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>> Hello, and welcome to the special Cube conversation
that we're launching in conjunction with Pure Accelerate.
Prakash Darji is here, is the general manager
of Digital Experience.
They actually have a business unit dedicated
to this at Pure Storage.
Prakash, welcome back, good to see you.
>> Yeah Dave, happy to be here.
>> So a few weeks back, you and I were talking
about the Shift 2 and as a service economy
and which is a good lead up to Accelerate,
held today, we're releasing this video in LA.
This is the fifth in person Accelerate.
It's got a new tagline techfest so you're making it fun,
but still hanging out to the tech, which we love.
So this morning you guys made some announcements
expanding the portfolio.
I'm really interested in your reaffirmed
commitment to Evergreen.
That's something that got this whole trend started
in the introduction of Evergreen Flex.
What is that all about?
What's your vision for Evergreen Flex?
>> Well, so look, this is one of the biggest moments
that I think we have as a company now,
because we introduced Evergreen and that was
and probably still is one of the largest disruptions
to happen to the industry in a decade.
Now, Evergreen Flex takes the power
of modernizing performance and capacity
to storage beyond the box, full stop.
So we first started on a project many years ago
to say, okay, how can we bring that modernization concept
to our entire portfolio?
That means if someone's got 10 boxes,
how do you modernize performance
and capacity across 10 boxes or across maybe
FlashBlade and FlashArray.
So with Evergreen Flex, we first are starting
to hyper disaggregate performance and capacity
and the capacity can be moved to where you need it.
So previously, you could have thought of a box saying, okay,
it has this performance or capacity range or boundary,
but let's think about it beyond the box.
Let's think about it as a portfolio.
My application needs performance or capacity for storage,
what if I could bring the resources to it?
So with Evergreen Flex within the QLC family
with our FlashBlade and our FlashArray QLC projects,
you could actually move QLC capacity to where you need it.
And with FlashArray X and XL or TLC family,
you could move capacity to where
you need it within that family.
Now, if you're enabling that, you have to change
the business model because the capacity needs
to get build where you use it.
If you use it in a high performance tier,
you could build at a high performance rate.
If you use it as a lower performance tier,
you could build at a lower performance rate.
So we changed the business model
to enable this technology flexibility,
where customers can buy the hardware
and they get a pay per use consumption model
for the software and services,
but this enables the technology flexibility
to use your capacity wherever you need.
And we're just continuing that journey
of hyper disaggregated.
>> Okay, so you solve the problem of having
to allocate specific capacity or performance
to a particular workload.
You can now spread that across whatever products
in the portfolio, like you said, you're disaggregating
performance and capacity.
So that's very cool.
Maybe you could double click on that.
You obviously talk to customers about doing this.
They were in pain a little bit, right?
'Cause they had this sort of stovepipe thing.
So talk a little bit about the customer feedback
that led you here.
>> Well, look, let's just say today
if you're an application developer
or you haven't written your app yet,
but you know you're going to.
Well, you need that at least say I need something, right?
So someone's going to ask you what kind of storage do you need?
How many IOPS, what kind of performance capacity,
before you've written your code.
And you're going to buy something
and you're going to spend that money.
Now at that point, you're going to go write your application,
run it on that box and then say, okay, was I right
or was I wrong?
And you know what?
You were guessing before you wrote the software.
After you wrote the software, you can test it
and decide what you need, how it's going to scale, et cetera.
But if you were wrong, you already bought something.
In a hyper disaggregated world,
that capacity is not a sunk cost,
you can use it wherever you want.
You can use capacity of somewhere else
and bring it over there.
So in the world of application development
and in the world of storage, today people think about,
I've got a workload, it's SAP, it's Oracle,
I've built this custom app.
I need to move it to a tier of storage, a performance class.
Like you think about the application
and you think about moving the application.
And it takes time to move the application,
takes performance, takes loan, it's a scheduled event.
What if you said, you know what?
You don't have to do any of that.
You just move the capacity to where you need it, right?
>> Yep. >> So the application's there
and you actually have the ability to instantaneously move
the capacity to where you need it for the application.
And eventually, where we're going is we're looking
to do the same thing across the performance hearing.
So right now, the biggest benefit is the agility
and flexibility a customer has across their fleet.
So Evergreen was great for the customer with one array,
but Evergreen Flex now brings that power
to the entire fleet.
And that's not tied to just FlashArray or FlashBlade.
We've engineered a data plane in our direct flash fabric
software to be able to take on the personality
of the system it needs to go into.
So when a data pack goes into a FlashBlade,
that data pack is optimized for use
in that scale out architecture with
the metadata for FlashBlade.
When it goes into a FlashArray C it's optimized
for that metadata structure.
So our Purity software has made this transformative
to be able to do this.
And we created a business model that allowed us
to take advantage of this technology flexibility.
>> Got it.
Okay, so you got this mutually interchangeable performance
and capacity across the portfolio beautiful.
And I want to come back to sort of the Purity,
but help me understand how this is different
from just normal Evergreen, existing evergreen options.
You mentioned the one array, but help us understand
that more fully.
>> Well, look, so in addition to this,
like we had Evergreen Gold historically.
We introduced Evergreen Flex and we had Pure as a service.
So you had kind of two spectrums previously.
You had Evergreen Gold on one hand,
which modernized the performance and capacity of a box.
You had Pure as a service that said don't worry about
the box, tell me how many IOPS you have
and will run and operate and manage that service for you.
I think we've spoken about that previously on theCUBE.
>> Yep.
>> Now, we have this model where it's not just about the box,
we have this model where we say, you know what,
it's your fleet.
You're going to run and operate and manage your fleet
and you could move the capacity to where you need it.
So as we started thinking about this,
we decided to unify our entire portfolio
of sub software and subscription services under
the Evergreen brand.
Evergreen Gold we're renaming to Evergreen Forever.
We've actually had seven customers just crossed a decade
of updates Forever Evergreen within a box.
So Evergreen Forever is about modernizing a box.
Evergreen Flex is about modernizing your fleet
and Evergreen one, which is our rebrand
of Pure as a service is about modernizing your labor.
Instead of you worrying about it, let us do it for you.
Because if you're an application developer
and you're trying to figure out,
where should I put my capacity?
Where should I do it?
You can just sign up for the IOPS you need
and let us actually deliver and move the components
to where you need it for performance, capacity,
management, SLAs, et cetera.
So as we think about this, for us this is a spectrum
and a continuum of where you're
at in the modernization journey
to software subscription and services.
>> Okay, got it.
So why did you feel like now was the right time
for the rebranding and the renaming
convention, what's behind?
What was the thing?
Take us inside the internal conversations
and the chalkboard discussion?
>> Well, look, the chalkboard discussion's simple.
It's everything was built on the Evergreen stateless
architecture where within a box, right?
We disaggregated the performance
and capacity within the box already,
10 years ago within Evergreen.
And that's what enabled us to build Pure as a service.
That's why I say like when companies say
they built a service, I'm like it's not a service
if you have to do a data migration.
You need a stateless architecture that's disaggregated.
You can almost think of this
as the anti hyper-converge, right?
That's going the other way.
It's hyper disaggregated.
>> Right.
>> And that foundation is true for our whole portfolio.
That was fundamental, the Evergreen architecture.
And then if Gold is modernizing a box
and Flex is modernizing your fleet and your portfolio
and Pure as a service is modernizing the labor,
it is more of a continuation in the spectrum
of how do you ensure you get better with age, right?
And it's like one of those things when
you think about a car.
Miles driven on a car means your car's getting older
and it doesn't necessarily get better with age, right?
What's interesting when you think about the human body,
yeah, you get older and some people deteriorate with age
and some people it turns out for a period of time,
you pick up some muscle mass, you get a little bit older,
you get a little bit wiser and you get a little bit better
with age for a while because you're putting
in the work to modernize, right?
But where in infrastructure and hardware
and technology are you at the point
where it always just gets better with age, right?
We've introduced that concept 10 years ago.
And we've now had proven industry success
over a decade, right?
As I mentioned, our first seven customers
who've had a decade of Evergreen update started
with an FA-300 way back when, and since then performance
and capacity has been getting better over time
with Evergreen Forever.
So this is the next 10 years of it getting better
and better for the company and not just tying it
to the box because now we've grown up,
we've got customers with like large fleets.
I think one of our customers just hit 900 systems, right?
>> Wow.
>> So when you have 900 systems, right?
And you're running a fleet you need to think about, okay,
how am I using these resources?
And in this day and age in that world,
power becomes a big thing because if you're using resources
inefficiently and the cost of power and energy is up,
you're going to be in a world of hurt.
So by using Flex where you can move the capacity
to where it's needed, you're creating
the most efficient operating environment,
which is actually the lowest power consumption
environment as well. >> Right.
>> So we're really excited about this journey of modernizing,
but that rebranding just became kind of a no brainer
to us because it's all part of the spectrum on your journey
of whether you're a single array customer,
you're a fleet customer, or you don't want
to even run, operate and manage.
You can actually just say, you know what,
give me the guarantee in the SLA.
So that's the spectrum that informed the rebranding.
>> Got it.
Yeah, so to your point about the human body,
all you got to do is look at Tom Brady's NFL combine videos
and you'll see what a transformation.
Fine wine is another one.
I like the term hyper disaggregated because that to me
is consistent with what's happening with the cloud and edge.
We're building this hyper distributed
or disaggregated system.
So I want to just understand a little bit about
you mentioned Purity so there's this software obviously
is the enabler here, but what's under the covers?
Is it like a virtualizer or megaload balancer, metadata
manager, what's the tech behind this?
>> Yeah, so we'll do a little bit of a double tech, right?
So we have this concept of drives where in Purity,
we build our own software for direct flash
that takes the NAND and we do the NAND management
as we're building our drives in Purity software.
Now ,that advantage gives us the ability
to say how should this drive behave?
So in a FlashArray C system, it can behave as part
of a FlashArray C and its usable capacity
that you can write because the metadata
and some of the system information is in NVRAM
as part of the controller, right?
So you have some metadata capability there.
In a legend architecture for example,
you have a distributed Blade architecture.
So you need parts of that capacity to operate almost
like a single layer chip where you can actually
have metadata operations independent
of your storage operations that operate like QLC.
So we actually manage the NAND in a very very different way
based on the persona of the system it's going into, right?
So this capacity to make it usable, right?
It's like saying a competitor could go ahead name it,
Dell that has power max in Isilon,
HPE that has single store and three power and nimble
and like you name, like can you really
from a technology standpoint say
your capacity can be used anywhere
or all these independent systems.
Everyone's thinking about the world like a system,
like here's this system, here's that system,
here's that system.
And your capacity is locked into a system.
To be able to unlock that capacity to the system,
you need to behave differently with the media type
in the operating environment you're going into
and that's what Purity does, right?
So we are doing that as part of our direct Flex software
around how we manage these drives to enable this.
>> Well, it's the same thing in the cloud precaution, right?
I mean, you got different APIs and primitive for object,
for block, for file.
Now, it's all programmable infrastructure
so that makes it easier, but to the point,
it's still somewhat stovepipe.
So it's funny, it's good to see your commitment
to Evergreen, I think you're right.
You lay down the gauntlet a decade plus ago.
First everybody ignored you and then they kind of laughed
at you, then they criticized you,
and then they said, oh, then you guys reached
the escape velocity.
So you had a winning hand.
So I'm interested in that sort of progression over
the past decade where you're going,
why this is so important to your customers,
where you're trying to get them ultimately.
>> Well, look, the thing that's most disappointing is
if I bought 100 terabytes still have
to re-buy it every three or five years.
That seems like a kind of ridiculous proposition,
but welcome to storage.
You know what I mean?
That's what most people do with Evergreen.
We want to end data migrations.
We want to make sure that every software updates,
hardware updates, non disruptive.
We want to make it easy to deploy
and run at scale for your fleet.
And eventually we want everyone to move
to our Evergreen one, formerly Pure
as a service where we can run and operate
and manage 'cause this is all about trust.
We're trying to create trust with the customer
to say, trust us, to run and operate and scale for you
and worry about your business because we make tech easy.
And like think about this hyper disaggregated
if you go further.
If you're going further with hyper disaggregated,
you can think about it as like performance
and capacity is your Lego building blocks.
Now for anyone, I have a son, he wants
to build a Lego Death Star.
He didn't have that manual, he's toast.
So when you move to at scale and you have this hyper
disaggregated world and you have this unlimited freedom,
you have unlimited choice.
It's the problem of the cloud today, too much choice, right?
There's like hundreds of instances of this,
what do I even choose? >> Right.
>> Well, so the only way to solve that problem
and create simplicity when you have
so much choice is put data to work.
And that's where Pure one comes
in because we've been collecting
and we can scan your landscape and tell you,
you should move these types of resources here
and move those types of resources there, right?
In the past, it was always about
you should move this application there
or you should move this application there.
We're actually going to turn the entire industry on it's head.
It's not like applications and data have gravity.
So let's think about moving resources
to where that are needed versus saying resources
are a fixed asset, let's move the applications there.
So that's a concept that's new to the industry.
Like we're creating that concept,
we're introducing that concept because now we have
the technology to make that reality a new efficient way
of running storage for the world.
Like this is that big for the company.
>> Well, I mean, a lot of the failures in data analytics
and data strategies are a function of trying
to jam everything into a single monolithic system
and hyper centralize it.
Data by its very nature is distributed.
So hyper disaggregated fits that model
and the pendulum's clearly swinging to that.
Prakash, great to have you, purestorage.com I presume
is where I can learn more?
>> Oh, absolutely.
We're super excited and our pent up by demand I think
in this space is huge so we're looking forward
to bringing this innovation to the world.
>> All right, hey, thanks again.
Great to see you, I appreciate you coming on
and explaining this new model and good luck with it.
>> All right, thank you.
>> All right, and thanks for watching.
This is David Vellante, and appreciate you watching
this Cube conversation, we'll see you next time.
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