from around the globe it's thecube presenting the convergence of file and object brought to you by pure storage we're back with the convergence of file and object a special program made possible by pure storage and co-created with the cube so in this series we're exploring that convergence between file and object storage we're digging into the trends the architectures and some of the use cases for unified fast file and object storage uffo with me is matt burr who's the vice president general manager of flashblade at pure storage hello matt how you doing i'm doing great morning dave how are you good thank you hey let's start with a little 101 you know kind of the basics what is unified fast file and object yeah so look i mean i think you got to start with first principles talking about the rise of unstructured data so when we think about unstructured data you sort of think about the projections 80 of data by 2025 is going to be unstructured data whether that's machine generated data or you know ai and ml type workloads you start to sort of see this i don't want to say it's a boom uh but it's sort of a renaissance for unstructured data if you will where we move away from you know what we've traditionally thought of as general purpose nas and and file shares to you know really things that focus on uh fast object taking advantage of s3 cloud native applications that need to integrate with applications on site um you know ai workloads ml workloads tend to look to share data across uh you know multiple data sets and you really need to have a platform that can deliver both highly performant and scalable fast file and object from one system so talk a little bit more about some of the drivers that you know bring forth that need to unify file an object yeah i mean look you know there's a there's there's a real challenge um in managing you know bespoke uh bespoke infrastructure or architectures around general purpose nas and daz etc so um if you think about how a an architect sort of looks at an application they might say well okay i need to have um you know fast daz storage proximal to the application um but that's gonna require a tremendous amount of dabs which is a tremendous amount of drives right hard drives are you know historically pretty pretty pretty unwieldy to manage because you're replacing them relatively consistently at multi-petabyte scale so you start to look at things like the complexity of das you start to look at the complexity of general purpose nas and you start to just look at quite frankly something that a lot of people don't really want to talk about anymore but actual data center space right like consolidation matters the ability to take you know something that's the size of a microwave like a modern flash blade or a modern um you know uffo device replaces something that might be you know the size of three or four or five refrigerators so matt why is is now the right time for this i mean for years nobody really paid much attention to object s3 already obviously changed you know that course most of the world's data is still stored in file formats and you get there with nfs or smb why is now the time to think about unifying object and and file well because we're moving to things like a contactless society um you know the the things that we're going to do are going to just require a tremendous amount more compute power network and quite frankly storage throughput and you know i can give you two sort of real primary examples here right um you know warehouses are being you know taken over by robots if you will um it's not a war it's a it's a it's sort of a friendly advancement in you know how do i how do i store a box in a warehouse and you know we have we have a customer who focuses on large sort of big box distribution warehousing and you know a box that carried a an object uh two weeks ago might have a different box size two weeks later well that robot needs to know where the space is in the data center in order to put it but also needs to be able to process hey i don't want to put the thing that i'm going to access the most in the back of the warehouse i'm going to put that thing in the front of the warehouse all of those types of data you know sort of real time you can think of the robot as almost an edge device uh is processing in real time unstructured data and its object right so it's sort of the emergence of these new types of workloads and i give you the opposite example the other end of the spectrum is ransomware right you know today you know we'll talk to customers and they'll say quite commonly hey if you know anybody can sell me a backup device i need something that can restore quickly if you had the ability to restore something in 270 terabytes an hour or 250 terabytes an hour that's much faster when you're dealing with a ransomware attack you want to get your data back quickly you know so i want to actually i was going to ask you about that later but since you brought it up what is the right i guess call it architecture for for for ransomware i mean how and explain like how unified object and file would support me i get the fast recovery but how would you recommend a customer uh go about architecting a ransomware proof you know system yeah well you know with with flashblade and and with flasharray there's an actual feature called called safe mode and that safe mode actually protects uh the snapshots and and the data from uh sort of being is a part of the of the ransomware event and so if you're in a type of ransomware situation like this you're able to leverage safe mode and you say okay what happens in a ransomware attack is you can't get access to your data and so you know the bad guy the perpetrator is basically saying hey i'm not going to give you access to your data until you pay me you know x in bitcoin or whatever it might be right um with with safe mode those snapshots are actually protected outside of the ransomware blast zone and you can bring back those snapshots because what's your alternative if you're not doing something like that your alternative is either to pay and unlock your data or you have to start retouring restoring excuse me from tape or slow disk that could take you days or weeks to get your data back so leveraging safe mode um you know in either the flash for the flash blade product is a great way to go about uh architecting against ransomware i got to put my i'm thinking like a customer now so safe mode so that's an immutable mode right can't change the data um is it can can an administrator go in and change that mode can he turn it off do i still need an air gap for example what would you recommend there yeah so there there are still um uh you know sort of our back or rollback role-based access control policies uh around who can access that safe mode and who can right okay so uh anyway subject for a different day i want to i want to actually bring up uh if you don't object a topic that i think used to be really front and center and it now be is becoming front and center again i mean wikibon just produced a research note forecasting the future of flash and hard drives and those of you who follow us know we've done this for quite some time and you can if you could bring up the chart here you you could see and we see this happening again it was originally we forecast the the death of of quote unquote high spin speed disk drives which is kind of an oxymoron but you can see on here on this chart this hard disk had a magnificent journey but they peaked in volume in manufacturing volume in 2010 and the reason why that is is so important is that volumes now are steadily dropping you can see that and we use wright's law to explain why this is a problem and wright's law essentially says that as you your cumulative manufacturing volume doubles your cost to manufacture decline by a constant percentage now i won't go too much detail on that but suffice it to say that flash volumes are growing very rapidly hdd volumes aren't and so flash because of consumer volumes can take advantage of wright's law and that constant reduction and that's what's really important for the next generation which is always more expensive to build and so this kind of marks the beginning of the end matt what do you think what what's the future hold for spinning disc in your view uh well i can give you the answer on two levels on a personal level uh it's why i come to work every day uh you know the the eradication or or extinction of an inefficient thing um you know i like to say that inefficiency is the bane of my existence uh and i think hard drives are largely inefficient and i'm willing to accept the sort of long-standing argument that um you know we've seen this transition in block right and we're starting to see it repeat itself in in unstructured data um and i'm willing to accept the argument that cost is a vector here and it most certainly is right hdds have been considerably cheaper uh than than than flash storage um you know even to this day uh you know up to this point right but we're starting to approach the point where you sort of reach a 3x sort of you know differentiator between the cost of an hdd and an sdd and you know that really is that point in time when uh you begin to pick up a lot of volume and velocity and so you know that tends to map directly to you know what you're seeing here which is you know a slow decline uh which i think is going to become even more rapid kind of probably starting around next year where you start to see sds excuse me ssds uh you know really replacing hdds uh at a much more rapid clip particularly on the unstructured data side and it's largely around cost the the workloads that we talked about robots and warehouses or you know other types of advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence type applications and workflows you know they require a degree of performance that a hard drive just can't deliver we are we are seeing sort of the um creative innovative uh disruption of an entire industry right before our eyes it's a fun thing to live through yeah and and we would agree i mean it doesn't the premise there is it doesn't have to be less expensive we think it will be by you know the second half or early second half of this decade but even if it's a we think around a 3x delta the value of of ssd relative to spinning disk is going to overwhelm just like with your laptop you know it got to the point where you said why would i ever have a spinning disc in my laptop we see the same thing happening here um and and so and we're talking about you know raw capacity you know put in compression and dedupe and everything else that you really can't do with spinning discs because of the performance issues you can do with flash okay let's come back to uffo can we dig into the challenges specifically that that this solves for customers give me give us some examples yeah so you know i mean if we if we think about the examples um you know the the robotic one um i think is is is the one that i think is the marker for you know kind of of of the the modern side of of of what we see here um but what we're you know what we're what we're seeing from a trend perspective which you know not everybody's deploying robots right um you know there's there's many companies that are you know that aren't going to be in either the robotic business uh or or even thinking about you know sort of future type oriented type things but what they are doing is greenfield applications are being built on object um generally not on not on file and and not on block and so you know the rise of of object as sort of the the sort of let's call it the the next great protocol for um you know for uh for for modern workloads right this is this is that that modern application coming to the forefront and that could be anything from you know financial institutions you know right down through um you know we've even see it and seen it in oil and gas uh we're also seeing it across across healthcare uh so you know as as as companies take the opportunity as industries to take this opportunity to modernize you know they're modernizing not on things that are are leveraging you know um you know sort of archaic disk technology they're they're they're really focusing on on object but they still have file workflows that they need to that they need to be able to support and so having the ability to be able to deliver those things from one device in a capacity orientation or a performance orientation while at the same time dramatically simplifying the overall administration of your environment both physically and non-physically is a key driver so the great thing about object is it's simple it's a kind of a get put metaphor um it's it scales out you know because it's got metadata associated with the data uh and and it's cheap the drawback is you don't necessarily associate it with high performance and and as well most applications don't you know speak in that language they speak in the language of file you know or as you mentioned block so i i see real opportunities here if i have some some data that's not necessarily frequently accessed you know every day but yet i want to then whether end of quarter or whatever it is i want to i want to or machine learning i want to apply some ai to that data i want to bring it in and then apply a file format uh because for performance reasons is that right maybe you could unpack that a little bit yeah so um you know we see i mean i think you described it well right um but i don't think object necessarily has to be slow um and nor does it have to be um you know because when you think about you brought up a good point with metadata right being able to scale to a billions of objects being able to scale to billions of objects excuse me is of value right um and i think people do traditionally associate object with slow but it's not necessarily slow anymore right we we did a sort of unofficial survey of of of our of our customers and our employee base and when people described object they thought of it as like law firms and storing a word doc if you will um and that that's just you know i think that there's a lack of understanding or a misnomer around what modern what modern object has become and perform an object particularly at scale when we're talking about billions of objects you know that's the next frontier right um is it at pace performance wise with you know the other protocols no but it's making leaps and grounds so you talked a little bit more about some of the verticals that you see i mean i think when i think of financial services i think transaction processing but of course they have a lot of tons of unstructured data are there any patterns you're seeing by by vertical market um we're you know we're not that's the interesting thing um and you know um as a as a as a as a company with a with a block heritage or a block dna those patterns were pretty easy to spot right there were a certain number of databases that you really needed to support oracle sql some postgres work etc then kind of the modern databases around cassandra and things like that you knew that there were going to be vmware environments you know you could you could sort of see the trends and where things were going unstructured data is such a broader horizontal um thing right so you know inside of oil and gas for example you have you know um you have specific applications and bespoke infrastructures for those applications um you know inside of media entertainment you know the same thing the the trend that we're seeing the commonality that we're seeing is the modernization of you know object as a starting point for all the all of the net new workloads within within those industry verticals right that's the most common request we see is what's your object roadmap what's your you know what's your what's your object strategy you know where do you think where do you think object is going so um there isn't any um you know sort of uh there's no there's no path uh it's really just kind of a wide open field in front of us with common requests across all industries so the amazing thing about pure just as a kind of a little you know quasi you know armchair historian the industry is pure was really the only company in many many years to be able to achieve escape velocity break through a billion dollars i mean three part couldn't do it isilon couldn't do it compellent couldn't do it i could go on but pure was able to achieve that as an independent company uh and so you become a leader you look at the gartner magic quadrant you're a leader in there i mean if you've made it this far you've got to have some chops and so of course it's very competitive there are a number of other storage suppliers that have announced products that unify object and file so i'm interested in how pure differentiates why pure um it's a great question um and it's one that uh you know having been a long time puritan uh you know i take pride in answering um and it's actually a really simple answer um it's it's business model innovation and technology right the the technology that goes behind how we do what we do right and i don't mean the product right innovation is product but having a better support model for example um or having on the business model side you know evergreen storage right where we sort of look at your relationship to us as a subscription right um you know we're gonna sort of take the thing that that you've had and we're gonna modernize that thing in place over time such that you're not rebuying that same you know terabyte or you know petabyte of storage that you've that you that you've paid for over time so um you know sort of three legs of the stool uh that that have made you know pure clearly differentiated i think the market has has recognized that um you're right it's it's hard to break through to a billion dollars um but i look forward to the day that you know we we have two billion dollar products and i think with uh you know that rise in in unstructured data growing to 80 by 2025 and you know the massive transition that you know you guys have noted in in in your hdd slide i think it's a huge opportunity for us on you know the other unstructured data side of the house you know the other thing i'd add matt and i've talked to cause about this is is it's simplicity first i've asked them why don't you do this why don't you do it and the answer is always the same is that adds complexity and we we put simplicity for the customer ahead of everything else and i think that served you very very well what about the economics of of unified file and object i mean if you bringing additional value presumably there's a there there's a cost to that but there's got to be also a business case behind it what kind of impact have you seen with customers yeah i mean look i'll i'll go back to something i mentioned earlier which is just the reclamation of floor space and power and cooling right um you know there's a you know there's people people people want to search for kind of the the sexier element if you will when it comes to looking at how we how you derive value from something but the reality is if you're reducing your power consumption by you know by by a material percentage um power bills matter in big in big data centers you know customers typically are are facing you know a paradigm of well i i want to go to the cloud but you know the clouds are not being more expensive than i thought it was going to be or you know i've figured out what i can use in the cloud i thought it was going to be everything but it's not going to be everything so hybrid's where we're landing but i want to be out of the data center business and i don't want to have a team of 20 storage people to match you know to administer my storage um you know so there's sort of this this very tangible value around you know hey if i could manage um you know multiple petabytes with one full-time engineer uh because the system uh to your and kaza's point was radically simpler to administer didn't require someone to be running around swapping drives all the time would that be a value the answer is yes 100 of the time right and then you start to look at okay all right well on the uffo side from a product perspective hey if i have to manage a you know bespoke environment for this application if i have to manage a bespoke environment for this application and a spoke environment for this application and this focus environment for this application i'm managing four different things and can i actually share data across those four different things there's ways to share data but most customers it just gets too complex how do you even know what your what your gold.master copy is of data if you have it in four different places or you try to have it in four different places and it's four different siloed infrastructures so when you get to the sort of the side of you know how do we how do you measure value in uffo it's actually being able to have all of that data concentrated in one place so that you can share it from application to application got it i'm interested we use a couple minutes left i'm interested in the the update on flashblade you know generally but also i have a specific question i mean look getting file right is hard enough uh you just announced smb support for flashblade i'm interested in you know how that fits in i think it's kind of obvious with file and object converging but give us the update on on flashblade and maybe you could address that specific question yeah so um look i mean we're we're um you know tremendously excited about the growth of flashblade uh you know we we we found workloads we never expected to find um you know the rapid restore workload was one that was actually brought to us from from a customer actually um and has become you know one of our one of our top two three four you know workloads so um you know we're really happy with the trend we've seen in it um and you know mapping back to you know thinking about hdds and ssds you know we're well on a path to building a billion dollar business here so you know we're very excited about that but to your point you know you don't just snap your fingers and get there right um you know we've learned that doing file and object uh is is harder than block um because there's more things that you have to go do for one you're basically focused on three protocols s b nfs and s3 not necessarily in that order um but to your point about s b uh you know we we are on the path through to releasing um you know smb full full native smb support in in the system that will allow us to uh service customers we have a limitation with some customers today where they'll have an smb portion of their nfs workflow um and we do great on the nfs side um but you know we didn't we didn't have the ability to plug into the s p component of their workflow so that's going to open up a lot of opportunity for us um on on that front um and you know we continue to you know invest significantly across the board in in areas like security which is you know become more than just a hot button you know today security's always been there but it feels like it's blazing hot today and so you know going through the next couple years we'll be looking at uh you know developing some some uh you know pretty material security elements of the product as well so uh well on a path to a billion dollars is the net on that and uh you know we're we're fortunate to have have smb here and we're looking forward to introducing that to to those customers that have you know nfs workloads today with an s b component yeah nice tailwind good tam expansion strategy matt thanks so much we're out of time but really appreciate you coming on the program we appreciate you having us and uh thanks much dave good to see you all right good to see you and you're watching the convergence of file and object keep it right there we'll be back with more right after this short break [Music]