 Welcome back to Vegas. Lisa Martin and Dave Vellante here with theCUBE live on the Venetian Expo Hall floor, talking all things AWS re-invent 2022. This is the first full day of coverage. It is jam-packed here. People are back. They are ready to hear all of the new innovations from AWS. Dave, how is it feel to be back yet again in Vegas? Yeah, Vegas, I think it's my 10th time in Vegas this year, so whatever. That's fine. This year alone. You must have a favorite steak restaurant then. There's several in Vegas. Actually, the restaurants in Vegas are actually really good. They are good. They used to be terrible, but I'll tell you, but my favorite, the place that closed, yeah, closed. In between where we are in the wind and the Venetian. Anyway. Was it cut? No, I forget what the name of it was. It was like a Greek steak place. Anyway. No, I'm hungry. We were at Pure Accelerate a couple years ago. Yes, we were. That's right. Pure was the first to do that. And then they made the acquisition of Portworx, which was pretty prescient, given the containers have been going through the roof. So I'm sort of excited to have these guys on and talk about that. We're going to unpack all of this. We've got one of our alumni back with us, Ben Kat Ramakrishnan, VP of Product, Portworx by Pure Storage. And Dan Kogan joins us for the first time, VP of Product Management and Product Marketing, FlashArray at Pure Storage. Guys, welcome to the program. Thank you. Thanks for having us. What's your favorite steak restaurant in Vegas? There's last day, I said there's a lot of good restaurants. There's a lot of good steak restaurants in Vegas. I like SDK. Yeah, that's a good one. That's a good one. Which one? SDK. Where's that? It's, I think, in Cosmopolitan. Ooh. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's one of the Weston, too. That's pretty good. I'm an herbs and rye guy. Have you ever been there? No. Herbs and rye is off strip, but it's fantastic. It's kind of like a local's joint. Have to dig through all of this great stuff today and then check that out. Talk to me. This is our first day, obviously, first main day. I want to get both of your perspectives, Dan. We'll start with you since you're closest to me. What are, how are you finding this year's events so far? Obviously, tons of people. Busy. Busy, yeah. It is old times. It's a bit bigger, right? Last re-invent I was at was 2019. Right before everything shut down and it was probably half the size of this, which is a different trend than I feel like most other tech conferences have gone where they've come back, but a little bit smaller. Re-invent seems to be the IT show. It really does. Venkat, are you finding the same in terms of what you're experiencing so far on day one of the event? Yeah, I mean, it's this tremendous excitement. Overall, I think it's good to be back. Very good crowd, great turnout, a lot of excitement around some of the new offerings. We've announced the book traffic has been pretty good and just the quality of the conversations, the customer meetings have been really good. There's very interesting use cases shaping up and customers really looking to solve real large scale problems. Yeah, it's been a phenomenal first day. Venkat, talk a little bit about, and then we'll get to you, Dan, as well. The relationship that Portworx by Peer Storage has with AWS, maybe some joint customers. Yeah, so we, definitely, we have been a partner of AWS for quite some time, right? Earlier this year, we signed what is called a strategic investment letter with AWS where we kind of put some giant effort together like to better integrate our products, plus, you know, kind of get in front of our customers more together and educate them on how they can deploy and build vision critical apps on, you know, EKS and EKS anywhere and outpost. So that partnership has grown a lot over the last year. We have a lot of significant mutual customer wins together, both on the public cloud on EKS, as well as on EKS anywhere, right? And there are some exciting use cases around Edge and like, you know, Edge deployments and, you know, like different levels of Edge and as well with the EKS anywhere. And there are pretty good wins on the outpost as well. So that partnership, I think, is kind of like growing across, not just we started over the one product line. Now our Portworx backup as a service is also available on EKS and, you know, along with Portworx data services. So it is also expanded across the product lines as well. And then, Dan, you want to elaborate a bit on AWS plus Peer? Yeah, it's for kind of what called the core Peer business or the traditional Peer business. Dave mentioned Cloud Block Store is kind of where things started and we're seeing that move and evolve from predominantly being a DR site and kind of story into now more and more production applications being lifted and shifted and running now natively in AWS on our storage software. And then we have a new product called Peer Fusion which is our storage as code automation product essentially takes you from moving, moving and managing of individual arrays. Now, obfuscates of the fleet level allows you to build a very cloud like back end and consume storage as code, very, very similar to how you do with AWS with an EBS. That product is built in AWS. So it's a SaaS product built in AWS really allowing you to turn your traditional Peer storage into an AWS like experience. What changed with Cloud Block Store? Because if I recall, am I right that you basically did it on S3 originally? S3 is a big, it's a number of components. And you had a high performance EC2 instances on top of lower cost object store. Is that still the case? That's still the architecture. Yeah, at least for AWS. It's a different architecture in Azure where we leverage their disk storage more but in AWS we're just based on essentially that back end. And then what's the experience when you go from say on-prem to AWS to sort of a cross cloud? Yeah, very simple. It's our replication technology built in. So our sync rep, our recent rep, our active cluster technology is essentially allowing you to move the data really, really seamlessly there. And then again, back to Fusion now being that kind of master control plane. You can have availability zones running Cloud Block Store instances in AWS. You can be running your own availability zones in your data centers, wherever those may happen to be. And that's kind of a unification layer across it all. And it looks the same to the customer. To the customer looks the same. At the end of the day, it's what the customer sees is the purity operating system. We have flash array proprietary hardware on-premises. We have AWS's hardware that we run it on here. But to the customer, it's just the flash array. That's a data super cloud actually. Yeah, the data super cloud. I agree. It spans multiple clouds. Multiple clouds on-premises. It abstracts all the complexity of the underlying muck and the primitives and presents a common experience. Yeah, and it's the same APIs, same management, console. Yeah, awesome. Everything's the same. Yeah, see, it's real. It's a thing. On containers, I have a question. So we're in this environment. Everybody wants to be more efficient. What's happening with containers? Is there, the intersection of containers and serverless, right? You think about all the things you have to do to run containers in VMs, configure everything, configure the memory, et cetera. And then serverless simplifies all that. I guess K-native in between or I guess Fargate. What are you seeing with customers between stateless apps, stateful apps, and how it all relates to containers? Yeah, it's a great question, right? I think one of the things that what we are seeing is that as people run more and more workloads in the cloud, right? There's this huge movement towards being the ability to bring these applications to run anywhere, right? Not just in one public cloud, but in the data centers and sometimes the edge clouds. So there's a lot of portability requirements for applications, right? I mean, just today morning, I was having breakfast with a customer who is a big AWS customer, but has to go into an on-prem air gap deployment for one of their large customers and is kind of replatforming some other apps into containers and Kubernetes because it makes it so much easier for them to deploy. So there is no longer the debate of is it stateless or is it stateful. It's pretty much all applications are moving to containers, right? And in that, you see people are building on Kubernetes and containers is because they wanted multi-cloud portability for the applications. Now, the other big aspect is cost, right? You can significantly, you know, like lower cost by running with Kubernetes and porkworks and by on the public cloud or on a private cloud, right? Because, you know, it lets you get more out of your infrastructure. You're not over provisioning your infrastructure. You're like just deploying the just enough infrastructure for your application to run with Kubernetes and scale it dynamically as your application loads scales. So customers are better able to manage costs, right? The serverless play in here though, right? Because if I'm running serverless, I'm not paying for the compute the whole time, right? But then stateless and stateful come into play. Serverless has a place, but it is more for like, you know, quick event-driven, you know, the stateless apps, stuff that needs to happen. The serverless has a place. But majority of the applications have need compute and more compute to run because there's like, you know, ton of processing you have to do. There is, you know, you're serving a whole bunch of users, you're serving up media, right? Those are not typically good serverless apps, right? Serverless apps do definitely have a place. There's a whole bunch of, you know, minor code snippets or events. You need to process every now and then to make some decisions. In that, yeah, you'll see serverless. But majority of the apps are still, you know, requiring a lot of compute and scaling the compute and scaling storage requirements all the time. Well, Venka was talking about with cost. That is probably our biggest tailwind from a cloud adoption standpoint. They initially, for on-premises vendors like your storage or historically on-premises vendors, the move to the cloud was a concern, right? And that we're going out of the data center business. We're going all in on the cloud where you can do that's kind of why we got ahead of that with Cloud Block Store. But as customers have matured in their adoption of cloud and actually moved more applications, they're becoming much more aware of the costs. And so anywhere you can help them save money seems to drive adoption. So they see that on the Kubernetes side, on our side, just by adding in things that we do really well, data reduction, thin provisioning, low cost snaps, those kind of things, massive cost savings. And so it's actually brought a lot of customers who thought they weren't going to be using, you know, our storage moving forward back into the fold. What are some of so cost savings, great huge business outcomes potentially for customers? But what are some of the barriers that you're helping customers to overcome on the storage side? And also in terms of moving applications to Kubernetes, what are some of those barriers that could help us? Yeah, I mean, I can ask you, simply from a core flash array side, it's enabling migration of applications without having to refactor them entirely, right? That's Kubernetes side is when they think about changing their applications and building them, we'll call quote unquote more cloud native, but there are a lot of customers that can't or won't or just aren't doing that, but they want to run those applications in the cloud. So the movement is easier back to your data super cloud kind of comment and then also eliminating this high cost associated with it. I'm kind of not a huge fan of the whole repatriation narrative. You know, you look at the numbers and it's like, yeah, there's some going on. But the one use case that looks like it's actually valid is I'm going to test in the cloud and I'm going to deploy on-prem. Now, I don't know if that's even called repatriation, but I'm looking for, I'm looking to help the repatriation narrative because but that's a real thing, right? It's more than repatriation, right? It's more about the ability to run your app, right? It's not just even test, right? I mean, like you're going to have different kinds of governance and compliance and regulatory requirements of to run your apps in different kinds of cloud environments, right? Certain regions may not have all of the compliance and regulatory requirements implemented in that cloud provider, right? So when you run with Kubernetes and containers, I mean, you kind of do the transformation. So now you can take that app and run in an infrastructure that allows you to deliver with under those requirements as well, right? So that portability is the major driver than repatriation, right? And you would do that for latency reasons. For latency and, you know, like, yeah. Or data sovereignty. Data sovereignty, right? I mean, yeah. Availability of your application and data just in that region, right? Okay, so if the capability is not there in the cloud region, you come in and say, hey, we can do that on-prem or in a colo and get you what you need to comply to your edicts. Yeah, or potentially moves to a different cloud provider, right? It's just a lot more control that you're providing to our customer at the end of the day. What's that move like? I mean, now you're moving data and everybody's going to complain about egress fees. Well, you shouldn't be, I think it's more of a one-time move. Like, you're probably not going to be moving data between cloud providers regularly, but if for whatever reasons you decide that I'm going to stop running an X cloud and I'm going to move to this cloud, what's the most seamless way to do that? So a customer might say, okay, that certification is not going to be available in this region or Gov cloud or whatever for a year. I need this now. Yeah, or various commercials, whatever it might be. And I'm going to make the call now one-way door and I'm going to keep it on-prem or, you know. And then worry about it down the road. Okay, makes sense. Dan, I'm going to talk to you about the sustainability element there because it's increasingly becoming a priority for organizations in every industry where they need to work with companies that really have established sustainability programs. What are some of the factors that you talk with customers about as they have choice in all flash arrays between current competitors, where? Yeah, I mean, we've leaned very heavily into that from a marketing standpoint recently because it has become so top of mind for so many customers, but at the end of the day, sustainability was built into the core of the purity operating system and flash array, back before it was flash array, right, in our early generation of products. The things that drive that sustainability of high density, high data reduction, small footprint, we needed to build that for peer to exist as a company. And we're maybe kind of the last all-flash vendor standing that came ground up all-flash, not just the disc vendor that's refactored, right? And so that sort of engineering from the ground up that's deeply, deeply into our software has a huge sustainability payout now. And we see that and that message is really, really resonating with customers. I haven't thought about that in a while. You actually are. I don't think there's any other, nobody else made it through the knothole. And you guys hit escape velocity and then some. We hit escape velocity and it hasn't slowed down, right? I could, earnings will be tomorrow, but the last many quarters have been pretty good. Yeah, we follow you pretty closely. I mean, there was one little thing in the pandemic and then boom, it's just kept frankincense, so. So at the end of the day though, right? We needed that level to be economically viable as a flash vendor going against disc. And now that's really paying off in a sustainability equation as well because we consume so much less footprint, power, cooling, all those factors. And there's been some headwinds with NAND pricing up until recently too that you've kind of blown right through and you know, you dealt with the supply issues Yeah, because the overall, one, we've been, again, one of the few vendors that's been able to navigate supply really well. We've had no major delays and disruptions, but the TCO argument's real. Like, at the end of the day, when you look at the cost of running on pure, it's very, very compelling. Adam Salipski made the statement, if you're looking to tighten your belt, the cloud is the place to do it. Yeah, okay, I buy that, but maybe. Maybe not. So again, we are seeing cloud customers that, you know, traditional pure data center customers that a few years ago said, we're moving these applications into the cloud. You know, it's been great working with you. We love pure, we'll have some on-prem footprint, but most of everything we're going to do is in the cloud. Those customers are coming back to us to keep running in the cloud. Because again, when you start to factor in things like then provisioning, data reduction, those don't exist in the cloud, so. So it's not repatriation. It's not repatriation. We want pure in the cloud. Correct, we want your software, so that's why we built CBS. And we're seeing that come all the way through. There's another cost savings is on the, you know, with what we are doing with Kubernetes and containers and Portrait Data Services, right? So when we run Portrait Data Services, typically where customers spend a lot of money in running the cloud managed services, right? Where, you know, there's obviously a sprawl of those, right, and then they end up spending a lot of hidden costs. So when we move that, you know, like when they run their data, like when they move their databases to Portrait Data Services on Kubernetes, you know, because of all of the, you know, all of the other cost savings we deliver, plus, you know, the licensing costs are a lot lower. You know, we deliver, you know, five X, just 10 X savings to our customers. Significant. You know, significant savings. Yeah, the operational things he's talking about too. We, my Fusion engineering team is one of his largest customers from Fort Worth Data Services because we don't have DBAs on that team. Which is developers, but they need databases. They need to run those databases. We turn to PDS. This is why he pays my bills. And that's why you guys have to come back because we're out of time. But I do have one final question for each of you. Same question. We'll start with you, Dan. Then Ben Cap will go to you. Billboard. Billboard or a bumper sticker? Say, we'll say, they're going to put a billboard on Caster Street in Mountain View near the headquarters. About Pure, what does it say? The best container for containers. Ben Cap, Portworx, what's your bumper sticker? Well, I would just have one big billboard that goes and says, got BX for the question mark, right? And let people start thinking about, what is BX? I love that. Got Portworx, beautiful. You've got a side career in marketing, I can tell. I think they moved him out of its engineering. I see. We really appreciate you joining us on the program this afternoon, talking about Pure, Portworx, AWS, really compelling stories about how you're helping customers really make big decisions and save considerable costs. We appreciate your insights. Awesome, great. Thanks for having us. Thanks, guys. Thank you. For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage.