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Celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage,
it's theCUBE.
Covering VMworld 2019.
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>> Welcome back everyone.
Live CUBE coverage here in Moscone North of Vmworld 2019.
I'm Jon with Dave Vellante.
Our 10th year covering VMworld.
We're here with esteemed CUBE alumni Vaughn Stewart,
Vice President Technology at Pure Storage.
Great to see you!
>> Guys, another year, another privilege to sit down
and have a little chat.
>> Another year that VMware doesn't die of something,
storage doesn't go away.
Every year, the containers is going to kill VMware.
VMware's resiliency as virtualization platform
is just second to none.
It's been well documented, we've been talking about it,
because the operational efficiencies
of what they have done has been great.
You guys are kicking butt in storage,
and again a sector that doesn't go away.
You got to put the data somewhere.
So storage continues to do well, congratulations.
What's the big secret?
>> Thanks, well we just shared
our Q2 financial results last week.
A 28% year on year growth.
We are the, by far, the fastest growing storage company.
And I think there's a lot of disruption
for the legacy vendors right now.
They're getting hit on all angles.
NexGen, AFA, vendors like us, follow by the cloud,
as well as platforms like ACI,
I think it's been, it's been a tough flooding
for some of the legacy vendors.
>> Talk about your relationship with VMware
and why that's been so important for Pure,
because again, again resiliency and operations,
at the end of the day that's where the rubber hits the road.
Making developers happy, but operating is the key.
>> Yeah, if you look at, so that's a really good question,
if you look at our business,
VMware is the number one platform deployed
on top of Pure Storage platforms,
and that's probably the case
for most of the storage vendors because
of their dominant position in the infrastructure.
That means as VMware evolves their product platforms,
whether it's the Pivatal acquisition,
the VMware Cloud Foundation,
VMware Cloud on AWS,
and as that'll expand, right,
you have to, as a partner, continue to jointly innovate.
Sometimes hand in hand, sometimes,
you know, on parallel paths to drive value
into that market for those customers
or you're not going to make it.
And, our investments of engineering-wise are significant.
We've had a large number of new capabilities
that we've rolled out through the years
that are specific to VMware.
That are either integrations
or enhancements to our platform.
We believe, through external data points,
we are the number one VVols vendor,
which was something that VMware launched
about seven or eight years back that kind of dipped,
but has risen back up.
And we're a key, I think, design partner right now
with the cloud platforms, the VMware Cloud Foundation
as well as VMware Cloud on AWS.
>> So as you know, this is our 10th year at VMworld.
You go back to 2010,
there was what I use to call the storage cartel.
And you weren't part of it.
You had early access to the APIs,
you had sort of, obviously EMC was in there.
You were really the only sort of newbie
to reach Escape Velocity, Pure Storage.
Now there's basically two independent
storage companies over a billion dollars,
you guys and NetApp.
So-- >> And I was at both (laughs).
>> You were at both.
You saw the opportunity, and you know,
leaned in hard.
Obviously it's paid off.
But so, why do you think you were able to be one of
the rare ones to achieve Escape Velocity,
when many people said, "That'll never happen,
"you'll never see another billion dollar storage company?"
And then, I'm interested in how you're achieving
number one in VVols in a world where it seems like,
you know, the ecosystem is getting a little tighter
between Dell and VMware.
But how do you guys thrive in that dynamic?
>> I think there's a challenge for all vendors
in terms of marketed, trying to get your message through.
Right, if one vendor does something well,
the rest of the market tries to obfuscate that.
We've been fortunate enough that
through our channel ecosystem,
our system's integrated partners,
right, to actually be able to demonstrate the technology,
to gain their enthusiasm to drive it into the market,
and then to actually demonstrate that to the customers.
And so how does that show up?
I think it's fair to say our platforms are more intelligent,
they're more automated,
and they operate at a greater scale than the competitors.
And you can look at it through one lens and say,
"Well, it's VMware APIs.
"Doesn't that make all the storage the same?"
And it's like, it does from a VMware operational standpoint,
but it doesn't mean how you deliver on that value prop,
or what you, as a platform,
deliver above and beyond is at parody.
And that's really where we demonstrate
a significant difference.
Let me give you one example.
We have a lot of customers,
a lot of customer growth in the last 12 months
around customers who are deploying ACI
along with all-flash arrays.
David Floyer had reached out recently and said,
"Well, wouldn't one compete with the other?"
It's like, yes, there's overlap,
but what we're finding from customers
is they're looking to say,
"If my applications need to be more cost effective,
"easier to manage at scale,
"we actually want to put it on a all-flash array."
And you say, "How could that be?"
I'll give you one simple example.
Do you know it takes anywhere from 10x to 100x less time
to upgrade your VMware infrastructure
on a shared array than if it's on hyper-converged?
Because you don't have to go through
the evacuation and re-hydration of all your data twice.
And so things like that are just really simple
that you wouldn't pick up in like a marketing scheme.
If you are a customer at scale you go,
"Oh, I can't afford a hundred man hours.
"I can afford one."
So it's simple things like that.
It's rapid provisioning,
it's not having silos that are optimized for performance,
or availability, or cost, it's about saying,
you know, your time to implement is a one time life cycle
on hardware, but it's probably something
that happens every quarter for the next three years, right?
So it's those thoughts. >> So this is your point
about innovation, the innovated vendors.
The modernization of storage is planning
for these use cases, where the old way didn't work.
>> Yeah, you mentioned that we're in 10 years now,
and one of the things that I have said over
the last six or seven years being at Pure is,
one of the things that I think is really interesting
about Pure is that our founder, John Colgrove,
came out of the volume manager
and file systems space at VERITAS, right?
He was the founder for those products.
He understood the intersection between managing
a storage array and your application.
And that goes through our ethos of our products.
Where, I think, a lot of storage platforms,
start up platforms come from storage guys
who worked in the hardware side.
And so they take a faster pipe,
or a faster form of media,
and they make another box that behaves like the other box,
from an operational perspective.
>> So you said HCI, complement or a competitor?
I'm still not sure which, maybe it's both.
And then same question for vSAN, right?
How do you?
>> So an area that we've put a lot of investment in
and started with VMware, around the middle of last year,
was putting vSAN with Pure Storage flash arrays together.
And so what you see that materialize now is,
when you look at VMware Cloud Foundation
or VMware Cloud in AWS,
the management domains must be vSAN.
And that's so that you can have an instant,
out of the box controlled management plane
that VMware executes on.
And then you have workload domains,
and those could be on a hyper-converged platform,
or they could on third-party storage.
And when you put those on Pure,
then you would gain all the advantages
that we bring to bare as an infrastructure
with all the same simplicity scale
and life cycle management that you get
from just the VMware SDDC manager.
And so it works very well together.
Now look, I'm sure what I share with you here,
there'll be some folks who are
on the vSAN team themselves that'll be like,
BS, but that's the nature of our business.
>> One of these I want to get your thoughts.
>> Customer's aside (laughs).
>> Yes (laughs). >> Ultimately (laughs).
>> Vaughn, you've always been kind of
on the cutting edge on all the conversations we've had.
I got to ask you about the container revolution,
which not new, Docker came out many, many years ago.
Jerry Chen, when he funded those guys,
and we covered that extensively,
obviously their business model changed,
Kubernetes is all the rage,
orchestrating the containers is a pivotal role
in all the action happening here,
it's big part of how things are with the apps side.
So the question is, how does containers impact
the storage world?
How do you see that being integrated in,
there's talk of putting Kubernetes on bare metal,
so you're starting to see HCI come back,
devices are aborting, so you're starting
to see hardware become important again, with that?
>> Well I love that, your drop of Pivital there right?
First off, kudos to VMware for the acquisition.
The Pivital guys are exceptional.
What they don't have is a lot of customers,
but the customers they do have are large customers, right?
So we've got a fair amount of Pivital on Pure customers,
and they are all at scale.
So I think that it's a great acquisition for VMware,
by far the most enterprised class form of containers today.
>> And they've always kind of been the fold,
and now they're officially in the fold.
>> Yeah, and so now the road map that was shared,
in terms of what VMware looks to do
to integrate containers into the ESXi platform itself,
it's managing VMs and containers next to each other,
it's perfect in terms of not having customers
have to pick or choose between which platform
and where you're going to deploy something.
Allow them to say, "You can deploy
"in whichever format you want."
It runs in the same ecosystem in management,
and then that trickles down to again,
your storage layer.
So, we do a lot of object storage
within the container ecosystems today,
a lot of high performance objects
because, you know, the file sizes of instances
or applications is much larger than, you know,
a document file that you or I might create online.
So there's a big need around performance in
that space along with again, management at scale.
>> It's interesting what you were saying about Pivital.
By the way, I like the acquisition too,
'cause I think it was cheap.
Anytime you can pick up a $4 billion asset
for 800 million in cash, you know, going to gets my attention.
But Pivital was struggling in the marketplace.
The stock price never even came close to its IPO,
you know, its spending patterns were down.
Do you feel as though the integration will,
with VMware, will supercharge Pivital?
>> I absolutely agree with that.
I've had this view that the container ecosystem
was really segmented.
You had companies that built
their products off of container.
So say your Twitter, or your Facebook, right?
The platform that your customers interact
with is all ran by containers.
Then you have an enterprise, you have containers,
which was more kind of classic applications, right?
And that would take time
for the applications to be deployed.
And so what have you seen now from Microsoft, right?
CPO can run as a container, right?
Oracle can run as a container.
As the enterprise apps start to roll over,
the enterprise will start to evolve
from virtual machines to containers.
And so I think the timing's right.
That's not to dismiss any of where Pivital
I think has built a brand right now
which helping companies build next gen platforms.
I have to make sure that I don't name drop customers
without references.
(all laughing)
So I had to pull back there.
Yeah, I think the time is right.
>> I'm interested how you guys can further capitalize
on containers.
We've been playing around with this notion
of data assurance, containers bring complexity
and so complexity's often times your friend
'cause you're all about simplifying complexity.
But so, how do you capitalize on this container trend
in the next three to five years?
>> So you've got storage needs for containers
that either tend to be ephemeral or persistent
and I think when containers were originally created
it was always this notion that it'd would be ephemeral
and it's like yeah, but where does
the data reside ultimately?
There's been significant growth around data persistence
and we've driven that in terms of leveraging
the Flex Vol drivers that have been put into the community,
driving that into our pure service orchestrator,
our PSO tool, which supports Pivital
and Kubernetes derivatives today.
Again we've got proven large scale installs
on this so it's providing
the same class of storage services,
simplicity and elegance in your integrations
that we have for VMware, we've been doing
that across Pivital already.
Pivital's interesting right,
they don't validate hardware, they only validate software.
So they validate our PSO and having
that same value prop for that infrastructure
'cause they are scale, you never find
a small scale containers ecosystem
and I keep referencing that point.
When you get to scale, considerations around
what does it take to allow that environment
to remain online and how they perform it
are significant considerations and we excel there.
>> Vaughn, talk about your event coming up.
You guys have Pure Accelerate September 17th
and 18th coming up.
Obviously the VMware ecosystem that you're part of here,
big part of that.
You guys have a lot of customers.
I know you can't reveal any news,
but what's expected at the show?
What can people who are interested
in either attending or might be some
of the notable things that might be happening?
>> Lot of orange.
>> We know that, one.
Two, I know theCUBE's going to be there for two days.
>> Dave: They'll be there for two days.
>> So hopefully you guys will get a load
of conversations with both our team,
product management, engineering,
maybe some of the leadership, but also customers.
I think customers are always the best statement
you can make about how you're doing in the market.
I think you will see from us a number
of announcements that I am prohibited
to share today but some really big things
that we're going to introduce to the market
so it should be excited for that.
And some just, a great showing of our partner,
our Alliance Ecosystem will be there.
Obviously VM will be there in force
as well as Red Hat with their--
>> Let me guess, it's going to be a cloudy future for you?
>> It's also going to be very analytical.
Splunk's going to be there, Elastic's going to be there.
>> Well you guys like to do first at these shows,
I mean kind of, I don't know if you were first
with an all-flash array but probably one
of the first if not the first.
The Evergreen thing ticked off a lot
of people, like why didn't we think of that?
You were first with sort of bundling MVME in,
the whole thing, the announcement you guys made in video,
that was before anybody else.
You know, your whole cloud play.
You like to be first so we expect another first next month.
>> Hopefully we will deliver
and you're not going to get me to leak anything here.
>> Vaughn, thanks for the insight.
Vice President Technology Alliance,
the Pure Storage, I'm Jon with Dave Vellante,
stay with for more coverage.
Robin Matlock, the CMO is coming on.
And of course tomorrow Michael Dell,
Pat Gelsinger and more and more great guests.
Senior vice presidents from VMware,
from all different groups.
We're going to be asking them all the tough questions
here in theCUBE.
Thanks for watching.
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