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>> Voiceover: From around the globe,
it's theCUBE with digital coverage
of AWS re:Invent 2020.
Special coverage sponsored by AWS Global Partner Network.
>> Hi, welcome to theCUBE Virtual
and our coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020 with special coverage
of APN partner experience, I'm John for your host,
we are theCUBE Virtual, we can't be there in person
we're there remote and our two next guests are,
we have Pure Storage Michael Sotnick,
VP of Worldwide Alliances Pure Storage
and Repertoire Czarnecki Principal Product Manager
for ATS Outposts, welcome to theCUBE.
>> Wonderful to be here, great to see you
and thanks for having us.
>> Michael, great to see you at Pure,
you guys had some great momentum earnings
and some announcements.
You guys have some new news, we're here at re:Invent
all part of AWS and Outposts,
I want to get into it right away.
Talk about the relationship with AWS,
I know you guys have some hot news
just on came out in late November, we're here in the event,
all the talk is about new higher level services,
hybrid edge, what are you guys doing?
What's the story?
>> Yeah, look, I got to tell you
the partnership with AWS is a very high profile
and strategic partnership for Pure storage.
Now, we've worked hard with our Cloud Block Store for AWS,
which is an extensibility solution for Pures FlashArray
and into AWS, I think the big news
and one of the things that we're most proud of,
you know, is the recent establishment
of Pure being service ready and Outposts ready
and the first and only on-prem storage solution
and we're shoulder to shoulder with AWS,
as AWS takes Outposts into the data center.
Now, they're going after key workloads
that we're well-known for
and we're very excited to partner with AWS in that regard.
>> You know, congratulations to Pure,
we've been following you guys from the beginning,
since inception, since it was found and startup
and now I see growing public company on the next level
kind of growth plan.
You guys were early on all this stuff with Flash,
with software and Cloud, so it's paying off.
Rob, I want to get to Outposts because this was probably
the most controversial announcements
I've ever covered at re:Invent over the past eight years,
it really was the first sign that Andy was saying,
you know what, we're working backwards from the customers
and they all are talking hybrid,
we're going to have Outposts give us the update.
What kind of workloads and verticals are seeing success
with Outposts, now that that's part of the portfolio?
How does it all working out?
Give us the update on the workloads and the verticals.
>> Absolutely, although I have to say
I'd call it more exciting than controversial.
(laughing)
We're so excited about the opportunities
that Outposts open for our customers
and customers have been asking us for years,
how can we bring AWS services to our data centers?
And we thought about it for a long time,
and until we define the Outposts service,
we really did thought we could do better
and then what Outposts does
is it lets us take those services,
the customers are familiar with
and lets us bring it to their data center
and one of the really bright spots over the past year
has just been how many different industries
and market segments have have shown interest
in Outposts, right?
You could have customers, for example,
with data residency needs,
those that have to do local data processing,
maybe have latency needs on a specific workload
that needs to run near their end users
or just folks trying to modernize their data center.
And that's a journey that transformation takes time, right?
So, Outposts works for all of those customers
and one of the things that's really become clear to us
is that to enable the success
that we think Outposts can have,
we need to meet customers where they are
and one of the fantastic things about
the Outposts ready program is many of those customers
are using Pure and they have Pure hardware,
and, you know we send an Outposts
over to the Pure lab recently,
and I have to tell you a picture of those two racks
next to each other, looks really good.
(laughing)
>> You know, it's funny just to kind of walk back
my controversial comment, you know,
I meant in the sense of that's when Cloud
really got big into the enterprise
and you had to deal with hybrid.
So, I do think it's exciting
because the Edge is a big theme here.
Can you just share real quick
before I get into some of the Pure questions
on this Edge piece with the hybrid,
because what the customer need
and when you talk to customers, I know you guys, you know,
really kind of work backwards from the customer.
What are their needs?
What causes them to look at Outposts
as part of their hybrid?
What's the Key consideration?
>> Yeah, so, there are a couple of different needs,
John right, one for example is we have regions
and local zones across the globe, but we're not everywhere
and they're data residency regulations that they're becoming
increasingly common and popular.
So, customers like come to us
and say, "look, I really need to run for example,
"a financial services workload that needs to be in Thailand"
and we don't have a regional local zone in Thailand,
but we can get them an Outposts to two places
where they need to be, right?
So, that requirement to keep data,
whether it's by regulation or by a contractual agreement,
that's a big driver.
The other pieces, there's a tremendous amount of interest
in the top-down
executive sponsorship from across enterprise customers
to transform their operations,
to modernize their digital approach.
But they're, when they actually look at their estate,
they do see an awful lot of hardware
and that's a hard challenge to plan the migration.
When you can bring an Outposts right into that data center,
it really makes it much easier because AWS is right there,
there could be a monolithic architecture
that it doesn't lend well to having part of the workload
running in the region,
part of the workload running in their data center,
but with an Outposts, they can extend AWS
to their data center and that just makes it so much easier
for them to get started on their digital transformation.
>> Michael this is a key trend, you guys saw early
Cloud operations on premise, it becomes Cloudified
at that point when you have DevOps on premises
and then Pure Cloud for bursting all that stuff
and now you've got the edge exploding as well as growth
and opportunity, what causes the customer
to get the pure option on Outposts?
What's the angle for you guys?
Obviously storage, you got data
and I can see this whole here where there's no region
and certainly Outposts stores data and that's a requirement
for a lot of certainly global customers and needs.
What's the Pure angle on this?
>> Yeah, I appreciate that
and appreciate Rob's comments around what AWS sees
in the wild in terms of Pure's footprint in the market share
that we've established as company over 11 years in business
and, you know, over eight years to shipping product.
You know, what I would tell you is
one of the things that a lot of people miss is
the simplicity and the consistency
that are characteristically, you know,
very much in the AWS experience
and equally within the Pure experience.
And that's really powerful,
so as we were successful in putting Pure into workloads
that, you know, for all the reasons
that Rob talked about, right?
Data gravity, you know, the regulatory issues,
just application architecture and its inability to move
to the Public Cloud, you know, our predictability,
our simplicity, our consistency really matched
what the customer was getting with other workloads
that they had in AWS.
And so, with AWS Outposts,
that's really bringing to the customer
that single pane of glass
to manage their entire environment and so we saw that
we made the three-year investment in Outposts, as Rob said,
just having our solution in Pure's Data Center,
it's set up and running today
with a solution built on FlashBlade,
which is our unstructured data solution
and you know, delivering fantastic performance results
in AI and ML workloads,
we see the same opportunity within backup
and disaster recovery workloads and into analytics,
and then equally the opportunity to build, you know,
FlashArray and our other storage solutions
and to build you know, architectures with Outposts
in our data center and bring 'em to market.
>> Real quick, just to follow up on that,
what used cases are you seeing that are most successful
with Outposts and in general,
how do you guys get your customers to integrate
with the rest of their environments
'cause, you know, everyone's got to know
this operating environments is not just Cloud Public
is Cloud on premise and everything else.
>> Yeah, you know, what's cool is,
and then Rob hit right on it,
is the wide range of indenstries
and the wide range of use cases and workloads
that are finding themselves attracted
to the Outposts offering and so, you know,
without a doubt there's going to be
I think what people would immediately believe, right?
AI and ML workloads
and the importance of having high performance storage
and to have a high performance Outposts environment
as close to the center as possible
of those solutions, but it doesn't stop there.
The traditional, virtualized database workloads
that are for reasons of application architecture,
aren't candidates to move AWS's Public Cloud offering
are great fit for Outposts.
and those are workloads that we've always traditionally
been successful with in the market
and see a great opportunity that, you know,
build on that success as an Outposts partner.
>> Rob, I've got to ask you last re:Invent,
when we were in person, when we had real life back then
(laughing)
I was at the replay party and hanging out
and this guy comes up to me, I didn't even know who he was,
obviously a big time engineer over there,
opens his hand up and shows me this little processor
and I'm like, he closes it and he's like,
and I go, can I take a picture?
And he was like, freaking out, don't take a picture.
It was the big processor, it was the big kind of (mumbles),
I think it was the big monster and it was just so small.
See the innovation in hardware,
you guys have done a lot there, so that's cool.
I'd like to get your thoughts on
where the future's going there
because you've got great hardware innovation,
but you got the higher level services with containers.
I know you guys took your time,
containers are super important
because that's going to deal with that,
so, how do you look at that?
You've got the innovation and the hardware check,
containers how does that all fit in?
'cause you guys have been making a lot of investments
in some of these Cloud native projects,
what's your position on that?
>> You know, it's all part of one common story John, right?
Customers, they want an easy path to delivering
impact for their business, right?
And you know, you've heard us speak a lot
over the past few years about how we're really seeing
these two different types of customers,
we have those customers that really love
to get those foundational core building blocks
and stitch them together in a creative way.
But then you have more and more customers
that they want to operate at a different level
and that's okay, we want to support both of them,
we want to give both of them all the tools that they need
to spend their time and put their resources
towards what differentiates their business
and just be able to give them support at whatever level
they need on the infrastructure side and, you know,
it's fantastic that our combination of investments
in hardware and services and now with Outposts,
we can bring those investments even closer to the customer.
If you really think about it that way,
the possibilities become limitless.
>> Yeah, it's not, I like the simplicity aspect
it's pretty beautiful too the way it looks,
it looks nice.
Michael, I got to ask you on your side,
a couple of big announcements over there,
we've been following from Pure looking back,
you obviously had the periods of service announcement
you bought the port works, was an acquisition, you know,
that's container management across the data center
including Outposts.
You've got Pure as a service,
is Pure as a service working with Outposts and how?
And if so, how and what's the consumption model
for customers there?
>> Yeah, thanks so much, John
and I appreciate you following us the way that you do,
It's meaningful and appreciated.
Listen, you know, I think the customers have made it clear
and AWS is you know, kind of led the way
in terms of the consumption and experience
expectations that customers have.
It's got to be consumable,
they've got to pay for what they use
and it's got to be outcome oriented.
And we're doing that with Pure as a service
and so I think we saw that early
and have been invested in Pure as a service
for our customers and, you know,
we look at the way we acquired Outposts as a customer
and a partner of AWS and that is exactly the same way
customers can consume Pure,
you know, all of our solutions in a,
use what you need, pay for what you use environment,
and you know, one of the exciting things
about our AWS partnership is it's wide ranging.
And one of the things that AWS has done,
I think world-class is marketplace and so we're excited
to share with this audience, you know,
really on the back of just recent announcement,
that Pure as service is available
within the AWS Marketplace.
And so you think about the simplicity and the consistency
that Pure and AWS deliver to the market.
AWS customers demand that
and they get that in the marketplace
and we're proud to have our offerings there
and port works has been in the marketplace
and will continue to be showcased
from a container management standpoint.
So, as those workloads increasingly become, you know,
the Cloud native, DevOps containerized workloads,
now we've got a solution end to end to support them.
>> Great job, great insight, congratulations to Pure,
good moves, just making some good moves.
Rob, I want to just get you the final word here on Outposts,
again, great everyone loves this product again,
it's a lot of attention,
it's really puts the operating model of Cloud
firmly in the on-premise world for Amazon,
opens up a lot of good conversations
and business opportunities and technical integrations are
all around you.
So, what's your message to the ecosystem
out there for Outposts?
What's the word?
I want to do, I work with you guys, how do I get involved?
What are some of the opportunities?
What's your position?
How do you talk of the ecosystem?
>> Yeah, you know, John I think the best way to frame it is,
we're just getting started,
where we've got our first year in the books,
we've seen so many promising signals from customers
had so many interesting conversations
that just weren't possible without Outposts
and you know, working with partners like Pure
and expanding our Outposts ready program
is just the beginning, right?
We launched back in September,
we've seen another meaningful set of partners come out
here at re:Invent and we're going to continue to double down
on both the Outposts business,
but specifically on working with our partners.
I think that the key to unlocking the magic of Outposts
is meeting customers where they are,
and those customers are using our partners
and there's no reason that it shouldn't just work
when they move their partner-based workload
from their existing infrastructure
right over to the Outposts.
>> All right, I'll leave it there,
Michael Sotnick VP of Worldwide Alliances at Pure Storage,
congratulations on a great innovation strategy.
It's easily to do alliances
when you've got a great product and technology.
Congratulations, Rob Czarnecki,
Principal, Product Manager of Outposts,
we'll be speaking more to you
throughout the next couple of weeks here
at re:Invent Virtual.
Thanks for coming on, I appreciate it.
>> Thank you.
>> Okay, so, CUBE Virtual, we are theCUBE Virtual,
we wish we could be there in person this year,
but it's a virtual event over three weeks.
Will be lots of coverage, I'm John, for your host.
Thanks for watching.
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