 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Pure Accelerate 2017, brought to you by Pure Storage. Welcome back to Pure 70 in San Francisco, everybody. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Stu Miniman. And this is theCUBE. We go out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. A lot going on here at Pure Accelerate 2017. Siva Kumar is here as the senior director of data center solutions at Cisco. And Mayor DeWaker is the product management lead for Converge at Pure Storage. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Great to be here. Thank you. We've heard a lot this morning about Converge, the Cisco partnership. We just had a couple of customers on that are doing flash stack. So Siva, let's start with you. Thoughts on Accelerate? You know, this is probably the coolest event I've been in many years. Different venue, right? Ambience, the venue and the fact that Warrior's won last night, it just joy. It's awesome today. Oh, you want to talk hoops for a little bit? You know, we can do that, you guys. We're Patriots fans, so we know obnoxious winning fans. Two out of the last three, it's good. It's good to be a winner, isn't it? Yep, absolutely. Well, Mayor, give us your thoughts on Converge. You guys have talked about Converge a lot today, flash stack, we just heard from some customers. Talk about the strategy. What are you guys trying to accomplish there? Yeah, so we launched the flash stack program about three years ago. And what we were starting to see in the industry was that there was a very clear preference from customers to buy full stack solutions, right? So we thought that was an opportunity for us to take our storage business and move it into an adjacent market, which was Converge. And we thought we had really addressed a lot of the storage pain points that people were seeing with the existing Converge solutions. So with our flash performance and the simplicity that Pure brings to the table, we thought we had an opportunity really to team up with Cisco and build a solution that can be sufficiently differentiated and something that people would really love to try out. Mayor, I wonder if you can help clarify something. A lot of times people hear Converge and they think coming together. When I think about the solutions that both Cisco UCS and Pure, there's lots of software and it's really a distributed type scalable architecture. So how am I both Converged and scalable? So what we're basically doing is we're trying to, so we're bringing best of breed solutions together, right? So I think there's a lot of synergy between the way UCS is architected and Pure is architected. So we're both stateless architectures on the compute side and the storage side. And what we're doing as part of the Pure storage, our flash stack Converge program is that we're really gluing these things together with a unified management platform which really brings everything together. So it really simplifies the deployment, it simplifies the day-to-day management of the entire stack, which is really what people are looking for. All right, so Siva, we've heard a lot today about Converge, we've heard some comments about Hyper Converge. What's the difference between Converged and Hyper Converged? I think if you look at the evolution in the industry, these are big shifts or the big ways customers want to consume. The genesis of all the work around Convergence, if you will, that started it all, was the customers started to realize I have bigger problems to solve from an IT perspective. I would rather not solve infrastructure problems all by myself. I want the vendors to solve this. I want the vendors to give me an experience that is far more turnkey. So I invest my time and resource on higher-order bits that are more in a business critical from their perspective. That truly allowed us to look into Convergence as a strategy and bring together certain use cases and value propositions that is very critical to IT, high availability, scalability, multi-site deployment, which are all critical for an IT to solve. We solve it first ourselves as a joint architecture. We validate that and then we provide blueprints that both our customers consumes and our partners consume. We are a very big channel partner community. A lot of our partners leverage the work we do to deliver a great value to our customers. While Convergence was heavily centered around array-based storages that the market was absorbing, the evolution of storage to include more in the software-defined world created another set of categories that allows customers to say, you know what, if my interest is much more on the simplification and start small and those type of model, it propped a new industry or a new paradigm in the industry. From our perspective, that's a huge value in Convergence. It's a $7 billion business and ITC thinks it's continues to grow. And we absolutely believe, you know, we have a purpose-built or a ground-up platform that was built for Flash, that's the pure storage architecture, is truly here and truly is a big part of our strategy building that. And of course, you know, as more use cases are coming to the compute side, we are here to embrace technologies like hyperconvergence because that's obviously something that's great for a server vendor to embrace as well. So, from your standpoint, I mean, I think of you guys as software heavy, software-led, but you're not participating in the so-called hyperconverge, that's because you don't want to own that part of the stack, you'd rather partner for it. What's your point of view there? Yeah, so I think from our standpoint, we believe that there is basically use cases both for hyperconverge and conversion for structure, right? We believe that with the program we have at Cisco, we can basically provide a very good, very compelling solution in FlashStack, and Cisco already has a solution in HyperFlex that addresses the hyperconverge use case, and we really see both of these coexisting in a lot of customer environments. There are use cases where HCI absolutely shines, and then there are use cases where we believe FlashStack is really the right solution. But it's interesting, you haven't sort of chased that trend, you're more focused on your areas than you're doing very well with it. Is that fundamental to the strategy, or is it just sort of, you guys are focused elsewhere? Yeah, so I think for us, for pure storage, I think we are looking at the conversion market really as there is a lot of existing business there that can be had, which is really tied to legacy storage platforms coming up for refresh as part of the conversion infrastructure deployments people already have. So that in itself is a fairly large opportunity for us, and we believe that with the messaging we have, which is you can consolidate a lot of your workloads on FlashStack, I think the platform that FlashStack is providing is really very well suited for the use cases that pure storage has traditionally played in, which is really the enterprise workloads. Is it fair to say that sort of Convergence 1.0, and of course Cisco was heavily involved in Convergence 1.0, you kind of arguably created it along with some partners, but is it fair to say that it was just too complex for a lot of customers, and are you trying to take that to a next level? Can you add some color to that? Yeah, I could answer that. I think the Convergence 1.0 was truly about idea operational simplification, because they truly wanted to consume these best of breed technologies without having to deal with so much of technology consumption itself, but as a system level consumption. But in parallel, what happened in the industry is obviously the evolution of cloud. Cloud brought a completely different paradigm of how you consume an infrastructure in itself. I mean, the email is an infrastructure now, because you buy from a cloud vendor, you get your VM in an email. So that's a very different way of consumption model, which created additional requirements for more simplification, the turnkey experiences and things like that led to another category. But if you look at FlashTag, what we are doing is we are bringing this simplification model into FlashTag as well. We recognize while building the best of breed is a great idea and great market for itself, simplification is never lost. People love that as well, so we are looking at bringing together as close to a single pane of glass possible with such strong technology play to deliver some of the simplification in this model as well. So you're truly trying to bridge the gap in offering something that our customers really want to see. Yeah, simplification is definitely a big piece of that wave of both converge and hyperconverged. When I think back when we launched all of these solutions, it was, okay, that day zero, I should be able to speed that up and the day one, the stuff afterwards, we should be able to make that easier. How are you measuring that these days? Any customers you can speak to as to how they dramatically shift that kind of keeping the lights on versus really being able to focus on the business? Yeah, so I think if you really look at a converged stack, there is three distinct pieces in it, right? So there's compute, storage, networking, and I think Cisco did a phenomenal job with the UCS and UCS manager platforms, right? In helping really put a cookie cutter approach around deploying compute. So if you look at what was remaining, networking was always kind of the low-hanging fruit. Storage was very complex, right? So with Pure coming into the picture, we have really simplified the overall deployment and management of storage, right? So we were talking from days down to a few hours to get storage going and get the entire flashback infrastructure going as a result, right? And then what we're doing is we're using a lot of existing tools that exist in the ecosystem. So a great example of that is UCS Director, which is being used very commonly by customers to deploy their entire data centers. We are integrating with that, and in addition to that, we're also integrating with a lot of hypervisor-level tools, like vCenter or hyper-V-level tools, right? And the benefit is that customers are getting to use the tools that are already used to with the simplicity of UCS and Pure to really simplify the overall deployment and also management of the entire stack. So really the problem you're solving is one of IT labor intensity, right? IT labor is too much IT labor, it's too non-differentiated, it's too expensive. Is that fair? Well, yeah, I think that, yeah, so fundamentally what we are solving is providing you a platform, a platform and an experience that IT wants, IT desires, but that also is optimized so that you can easily provide a platform experience, but then the workload and the diversification you see in the market. And the one side is an Oracle database, you don't touch it for four years kind of a thing. On the other hand, you have a container which leaves for two seconds. So you truly have a complete range of use cases. Each demands something different from a platform. Our strategy and our goal is to provide a single cohesive platform that uniformly works across all of these use cases from an IT operations and management standpoint. I mean, you realize the challenge is quite complex but the solution is a huge value for our customers and that's really our journey in solving this problem. Can you share any, what should we expect to see from a kind of joint engineering deployment going forward? I heard in the keynote this morning, some really, the cloud native AI, ML type deployments. We're talking less about virtualization, more about containers and microservices. Where should we look to Cisco and Pure in the future? So I think there's an interesting demo on the floor which really talks about something that's cutting edge. NVMe over fabric. So the next big innovation from Pure is an NVMe, all NVMe array. That is obviously no performance holds there. It's absolutely a screaming box. We have a Cisco adapter technology that can deliver high performance, low latency IO transport on top of a fabric, on top of an Ethernet fabric to talk NVMe from the host. Just the power of how much you can do IO subsystem from a compute perspective onto the network and talking to the storage and the ability to bring a super class performance from a storage perspective is absolutely a next generation cutting edge. And vendors like this coming together truly solves the industry's next big problem. Who better to solve a fabric network bandwidth issue than Cisco partnering with best of breed from a storage? Then that's one, just sort of a technology and architectural play, if you will. But on a use case workload type of scenarios, we have done a lot of the traditional use cases quite a bit in the databases and the VDIs of the world. But we are now looking at the next generation use cases. Containers, microservices. How do I make the Docker environment integrate seamlessly with a flash tag? Yeah, this is a very different paradigm. How do I enable flash tag to be very simple to consume for Kubernetes? Because these are use cases where the developer who is much more focused on clouds does not really think there is an infrastructure underneath, he doesn't even care about it. So we need to give him that experience so that it's a seamless way of deploying and managing these DevOps environment as well. So that's the next wave of what we are doing is to provide that agility factor coming out of the flash tag. And the foundational architecture being built for this obviously helps. And you see NVME over fabric as kind of one of those foundational aspects, right? That will be another architectural cog in the same context of what we are trying to do. Are you with flash tag able to preserve that same experience for customers? The evergreen experience, the never have to migrate your data, I mean all that wonderful stuff. Is that translated into the partnership? We are, so we are taking a lot of the same goodness we have with the storage platform and we are extending that into flash tag. So we have very similar to Pure, you can almost non-disruptively upgrade pretty much everything in the UCS stack. And we have special programs now with Cisco through which we can provide people the option to also get new gear every couple of years very similar to the evergreen storage program we have through Pure Storage. So is it fair to say, well first of all is that unique to Pure or is that something that Cisco sort of has innovated on? It's from a storage perspective Pure I think truly created the easy button for storage which is nonexistent. It's one of the hardest problems to solve. But what about the other pieces? And Cisco obviously pioneered the fabric based stateless compute which is still the standard in the industry of how to do the easy button for compute is truly what we brought to the table that truly revolutionized the industry. I absolutely think that's where the architecture, individually you're building technology that are great. When you combine that and jointly engineer the solution and provide the turnkey value to the customer then the absolute value is manifested in a very big way. And I think that's our journey. We are here, obviously we are hearing a lot of great customers coming in. But the more customers we hear, the more we learn. But you've substantially sort of recreated that experience to a great degree. Absolutely, absolutely. I mean I think that's a huge differentiator for Pure. You don't hear a lot of other companies talking about it and when you talk to your customers they always point to that. The migrations are just such a painful horrible experience. So good stuff. All right we have to leave it there Jens. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate it. Thank you. Pleasure, thank you. All right, take care. Keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from Pure Accelerate 2017. We're right back.