 Hello and welcome to the special CUBE conversation that we're launching in conjunction with Pure Accelerate. Prakash Darje is here as the general manager of digital experience, actually have a business unit dedicated to visit Pure Storage. Prakash, welcome back, good to see you. Yeah, Dave, happy to be here. So a few weeks back, you and I were talking about the shift to an as a service economy and which is a good lead up to Accelerate. Held today, we're releasing this video in LA. This is the fifth in-person Accelerate. It's got a new tagline tech fest, so you can make it fun, but still hanging on to the tech, which we love. So this morning, you guys made some announcements expanding the portfolio. I'm really interested in your reaffirmed commitment to Evergreen. That's something that got this whole trend started in the introduction of Evergreen Flex. What is that all about? What's your vision for Evergreen Flex? Well, so look, this is one of the biggest moments that I think we have as a company now because we introduced Evergreen and that was, and probably still is, one of the largest disruptions to happen to the industry in a decade. Now, Evergreen Flex takes the power of modernizing performance and capacity of the storage beyond the box, full stop. So we first started on a project many years ago to say, okay, how can we bring that modernization concept to our entire portfolio? That means if someone's got 10 boxes, how do you modernize performance and capacity across 10 boxes or across maybe FlashBlade and FlashArray? So with Evergreen Flex, we first are starting to hyper-disaggregate performance and capacity and the capacity can be moved to where you need it. So previously, you could have thought of a box saying, okay, it has this performance or capacity range or boundary, but let's think about it beyond the box. Let's think about it as a portfolio. My application needs performance or capacity for storage. What if I could bring the resources to it? So with Evergreen Flex within the QLC family with our FlashBlade and our FlashArray C projects, you could actually move QLC capacity to where you need it. And with FlashArray X and XL or TLC family, you could move capacity to where you need it within that family. Now, if you're enabling that, you have to change the business model because the capacity needs to get built where you use it. If you use it in a high performance tier, you get built at a high performance rate. If you use it as a lower performance tier, you get built at a lower performance rate. So we changed the business model to enable this technology flexibility where customers can buy the hardware and they get a pay-per-use consumption model for the software and services, but this enables the technology flexibility to use your capacity wherever you need. And we're just continuing that journey of hyperdisaggregated. Okay, so you solved the problem of having to allocate specific capacity or performance to a particular workload. You can now spread that across whatever products in the portfolio. You can, like you said, you're disaggregating performance and capacity. So that's very cool. Maybe you could double click on that. I mean, you obviously talk to customers about doing this. They were in pain a little bit, right? Because they had this sort of stovepipe thing. So talk a little bit about the customer feedback that led you here. Well, look, let's just say today, if you're an application developer, or you haven't written your app yet, but you know you're going to, well, you need to at least say I need something, right? So someone's going to ask you, how many, what kind of storage do you need? How many IOPS, what kind of performance capacity before you've written your code? And you're going to buy something and you're going to spend that money. Now, at that point, you're going to go write your application, run it on that box, and then say, okay, was I right or was I wrong? And you know what? You were guessing before you wrote the software, after you wrote the software, you can test it and decide what you need, how it's going to scale, et cetera. But if you were wrong, you already bought something. In a hyper-disaggregated world, that capacity is not a sunk cost. You can use it wherever you want. You can use capacity of somewhere else and bring it over there. So in the world of application development and in the world of storage, today people think about, I've got an application, I've got a workload. It's SAP, it's Oracle, I've built this custom app. I need to move it to a tier of storage, a performance class. Like you think about the application and you think about moving the application. And it takes time to move the application, takes performance, takes loan, it's a scheduled event. What if you said, you know what? You don't have to do any of that. You just move the capacity to where you need it. Right? So the application's there and you actually have the ability to instantaneously move the capacity to where you need it for the application. And eventually where we're going is we're looking to do the same thing across the performance tiering. So right now, the biggest benefit is the agility and flexibility a customer has across their fleet. So Evergreen was great for the customer with one array. Evergreen Flex now brings that power to the entire fleet. And that's not tied to just FlashArray or FlashBlade. We've engineered a data plane in our direct flash fabric software to be able to take on the personality of the system it needs to go into. So when a data pack goes into a FlashBlade, that data pack is optimized for use in that scale out architecture with the metadata for FlashBlade. When it goes into a FlashArray C, it's optimized for that metadata structure. So our purity software has made this transformative to be able to do this. And we created a business model that allowed us to take advantage of this technology flexibility. Got it. Okay, so you got this mutually interchangeable performance and capacity across the portfolio. Beautiful. And I want to come back to sort of the purity, but help me understand how this is different from just normal Evergreen, existing Evergreen options. Is this, you mentioned the one array, but help us understand that more fully. Well, look, so we're actually, in addition to this, like we had Evergreen Gold historically. We introduced Evergreen Flex and we had Pure as a Service. So you had kind of two spectrums previously. You had Evergreen Gold on one hand, which modernized the performance and capacity of a box. You had Pure as a Service that said, don't worry about the box. Tell me how many IOPS you have and we'll run and operate and manage that service free. Think we've spoken about that previously on the game. Now, we have this model where it's not just about the box. We have this model where we say, you know what? It's your fleet. You're going to run and operate and manage your fleet and you can move the capacity to where you need it. So as we started thinking about this, we decided to unify our entire portfolio of software and subscription services under the Evergreen brand. Evergreen Gold were renaming to Evergreen Forever. We've actually had seven customers just cross a decade of updates for Evergreen within a box. So Evergreen Forever is about modernizing a box. Evergreen Flex is about modernizing your fleet and Evergreen One, which is our rebrand of Pure as a Service is about modernizing your labor. Instead of you worrying about it, let us do it for you because if you're an application developer and you're trying to figure out, where should I put my capacity? Where should I do it? Like you can just sign up for the IOPS you need and let us actually deliver and move the components to where you need it for performance capacity, management, SLAs, et cetera. So as we think about this, for us, this is a spectrum in a continuum of where you're at in the modernization journey to software subscription and services. Got it. So why did you feel like now was the right time for the rebranding and the renaming convention? What's behind, what was the thing? Take us inside the internal conversations and the chalkboard discussion. Well, look, the chalkboard discussion simple. It's, everything was built on the Evergreen stateless architecture where within a box, right? We disaggregated the performance and capacity within the box already 10 years ago within Evergreen. And that's what enabled us to build pure as a service. That's why I say, like, when companies say they built a service, I'm like, it's not a service if you have to do a data migration. You need a stateless architecture that's disaggregated. You can almost think of this as the anti-hyperconverge, right? That's going the other way. It's hyper disaggregated. And that foundation is true for our whole portfolio. So like, that was fundamental, the Evergreen architecture. And then, if gold is modernizing a box and flex is modernizing your fleet and your portfolio and pure as a service is modernizing the labor, it is more of a continuation in the spectrum of how do you ensure you get better with age, right? And it's like one of those things when you think about a car, miles driven on a car means your car's getting older and it doesn't necessarily get better with age, right? What's interesting when you think about the human body, yeah, you get older and some people deteriorate with age and some people, you know, it turns out for a period of time, you pick up some muscle mass, you get a little bit older, you get a little bit wiser and you get a little bit better with age for a while because you're putting in the work to modernize, right? But where an infrastructure and hardware and technology are you at the point where it always just gets better with age, right? We've introduced that concept 10 years ago and we've now had proven industry success over a decade, right? As I mentioned, you know, our first seven customers who had a decade of evergreen updates started with an FAA, you know, 300 way back when and since then performance and capacity has been getting better over time with evergreen forever. So this is the next 10 years of it getting better and better for the company and not just tying it to the box because now we've grown up, we've got customers with large, like large fleets. I think one of our customers just hit 900 systems, right? So when you have 900 systems, right? And you're running a fleet, you need to think about, okay, how am I using these resources? And, you know, in this day and age, in that world, power becomes a big thing because if you're using resources inefficiently and the cost of power and energy is up, you're gonna be in a world of hurt. So by using flecks where you can move the capacity to where it's needed, you're creating the most efficient operating environment, which is actually the lowest power consumption environment as well. So we're really excited about this journey of modernizing but that rebranding just became kind of a no-brainer to us because it's all part of the spectrum to meet you on your journey of whether you're a single array customer, you're a fleet customer or you don't want to even run, operate and manage, you can actually just say, you know what, give me the guarantee in the SLA. So that's the spectrum that, you know, informed the rebranding. Got it. Yeah. So to your point about the human body, all you have to do is look at Tom Brady's NFL Combine videos and you'll see what a transformation, either fine wine is another one. I like the term hyper disaggregated because that to me is consistent with what's happening with the cloud and edge. You know, we're building this hyper distributed or disaggregated system. So I want to just understand a little bit about, you know, you mentioned purity. So there's this software obviously is the enabler here but what's under the covers is like a virtualizer or mega load balancer or metadata manager. What's the tech behind this? So we'll do a little bit of a tech double click, right? So we have this concept of drives where in purity, we build our own software for direct flash that manage takes the NAND and we do the NAND management as we're building our drives in purity software. Now that advantage gives us the ability to say how should this drive behave? So in a flash or AC system, it can behave as part of a flash or AC and it's usable capacity that you can write because the metadata and some of the system information is in the NV RAM as part of the controller, right? So you have some metadata capability there in a legend architecture, for example, you have a distributed blade architecture. So you need parts of that capacity to operate almost like a single layer chip where you can actually store, have metadata operations independent of your storage operations that operate like QLC. So we actually manage the NAND in a very, very different way based on the persona of the system it's going into, right? So this capacity to make it reusable, right? It's like saying a competitor could go ahead name it Dell that has PowerMax and Isilon, HPEA that has single store and three par and nimble and like you name, like can you really from a technology standpoint say your capacity can be used anywhere or all these independent systems? Everyone's thinking about the world like a system like here's this system, here's that system, here's that system and your capacity is locked into a system to be able to unlock that capacity to the system, you need to behave differently with the media type in the operating environment you're going into and that's what Purity does, right? So we're doing that as part of our direct flash software around how we manage these drives to enable this. Well, it's the same thing in the cloud precaution, right? I mean, you got different APIs and primitives for object, for block, for file. Now, you know, it's all programmable infrastructure so that makes it easier. But to the point, it's still somewhat stovepipe. So, you know, it's funny, it's good to see your commitment to evergreen. I think you're right, you laid down the gauntlet a decade plus ago. First, everybody ignored you and then they kind of laughed at you and then they criticized you and then you guys reached escape velocity so you had a winning hand. So I'm interested in that sort of progression over the past decade where you're going, why this is so important to your customers, where are you trying to get them ultimately? Well, look, the thing that's most disappointing is if I bought a hundred terabytes to after we buy it every three or five years, like that seems like our kind of ridiculous proposition, but welcome to storage. You know what I mean? That's what most people do with evergreen. We want to end data migrations. We want to make sure that every update, software updates, hardware updates, non-disruptive, we want to make it easy to deploy and run at scale for your fleet. And eventually we want everyone to move to our evergreen one formerly peer as a service where we can run and operate and manage. Because this is all about trust. We're trying to create trust with the customer to say, trust us to run and operate and scale for you and worry about your business because we make tech easy. And think about this hyperdisaggregated if you go further. Like if you're going further with hyperdisaggregated and you can think about it as like performance and capacity as your Lego building blocks. Now for anyone, I have a son, we built, he wants to build the Lego Death Star. If you didn't have that manual, like, he's toast. So when you move to at scale and you have this hyperdisaggregated world and you have this unlimited freedom, you have unlimited choice. It's the problem with the cloud today, too much choice. There's like, hundreds of instances of this, what do I even choose? Well, so the only way to solve that problem and create simplicity when you have so much choice is put data to work. And that's where peer one comes in because we've been collecting and we can scan your landscape and tell you, you should move these types of resources here and move those types of resources there. In the past, it was always about you should move this application there or you should move this application there. We're actually going to turn the entire industry on its end. It's not like applications and data have gravity. So let's think about moving resources to where they're needed versus saying, you know, resources are a fixed asset. Let's move the applications there. So that's a concept that's new to the industry. Like we're creating that concept, we're introducing that concept because now we have the technology to make that reality a new efficient way of running storage for the world. Like this is that big for the company. Well, I mean, a lot of the failures in data analytics and data strategies are a function of trying to jam everything into a single monolithic system and hyper-centralize it. Data by its very nature is distributed. So hyper-disaggregated fits that model and the pendulum is clearly swinging to that across. Great to have you purestorage.com. I presume is where I can learn more. Oh, absolutely. So we're super excited and are pent up by demand, I think in this space is huge. So, you know, we're looking forward to bringing this innovation to the world. All right, hey, thanks again. Great to see you. I appreciate you coming on and explaining this new model and good luck with it. All right, thank you. All right, and thanks for watching. This is Dave Vellante and appreciate you watching this CUBE Conversation. We'll see you next time.