(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)