 Live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high-tech coverage, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2019, brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. Welcome back everyone, live CUBE coverage here in Moscone North at VMworld 2019. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, 10th year covering VMworld, we're here with esteemed CUBE alumni, Von Steward, vice president, technology at Pure Storage, great to see you. Guys, another year, another privilege to sit down and have a little chat. Another year that VMware doesn't die of something, storage doesn't go away. Every year, containers is going to kill VMware. VMware's resiliency as virtualization platform is just second to none. It's been well-documented, we've been talking about it because the operational efficiencies of what they've done has been great. You guys are kicking butt in storage and again, a sector that doesn't go away. You got to put the data somewhere. So storage continues to do well, congratulations. What's the big secret? Thanks, well we just shared our Q2 financial results last week, a 28% year-on-year growth. You know, we are the by far, you know, the fastest growing storage company and I think there's a lot of disruption for the legacy vendors right now. They're getting hit on all angles. Next-gen AFA vendors like us, followed by the cloud as well as platforms like HCI. I think it's been a tough sledding for some of the legacy vendors. Talk about your relationship with VMware and why that's been so important for Pure because again, resiliency, operations at the end of the day, that's where the rubber hits the road. Making developers happy, but operating is a key. Yeah, if you look at, so that's a really good question, if you look at our business, VMware is the number one platform deployed on top of Pure Storage platforms and that's probably the case for most of the storage vendors because of their dominant position in the infrastructure. That means as VMware evolves their product platforms, right? Whether it's the Pivotal Acquisition, VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware Cloud and AWS and as that'll expand, right? You have to, as a partner, continue to jointly innovate, sometimes hand-in-hand, sometimes, you know, on parallel paths to drive value into that market for those customers or you're not going to make it and our investments engineering-wise are significant. We've had a large number of new capabilities that we've rolled out through the years that are specific to VMware, that are either integrations or enhancements to our platform. You know, we believe through external data points, we are the number one V-Vol's vendor, which is, you know, which was something that VMware launched about seven, eight years back that kind of dipped but has risen back up and we are a key, I think, design partner right now with the cloud platforms, the VMware Cloud Foundation as well as VMware Cloud and AWS. So, as you know, this is our 10th year at VMworld. You go back to 2010, there was what I used to call the storage cartel and you weren't part of it, right? You had early access to the APIs, you had sort of, obviously EMC was in there. You were really the only sort of newbie to reach escape velocity for your storage. Now, there's basically two independent storage companies over a billion dollars, you guys in NetApp. So... And I was at both. And you were both, right? And you saw the opportunity and, you know. Yeah. Leaned in hard. Yeah, well there was, there was time when it's paid off. But so, why do you think you were able to be one of the rare ones to achieve escape velocity? When many people said that will never happen, you'll never see another billion dollar storage company. And then, I'm interested in how you're achieving number one in V-Vol's in a world where it seems like, you know, the ecosystem is getting a little tighter between Dell and VMware. But how do you guys thrive in that dynamic? I think there's a challenge for all vendors in terms of marketing to try to get your message through, right? If one vendor does something well, the rest of the market tries to obfuscate that. We've been fortunate enough that through our channel ecosystem, our systems integrator partners, right? To actually be able to demonstrate the technology, to gain their enthusiasm, to drive it into the market, and then actually demonstrate it to the customers. And so, how does that show up? I think it's fair to say our platforms are more intelligent, they're more automated, and they operate at a greater scale than the competitors. And you can look at this through one lens and say, well, it's VMware APIs, doesn't that make all the storage the same? And it's like, it does from a VMware operational standpoint. But it doesn't mean how you deliver on that value prop or what you, as a platform deliver above and beyond, is at parity. And that's really where we demonstrate a significant difference. Let me give you one example. We have a lot of customers, a lot of customer growth in the last 12 months around customers who are deploying HCI along with all flash arrays, right? And David Floyd had reached out recently and said, well, wouldn't one compete with the other? And it's like, yes, there's overlap. But what we're finding from customers is they're looking to say, if my applications need to be more cost effective, easier to manage at scale, we actually want to put it on an all flash array. And you say, well, how could that be? I'll give you one simple example. Do you know it takes anywhere from 10x to 100x less time to upgrade your VMware infrastructure on a shared array than if it's on hyperconverged? Because you don't have to go through the evacuation and rehydration of all your data twice, right? And so things like that that are just really simple that you wouldn't pick up in like a marketing scheme. If you are a customer at scale, you go, oh, I can't afford 100 man hours, I can afford one, right? And so it's simple things like that. It's rapid provisioning. It's not having silos that are optimized for performance or availability or cost. It's about saying, you know, your time to implement is a one time life cycle on hardware, but it's probably something that happens every quarter for the next three years, right? So this is your point about innovation, the innovative vendors, your modernization of storage is planning for these use cases where the old way didn't work. Yeah, yeah, you mentioned that we're 10 years now and one of the things that I've said over the last six or seven years being at Pure is one of the things that I think is really interesting about Pure is that our founder, John Calgrove, came out of the volume manager and file system space at Veritas, right? He was the founder for those products. He understood the intersection between managing a storage array and your application. And that goes through our ethos of our products where I think a lot of storage platforms, a startup platforms come from storage guys who worked on the hardware side. And so they take a faster, you know, pipe or a faster form of media and they make another box that behaves like the other box from an operational perspective. So you said HCI, a compliment or a competitor? I'm still not sure which, maybe it's both. And then same question for VSAN. Yeah. How do you... So an area that we've put a lot of investment in and started working with VMware around the middle of last year was putting VSAN with Pure Storage flash arrays together. And what you see that materialize now is when you look at VMware Cloud Foundation or VMware Cloud in AWS, the management domains must be VSAN. And that's so that you can have an instant out-of-the-box controlled management plane that VMware executes on. And then you have workload domains. And those could be on a hyper-converged platform or they can be on third-party storage. And when you put those on Pure, then you would gain all the advantages that we bring to bear as an infrastructure with all the same simplicity, scale, and life-cycle management that you get from just the VMware STDC manager. And so it works very well together. Now look, I'm sure what I share with you here, there'll be some folks who are on the VSAN team themselves, so to be like BS, but that's the nature of our business. One of the things I want to get your thoughts... The customer's decide. Ultimately. Yes, yeah. Vons, you've always been kind of on the cutting edge and all the conversations we've had. I got to ask you about the container revolution, which is not new. Docker came out many, many years ago, Jerry Chen, when he funded those guys. And we covered that extensively, obviously their business model changed. Kubernetes is all the rage orchestrating the containers. It's a pivotal role in all the action happening here. It's a big part of how things are with the app side. So the question is, how does containers impact the storage world? How do you see that being integrated in? Who has talk of putting Kubernetes on bare metal? So you're starting to see HCI come back. Devices are important. You're starting to see hardware become important again with that. I love your drop of Pivotal there, right? First off, kudos to VMware for the acquisition. The Pivotal guys are exceptional. What they don't have is a lot of customers, but the customers they do have are large customers, right? So we've got a fair amount of Pivotal on pure customers and they are all at scale. So I think it's a great acquisition for VMware by far the most enterprise class form of containers today. And they've always kind of been the fold. Now they're officially in the fold. Yes. Formalize it. And so now that the roadmap that was shared in terms of what VMware looks to do to integrate containers into the ESXi platform itself, right? It's managing VMs and containers next to each other. That's perfect. In terms of not having customers have to pick or choose between which platform and where you're going to deploy something. Allow them to say you can deploy it on whichever format you want. It runs in the same ecosystem in management. And then that trickles down to your storage layer. So we do a lot of object storage within the container ecosystems today, a lot of high performance objects because the file sizes of instances or applications is much larger than a document file that you or I might create online. So there's a big need around performance in that space along with again, management at scale. It's interesting what you're saying about Pivotal. And by the way, I like the acquisition too because I think it was cheap. Anytime you can pick up a $4 billion asset for 800 million in cash, you know, kind of gets my attention. But Pivotal was struggling in the marketplace. The stock price never even came close to its IPO. You know, its spending patterns were down. Do you feel as though the integration with VMware will supercharge Pivotal? I absolutely agree with that. I've had this view that the container ecosystem was really segmented. You had companies that built their products off of containers. So say your Twitter or your Facebook, right? The platform that your customers interact with is all ran by containers. Then you have an enterprise view of containers which was more kind of classic applications, right? And that would take time for the applications to be deployed. And so what have you seen now for Microsoft, right? See what can run as a container, right? What can run as a container? As the enterprise apps start to roll over, the enterprise will start to evolve from virtual machines to containers. And so I think the timing's right. That's not to dismiss any of where Pivotal, I think, has built their brand right now, which is helping companies build next-gen platforms, you know? I have to make sure that I don't name drop customers when I'm referencing this, so I had to pull back there. Yeah, I think the timing's right. I'm interested in how you guys can further capitalize on containers. And we've been playing around with this notion of data assurance. Containers bring complexity. And so complexity is oftentimes your friend because you're all about simplifying complexity. But so how do you capitalize on this container trend in the next three to five years? So you've got storage needs for containers that either tend to be ephemeral or persistent. And I think when containers were originally created, it was always this notion that it'd be ephemeral. And it's like, yeah, but where does the data reside? Ultimately, there's been significant growth around data persistence. And we've driven that in terms of leveraging the FlexVol drivers that have been put into the community, driving that into our pure service orchestrator, our PSO tool, which supports Pivotal and Kubernetes derivatives today. Again, we've got proven large-scale installs on this. So it's providing the same class of storage services, simplicity and elegance in your integrations that we have for VMware. We've been doing that across Pivotal already. Pivotal's interesting, right? They don't validate hardware, they only validate software, so they validate our PSO and having that same value prop for that infrastructure because they are scale. You never find a small-scale containers ecosystem. And I keep referencing that point. When you get to scale considerations around what does it take to allow that environment to remain online and how they perform it, our significant considerations, and we excel there. Bon, talk about your event coming up. You guys have Pure Accelerate, September 17th and 18th coming up. Obviously the VMware ecosystem that you're part of here, big part of that. You guys have a lot of customers. I know you can't reveal any news, but what's expected at the show? What can people who are interested in either attending or might be just some of the notable things that might be happening? A lot of orange. We know that. One, number two, I know theCUBE's going to be there for two days. So hopefully you guys will get a load of conversations with both our team, product management, engineering, maybe some of the leadership, but also customers. I think customers are always the best statement you can make about how you're doing in market. I think you will see from us a number of announcements that I am prohibited to share today, but some really big things that we're going to introduce to the market, so we should be excited for that. And just a great showing of our partner, our Alliance ecosystem will be there. Obviously, VM will be there in force, as well as Red Hat with their open-sheet. Let me guess, it's going to be a cloudy future for you. It's also going to be very analytical. Splunk's going to be there, Elastic's going to be there. So, you know. Well, you guys like to do first at these shows. I mean, it kind of, I don't know if you're first with an all-flash array, but probably one of the first, if not the first. The evergreen thing ticked off a lot of people. Like, why didn't we think of that? You were first with sort of bundling NVMe in. The whole thing, the announcement you guys made in video, that was before anybody else. You know, your whole cloud play, you like to be first, so we expect another first next month. Hopefully, we will deliver, and you're not going to get me to leak anything here. Thanks for the insight. Vice President of Technology Alliance, the peer storage, I'm John Rodd, Dave Vellante, stay with us for more coverage. Robin Matlock, the CMO is coming on, and of course tomorrow, Michael Dell, Pat Gelsinger, and more and more great guests. Senior Vice Presidents from VMware, from all different groups. We're going to be asking them all the tough questions here in theCUBE. Thanks for watching.