study. We've been talking about it for the last couple of weeks in theCUBE around the true private cloud market forecast. True private cloud is an on-prem infrastructure that substantially mimics the public cloud at a much lower cost. We came up with this notion of true private cloud because there was so much cloudwashing going on, which really was virtualization. Now, the true private cloud is growing actually faster than any other cloud segment, now from a smaller base, granted. But we see about a 230 billion dollar TAM over the next 10 years evolving. Now, the most important part of this, and Scott Dietzen touched upon this in the morning, as did Hat, using some nicknames again, that companies are really focused on lowering their IT labor costs, and we see 150 billion dollars, approximately, of IT labor moving out of nondifferentiated heavy lifting, into what we sometimes call vendor R&D. In the form of cloud, or on-prem products, appliances, and other software frameworks that can automate and eliminate this low-value provisioning and patching and LUN management. So, Stu, you were very much involved in that true private cloud report, that market's exploding. I mean, to me, it's all about TAM expansion for Pure. They're a billion dollar company, roughly, they're participating in a 30 or 40 billion dollar market, so they have a long way to go. >> Yeah, absolutely. Because really, Dave, it's about the application. It is not a winner-takes-all environment. When you look at multicloud, it's what applications, and even we start teasing apart pieces of my applications and where they live. So, I look at, there was a nice logo slide that Pure put up, and you say okay, Hulu is a customer. Well, is Pure helping with their CDN? I really doubt it. You know, you look at Workday. Workday, up on stage at Amazon Reinvent talking about how they partnered with Amazon. So what applications is Pure winning, which ones are their customers using the public cloud for, and how does all of that sort out? Absolutely, true private cloud is really that reinvention of the data center, that flipping, if you will, of I mean Dave, you probably know better than me, that saying that IT spends 80 or 90 percent of their budget on keeping the lights on. How do we flip that so we can spend money on innovating, driving the business forward, stop spending on one of our favorite terms, undifferentiated heavy lifting and move to innovate and drive the business, and have IT serving those applications and serving the things that help me differentiate from the competition and move faster. Because, absolutely I'm sure something we'll hear this show, is it's that agility and that speed is what companies need, and Pure with their six nines of availability and that if you buy it today you're future-proof, if you will, is going to help customers say that they can have a platform that they buy today and know it's going to serve them well in the future. >> Well, Mark Benioff I think was the first that I heard said it, or it might've been Peter Burns, I can't remember, but basically there're going to be many more SaaS companies coming out of non-tech companies than tech companies. That to me, Stu, is a big, big tailwind for a company like Pure who's software first, software-defined, knows how to sell to SaaS companies. The other thing is, Pure's the latest company. They didn't say this but they certainly, one could infer it, the latest company to basically say tape is dead. So it used to be offsite backup the tape, now they're talking the flash to flash to cloud as the long-term retention. So a lot of really interesting things going on here. The venue is actually quite amazing, it's at Pier 70, this place is going to get torn down right after this show, it's a place that used to be an old steel mill that used to make battleships here, about two battleships a year during World War II. >> Yeah, the new Warriors facility is going to be here in Dogpatch soon, and I know everybody's super excited about that. >> Yeah, well, yeah, a lot of purple hats here, a lot of excited Warriors fans. >> All right, we'll be back, we've got day-to-day all day, wall-to-wall coverage of Pure Accelerate, #PureAccelerate. This is theCUBE, I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman, we'll be right back with Scott Dietzen right after this short break. (upbeat electronic chords)