live from Miami Beach Florida it's the queue covering beam on 2019 brought to you by V hello everyone welcome back to Miami this is the cubed a leader and live tech covers is day two of our coverage of v-mon 2019 at the Fontainebleau Hotel in sunny Miami Dave Volante with Peter Burroughs Trevor stars is here is the director of systems engineering for pure storage Trevor great to see you again yeah thanks for having me yeah well we've been following pure since the did the early days I remember interviewing Scott Dietzen it's a snw way back when and seeing the ascendency and the rise fewer hits escape velocity he goes public just been an awesome ride you guys have really kind of transformed the industry started out as you know the flash play but now really getting much deeper into sort of data and data strategies and data protection is one of those so we're here at v-mon what are your impressions so far this week the conference has been great a lot of great interactions theme has been an incredibly strong alliance partner for us the synergies are just incredible because you know as we've evolved as you mentioned from a singular product in all flash array and disrupting the market there back in the early 2010's evolving into more of a data platform company and data protections actually turned out to be a great business for us it's growing incredibly fast and you know like I said a lot of great synergies with beam so the systems engineering role has always been a critical part of the the sales process right this right the SC's is like I need an se you know and then you guys will go in help the sales team really understand what the customer needs you'll help solve problems but how was that roll it to find a pure and how was it evolving in the industry yeah absolutely and I think similar to our products in the early days we we hired a lot of folks who were storage specialists and and we've evolved into having to go far beyond that right into the different realms around things like AI machine learning data protection you know virtualization containers and so it it's definitely evolving it's challenge to us as a company and we're certainly trying to not maintain a status quo we want to continue to disrupt and do that in adjacent markets so how do you work with veem just in terms of taking your platform and their software and making a solution that's kind of simple for customers it's not you know stove-piped you know single throat to choke describe that whole process yeah yeah so we recently earlier this year maybe it was late last year we we developed some integration with beam to where we we actually integrate with their universal storage API so beam can control pure storage snapshots which you're which are probably familiar with pure snapshots on flash are incredibly powerful it's a it's a very powerful metadata engine in purity and which means we can take thousands of snapshots with no performance impact in their near instantaneous with veeam we can instantly integrate that into Veen backup and data protection workflows and vm can completely control pure storage snapshots both honoré and offer a which we'll talk about without having to have a storage administrator log into pure at all okay and so talk more about how the system plays with your customers I mean when you're when you're in with the customer and you're sort of scoping it out how is that conversation changing is just in terms of as you say you went from okay here's an array and flash now there's all the spectrum of other things that you're doing that's what's the data protection conversation like how does it relate to their digital transformation their digital business where do you guys fit there well operationally we've seen a huge trend from customers that a decade or so ago you saw the trend of going from disk to disk to tape tape for long term archive what we're actually here at the conference really promoting is this idea of the next big wave of evolution there which is we see customers going from flash to flash for the first step in backup and then instead of off-site tape going to the cloud so that's been an incredibly successful message for us early on and so that actually started with you know I mentioned the pure flash or a snapshot integration but actually moving those snapshots off of flash array to our second product which is flash blade flash blades a really unique product it was originally designed with the next big wave of innovation in mind around things like containers and deep learning where high amounts of bandwidth and parallelism are just absolutely critical billions of small files it just so happens that actually caters really well to backup performant and restore performance so backing up to disk was a big success for a lot of customers but what they're seeing now and what we're seeing as workloads continue to get more diverse is that there's a restore challenge so we have customers that are backing up to disk but they're seeing massive challenges around getting their data back and getting back online the recovery time objective pressures from the business are becoming more and more important this actually started for us in the SAS industry where one of the world's largest SAS providers out in Silicon Valley had to do an increasing amount of restore and they've they actually started using flash blade as what we call a rapid restore platform so they're able to nearly instantaneously restore these databases and what we found is nearly across the board and in all other industries that there's a large number of customers that have that challenge more so then we find you know going to market with flash played for like AI for example there's not as many people doing that quite yet we've been successful in the ones that are but across the board healthcare legal high-tech you name it it there's a restore problem and with flash played we've seen people go you know for example one of our really other customers outside of the SAS world is in the healthcare space the industry's number one cancer center in the in the world is actually leveraging it for rapid restore for databases but they're also doing some other neat things because flash blades not a purpose-built backup appliance it can be used for other things anything file an object works great so what you can do is you can combine the use cases and that's been really powerful from a TCO perspective you might say customers might say well you know flash is too expensive but if there's a restore problem that may not matter and then if you combine it with other use cases we call that our data hub story it's even more powerful in the TCO becomes you know really attractive so the healthcare using it for PACs and rapid restore you know there's other industries like you know my gaming industry like I mentioned high tech so that data hub message has been really powerful that's return on asset and asset leverage oh absolutely and and and one of the things I'd like to talk about Trevor is relating to that is there are a lot of ways of describing some of those fundamentals some of those really contingent and essential changes that are taking place in the industry today but one of them clearly is flash allows us to move from a data storage orientation of record and you know save the data to one of deliver the data to new applications pure has been at the vanguard of that and has seen a lot of these new use cases as we think about no return on data assets and whatnot how is your visibility into those new use cases changing Pure's perspective and pure customers perspective on data protection because it seems like the notion of data protection which has been around for a long time is starting to fray as these new use cases say it's not just protecting about what's happened it's setting me up for doing new types of work in the future so how is that how is pure seeing that how does that conversation about data protection changing because of some of the drive that purus got in them in the marketplace yeah and I think the first step is hey I can backup my data but if I can't use it it's kind of worthless right so being able to use that data and much much more rapidly but also repurposing that this idea of data silos has been around IT for years and with flash blade and that data hub story we're really breaking down those silos to be able to say hey the same the same platform that you're storing your data protection data as well as other data it's the same platform that I might be able to spin that data up so beams got a great story with data labs where you can actually spin up these virtual environments and run and on a purposeful backup device you know you it's it's questionable if that actually works right and having to pull that back over the network to another silo with Flash blade and the data hub it makes that realistic and and getting so much more out of the data delivering that back to the business and actually be able to deliver these key insights into what my data is actually doing and be able to make better business decisions as what the output you see kind of an analogy of a relationship between previous to now where storage was about persisting data and therefore was about protecting what has happened to flash being about delivering data to new applications and therefore there's some new concept our customers pushing you guys towards something that goes that's bigger than data protection I mean it's something that we're struggling with and one of the customers we have is struggling with how do I talk about what these services are when I'm spitting up kubernetes clusters like that that's right so is it is there some new conversation that you're starting to see you guys are one of the first to have a conversation about data you know flash data for AI are you starting to have conversations about you know deliver data something more than protection yeah near real-time ability to spin up development environments see ICD pipelines all of those things we actually have a product that as a pure customer you get as inclusive of maintenance contract called pure source service Orchestrator which can actually help provision end-to-end container environments and being able to repurpose that data for like I said test dev development pipelines and those kind of things and we're also as you've probably heard we're tying that into a cloud strategy as well so there's there's products we've announced cloud block storage side as well as object engine which is a product we haven't talked about yet which enables customers to truly see the benefit of a hybrid cloud scenario so they may be developing an application on Prem and pushing the cloud or vice versa and we're actually going to give them that back capability to do that talk more about object engines specifically what it is that means been inferring object yes store and object engine you know you hear the name it could mean a number of things but clearly it has to do with object storage so object engine was actually a technology that was born in the cloud so it was a cloud native application that was really designed around data reduction for cloud workloads what we've done as part of that product it folded into peers we've actually ironically it is not what we used it for first we'd developed an appliance and we call that our object engine appliance that's just phase one so what object engine delivers is a highly scalable highly performant data reduction platform we're starting with backup and data protection workloads so vemma obviously does their in-line data reduction technology if the customer finds that they need something more scalable they can actually leverage object engine to do that and then flash blade on the back end as the initial tier and then the future vision for object engine is that it's going to give you the cloud connectivity to be able to say okay I want to automatically push my backup workloads from an archive perspective out to the cloud we're starting in AWS we're gonna do Azure and others as well so the next big wave of that that you'll see is actually running object engine in the cloud in a hybrid scenario and be able to move those work clothes back and forth so kind of envision you know the the near-term backup and restore most of the resource happen within a week or two on Prem and then 100% also stored in the cloud for more long-term archives so that really it really completes the flash to flash the cloud story but we're not gonna stop with backup workloads either and where's your sort of value added in that equation and where's VM and how do you sort of what's the connection points there good question good question so I you know I think again I mentioned via obviously has their in line data reduction technology where we insert object engine is really one of two reasons one if if our data reduction offsets the cost of the whole solution without using it with just using beams data reduction because it is it's a hardware offload essentially and then the second one is if you need a you know a large amount of data that you want to push out to the cloud as our kind of phase two of that product right okay I want to ask you about the partnership from the terms from the standpoint of values sure the values of pure are you guys are fun company I love orange you go to pure accelerate everybody's wearing orange to come here everybody's wearing green so these seem to be kind of birds of a feather but but we just talked about value add what about the values of your company and sort of how you guys getting along yeah we're getting along great I like I said there's a lot of synergies from a solution standpoint but just from a go-to market standpoint trying to be you know a disruptive company it just technology disruptive solutions what is that next thing right not being a me-too player in the market and so I think we share a lot of those those same values but also customer success we really focus on the outcomes and a happiness of the customer and that that's down in the core of our engineering same thing with beam where I think we can really help each other is Veeam has a big push right now to move up market into the enterprise and we feel like we can help beam in that respect we've been very successful in enterprise and likewise veem obviously has a major presence in amia and that's a market that is is is growing for us substantially but we've got a lot of upside so we really think we can help each other there and I actually failed to mention the very first object engine flash Blade sale we did was with him so you know it was it was it was just natural in that perspective and I think pre object engine and before this whole idea of rapid restore really took off with flash blade it was it was just the flashier a protection and even that's still pretty new but now it's much more comprehensive so we've got common common competitors as well and pure accelerates coming up in September it's in Austin you're your hometown I'm town in Austin Texas so yeah we'll be there September 15th to 18th and we're going to be talking about a ton of stuff obviously flash to flash the cloud but well beyond storage as well so even if you know don't think of it as just a storage conference it's always fun event we've covered now I think twice this will be our third year so in Austin is a great great town and looking forward to that Trevor thanks so much for coming on the cube love that loved it thanks for having me feel very welcome all right keep it right to everybody we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break I'm Dave Volante with Peterborough's v-mon 28 2019 from Miami right back