>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of VMworld 2020 brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stuart Miniman and this is theCUBES's coverage of VMworld 2020. Our 11th year doing the show and happy to welcome back to the program one of our CUBE's alums. Somebody that's is going to VMworld longer than we have been doing it for theCUBE. So Vaughn Stewart he is the Vice President of Technology Alliances with Pure Storage Vaughn, nice to see you. How you doing? >> Hey, Stu. CUBE thanks for having me back. I miss you guys I wish we were doing this in person. >> Yeah, we all wish we were in person but as we've been saying all this year, we get to be together even while we're apart. So we look to you on little screens and things like that rather than bumping into each other at some of the after parties or the coffee shops all around San Francisco. So Vaughn, obviously you know Pure Storage long, long, long partnership with VMware. I think back the first time that I probably met with the Pure team, in person, it probably was around Moscone, having a breakfast having a lunch, having a briefing or the likes. So just give us the high level. I know we've got a lot of things to dig into. Pure and VMware, how's the partnership going these days? >> Partnership is growing fantastic Pure invests a lot of engineering resources in programs with VMware. Particularly the VMware design partner programs for vVols, Container-Native Storage et cetera. The relationship is healthy the business is growing strong. I'm very excited about the investments that VMware is making around VMware Cloud Foundation as a replatforming of what's going on MPREM to help better enable hybrid cloud and to support Tanzu and Kubernetes platforms. So a lot going on at the infrastructure level that ultimately helps customers of all to adopt cloud native workloads and applications. >> Wonderful. Well a lot of pieces to unpack that. Of course Tanzu big piece of what they're talking about. But let's start. You mentioned VCF. You know what is it on the infrastructure side, that is kind of driving your customer adoption these days, and the some of the latest integrations that you're doing? >> Yeah you know VCF has really caught the attention of our mid to large or mid to enterprise size customers. The focus around, as I use the phrase replatform is planning out with VMworld phrase. But the focus on simplifying the lifecycle management, giving you a greater means to connect to the public cloud. I don't know if you're aware, but all VMware public cloud offerings have the VCF framework in terms of architectural framework. So now bringing that back on-prem, allowing customers on a per workload domain basis to extend to a hybrid cloud capability. It's a really big advancement from kind of the base vSphere infrastructure, which architecturally hasn't had a significant advancement in a number of years. What's really big around VCF besides the hybrid connectivity, is the couple of new tools SDDC Manager and vSphere Lifecycle Manager. These tools can actually manage the infrastructure from bare metal up to workload domains and then from workload domains you're now handing off to considered like delegated vCenter Servers right? So that the owner of a workload if you will and then that person can go ahead and provision virtual machines or containers, based on whatever is required to run their workloads. So for us the big gain of this is the advancement in the VMware management. They are bringing their strength in providing simplicity, and end-to-end hardwared application management to disaggregated architectures. Where the focus of that capability has been with HCI over say the past five or six years. And so this really helps close that last gap, if you will, and completes a 360 degree view of providing simplified management across dissimilar architecture and it's consistent and it's standardized by VMware. So HCI, disaggregated architecture, public cloud, it all operates the same. >> So Vaughn, you made a comment about not a lot of changes. If I remember our friends at VMware they made a statement vSphere 7 was the biggest architectural change in over a decade. Of course bringing in Kubernetes it's a major piece of the Tanzu discussion. Pure. Your team's been pretty busy in the Kubernetes space too. Recent acquisition of Portwox to help accelerate that. Maybe let's talk a little bit about you know cloud native. What you're hearing from your customers. (chuckles) And yeah, like we've Dave Vellante had a nice interview with, Pure and Portwox CEOs. Give the VMworld audience a little bit of an update as you know where you all fit in the Kubernetes space. >> Yeah and actually, there was a lot that you shared there kind of in connecting the VCF piece through to vSphere 7 and a lot of changes there in driving into Tanzu and containers. So maybe we're going to jump around here a bit but look we're really excited. We've been working with VMware, but in addition to all of our application partners, you are seeing nearly every traditional enterprise application being replatformed to support containers. I'd love to share with you more details, but there's a lot of NDAs I'd be breaking in that. But the way for enterprise adoption of containers is right upon us. And so the timing for VMware Tanzu is ideal. Our focus has always been around providing a rich set of data services. One that provides faster provisioning, simplified fleet management, and the ability to move that container and those data services between different clouds and different cloud platforms, Be it on-prem, or in the public cloud space. We've had a lot of success doing that with the Pure Service Orchestrator Version 6.0 enables CSI compliant persistent storage capabilities. And it does support Tanzu today. The addition or I should say the acquisition of Portworx is really interesting. Because now we're bringing on an enhanced set of data services that not only run on a Pure Storage storage products, but runs universally regardless of the storage platform, or the Cloud architecture. The capabilities within Portworx are above and beyond what we had in PSO. So this is a great expansion of our capabilities. And ultimately we want to help customers. Whether they want to do containers solely on Tanzu, or if they're going to mix Tanzu with say Amazon EKS, or they've got some department that does development on OpenShift. Whatever it might be. You know that the focus of storage vendors is obviously to help customers make that data available on these platforms through a consistent control plane. >> Yeah. Vaughn it's a great acquisition. Think a nice fit. Anybody that's been talking to Pure the last year or so you've been. How do we take the storage make it more cloud native if you will. So you've got code. Obviously, you've got a great partnership with VMware, but as you said, in Amazon and some of the other hyper clouds those clouds, those storage services, no matter where a customer is, so that that core value, of course we know, is this the software underneath it. And that's what Portworx is. So you know not only Pure's, but other hardware, other clouds and the likes. So a really interesting space You know Vaughn, you and I've been covering this, since the early days of VMware. Hey this software is kind of a big deal and you know (chuckles) cloud in many ways is an extension of what we're doing. I know we used to joke how many years was it that VMworld was storage world? You know. >> Ooh yeah. >> There was talk about like big architectural changes, you know vVols When that finally came out, it was years of hard work by many of the big companies, including your previous and current you know employer. What's the latest? My understanding is that there are some updates there when it comes to the underlying vVols. What are the storage people need to know? >> Yeah. So great question and VMware is always been infrastructure world really Right? Like it is a showcase for storage. But it's also been a showcase for the compute vendors and every Intel partner. From a storage perspective, a lot is going on this year that should really excite both VMware admins and those who are storage centric in their day-to-day jobs. Let's start with the recent news. vVols has been promoted within VCF to being principal storage. For those of you who maybe are unfamiliar with this term 'principal storage' VMware Cloud Foundation supports any form of storage that's supported by vSphere. But SDDC manager tool that I was sharing with you earlier that really excites large scale organizations around it's end-to-end simplicity and management. It had a smaller, less robust support list when it comes to provisioning external storage. And so it had two tiers. Principal and secondary. Principal meant SDDC manager could provision and deprovision sub-tenants. So the recent news brings vVols both on Fiber Channel and iSCSI up to that principal tier. Pure Storage is a VMware design partner around vVols. We are one of the most adopted vVols storage platforms, and we are really leaning in on VCF. So we are very happy to see that come to fruition for our customers. Part of why VMware partners with Pure Storage around VCF, is they want VCF enabled on any Fabric. And you know some vendors only offer ethernet only forms of connectivity. But with Pure Storage, we don't care what your Fabric is right. We just want to provide the data services be it ethernet, fiber channel or next generation NVMe over Fabric. That last point segments into another recent announcement from from VMware. Which is the support for NVMe over Fabric within vSphere 7. This is key because NVMe over Fabric allows the IO path to move away from SCSI based form of communication one to a memory based form of communication. And this unleashes a new level of performance, a way to better support those business and mission critical applications. Or a way to drive greater density into a smaller form factor and footprint within your data center. Obviously Fabric upgrades tend to not happen in conjunction with hypervisor upgrades, but the ability to provide customers a roadmap and a means to be able to continually evolve their infrastructure non disruptively, is our key there. It would be remiss of me to not point out one kind of orthogonal element, which is the new vMotion capabilities that are in vSphere 7. Customers have been tried for a number of years, probably from vSphere 4 through six to virtualize more performance centric and resource intense applications. And they've had some challenges around scale, particularly with the non-disruptive. The ability to non disruptively move a workload. VMware rewrote vMotion for vSphere 7 so it can tackle these larger more performance centric workloads. And when you combine that along with the addition of like NVMe over Fabric support, I think you're truly at a time where you can say, almost every workload can run on a VMware platform, right? From your traditional two two consolidation where you started to looking at performance centric AI, in machine learning workloads. >> Yeah. A lot of pieces you just walked through Vaughn, I'm glad especially the NVMe over Fabric piece. Just want to drill down one level there. As you said, there's a lot of pieces to make sure that this is fully worked. The standards are done, the software is there, the hardware, the various interconnects there and then okay, when's does the customer actually ready to upgrade that? How much of that is just you know okay hitting the update button. How much of that is do I need to do a refresh? And we understand that the testing and purchasing cycles there. So how many customers are you talking to that are like, "Okay I've got all the pieces, "we're ready to roll, "we're implementing in 2020." And you know, what's that roadmap look like for kind of the typical enterprise, which I know is a bit of an oxymoron? (laughs) >> So we've got a handful. I think that's a fair way to give you a size without giving you an exact number. We had a handful of customers who have NVMe over Fabric deployments today. The deployments tend to be application or workload centric versus ubiquitous across the data center. Which I think does bear an opportunity for VMware adoption to be a little bit earlier than across the entire data center. Because most VMware architectures today are based on top of rack switching. Whether that switching is fiber channel or ethernet base, I think the ability to then upgrade that switch. Either you've got modern hardware and it just needs a firmware update, or you've got to replace that hardware and implement NVMe over Fabric. I think that's very attractive. Particularly that you can do so in a non disruptive manner with a flash array or with flash deck. We expect to see the adoption really start to take take hold in 2021. But you probably won't see large market gains until 2022 or 23. >> Well that's super helpful Vaughn especially Pure Storage you've got customers that have some of the most demanding performance environments out there. So they are some of the early adopters that you would expect go into adopting this new technology. All right. I guess last piece, listening to the keynote looking at all the announcements that they have you know, VMware obviously has a big push into the cloud native space they've made a whole lot of acquisitions. We touched on a little bit before but what's your take as to what you are hearing from your customers, where they are with adoption into really modernizing and accelerating their businesses today? >> I think for the majority of our customers and again I would consider more of a commercial or mid market centric up through enterprise. They've particularity enterprise, they've adapted cloud native technologies particularity in developing their own internal or customer facing applications. So I don't think the technology is new. I think where it's newer is this re platforming of enterprise applications and I think that what's driving the timeline for VMware. We have a number of Pivotal deployments that run up here. Very large scale Pivotal deployments that run on Pure. And hopefully as you audience knows Pivotal is what VMware Tanzu has been rebranded as. So we've had success there. We've have had success in the test and development and in the web facing application space. But now this is a broader initiative from VMware supporting enterprise apps along with you know the cloud native disaggregated applications that have been built over the last say five to 10 years. But to provide it though a single management plane. So I'm bullish, I'm really bullish I think they are in a unique position compared to the rest of our technology partners you know they own the enterprise virtualization real estate and as so their ability to successfully add cloud native application to that, I think it's a powerful mix . For us the opportunity is great. I want to thank you for focusing on the fact that we've been able to deliver performance. But performances found on any flash product. And it's not to demote our performance by any means, but when you look at our customers and what they purchase us in terms of the repeat purchases, it's around simplicity, it's around the native integration with VMware and the extending of that value prop through our capabilities whether it's through the end-to-end infrastructure management, through data protection extending in the hybrid cloud. That's where Pure Storage customers fall in love with Pure Storage. And so it's a combination of performance, simplicity and ultimately, you know, economics. As we know economics drive most technical decisions not the actual technology itself. >> Well, Vaughn Stewart thank you so much for the update, congratulation on all the new things that are being brought out in the partnership >> Thank you Stu appreciate being on theCUBE, big shout out to VMware congratulations on VMworld 2020, look forward to seeing everybody soon >> All right, stay tuned for more coverage VMworld 2020 I'm Stu Miniman and that you for watching theCUBE. (bright upbeat music)