>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to a special CUBE conversation. Going to be going through digging a little bit into the history as well as talking about the modern storage environment. Happy to welcome back to the program. One of our CUBE alumni, someone even I actually known for many years, we worked together for a number of years. Scott Delandy is the Technical Director of Dell Storage in Data Protection Division, of course with Dell Technologies. Scott, great to see you. >> Hey, Stu, is so awesome to see you guys. Thank you for the opportunity to come and chat with you. Today we've got some really exciting stuff that we want to go through and I know you and I are probably going to have a little bit of an issue because I know when we get together, we always want to reminisce about, you know, the things that we've done and you know, the stuff that we've gotten to work on and as well as the cool stuff that's happening within technology today. So everybody buckle in, 'cause this is going to be cool. >> Unfortunately, you know, we're only a few miles away from each other in person, but of course, in these time we have to do it while remote, but we'll walk side by side for a little bit of memory lane. >> Yes absolutely. >> You know, as I hinted you and I both worked at a company that many people will remember, I always worry Scott, you know, the younger people, you know, will be like, EMC, you know, who are they? Back when I started at EMC in 2000, it was, you know, you talked about prime and deck and some of the other companies here in Massachusetts that had been great and then been acquired or things that happened. So you even had a little bit, you've had a longer tenure at what is now Dell, EMC, of course, you know, the mega merger a couple of years ago. So, talk about a little bit, you know, your journey and we're going to be talking about PowerMax, which of course is the continuation of the long legacy of this Symmetrics platform. >> Yeah, it's crazy. So, I hit 30 years, with EMC and now with, Dell back in July. So it's been, you know, an amazing three now going on three plus decades of being able to work with amazing technology, incredibly talented people within the organization, as well as some of the best and brightest when it comes to users and customers that actually deploy the technology. So it's been a tremendous ride and you know, I'm not planning on slowing down any time soon. Let's just keep going, man. >> Yeah. You talk about decades, Scott, it felt like 2020 has been a decade into itself. (Scott laughs) So, but we, we talk about that history, Symmetrics really created, you know, that, that standalone storage business, you know, created a lot of technologies that help drive a lot of businesses out there, bring us up to speed, PowerMax, you know, what, where does that business fit in their portfolio? Got any good stuff for us that's adoption here in 2020. >> Yeah. I mean, you, you kind of said it. So when Symmetrics was originally introduced, and that was kind of one of the older generations architectures of what we now know today as PowerMax, a lot has changed with respect to the platform in terms of the technology, the types of environments that we support, the data services that we provide. So it's been, you know, again, three plus decades of evolution in terms of the technology, but kind of the concept of external storage buying computer deploying compute, separate from the storage infrastructure, that was a, unheard of concept back in 1990 when we first introduced Symmetrics. So this, month September is actually the 30 year anniversary from when we actually first created, that platform and, you know, lots of things have changed, right? It started as, you know, a mainframe platform and then we evolved into mainframe and open systems. And then we started looking at the adoption of things like client server, and then environments became virtualized, and, you know, throughout that entire history Symmetrics and now PowerMax has really been, one of the core tenants in terms of leveraging the storage infrastructure to make a lot of those evolutions happen in terms of the types of applications, types of operating environments and just the entire ecosystem that goes around, supporting an organization's applications and helping them run their business. Now where you know, PowerMax comes into play today, it is that it's still considered, the gold standard when it comes to high end technology, providing the reliability, the automation, the data services, the rich functionality that has made that platform, the success that still continues to be. You know, one of the things that blows my mind is if you look at just the last earnings call from, you know, last month or a couple of months ago now, PowerMax business is still growing what grew for that quarter at a triple digit rate. And, you know, you think of, you know, you look at kind of what's happening from a technology standpoint and kind of, you know, external storage has been a pretty kind of stable segment in terms of the infrastructure business, but still being able to see that type of growth, and just talking to users and, you know, hearing how much they continue to love the platform, how they continue to, you know, rely on the types of things that we're able to provide for their applications, for their businesses, just the tremendous amount of trust that's been built up, with respect to that platform. It's cool to be a part of that, and to be able to hear those types of things from the people that actually use the products. >> Yeah. One of the big changes during my time, you know, in the portfolio there, Scott was of course the real emergence of server virtualization with VMware of course. I'd actually started working, you know, when I was at EMC with VMware ahead of the acquisition. And then once the acquisition happened, there was a long maturation of storage in VMware environment. We kind of look back and say, you know, we spent a decade trying to fix and make sure that, you know, storage and networking could work well in those virtual environments. So we've got VMworld going on, understand you've got some news on the update, you know, that constant cadence of always make sure that, the storage and the virtual environment, work very well together. So, why don't you bring us up to date on the new. >> Yeah, so it's pretty exciting. So we are announcing some new software capabilities for the platform, as well as some new hardware enhancements, but basically the three focuses are a tighter integration with VMware specifically, by introducing new support for vVols and then changing the way that we've been able to deploy, and support vVols within the platform. We're also introducing, new cloud capabilities. So being able to take your primary storage, your PowerMax system, and being able to extend that to leverage cloud deployments. So being able to consume the capacity a little bit differently, being able to support some real interesting use cases in terms of why somebody might want to take their primary tier one storage and connect that, and to be able to move some of those datasets into a cloud provider. And then the third part is some really innovative things happening around security, really around being able to provide additional support for data protection, especially for things like encrypted environment, while still being able to preserve the efficiencies that we've built into these storage platforms. So those are kind of the three big things there's lot of other what we would call giblets also associated with the launch. But those are really the big ticket items that I think people are talking about in terms of this release. >> Well, let's drill in a little bit there, Scott. So if we take the cloud piece, you know, their message, of course, we understand, you know, Dell and VMware have partnered very closely together. VMware very much is driving that, you know, hybrid and multicloud deployment out there. So when I talk to some of the product teams, is you know, that consistency of deployment, you know, say you take a BX rail with VMware VCF, that that similar environment, what I could do in a Google cloud or an Azure, how does the, those cloud solutions that you talk about fit into that overall discussion? >> Well, when you look at something like vVols, right? So, vVols is a little bit of a change or a newer way of being able to connect, into an external storage platform. And one of the things that we're trying to solve with vVols is being able to provide, better granularity in terms of the storage and the capacity being consumed at the individual VM level, but also being able to plug into the VMware ecosystem so that even though you have an external storage device connected into that environment, the way it gets managed, the way it gets provisioned, the way you set up replication, the way you recover things is completely transparent because all of that is handled, through the VMware software that sits above that. So it seems like a trivial exercise to just, you know, plug in a storage system and kind of away you go, but there's heavy lifting required in order to support that because you've got that in sometimes, in some cases make changes to the things that you're doing on the back end storage side, as well as work with the ecosystem provider in this case VMware. That have changes so that they can support some of the functionality and some of the rich data services that you're able to provide under the covers. Right. I'll give you a great example. So one of the things that we have the ability to do today is when we plug into a VMware environment with a PowerMax, we can support up to 64,000 devices, right? And you just try and get your head around that 64,000 devices. What does that even mean? It sounds like a lot, is that just marketing number and nobody would ever, you know, get to that level in terms of the number of devices that you would have to support. But one of the, kind of the technical challenges that we wanted to be able to solve is that when you deploy a virtual machine, each individual virtual machine consumes minimally three vVols in order to support that. And sometimes dozens and dozens of vVols especially if you're looking at doing things like copies or making snapshots of that. So the ability to scale to that large number of vVols and being able to support that, in a single storage system is very powerful for our users, especially folks out there that are looking to do, massive levels of consolidation where they really want to collapse the infrastructure down. They want to get as few physical things that they have to manage, which means you're spreading, you know, hundreds, thousands of these virtual machines into a single piece of infrastructure. So scale really does matter, especially for the types of users that would deploy a PowerMax in their environment, because of, again, the things that they're trying to do from an IT perspective, as well as the things that they need to do in order to be able to support their businesses. >> Yeah. Well, Scott, absolutely scale is such an important piece of the overall discussion today. It means different things to different people. It could mean you're massively scaling out like the hyperscalers, there's the edge discussion of, you know, small scale, but lots of copies. Talk to me about scale when it comes to those mission critical application. So, you know, I think about the solutions and data services that you're talking about, of course, you know, EMC, the Symmetrics really helped create that allegory with things like SRDF, Timefinder back in the day. So, what are you hearing today what's most important for critical application. >> So it really, excellent point. It really comes down to automation, right? Where, you know, you think of some of these, large environments, and we have users out there today that will have tens of thousands of virtual machines running in a single system. And you know, the ability to manage those, you can't find human beings that are, enough of them, as well as, you know ability to keep up with all the changes that happen in that environment. It's just something, that cannot physically be done in a manual way. So having that environment as automated as possible is really important, but it's not just automation, it's being able to automate at scale, right? So if I have 10,000 VMs and I want to go ahead and make a change in the environment, going through and making those VM by VM by VM is incredibly impractical. So being able to plug into the environment and being able to have hooks or APIs into the interfaces that sit on top of that, that's where a lot of the value comes in, right. It's really that automation, because again, tens of thousands of VMs, 64,000 devices. cool cool stuff, but you're not going to manage those individually. So how do you take that infrastructure and how do you literally make it, invisible to everybody around it so that when you have something that you want to do, just worry about the outcome, you don't worry about the individual steps required in order to get to that outcome. >> Yeah. What you said is so important, Scott, I love when PowerMax first came out, I got to talk with some of the engineers and, you know, the comment I made is, we've been talking about automation for decades. You know, Scott, you probably know better than most, when some of the previous generations, no automation would be discussed, but it's different. And what they really said is, it's so much about, you know, machine scale and being able to, we've gone beyond human scale. Humans could not keep up with the amount of changes and how we do things, and it's not just some scripts that you build. So there really is that, kind of machine learning built into what we're talking about. The other thing we've talked about for a long time and has always been critical in your space and you'd hit it up before, security. So, you know, give us the discussion of, you know, security in PowerMax, how that fits over in company's overall security stance. >> Well, I mean, at a very high level, I can confidently say that there is a heightened level of awareness around security, especially for the types of applications and the types of data, that we would typically support within these platforms. So it is very much a top of mind discussion. And, you know, one of the things that people are looking at in terms of how do I protect that data is it needs to be encrypted, right? And you know, we've been doing encryption for many many years. Right? We first introduced that through a feature called DARE which is Data At Rest Encryption, which would allow us at the individual drive level to encrypt it. So if that drive was ever physically removed either to be serviced, or, you know, someone just lost the drive, you wouldn't have to worry about that data being kind of out in the wild and being able to be accessed by somebody, because there was an encryption key. And unless you had that key, you could not access that data. And for many many years, that became a check in the box requirement. You cannot put your gear in my data center, unless I can assure that that data that's being stored on that system is encrypted, right. What's changing now, is just being able to encrypt the data on the array is no are good enough for some environments. The data needs to be encrypted from the host, from it being written by the application all the way through the server, the memory, the networks, everything, the controllers, right to the backend storage. So it's not just encrypting the data that's at rest, but encrypting the data end to end. Right. And one of the challenges that you have is that when you are writing an encrypted data, to a storage platform, especially in all flash storage platform, one of the data services that provides a lot of value is the ability to do data reduction, through a combination of things like data deduplication, and compression, and pattern recognition. There's all this kind of cool stuff that happens under the covers. So we will typically see a three to one, four to one data reduction for a particular application. But when that data is encrypted, you no longer get that efficiency it won't dedup, it won't compress. That kind of changes the sort of economic paradigm if you would, as you look at these external storage devices. So we've been talking to customers, we had one customer in particular come to us. They were a large insurance company. And one of their biggest customers came to them and said, our new policy is that all of our employee data, has to be encrypted, encrypted end to end. And so, as they looked at, well, how are we going to address that requirement? They quickly realized that in order to do that, they're going to need to increase the amount of storage that they have three to four X, because this data that they were getting really high deduplication and compression up against, they we're no longer going to get that. So what we did is we looked at well, what are ways that we can preserve the data efficiencies, the data reduction on the storage side, while still being able to meet the requirement to encrypt that data? So one of the new features that we're introducing within PowerMax is the ability to do end-to-end encryption while still being able to preserve the efficiencies. So I can turn encryption on all the way at the host level. I can write that data into the PowerMax, the PowerMax has access to the encryption keys that are on the host. It has the ability to decrypt that data in line. So there's no bump in the wire. There's no performance impact, apply the data reduction to it, and then re-encrypt the data as we're writing it out to the back. Yeah. So it's a hugely important feature for IT organizations, that are just now kind of getting their heads around this emerging requirement, that it's just not the stuff that's at rest that needs to be encrypted, it's the data end to end that's in that process. So big challenge there, and it really is one of the innovations that we're kind of pushing, in order to basically meet that requirement for this you know, set of users out there that see this as either something that they need today, or an evolving requirement where they want to put infrastructure in place. So if they're not doing it today, but they see maybe a couple of years down the line, that's something that they're going to need to do. They have the ability to enable that feature on the storage itself. >> Well, so Scott, 30 years of innovation, driving through this, you know, first of all, I hope if you haven't planned already, you need to get one of those Symmetrics refrigerators that I saw from back in the day, you know, wheel that out to the parking lot of where our tool's used to be, you know, a sign to the times that, you know, it used to be a bar for a few times now, you know, an organic sushi place, but you know, socially distanced gathering to celebrate, but give us a little look forward, you know, 30 years, I'm not resting on your laurels, always moving forward. So what would we expect to see, from PowerMax you know, going forward? >> So, two things, number one, the person that came up with that idea of the, what we internally refer to as the V fridge was an absolute genius. Just, you know, I would say that person was a genius. Second thing is in terms of, you know, what we see going forward is, I mean, one of the top of mind discussions for a lot of users is cloud, right? How do I have a cloud strategy? I know that I have applications that I am going to continue to need to run in my, what we'll call a quote unquote traditional data center, just because of the sensitivity of the application, just the predictability that I need around that. I need to basically control that and I have the economics in place where that becomes a really cost effective way of being able to support those types of workloads. But that said, there are other ways that I can consume storage infrastructure, that doesn't require me to go ahead and buy a storage system and kind of deploy it in a data center that I own. So users want to basically be able to explore that as an option, but they want to really understand what's the right use case for that. So one of the things that we're also introducing within PowerMax, and we expect there to be a lot of interests and we expect there to be definitely a solid uptake in terms of adoption, is the ability connect a PowerMax into a cloud, right? So this could be a Dell ECS platform. It could be Amazon S3, it could be Microsoft Azure. So there's a lot of flexibility in terms of the type of cloud connectivity that I could support. But as we looked at you know, what do we want to do? We don't want to to just, you know, connect into a cloud because that's doesn't mean anything, right? So we need to understand, you know, what's, the right use case, right? So when we talk to a lot of our users, they had their storage systems and what they were doing is they were using a lot of capacity for things like snapshots, right? Creating point in time copies of their applications, for a variety of reasons, doing those for database checkpoints, doing those to support testing and development environments, doing those because they wanted to make a copy, and do some sort of offline processing up against that. But very mature, very well established concept of making copies called snapshots. And when we talk to some users, they are, we have some out there that are very heavy consumers of snapshots. And in some cases, 25-30% of the storage that they're using, is being consumed for snapshots. And what the requirement was is, Hey, if I could free up that space by taking these snapshots that I create, then may be I'll use them within the first couple of days, couple of weeks, but then I want to keep those snaps, but I don't really need to keep them, on my primary tier one storage. Maybe if I could offload those to another type of storage, that's either more cost effective, allows me to consume it on demand, gives me the ability to free up those resources so that I could use this capacity that I already own for other things that are growing within the environment, that would be something that I would be interested in. So we, we heard that requirement and, you know, from a product management standpoint, when you look at developing new products, new capabilities, there's kind of three things that you always want to do. Number one, you want to identify what is the requirement? What is the use case? What is the problem that you're trying to solve? And you want to make sure you understand that really well. And you build a technology that's designed to do that in a very good and efficient way. So that's number one. Number two is you want to make it easy to deploy, right? We don't want to create an environment where you need, you know, it's very fragile and you need, you know, specialized skills to go in there and deploy it, it's literally firing up the application, putting in the IP addresses for the S3 storage that you want to connect to, and then away you go, your setup is done, really really simple setup. But the third thing, and really, you know, one of the more important things is, what's the user experience? right. Is this something bizarre? Is this managed as a vApp? Is this something that I have to, you know, click on another application, I have to fire up another screen? So you want to take the management of that data service, and you want to build it right into the platform itself. So with the cloud snapshot capability that we're introducing, that's exactly what we're doing. Where we've identified a solid use case that we knew a lot of customers out there are going to be very interested in understanding, what they can do with this. And what type of new flexibility it can provide. Number two, making it super simple to deploy. Matter of fact, it's included with the PowerMax. You buy the PowerMax, that software functionality, that capability is included with the platform. So there's not even an additional licensing charge required to do that. It's included with the storage. And number three, an ease of perspective. I create a snapshot. I have the option. Do I want that snapshot to live on the array that I created it? Or do I want to take that snapshot, and do I want to push it off onto that provider? Whether it's an ECS in my data center or whether it's something that's sitting over an Amazon AWS, but really easy to basically deploy. And what we plan to do is to take this capability that we've narrowed down to a very specific use case in order to make sure, that we have a clear idea of what the benefits are in terms of why users would want to deploy it, look at other things, because there are other opportunities that we have to expand that to as that capability matures, and as we start to see adoption really take off, >> Oh, Scott, great to catch up with you. Thanks so much for helping us, you know, look down memory lane, as well as a look at the new pieces today and where we're going for the future >> Stu, always a pleasure. Thanks a lot. Great to talk to you again, as always. And hopefully we can get to do this again sometime soon, and maybe a real kind of physical sort of setting, where you know, we're not separated by, you know, a couple of counties and having to go to the West coast and come back here, but maybe you know, actually in a similar physical location. >> Definitely. We all hope for that in the future that we can get everybody back together. In the meantime, we have all the virtual coverage, be sure to check out thecube.net Of course all theCUBE conversations as you can see linked on the front page. Well, it shows like VMworld that we alluded to. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching. Thank you. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. (intense music) >> Hi, everybody, this is Dave Vellante in theCUBE, and as you know, I've been doing a CEO series, and welcome to the isolation economy. We're here at theCUBE's remote studio, and really pleased to have Charlie Giancarlo, who is the CEO of PureStorage. Charlie, I wish we were face-to-face at Pure Accelerate, but this'll have to do. Thanks for coming on. >> You know, Dave, it's always fun to be face-to-face with you. At Pure Accelerate when we do it in person is great fun, but we do what we have to do, and actually, this has been a great event for us, so appreciate you coming on air with me. >> Yeah, and we're going to chat about that, but I want to start off with this meme that's been going around the internet. I was going to use the wrecking ball. I don't know if you've seen that. It's got the people, the executives in the office building saying, "Eh, digital transformation; "not in my lifetime," complacency, and then this big wrecking ball, the COVID-19. You've probably seen it, but as you can see here, somebody created a survey, Who's leading the digital transformation at your company? The CEO, the CTO, or of course circled is COVID-19, and so we've seen that, right? You had no choice but to be a digital company. >> Well, there's that, and there's also the fact that the CEOs who've been wanting to push a digital transformation against a team that wants to stick with the status quo, it gives the CEO now, and even within our own company in Pure, to drive towards that digital transformation when people didn't really take up the mantle. So no, it's a great opportunity for digital transformation, and of course, the companies that have been doing it all along have been getting ahead during this crisis, and the ones that haven't are having some real trouble. And you and I have had some really interesting conversations. Again, that's, I think, the thing I miss most, not only having you in theCUBE, but the side conversations at the cocktail parties, et cetera. And we've talked about IP, and China, and the history of the US, and all kinds of interesting things there, but one of the things I want to put forth, and I know you guys, Kix especially, has done a lot of work on Tech For Good, but the narrative pre-COVID, PC I guess we'd call it, was really a lot of vitriol toward big tech especially, but you know what? That tech lash... Without tech, where would we be right now? >> Well, just think about it, right? Where would we be without videoconferencing, without the internet, right? We'd be sheltered in place with literally nothing to do, and all business would stop, and of course many businesses that require in-person have, but thank God you can still get goods at your home. You can still get food, you can still get all these things that today is enabled by technology. We've seen this ourselves, in terms of having to make emergency shipments during our first quarter to critical infrastructure to keep things going. It's been quite a quarter. I was saying to my team recently that we had just gotten everyone together in February for our sales kickoff for the year, and it felt like a full year since I had seen them all. >> Well, I had interviewed, I think, is it Mike Fitzgerald, your head of supply chain. >> Yes. >> In March, and he was saying, "No. "We have no disruptions. "We're delivering for clients," and we certainly saw that in your results in the quarter. >> Yeah, no, we're very fortunate, but we had been planning for doing our normal business continuity disaster planning, and actually, once we saw COVID in Asia in January we started exercising all those muscles, including pre-shipping product around to depos around the world in case transportation got clogged, which it in fact did. So we were well-prepared, but we're also, I think, very fortunate in terms of the fact that we had a very distributed supply chain. >> Yeah, I mean you guys obviously did a good job. You saw in Dell's earnings they held pretty firm. HPE, on the other hand, really saw some disruption, so congratulations to you and the team on that. So as we think about exiting this isolation economy, we've done work that shows about 44% of CIOs see a U-shaped recovery, but it's very fragmented. It varies by industry. It varies by how digital the organizations are. Are they able to provide physical distancing? How essential are these organizations? And so I'm sure you're seeing that in your customer base as well. How are you thinking about exiting this isolation economy? >> Well, I've certainly resisted trying to predict a U- or a V-shape, because I think there are many more unknowns than there are knowns, and in particular, we don't know if there's a second wave. If there is a second wave, is it going to be more or less lethal than the first wave? And as you know, maybe some of your audience knows, I contracted COVID in March. So I've done a lot of reading on not just COVID, but also on the Spanish flu of 1918-1919. It's going to take a while before this settles down, and we don't know what it's going to look like the rest of the year or next year. So a lot of the recovery is going to depend on that. What we can do, however, is make sure that we're prepared to work from home, work in the office, that we make sure that our team out in the field is well-placed to be able to support our customers in the environment, and the way that we're incenting our overall team now has less to do with the macro than it does with our specific segment, and what I mean by that is we're incenting our team to continue to build market share, and to continue to outperform our competition as we go forward, and also on our customer satisfaction figure, which you know is our Net Promoter Score, which is the highest in the industry. So that's how we're incenting our team. >> Yeah, and we're going to talk about that, and by the way, yes, I did know, and it's great to see you healthy, and I'd be remiss if I didn't also express my condolences, Matt, the loss of Matt Danziger, your head of IR, terrible tragedy. Of course Matt had some roots in Boston, went to school in Maine. >> Yeah. >> Loved Cape Cod, and so really sad loss, I'm sure, for all of the Puritans. >> It's affected us all very personally, because Matt was just an incredible team member, a great friend, and so young and vital. When someone that young dies for almost unexplainable reasons. It turned out to be a congenital heart condition that nobody knew about, but it just breaks... It just breaks everyone's heart, so thank you for your condolences. I appreciate it. >> You're welcome. Okay, so let's get into the earnings a little bit. I want to just pull up one of the charts that shows roughly, I have approximately Q1 because some companies like NetApp, Dell, HPE, are sort of staggered, but the latest results you saw IBM growing at 19%. Now we know that was mainframe-driven in a very easy compare. Pure plus 12, and then everybody else in the negative. Dell, minus five, so actually doing pretty well relative to NetApp and HPE, who, as I said, had some challenges with deliveries. But let's talk about your quarter. You continue to be the one sort of shining star in the storage business. Let's get into it. What are your big takeaways that you want us to know about? >> Well, of course I'd rather see everybody in the black, right, everybody in the positive, but we continue to take market share and continue to grow 20 to 30% faster than the rest of the industry combined, and it's quarter after quarter. It's not just a peak in one quarter and then behind in another quarter. Every quarter we're ahead of the rest of the industry, and I think the reasoning is really quite straightforward. We're the one company that invests in storage as if it's high technology. You do hear quite often, and even among some customers, that storage is commoditized, and all of our competitors invest in it, or don't invest in it, as if it's a commoditized market. Our view is quite straightforward. The science and the engineering of computing and data centers continues to evolve, continues to advance, has to advance if we continue down this path of becoming more of a digital economy. As we all know, processors advance in speed and capability. Networking advances in terms of speed and capability. Well, data storage is a third of data center spend, and if it doesn't continue to advance at the same pace or faster than everything else, it becomes a major bottleneck. We've been the innovator. If you look at a number of different studies, year after year, now over six or seven years, we are the leader in innovation in the data storage market, and we're being rewarded for that by penetrating more and more of the customer base. >> All right, let's talk about that. And you mentioned in your keynote at Accelerate that you guys spend more on R&D as a percentage of revenue than anybody, and so I want to throw out some stats. I'm sorry, folks, I don't have a slide on this. HPE spends about 1.8 billion a year on R&D, about 6% of revenues. IBM, I've reported on IBM and how it's spending the last 10 years, spent a huge amount on dividends and stock buybacks, and they spent six billion perpetually on R&D, which is now 8% of revenue. Dell at five billion. Of course Dell used to spend well under a billion before the EMC acquisition. That's about 6% of revenue. And NetApp, 800 million, much higher. They're a pure play, about 13%. Pure spends 430 million last year on R&D, which is over 30% of revenue on R&D, to your point. >> Yeah, yeah, well, as I said, we treat it like it's high technology, which it is, right? If you're not spending at an appropriate level you're going to fall behind, and so we continue to advance. I will say that you mentioned big numbers by the other players, but I was part of a big organization as well with a huge R&D budget, but what matters is what percent of the revenue of a specific area are you spending, right? You mentioned Dell and VMware. A very large fraction of their spend is on VMware. Great product and great company, but very little is being spent in the area of storage. >> Well, and the same thing's true for IBM, and I've made this point. In fact, I made this point about Snowflake last week in my breaking analysis. How is Snowflake able to compete with all these big whales? And the same thing for you guys. Every dime you spend on R&D goes to making your storage products better for your customers. Your go-to-market, same thing. Your partner ecosystem, same thing, and so you're the much more focused play. >> Right, well I think it boils down to one very simple thing, right? Most of our competitors are, you might call them one-stop shops, so the shopping mall of IT gear, right? The Best Buy, if you will, of information technology. We're really the sole best of breed player in data storage, right, and if you're a company that wants two vendors, you might choose one that's a one-stop shop. If you have the one-stop shop, the next one you want is a best of breed player, right? And we fill that role for our customers. >> Look it, this business is a technology business, and technology and innovation is driven by research and development, period, the end. But I want to ask you, so the storage business generally, look, you're kind of the one-eyed man in the land of the blind here. I mean the storage business has been somewhat on the back burner. In part it's your fault because you put so much flash into the data center, gave so much headroom that organizations didn't have to buy spindles anymore to get to performance, the cloud has also been a factor. But look, last decade was a better decade for storage than the previous decade when you look at the exits that you guys had and escape velocity, Nutanix, if you can kind of put them in there, too. Much larger than say the Compellents or 3PARs. They didn't make it to a billion. So my question is storage businesses, is it going to come back as a growth business? Like you said, you wish everybody were in the black here. >> Right, well a lot of what's being measured, of course, is enterprise on-prem storage, right? If we add on-prem and cloud, it actually continues to be a big growth business, because data is not shrinking. In fact, data is still growing faster than the price reduction of the media underneath, right, so it's still growing. And as you know, more recently we've introduced what we call Pure as-a-Service and Cloud Block Store. So now we have our same software, which we call Purity, that runs on our on-prem arrays, also running on AWS, and currently in beta on Azure. So from our point of view this is a... First of all, it's a big market, about $30 to $40 billion total. If you add in cloud, it's another $10 to $15 billion, which is a new opportunity for us. Last year we were about 1.65 billion. We're still less than, as you know, less than 10% of the overall market. So the opportunity for us to grow is just tremendous out there, and whether or not total storage grows, for us it's less important right now than the market share that we pick up. >> Right, okay, so I want to stay on that for a minute and talk about... I love talking about the competition. So what I'm showing here with this kind of wheel slide is data from our data partner ETR, and they go out every quarter. They have a very simple methodology. It's like Net Promoter Score, and it's very consistent. They say relative to last year, are you adopting the platform, that's the lime green, and so this is Pure's data. Are you increasing spend by 6% or more? That's the 32%, the forest green. Is spending going to be flat? Is it going to decrease by more than 6%? That's the 9%. And then are you replacing the platform, 2%. Now this was taken at the height of the US lockdown. This last survey. >> Wow. >> So you can see the vast majority of customers are either keeping spending the same, or they're spending more. >> Yeah. >> So that's very, very strong. And I want to just bring up another data point, which is we like to plot that Net Score here on the vertical axis, and then what we call market share. It's not like IDC market share, but it's pervasiveness in the survey. And you can see here, to your point, Pure is really the only, and I've cited the other vendors on the right hand, that box there, you're the only company in the green with a 40% Net Score, and you can see everybody else is well below the line in the red, but to your point, you got a long way to go in terms of gaining market share. >> Exactly, right, and the reason... I think the reason why you're seeing that is really our fundamental and basic value is that our product and our company is easy to do business with and easy to operate, and it's such a pleasure to use versus the competition that customers really appreciate the product and the company. We do have a Net Promoter Score of over 80, which I think you'd be hard-pressed to find another company in any industry with Net Promoter Scores that high. >> Yeah, so I want to stay on the R&D thing for a minute, because you guys bet the company from day one on simplicity, and that's really where you put a lot of effort. So the cloud is vital here, and I want to get your perspective on it. You mentioned your Cloud Block Store, which I like that, it's native to AWS. I think you're adding other platforms. I think you're adding Azure as well, and I'm sure you'll do Google. >> Azure, Azure's in beta, yes. >> Yeah, Google's just a matter of time. Alibaba, you'll get them all, but the key here is that you're taking advantage of the native services, and let's take AWS as an example. You're using EC2, and high priority instances of EC2, as an example, to essentially improve block storage on Amazon. Amazon loves it because it sells Compute. Maybe the storage guys in Amazon don't love it so much, but it's all about the customer, and so the native cloud services are critical. I'm sure you're going to do the same thing for Azure and other clouds, and that takes a lot of investment, but I heard George Kurian today addressing some analysts, talking about they're the only company doing kind of that cloud native approach. Where are you placing your bets? How much of it is cloud versus kind of on-prem, if you will? >> Yeah, well... So first of all, an increasing fraction is cloud, as you might imagine, right? We started off with a few dozen developers, and now we're at many more than that. Of course the majority of our revenue still comes from on-prem, but the value is the following in our case, which is that we literally have the same software operating, from a customer and from a application standpoint. It is the same software operating on-prem as in the cloud, which means that the customer doesn't have to refactor their application to move it into the cloud, and we're the one vendor that's focused on block. What NetApp is doing is great, but it's a file-based system. It's really designed for smaller workloads and low performance workloads. Our system's designed for high performance enterprise workloads, Tier 1 workloads in the cloud. To say that they're both cloud sort of washes over the fact that they're almost going after two completely separate markets. >> Well, I think it's interesting that you're both really emphasizing cloud native, which I think is very important. I think that some of the others have some catching up to do in that regard, and again, that takes a big investment in not just wrapping your stack, and shoving it in the cloud, and hosting it in the cloud. You're actually taking advantage of the local services. >> Well, I mean one thing I'll mention was Amazon gave us an award, which they give to very few vendors. It's called the Well-Architected AWS Award, because we've designed it not to operate, let's say, in a virtualized environment on AWS. We really make use of the native AWS EC2 services. It is designed like a web service on EC2. >> And the reason why this is so important is just, again, to share with our audience is because when you start talking about multi-cloud and hybrid cloud, you want the same exact experience on-prem as you do in the cloud, whether it's hybrid or across clouds, and the key is if you're using cloud native services, you have the most efficient, the highest performance, lowest latency, and lowest cost solution. That is going to be... That's going to be a determinate of the winner. >> Yes, I believe so. Customers don't want to be doing... Be working with software that is going to change, fundamentally change and cause them to have to refactor their applications. If it's not designed natively to the cloud, then when Amazon upgrades it may cause a real problem with the software or with the environment, and so customers don't want that. They want to know they're cloud native. >> Well, your task over the next 10 years is something. Look it, it's very challenging to grow a company the size of Pure, period, but let's face it, you guys caught EMC off-guard. You were driving a truck through the Symmetrics base and the VNX base. Not that that was easy. (chuckling) And they certainly didn't make it easy for ya. But now we've got this sort of next chapter, and I want to talk a little bit about this. You guys call it the Modern Data Experience. You laid it out last Accelerate, kind of your vision. You talked about it more at this year's Accelerate. I wonder if you could tell us the key takeaways from your conference this year. >> Right, the key takeaway... So let me talk about both. I'll start with Modern Data Experience and then key takeaways from this Accelerate. So Modern Data Experience, for those that are not yet familiar with it, is the idea that an on-prem experience would look very similar, if not identical, to a cloud experience. That is to say that applications and orchestrators just use APIs to be able to call upon and have delivered the storage environment that they want to see instantaneously over a high speed network. The amazing thing about storage, even today, is that it's highly mechanical, it's highly hardware-oriented to where if you have a new application and you want storage, you actually have to buy an array and connect it. It's physical. Where we want to be is just like in the cloud. If you have a new application and you want storage or you want data services, you just write a few APIs in your application and it's delivered immediately and automatically, and that's what we're delivering on-prem with the Modern Data Experience. What we're also doing, though, is extending that to the cloud, and with Cloud Block Store as part of this, with that set of interfaces and management system exactly the same as on-prem, you now have that cloud experience across all the clouds without having to refactor applications in one or the other. So that's our Modern Data Experience. That's the vision that drives us. We've delivered more and more against it starting at the last Accelerate, but even more now. Part of this is being able to deliver storage that is flexible and able to be delivered by API. On this Accelerate we delivered our Purity 6.0 for Flash Array, which adds not only greater resiliency characteristics, but now file for the first time in a Flash Array environment, and so now the same Flash Array can deliver both file and block. Which is a unified experience, but all delivered by API and simple to operate. We've also delivered, more recently, Flash Array 3.0... I'm sorry, Purity 3.0 on FlashBlade that delivers the ability for FlashBlade now to have very high resiliency characteristics, and to be able to even better deliver the ability to restore applications when there's been a failure of their data systems very, very rapidly, something that we call Rapid Restore. So these are huge benefits. And the last one I'll mention, Pure as-a-Service allows a customer today to be able to contract for storage as a service on-prem and in the cloud with one unified subscription. So they only pay for what they use. They only pay for what they use when they use it, and they only pay for it, regardless of where it's used, on-prem or in the cloud, and it's a true subscription model. It's owned and operated by Pure, but the customer gets the benefit of only paying for what they use, regardless of where they use it. >> Awesome, thanks for that run through. And a couple other notes that I had, I mean you obviously talked about the support for the work from home and remote capabilities. Automation came up a lot. >> Yep. >> You and I, I said, we have these great conversations, and one of the ones I would have with you if we were having a drink somewhere would be if you look at productivity stats in US and Europe, they're declining-- >> Yes. >> Pretty dramatically. And if you think about the grand challenges we have, the global challenges, whether it's pandemics, or healthcare, or feeding people, et cetera, we're not going to be able to meet those challenges without automation. I mean people, for years, have been afraid of automation. "Oh, we're going to lose jobs." We don't have enough people to solve all these problems, and so I think that's behind us, right-- >> Yeah, I agree. >> The fear of automation. So that came up. Yeah, go ahead, please. >> I once met with Alan Greenspan. You may remember him. >> Of course. >> This is after he was the chairman, and he said, "Look, I've studied the economies now "for the last 100 years, "and the fact of the matter is "that wealth follows productivity." The more productive you are as a society, that means the greater the wealth that exists for every individual, right? The standard of living follows productivity, and without productivity there's no wealth creation for society. So to your point, yeah, if we don't become more productive, more efficient, people don't live better, right? >> Yeah, I knew you'd have some good thoughts on that, and of course, speaking of Greenspan, we're seeing a little bit of rational exuberance maybe in the market. (chuckling) Pretty amazing. But you also talked about containers, and persisting containers, and Kubernetes, the importance of Kubernetes. That seems to be a big trend that you guys are hopping on as well. >> You bet. It is the wave of the future. Now, like all waves of the future, it's going to take time. Containers work entirely differently from VMs and from machines in terms of how they utilize resources inside a data center environment, and they are extraordinarily dynamic. They require the ability to build up, tear down connections to storage, and create storage, and spin it down at very, very rapid rates, and again, it's all API-driven. It's all responsive, not to human operators, but it's got to be responsive to the application itself and to the orchestration environment. And again, I'll go back to what we talked about with our Modern Data Experience. It's exactly the kind of experience that our customers want to be able to be that responsive to this new environment. >> My last question is from John Furrier. He asked me, "Hey, Charlie knows a lot about networking." We were talking about multi-cloud. Obviously cross-cloud networks are going to become increasingly important. People are trying to get rid of their MPLS networks, really moving to an SD-WAN environment. Your thoughts on the evolution of networking over the next decade. >> Well, I'll tell you. I'm a big believer that even SD-WANs, over time, are going to become obsolete. Another way to phrase it is the new private network is the internet. I mean look at it now. What does SD-WAN mean when nobody's in the local office, right? No one's in the remote office; they're all at home. And so now we need to think about the fact... Sometimes it's called Zero Trust. I don't like that term. Nobody wants to talk about zero anything. What it really is about is that there is no internal network anymore. The fact of the matter is even for... Let's say I'm inside my own company's network. Well, do they trust my machine? Maybe not. They may trust me but not my machine, and so what we need to have is going to a cloud model where all communication to all servers goes through a giant, call it a firewall or a proxy service, where everything is cleaned before it's delivered. People, individuals only get, and applications, only get access to the applications that they're authorized to use, not to a network, because once they're in the network they can get anywhere. So they should only get access to the applications they're able to use. So my personal opinion is the internet is the future private network, and that requires a very different methodology for authentication for security and so forth, and if we think that we protect ourselves now by firewalls, we have to rethink that. >> Great perspectives. And by the way, you're seeing more than glimpses of that. You look at Zscaler's results recently, and that's kind of the security cloud, and I'm glad you mentioned that you don't like that sort of Zero Trust. You guys, even today, talked about near zero RPO. That's an honest statement-- >> Right. >> Because there's no such thing as zero RPO. (chuckling) >> Right, yeah. >> Charlie, great to have you on. Thanks so much for coming back in theCUBE. Great to see you again. >> Dave, always a pleasure. Thank you so much, and hopefully next time in person. >> I hope so. All right, and thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, and we'll see you next time. (smooth music)

(jazzy intro music) [Narrator] Live from New York, it's the Cube! Covering the IBM Machine Learning Launch Event, brought to you by IBM. Now, here are your hosts: Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. >> Welcome back to New York City, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We've been covering, all morning, the IBM Machine Learning announcement. Essentially what IBM did is they brought Machine Learning to the z platform. My co-host and I, Stu Miniman, have been talking to a number of guests, and we're going to do a quick wrap here. You know, Stu, my take is, when we first heard about this, and the world first heard about this, we were like, "Eh, okay, that's nice, that's interesting." But what it underscores is IBM's relentless effort to continue to keep z relevant. We saw it with the early Linux stuff, we're now seeing it with all the OpenSource and Spark tooling. You're seeing IBM make big positioning efforts to bring analytics and transactions together, and the simple point is, a lot of the world's really important data runs on mainframes. You were just quoting some stats, which were pretty interesting. >> Yeah, I mean, Dave, you know, one of the biggest challenges we know in IT is migrating. Moving from one thing to another is really tough. I love the comment from Barry Baker. Well, if I need to change my platform, by the time I've moved it, that whole digital transformation, we've missed that window. It's there. We know how long that takes: months, quarters. I was actually watching Twitter, and it looks like Chris Maddern is here. Chris was the architect of Venmo, which my younger sisters, all the millennials that I know, everybody uses Venmo. He's here, and he was like, "Almost all the banks, airlines, and retailers "still run on mainframes in 2017, and it's growing. "Who knew?" You've got a guy here that's developing really cool apps that was finding this interesting, and that's an angle I've been looking at today, Dave, is how do you make it easy for developers to leverage these platforms that are already there? The developers aren't going to need to care whether it's a mainframe or a cloud or x86 underneath. IBM is giving you the options, and as a number of our guests said, they're not looking to solve all the problems here. Here's taking this really great, new type of application using Machine Learning and making it available on that platform that so many of their customers already use. >> Right, so we heard a little bit of roadmap here: the ML for z goes GA in Q1, and then we don't have specific timeframes, but we're going to see Power platform pick this up. We heard from Jean-Francois Puget that they'll have an x86 version, and then obviously a cloud version. It's unclear what that hybrid cloud will look like. It's a little fuzzy right now, but that's something that we're watching. Obviously a lot of the model development and training is going to live in the cloud, but the scoring is going to be done locally is how the data scientists like to think about these things. So again, Stu, more mainframe relevance. We've got another cycle coming soon for the mainframe. We're two years into the z13. When IBM has mainframe cycles, it tends to give a little bump to earnings. Now, granted, a smaller and smaller portion of the company's business is mainframe, but still, mainframe drags a lot of other software with it, so it remains a strategic component. So one of the questions we get a lot is what's IBM doing in so-called hardware? Of course, IBM says it's all software, but we know they're still selling boxes, right? So, all the hardware guys, EMC, Dell, IBM, HPE, et cetera. A lot of software content, but it's still a hardware business. So there's really two platforms there: there's the z and there's the Power. And those are both strategic to IBM. It sold its x86 business because it didn't see it as strategic. They just put Bob Picciano in charge of the Power business, so there's obviously real commitments to those platforms. Will they make a dent in the market share numbers? Unclear. It looks like it's steady as she goes, not dramatic increase in share. >> Yeah, and Dave, I didn't hear anybody come in here and say this offering is going to say, well let me dump x86 and go buy mainframe. That's not the target that I heard here. I would have loved to hear a little bit more as to where this fits into the broader IOT strategy. We talked a little bit on the intro, Dave. There's a lot of reasons why data's going to stick at the edge when we look at the numbers. For the huge growth of public cloud, the amount of data in public cloud hasn't caught up to the equivalent of what it would be in data centers itself. What I mean by that is, we usually spend, say 30% on average for storage costs inside a data center. If we look at public cloud, it's more around 10%. So, at AWS Reinvent, I talked to a number of the ecosystem partners, that started to see things like data lakes starting to appear in the cloud. This solution isn't in the data lake family, but it's with the analytics and everything that's happening with streaming and machine learning. It's large repositories of data and huge transactions of data that are happening in the mainframe, and just trying to squint through where all the data lives, and the new waves of technologies coming in. We heard how this can tie into some of the mobile and streaming activities that aren't on the mainframe, so that it can pull them into the other decisions, but some broader picture that I'm sure IBM will be able to give in the future. >> Well, normally you would expect a platform that is however many decades old the mainframe is, after the whole mainframe downsizing trend, you would expect there would be a managed decline in that business. I mean, you're seeing it in a lot of places now. We've talked about this, with things like Symmetrics, right? You minimize and focus the R&D investments, and you try to manage cost, you manage the decline of the business. IBM has almost sort of flipped that. They say, okay, we've got DB2, we're going to continue to invest in that platform. We've got our major subsystems, we're going to enhance the platform with Open Source technologies. We've got a big enough base that we can continue to mine perpetually. The more interesting thing to me about this announcement is it underscores how IBM is leveraging its analytics platform. So, we saw the announcement of the Watson Data Platform last September, which was sort of this end-to-end data pipeline collaboration between different persona engine, which is quite unique in the marketplace, a lot of differentiation there. Still some services. Last week at Spark Summit, I talked to some of the users and some of the partners of the Watson Data Platform. They said it's great, we love it, it's probably the most robust in the marketplace, but it's still a heavy lift. It still requires a fair amount of services, and IBM's still pushing those services. So IBM still has a large portion of the company still a services company. So, not surprising there, but as I've said many many times, the challenge IBM has is to really drive that software business, simplify the deployment and management of that software for its customers, which is something that I think it's working hard on doing. And the other thing is you're seeing IBM leverage those platforms, those analytics platforms, into different hardware segments, or hardware/cloud segments, whether it's BlueMix, z, Power, so, pushing it out through the organization. IBM still has a stack, like Oracle has a stack, so wherever it can push its own stack, it's going to do that, cuz the margins are better. At the same time, I think it understands very well, it's got to have open source choice. >> Yeah, absolutely, and that's something we heard loud and clear here, Dave, which is what we expect from IBM: choice of language, choice of framework. When I hear the public cloud guys, it's like, "Oh, well here's kind of the main focus we have, "and maybe we'll have a little bit of choice there." Absolutely the likes of Google and Amazon are working with open source, but at least first blush, when I look at things, it looks like once IBM fleshes this out -- and as we've said, it's the Spark to start and others that they're adding on -- but IBM could have a broader offering than I expect to see from some of the public cloud guys. We'll see. As you know, Dave, Google's got their cloud event in a couple of weeks in San Francisco. We'll be covering that, and of course Amazon, you expect their regular cadence of announcements that they'll make. So, definitely a new front in the Cloud Wars as it were, for machine learning. >> Excellent! Alright, Stu, we got to wrap, cuz we're broadcasting the livestream. We got to go set up for that. Thanks, I really appreciate you coming down here and co-hosting with me. Good event. >> Always happy to come down to the Big Apple, Dave. >> Alright, good. Alright, thanks for watching, everybody! So, check out SiliconAngle.com, you'll get all the new from this event and around the world. Check out SiliconAngle.tv for this and other CUBE activities, where we're going to be next. We got a big spring coming up, end of winter, big spring coming in this season. And check out WikiBon.com for all the research. Thanks guys, good job today, that's a wrap! We'll see you next time. This is theCUBE, we're out. (jazzy music)