 From Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE, covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2019, brought to you by Pure Storage. Howdy from Austin, Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. We are day one of our coverage of Pure Accelerate 2019, welcoming a couple of guests to theCUBE. One is an alumni, Nathan Hall, VP of America's Systems Engineering from Pure. Nathan, welcome back to theCUBE. Thanks, thanks very much. And you brought a buddy from Cisco. We have Tom Selleff, Director of Systems Engineering in the America's Data Center. Welcome to theCUBE, Tom. Thanks for having me. It's Howdy Y'all. Howdy Y'all, okay. Thank you. I took the wicked, smart guy from Boston to figure that out. Local. All right, so Y'all, let's talk about Cisco and Pure. You guys have been partners now since Nathan and we were chatting, since about the IPO, about four years ago. Let's start with you, Nathan, our Pure guy. The Cisco Pure partnership evolution, better together. What have you done over those last five years that sets you up for another first that you're going to share with us today? Sure, so it's a deep relationship that's only getting deeper and it's really at all levels. It starts with the executive alignment. And you think about Charlie, Giancarlo from Cisco. We've got a lot of just common cross-pollination there. But now it extends, certainly the field level. Tom and I are doing a lot of planning together in terms of having our teams go after common use cases. But now it extends to engineering as well. We had a UCS director plugin that we've had for some time now, but Pure is now first in terms of having integration into Cisco InterSight. So we are first and only to have storage integration into Cisco InterSight so that Cisco and Pure customers can really manage their environment from one console. So a lot of simplicity, just single SAS interface for managing everything. Tom, why Pure, why first with them? Well, Nathan, he articulated it well. You can look at the executive level. We talked about Charlie, but even all of our Cisco executives but also to the engineering. We started really strong with the field sales teams. But even if you look at the little things that our customers noticed, but a lot of people may not like the internal development of validated design guides, use cases. We churned them out with Pure as our top ecosystem partner, more than anybody. There's a lot of work being done. Our customers see that and it's really helped drive our go to market together. It's really a very strong strategy. So there's a CVD around this, is that right? Yeah, there's many, there's 22 right now and we're churning them out about one or two a quarter. With some vendors we might put out some initially, we might do one or two things well. We do a lot of things well. I guess you could say we do 22 things well with the CVDs, but more than that. So this really started in the field, if I understand correctly, is that right? So I always look for these deals and say, is it a Barney deal? Barney deal, I love you, you love me. And if there's real engineering going on, then you say, okay, it's beyond a Barney deal. So it starts in the field with what? Hey, customer wants us to work together. And then how does the partnership evolve into where you're putting engineering resources? And what does that look like? I think a lot of it evolves from just showing progress and showing success. If you look at, we just have a lot of common goals and from a portfolio perspective, we fill in a lot of each other's gaps. So that's really where it started, was having the success in the field, and that drove, we should actually make greater investments in terms of engineering development, those 22 CVDs, the inter-site integration, et cetera. So we were talking earlier about CI, HCI, for audience members who, it's kind of nuanced, how do you guys look at the intersection of those two? I'd say it's another better together story. For example, we have a recent joint customer win where essentially across their entire SAP landscape, we have Cisco HyperFlex, the HX, managing the database portion. We have FlashStack with Pure Storage managing the HANA portion, and really it all comes now into single console which is inter-site. So we're really able to provide the best type of infrastructure for the right workload at the right time, but all make it look like one single experience to the customer. So from a customer conversation perspective, let's go back to, we've talked about now this exciting new first engineering alignment, going back to the field where customers have a multitude of workloads, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, VDI, and there's FlashStack, like 31 flavors of FlashStack, right? What's that conversation like in terms of CI versus HCI? When you guys come into play, obviously FlashStack being, like I mentioned, a number of flavors of that been around for a while, how do you help the customers determine what infrastructure is optimal for their workloads and their business objectives? Yeah, you know, there's a clear delineation between a hyper-convergence, an HX platform, a hyper-flex platform, and the converged infrastructure that we have with FlashStack. If you look at it a FlashStack, it's an all-in-one solution, compute, fabric, storage. It's more for tier one apps, something that's scalable, something that's highly dense, tier one application, latency obviously plays into this. I'd say it's a little less with the hyper-flex platform and hyper-convergence. Much easier to stand up, much quicker to stand up within a half an hour. It's a storage play, it does many of the similar same things, but we're kind of closing the gap on both of them because even what you would call that smaller platform that started off at more tier one, excuse me, tier two and tier three is now moving into the tier one space. But it's really about scalability, ease of use. Some of them here are stronger in some markets like maybe a higher enterprise, but we can sell them across anywhere, whether it be public sector, commercial, mid-market, smaller customers, but they each have use cases that they fit in very well. This morning in the keynotes, we heard a lot about APIs. I want to get into multi-cloud in a second, but before I do, we talk a lot about infrastructure as code, DevOps, we heard a lot about Kubernetes, a little bit about Kubernetes this morning. And the Cisco DevNet, I've often said on theCUBE, they're the only large established company that's figured out how to do something for developers. Now, does your partnership extend into sort of infrastructure as code? How does that all sort of go through? Is DevNet a play here or even on a roadmap? So from DevNet, can you take that one? Well, I can say yes, it is a play. If you take a look at all of our solutions, primarily the compute and the fabric solutions, programmability is really a key function that we have and the customers can go in and they can actually work in with our APIs, APIs that we work with other vendors too, that are dedicated to other vendors. It is a key thing and we, DevNet became to the forefront probably about five years ago when it was really built off of that development effort. So that's critical for us going forward here. There's a lot that we're doing, I know we're going to talk about inter-site and some other things where that was a key element of it. Yeah, so this is important. You were at Cisco Live. And Cisco DevNet, yes. And we were in the DevNet zone and you remember you had many, many booths, very specialized and you have CCIEs learning Python, learning how to program infrastructure for new use cases, Edge comes in. Anything you'd add, Nathan, to sort of programmability? So I think just from day one, from Pure Storage just having our RESTful API interface, having code.purestorage.com, we've tried to make it as much automatable as possible, as easy to really create a community of developers that can create these integrations very quickly. And honestly, evidence of that isn't inter-site itself. How quickly we got that integration happening is because of that RESTful API interface. We were able to take the kind of AI ops of Pure One and bring it into inter-site, be able to get inter-site to talk to Pure Storage very easily because of that strength of API first. What do we need to know about inter-site? Maybe add some color there, what is it? How's it work? What's the kind of history and how do you guys turn what you're doing in integration into customer value? Sure, if I look at going back to your comments around why converge versus hyper-converge, it's often really a story of simplicity, right? Customers want something simple for the data center. They know they can get it out in the cloud, but they can't always run their workloads out in the external cloud. So simplicity is for inter-site, no matter what it is, if it's converged or hyper-converged, if it's Pure Storage, being able to have a single interface to monitor your infrastructure, lifecycle it to get really specific, imagine a VMware administrator is able to, in that single console, provision storage from Pure to a UCS server, format it for VMware ESX and VMFS, and in that single console. So it doesn't have to go to a bunch of different consoles. It gets that cloud-like experience and that's what inter-site delivers. So you get that simplicity whether it's converged or hyper-converged with inter-site. Whether it's in the cloud, it's the edge, it's the branch, hybrid cloud, instead of having to manage it, I think that Nathan just hit on these single clusters of storage compute, what have you. These can all be managed from one single console, worldwide, no matter where they sit. So I want to talk about multi-cloud, if we can. So if I look at the players in multi-cloud, the big whales, VMware, Red Hat, Google, Microsoft and Cisco, you partner with all of those, pretty much I think, yeah. AWS is not in the list, but you figure they're kind of the facto part of the multi-cloud scene but they're not going after multi-cloud. Cisco's relatively new entrant there. You got companies that have a cloud like Microsoft and Google that want to participate. You got companies that don't have a cloud like Cisco that want to participate. Where does Pure fit in to that multi-cloud opportunity and how does it relate to the partnership? Well, I think where we found a solid partnership with Cisco and multi-cloud is the same approach to multi-cloud, and that is, I'd call it, open multi-cloud. So as opposed to having, you know, forcing a single type of hypervisor on one side or a single cloud, external cloud on the other side, how do we make certain that our customers can run any app anywhere? How do we at Pure provide the data fabric, having the most efficient metadata fabric out there to kind of get around the data gravity problems of moving workloads? And we do that now with Pure FlashArray on-premises, cloud block store out in the cloud, our ability to cloud snap to Azure to AWS. And that's part of the story. The other part of the story is the fabric and the compute. So with ACI Anywhere, really that completes the Any Workload Anywhere story and keeping it open so it's not just one hypervisor, you know, or one cloud provider on the other side. So you'd be the data plane in that equation with the management of that data plane. Sure. And then Cisco is the overall management framework, the control plane, I guess we could call that. Is that the right way to think about it? I'd say part of the control plane and the network fabric as well. And we're part of the, essentially, the consistent data services no matter where you go. So really up-leveling, for example, EBS to a enterprise grade of storage that it wasn't before. Now we have something that, whether you're on hardware, on-premises, or in the cloud, you can run that monolithic application in places you couldn't do it before. So let's look at this in the real world, in a customer environment. Talk to me about whatever kind of, you know, whether it's a bank or an airline or what have you. What are the business benefits that we'll use Delta Airlines as an example? What would they get out of this? If they think of all of the things that they need to achieve internally and be able to deliver to their customers, what's that, you know, TCO, ROI? What are all those sexy things that you guys are delivering? So I'd say they get, essentially, a lot of the barriers to getting the TCO you want for a given workload are based on compatibility. Maybe you want to run it out in Amazon, but you can't get it there because it's this massive monolithic app. The sync would take days. The SLA out there isn't quite what you want. Now, being able to provide a consistent experience no matter where that data plane is, you get that choice, right? You can go and evaluate AWS or Azure and say that's ultimately the right TCO for my application. And I know it can run out there because I've essentially standardized my data fabric anywhere. And it's the same story, essentially, now with ACI anywhere as well. So the ability to keep, essentially, the fundamental elements of the application, the infrastructure around it, consistent, no matter where it is, frees that IT decision maker to put it in the right place. You don't have to be constrained by compatibility anymore. So internal operations can be dialed way up, which means those folks are free to resources to work on other higher value projects. And the customer on the other end who doesn't know any of the stuff is under the hood is getting what they need when they want it. Exactly. Yeah, you can manage, if you look at ACI, you can manage the automation of the applications across the network fabric, again, wherever it may be. And there's robustness there, there's telemetry, there's measurements. So instead of just looking at the application, you look at the robustness of that on the network. And the network here is absolutely critical. None of this is going to run. I think as Nathan hit on that it could be in the cloud, it could be in the branch, you still want the same level of performance, the SLA, the five nines, and that's where the network comes in. That's what's critical. Well, the security piece as well. Absolutely. You guys are largely coming at the multi-cloud from, of course, the network strength that you have, but you've also got a security angle there because you can go deep packet inspection and that's a sweet spot for you guys. Yeah, absolutely. Talk about security and its importance. Well, I think the security, I mean, one of the big plays that we have with ACI and with Tetration is being able to look in literally billions of packets a second and being able to track and make real-time decisions on any type of threat, threat defense that's built right in. So normally, obviously you have a firewall and you try to keep everything out, but a lot of what we happen, a lot of the penetration security hack happens inside. And so this is able to look at all of the flows, not every single packet, the flow of the application and the information and to see if there's a threat in real time. It takes a lot of processing power, a lot of storage and a lot of capacity, but that's a Tetration product and it's a huge play. Our security team actually is outselling that in addition to the data center teams. So is Wallingford Yankees country or Red Sox country? Oh, it's right on the border. So yeah, I've got my in-laws, Yankees, my parents, Red Sox, so it's very difficult at home. You're a Pat's fan, of course. Did you feel dirty watching the game on Sunday or? No, not at all. Oh, you felt good? No, not at all. Maybe 19 and old this year, we'll see. And you're Switzerland in this whole debate? I try to be, I try to be, it's hard, it's hard. Well, you know, we're, this company is warriors, right? So we can talk NBA too. There's a really interesting NBA season coming up now, you know? Not so much for our team, but. Right, right. You never know. You never know. I had to try to be Switzerland too, because I was the Westcoaster with the Eastcoaster boss, you know how it goes. So Tom, last question for you. Whole bunch of announcements that came out of Pure today. As we look at all of the partnerships that Pure has, we talked about that, that Cisco has as well. What are some of the things that as a partner, as a valued strategic partner, that Cisco hears when they hear Pure talking about delivering everything as a service and what they're doing with AI and dialing up things there. What is Cisco's reaction to that news? Well the thing with Pure, and it preceded this conference, but I really heard it with the new announcements and Nate and I, we have a lot of things we're going to work with our systems engineers on in the Americas. It's just the innovation, which is pretty incredible. You know, you kind of have the big four products here, primarily with the flash arrays, the CI platforms, the flash blades, what's going on with Pure One. That's going to be critical going forward and we have very similar messages with Multi-Cloud. We talked about the validated designs. This is really going to lead us to almost like, it's kind of funny, when you have an innovative partner, you can do reboots every year and people don't think you're just throwing, you know, work at them or what have you. It's like, now we really innovate it again. 12, 15 months later, we're going to hit this again and come at it. And so Pure is probably one of the only partners we have that type of relationship with. All right. Well guys, thank you so much for joining David and me on theCUBE today. We appreciate it. We look forward to following the evolution of the Cisco Pure partnership. Thanks for your time. Thank you. Thank you guys. For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, y'all from Pure Accelerate in Austin, Texas.