 I'm John Furrier here in the CUBE studios in Palo Alto for a special CUBE conversation on some big news from Pure Storage. We're here, which had Kenny, who's the Vice President of Product Insolutions at Pure Storage, big cloud news, a historic announcement for Pure Storage, one of the fastest growing startups in the storage business went public and following these guys since creation. A great success story in Silicon Valley and certainly innovative products now announcing a cloud product, cloud data services now in market. Chad, this is huge. It's an exciting time, thank you so much for having us. So you guys, obviously great storage success story, but now the reality has changed and we've been sitting on the CUBE, nothing changes, you got storage, compute and networking, old way, new way in the cloud, gain is still the same, storage isn't going away, you got to store the data somewhere and the data tsunami is coming, still coming with edge and a bunch of other things, cloud more important than ever. To get it right is super important. So what is the announcement of cloud data servers? Explain what the product is, why you guys built it, why now? Awesome, so a couple of different innovations that are part of this launch to start with, we have cloud block store which is taking purity, which is our operating system found on prem and actually moving it to AWS. And we spent a bunch of time optimizing these solutions to make that so that we could actually take on tier one mission critical applications. A key differentiator is that most folks were really chasing after test dev and leveraging the cloud for that type of use case, whereas cloud block stores really kind of industry strength and ready for mission critical applications. We also took protection mechanisms from flash array on premises and actually made it so that you could use cloud snap and move and protect data into the public cloud via a portable snapshot technology which we can dig into a little bit later. And then the last part is, we thought it was really ripe to change data protection just as a whole. Most people are doing kind of disc to disc to tape and then moving tape off site. We believe the world has shifted, there's a big problem in data protection. Restoring data is not happening in the timeframe that it's needed. And SLAs aren't being met. End users are not happy with the overall solution as a whole. We believe that restorations from flash are incredibly important to the business. But in order to get there, you have to offset the economics. And so what we're building is a flash to flash to cloud solution, which enables folks to be able to take the advantages of the economics of cloud and be able to then have a caching mechanism of flash on premises so that they can restore things relatively quickly for the predominant set of data that they have out there. And just so I get everything right here, you guys always been on premises only. This is now a cloud solution. It's software. Correct. Why now? Why wait till now? Is the timing right? What's the internal conversation? Why should customers know? Is this the right time? So the evolution of cloud's been pretty interesting as we've gone through it. So most customers went from kind of 100% on premise. The cloud came out and said, hey, I'm going to move everything to the cloud. They found that that didn't work great for enterprise applications. And so they kind of moved back and realized that hybrid cloud was going to be a world that they wanted to leverage both. We're seeing a lot of other shifts in the market. VMware now having RDS in platform, now is true hybrid cloud kind of playing out there. Amazon running in AWS is a good mixture just to showcase where people really want to be able to leverage the capabilities of both. So it's good timing because the customers are kind of re-architecting as well. Hybrid applications are definitely what people want. 100% and the application stack, I think was the core focus that really shifted over time. Instead of just focusing on hybrid cloud infrastructure, it was really about how applications could leverage multiple types of clouds to be able to leverage the innovation and services that they can provide. You know, I've always been following the IT business for 30 years. It's always been an interesting kind of trend. You know, you buy something from a vendor and there's trade-offs. And there's always the buy, you know, the payback periods. But now I think with this announcements, it's interesting as you get the product mix that allows customers to have choice and pick what they want. There's no more trade-offs. If they like cloud, you go to cloud. If you like on-premise, as you go on-premises. It sounds like an easy concept, but the crazy part to this is that the cloud divide is real. I mean, they are very different environments. As we talked to customers, they were very lost on how I was going to take an enterprise application and actually leverage the innovations within the cloud. They wanted it, they needed it, but at the same time, they weren't able to deliver upon it. And so we realized that the data layer, fungdamentally, was the area that could give them that bridge between those two environments. And we could add some core values to the cloud for even the next generation kind of developer who's developing in the cloud to bring in, you know, better overall resiliency management and all sorts of new features that they weren't able to take advantage of in traditional public cloud. You know, Joe wants to do Miniman and Dave Vellante about the serverless trend and how awesome that is. It's just, you look at the resource pool as a serverless pool resource. So is this storage-less? So it's still backed by storage, obviously. No, it's just making it go, wait, that you're looking at it as like, what's service-less is to the user? You guys are providing that same kind of storage pool addressable through the application realm as of its source-less. And what's great about, you know, just taking 100% software platform and moving it to the cloud is customers can spin this up like in minutes. And what's great about it is they can spend many, many, many instances of these things for various different use cases that they have out there and get true utility out of it. And so they're getting the agility that they really want while not having to offset the values that they really come to love about Pure Storage on premises. Now they can actually get it all in the public cloud as well. I want to dig into the products a little bit. Before we get there, I want you to answer the question that's probably on people's minds. I know you've been at Pure really from the beginning. So you've seen the history. Most people will look at you guys and say, hey, well you're a hardware vendor. I have Pure Boxes everywhere. It's doing a great job. You pioneered the Flash all, you know, speed game on storage. People want, you know, kill latency as they say. You guys have done a great job, but wait a minute, this is software. Explain how you guys did this, why it's important. People might not know that this is a software solution. They might be knowing of hardware. What's the difference? Is there a difference? Why should they care? And what's the impact? It's a great question. I think, you know, since we sell hardware products, most people see us as the hardware company. But at the end of the day, the majority of Inge and Dev is software. And we're building software to make originally off-the-shelf components to be enterprise worthy. You know, over time, we decided to optimize the hardware too. And that pairing between the software and hardware gets some inherently great values. And this is why we didn't just take our software and just kind of throw it into every cloud and say have at it to customers like a lot of folks did. We spent a lot of time just like we did on our hardware platform, optimizing for AWS to start with so that we could truly be able to leverage the inherent technologies that they have, but build software to make it even better. It's interesting. I interviewed Andy Petrelstein at VMworld and he's the chairman of Arista and he's called, that's Pat Gelsen who calls him the Rembrandt of Motherlands. And he goes, John, we're in the software business. And he goes, let me tell you, hardware is easy. Software is hard. I agree. So everyone's pretty much in the software business. This is not a change for pure. Well, this is the same game we've been in. Yeah. All right, let's get into the product. So the first one is cloud block store for AWS, which is the way Amazon does the brand. So it's on Amazon or for Amazon, as they say, they use different words. So this is pure software in the cloud. Your pure companies, yeah, pure, technically pure software in the cloud as a software, no hardware. 100% storage, API support always encrypted, seamless management and orchestration, DR backup migration between clouds. That's kind of the core premise. So what does the product do? What's the purpose of the product? On the Amazon piece, if I'm a customer of pure or a prospect for pure, what does the product give me? What's the capabilities? Great idea. So I would say that the biggest thing that customers get is just leverage for their application stack to be able to utilize the cloud. And let me give you a couple of examples because they're kind of fun. So first off, cloud block store is just software that sits in the cloud that has many of the same utilities that run on premises. And by doing so, you get the ability to be able to do stuff like I want to replicate from as a DR target. So maybe I don't have a secondary site out there, a secondary site out there. And I want to have a DR target that I could spin up in the event of a disaster. You can easily set up bi-directional replication to the instance that you have running in the cloud. It's the exact same experience, the exact same APIs, and you get our cloud data management with pure one to be able to see both sites, one single pane of glass and make sure everything's up and running and doing well. You could also though leverage a test dev environment. So let's say I'm running production on-prem, our premises, I can then go ahead and replicate to the cloud, spin up an instance for test dev and run reporting, run analytics and run anything else that I wanted on top of that and spin up compute relatively quickly. Maybe I don't have it on-prem. Next, we could focus on replicating for protection. Let's say for compliance, I want to have many instances to be able to restore back in the event of a disaster or in the event that I just want to look back during a period of time. The last part is go on, not just on-prem to the cloud but leveraging the cloud for even better resiliency to take enterprise applications and actually move them without having to do massive re-architecture. If you look at what happens, Amazon recommends typically that you have data in two different availability zones so that when you put an application on top of it, it can be resilient to any sort of failures within an AZ. What we've done is we've taken our active cluster technology which is active, active replication between two instances and made it so that you could actually replicate between two availability zones and your application now doesn't need to be re-architected whatsoever. So you basically, I get this right, you had core software that made all that flash on the box on-premises, which is a hardware solution. Which sounds like it was commodity boxes, so it's components. Just like the cloud. You take it to the cloud and there's an amazing amount of boxes out there. They have tons of data centers, so you treat the cloud as if it's a virtual device, so to speak. Correct, I mean the cloud functionally is just compute and storage and networking on the back end of which has been abstracted by some sort of layer in front of it. And so we're leveraging compute resources for our controllers and we're leveraging persistent storage media for our storage, but what we've done in software is optimize a bunch of things. An example just as one is, you know in the cloud when you procure storage you pay for all of it whether you leverage it or not. We incorporate Ddupe, compression, thin provisioning, AES-256, encryption, all data at rest. These are data services that are just embedded in that aren't traditionally found in a traditional cloud. It just makes so much sense. I mean if you're an application developer you focus on building the app, not worrying about where the storage is and how it's all managed. Because if you want persistent data and you're in a managed state and all this other stuff going on. I just need a dashboard. I need to know where the storage is. Is it available? And brand to the table. And make it easy with the same APIs that you were potentially running on premises. And the last part I would say is that the layered services that are built into purity like our snapshot technology and being able to refresh test dev environments or create 10 sandboxes for 10 developers in the cloud and add compute instances to them is not only instantaneous but it's space saving as you actually do it. Whereas in the normal cloud offerings you're paying for each one of those instances. And the agility is off the charts, it's amazing. Okay, final question on this one is how much is it going to cost? How does the customer consume it? Is it in the marketplace? Do I just click a button, spin up things? How is the interface? What's the customer interaction and engagement with the product? How they buy it? How much is the cost? Can you share the interaction with the customer? So we're just jumping into beta. So a lot of this is still being worked out. But what I will tell you is it's the exact same experience that customers have come to love with Pure. You can go download the cloud formation template into your catalog within AWS so you can spin up instances. The same kind of consumption models that we've built on Prim will be applied to cloud. And so it'll be a very similar consumption model which has been super consumer friendly that customers have loved from us over the years. And it will be available in the mid part of next year. And so people will be able to beta it today, test it out, see how it works and then put it into full production in the mid part of next year. And operationally in the workflows the customers don't skip a beat. It's the same kind of format, languages and the words and the workflow. It feels like Pure all the way through. Correct. And not only are we 100% built on a REST API but all of the things that we built in with Python libraries that automate this for developers to PowerShell toolkits, to Ansible playbooks, all of the stuff we built on code.purestorage.com are all applicable to both sites and you get Pure One, our cloud based management system to be able to see all of it in one single pane of clouds. Okay, let's move on. So the next piece I think is interesting and I'll get your thoughts on this is that the whole protection piece. So like on-premises kind of really kind of held back from the cloud mainly to protect the data. So you guys got cloud snap for AWS. What does this product do? Is this the protection piece? How does this work? What is the product? What's the features and what's the value? So StoreReduce was a recent acquisition that we did that enables deduplication on top of an S3 target. And so it allows you to store an S3 deduplicated into a smaller form factor and we're pairing that with both an on-premises addition which will have a flash blade behind it for super fast restores. So think of that as a caching tier for your backups but then also be able to replicate that out to the public cloud and leverage StoreReduce natively in the public cloud as well. So that's the StoreReduce product. So StoreReduce is that piece. Is it an object store? It is, yes. And we pair that with cloud snap which is natively integrated within FlashArray. So you can also do snapshots to a flash blade for fast restores for both NFS and you can send it also to S3 in the public cloud. And so you get the inherent abilities to even do VM level granularity or volume level granularity as well from a FlashArray directly without needing to have any additional hardware. Okay, so the data services are the block storage, StoreReduce and cloud snap on 4AWS. Correct. How would you encapsulate this from a product and solution standpoint? How would you describe that to a customer in an elevator or just a quick value statement? What's in it for them? Sure. So Pure's been seen by customers as an innovation engine that optimized applications and allowed them to do, I would say, amazing things into the enterprise. What we're doing now is we're evolving that solution out of just an on-premises solution and are making it available in a very agile cloud world. We know this world is evolving dramatically. We know people want to really be able to take advantage of the innovations within the cloud. And so what we're doing is we're finally bridging the gap between on-premises and the cloud, giving them the same user experience that they've come to love with Pure and all of the clouds that they potentially need to develop in. Okay, so from the announcement standpoint, you guys got cloud block storage, limited public beta right out of the gate. Yep. So, GAA in mid 2019. Correct. Cloud Snap is GAA announcement and StoreReduce is going into beta first half of 2019. Correct. We're excited about it. So for the skeptics out there, who are they? Hey, you know, Chad, I got to tell you, I love the cloud, but I'm a little bit nervous. How do I test and get a feeling for, this is what I'm going to jump in and look at this. What should I look at first? What sequence should I try this? Have you guys have a playbook for them to either kick the tires or how should they explore to get proficient in the new solution? Good question. All right, so for one, if you're a FlashArray customer, Cloud Snap gives you the ability to be able to take this new entity called a portable snapshot, which is data paired with metadata and allow you to be able to move data off of a FlashArray. You can put it to an NFS target or you can send it to the cloud. And so that's the most logical one that folks will probably leverage first, because it's super exciting for them to be able to leverage the cloud and spin up instances if they'd like to. However, protect back to their on-prem. Also, Cloud Block Store is great because you can spin it up relatively quickly and test out applications between the two. One area that I think customers are going to be really excited about is you could run an analytics environment in the cloud and spin up a bunch of compute from your production instance by just replicating it up into the cloud. And the last part is, is I think backup is not super sexy. Nobody likes to talk about it, but it's a significant pain point that's out there. And I think we can make some major inroads in helping businesses get better SLAs. And so we're very, very interested to see the great solutions people bring with us. So I got to put you in the spot here and ask you, there's always the, I love the cliche. Is it a vitamin or is it a aspirin? Is there a pain point? So obviously backup, I would agree, backup and recovery, certainly with disaster. You see the wildfires going on here in California. You can't start thinking about what the disaster recovery plan. And then you got top-line growth with application developers, the kind of the vitamin, if you will. What are the use cases low-hanging fruit for someone to like test this out from a kind of pain point standpoint? Is it backup and what's the kind of the growth angle? I wanted to kind of test out this new solution. What should I look at first? What would you recommend? So it's a very tough, it's a very tough question. So CloudSnap obviously is the easy one. I'd say CloudBlockStore is one that I think people will, you know, if I look at my biggest, customer's biggest challenges out there, it's, how do I get applications portable? And so I think CloudBlockStore really gives you the application portability. And so I think it's finally achieving that whole hybrid cloud world. But you know, at the end of the day, backup is a really big pain point that the enterprise deals with like right this second. And so there's areas where we believe we can add inherent values to them with being able to do fast restores from Flash that meets LLA's very quickly and is an easy fix. And you guys feel good about the data protection aspect of this. Yes, very much so. Awesome, I want to give you a personal take on this. You were early on and pure. What's the vibe inside the company now? So this is Cloud and we all, people love Cloud, this benefits for Cloud as well as on-premises. What's the mood like inside Pure Storage? You've seen from the beginning now you're a public company and growing up really, really fast. What's the vibe like inside Pure Storage? It's funny, it hasn't really changed all that much in the cultural side of the thing, of the business. I mean, I love where I work because of the people. I mean, the people bring so much fun to the business, so much innovation. And we have a mindset that's heavily focused on customer first. And that's one of the things, I always tell this kind of story is when we first started, we sat in a room on a whiteboard and wrote up, what is everything that sucks about storage? And instead of trying to figure out how do we make a 2.0 version of some storage array, we actually figured out what are all the customer pain points that we needed to satisfy? And then we built innovations to go do that. Not go chase the competition, but actually go alleviate customer challenges. And we just continue to kind of focus on customer first. And so the whole company kind of rallies around that. And I think you see a very different motion than what you do in most companies, because we love hearing about customer results of our products. Engineering just will rally around when a customer shows up just to hear exactly their experience associated to it. And so with this, I think what they see is a continued evolution of the things that we've been doing and they love seeing and providing customer solutions and areas that they were challenged to deal with. What was some of the customer feedback when you guys started going out, and you guys said the product, you're doing all that early work, and you got to go talk to some people and knock on them. Hey, what do you think? Would you like the cloud a little bit of cloud? How would you like cloud to be implemented? What were some of the things you heard from customers? So a lot of them said, if you can take your core tenants, which was simplicity, efficiency, reliability, and customer kind of focus around consumption, and if you could give that to me in the cloud, that would be the nirvana. And so when we looked at this model, that's exactly what we did. We said, let's take what people love about us on-prem and give them the exact same experience in the cloud. That's great, and that's what you guys done. Congratulations. It's great to hear the cloud story here, Chet. Kenny, Vice President of Product Solutions at Pure Storage, taking the formula of success on premises with Flash and the success there and bringing it to the cloud. That's the big deal in this announcement. I'm Jennifer here in the Palo Alto Studios. Thanks for watching.