 From Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE, covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2019, brought to you by Pure Storage. Good morning from Austin, Texas, Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante at Pure Accelerate 2019. This is our second day. We just came from a very cool, interesting keynote. Dave, whenever there's astronauts, my inner NASA geek from the early 2000s, she just comes right back up. Lila Melvin was on. What a phenomenal story. Talking about technology and the feeling of innovation, but also a great story of inspiration from a steam perspective, science, technology, engineering, arts, math, I loved that. And... And fun. Very fun. One of the better talks I've ever seen. It really was. I had so many elements that I think you didn't have to be a NASA fan or a NASA geek or a space geek to appreciate all of the lessons that Lila and Melvin learned along the way that he really is inspiring everybody in the audience to take note of. It was, I thought it was outstanding. That was incredibly accomplished, right? I mean, scientist, MIT engineer, played in the NFL, went to space. Some really fun stuff when they were doing, messing around with gravity. I never knew you could do that. He had this water bubble. I've never seen that before and they were throwing M&M's inside and then he consumed it and choked on it, which was pretty funny. Yeah, well, it was near and dear to me. I worked with NASA my first job at a grad school. I did and managed biological payloads that flew on the space shuttle. And the mission that he talked about that didn't land Columbia, that was the mission that I worked on. So when he talked about that countdown clock going positive, I was there on the runway with that. So for me, it just struck a chord of... So this is, of course, the 50th anniversary of the moonwalk. And you know how I have this thing about watches, kind of like you have with shoes? I had to... Hey, handbags. Is that not true? Oh, it's handbags for you? I know, that was a terrible thing for me to say. But you have great shoes. So I just assumed, but not good to make assumptions. So I bought a moon watch this year, which was the watch that Neil Armstrong used not the exact one, but the similar one, right? And it actually has an acrylic face because they're afraid if it cracked in space, you'd have glass all over the place. So that's a little nostalgia there. Well, and one of the neat things too is you look at the mission that President John F. Kennedy established in the 60s for getting a man in space in that 10-year period, that being accomplished. And kind of a parallel with what Pure Storage has done in its first 10 years of tremendous innovation. This keynote, again, day two, standing here only, at least about 3,000 people are so here. Storage, as James Governor said, your friend and also who keynoteered after Leland this morning. You know, Mark Andreessen, software is eating the world, storage is eating the world. We have to have secure locations to store all this data so that we can extract maximum value from it. So nice parallel between the space program and Pure Storage's achievements. James is really good, isn't he? I mean, he had to follow Leland, and I mean, again, one of the better talks I've ever heard. But James is very strong. He's funny, he's witty, he cuts to the chase, he always tells it like it is. He's a very, Monk Chips is very focused on developers and they do a really good job there. One of the things he talked about was S3 and how Amazon uses this working backwards methodology, which maybe a lot of people don't know about, but what they do is they write and rewrite and rewrite and vet and rewrite the press release before they announce the product. And then even before they develop the product, so they write the press release and then they work backwards from there. So this is the outcome that we're trying to achieve and it's a very disciplined process that they use and as he said, they may revise it hundreds and hundreds of times and he put up Andy Jassy's quote from 2004 around S3. That actually surprised me, 2000, maybe I read it wrong. No, it was 2004. S3 came out after EC2, which was 2006, so I don't know, maybe I'm getting my dates wrong or I think James actually got his dates wrong, but who knows, maybe he got a copy of that from the internal working document, working backwards doc, that could be what it was. But again, the point being, they envisioned this simple storage that developers didn't have to think about that was virtually unlimited in capacity, highly available and dirt cheap, which is what people want. And so he talked about that and then he gave a little history of the Dell Technologies families and I tweeted out this funny little, basically Pivotal, VMware, EMC and Dell and their history. Dell was basically IPO in 1984 and then today. There's a few things in between, I know. But he's got a great perspective on things and I think it resonated with the audience. Then he talked a lot about Kubernetes, jokingly tongue-in-cheek how Kubernetes, everybody thought was going to kill VMware. But his big takeaway was look, you got all these skills, virtualization skills, core database skills. I would even add to that, understanding of how storage works and I always joke, if your career is based on managing loans, you might want to rethink your career. But his point was, which I liked, it was look, all those skills you've learned are valuable but you now have to step up your game and learn new skills. You have to build on top of those skills. So the history that you have and the knowledge that you've built up is very valuable but it's not going to propel you to the next decade. And so I thought that was a good takeaway and it was an excellent talk. So looking back at the conversations yesterday, the press releases that came out, the advancements of what Pure is doing with AWS, with NVIDIA, with the AI data hub, for example, delivering more of their portfolio as a service to allow businesses, whether it's a law firm, like we talked to yesterday, a utility or Mercedes AMG Petunas Motorsport to be able to access data securely, incredibly quickly, recover it, restore it, absolutely critical and really can be game-changing depending on the type of organization. I want to get your perspectives on some of the things that you heard anecdotally yesterday after we wrapped. In terms of the atmosphere, the vibe, the thoughts on Pure's next 10 years. Yeah, so several things. Just some commentary, so it's always good at night. You go around, you get a lot of data, we sometimes call it metadata. I think one of the more interesting announcements to me was the block storage on AWS. I don't necessarily think this is going to be a huge product near-term for Pure in terms of meaningful revenue, but I think it's interesting that they're embracing the trend of the cloud and they're actually architecting cloud solutions using Amazon services and blending in their own super gluing, their own, I mean it's not really super glue, but blending in their own software for their customers to extend. Now, some of the nuances, I don't think they're going to have better write performance, I think they'll have better read performance, clearly they have better availability. I think it's going to be a little bit more expensive. All these things are TBD. That's just my take based on looking at what I've seen and talking to some people. But to me, the important thing is that Pure's embracing that cloud model. Historically, companies that are trying to defend an existing business, they retreat. They denigrate, they don't embrace. We know that Pure's going to make more money on-prem than it does in the cloud, at least I think. And so it's to their advantage for companies to stay on-prem, but at the same time, they understand the trend is your friend and they're embracing that. So that was kind of one thing. The second thing I learned is Charlie, G, and Carlo spent a lot of time with them last night as did you. He's a bit of a policy wonk in very sort of narrow areas. He shared with me some of the policy work that he's done around IP protection and not necessarily on the side that you would think. You would think, okay, IP protection, that's a good thing, but a lot of the laws that we're trying to be promoted for IP protection were there to help big companies, essentially crushed small companies. So he fought against that. He shared with me some things around net neutrality. You think you know which side of net neutrality he'd be on, not necessarily. So he had some really interesting perspectives on that. We also talked to you, and I won't share the name of the company, but a very large financial institution that's betting a lot on Pure. It was very interesting to me. This is one of the brand names. Everybody would know it if you heard it. And their head of storage infrastructure was here at the show. Now, I know this individual and this person doesn't go to a lot of shows, but this person shows to come to this show because they're making an investment in Pure in a fairly big way. And they spent a lot of time with Pure management expressing their desires as part of an executive forum that Pure holds. They didn't really market that a lot. They didn't really tell us too much about it because it was a little private thing, but I happen to know this individual. And I learned several things. They like Pure a lot. They use it for a lot of their workloads, but they have a lot of other storage. They can't necessarily get rid of that other storage for a lot of reasons. Inertia, technical debt, good tickets at the baseball game, all kinds of politics going on there. I also asked specifically about some hybrid companies products where the cost structure's a little bit better. So this gets me to flash array C. And we talked to Charlie Jean Carlo about this about his flash prices come down and it opens up new markets. I got some other data yesterday and today that that flash array C is not going to be quite priced, we don't think, as well as hybrid arrays. It's closing the gap. It's between one and one and a quarter, one and a half dollars per gigabyte. Whereas hybrid arrays, you're seeing half that, 70 cents a gigabyte. Sometimes as low as 60 cents a gigabyte. Sometimes higher, sometimes higher as a dollar. But the average around 65, 70 cents a gigabyte. So there's still a gap there. Flash prices have to come down further. The other thing I learned, I'm going to just keep going. Go ahead. The other thing I learned is that China is really building a lot of fab capacity in NAND to try to take out the thumb drive marketplace. So they're going to go after the low end. So companies like Samsung and Toshiba, Toshiba just renamed the company. I can't remember the name of the company, but Micron and the NAND flash NAND manufacturers are going to have to now go use their capacity and go after the enterprise. Because China fab is going to crush the low end and bomb the low end pricing. Somebody else told me about a third of flash consumption is in China now. So interesting things going on there. So near term, flash array C is not going to just crush spinning disk and hybrid. It's going to get closer and it's going to slowly eat away at that. As NAND prices come down, it really could more rapidly eat away at that. So I learned some other stuff too, but I'll take a breath. So one of the things I think resoundingly that we heard not just yesterday on the program day, but even last night at the executive event we were at is that from this large financial services company that you mentioned, Pure Storage is a strategic partner to many organizations from small to large that is incredibly valued to your point. This gentleman only goes to maybe a couple of events a year and this is one of them. This is a company that in its first 10 years has embraced competition ahead on. I loved how you talked about yesterday, 10 years ago, they just drove a truck through EMC's market share and sort of ripping and replacing. They're bold, but they're also doing it in a way that's very methodical. They're working on bringing, changing companies' perspectives of even backup data as becoming an asset. So put it on flash. Because if you can't rapidly restore that if there's an outage, whether it is an attack or it's unintentional, you know, human related, and that data can't be recovered quickly, you're in a big, big problem. And so them as a strategic component of this as in any industry, I think was a very resounding sentiment that I heard and felt yesterday. Yeah, this ties into TAM expansion, what we talked to Charlie, Giancarlo about. New workloads with AI as an example, flash, or AC, lowering prices will open up some of those new workloads. Data protection backup is clearly an opportunity. And I think it's interesting, you're seeing a lot of companies now announce, a lot of vendors announce flash-based recovery systems. I'll call them recovery systems because I don't even consider them backup anymore. It's not about backup, it's about recovery. Oracle was actually one of the first to use that kind of concept with the zero data loss recovery appliance. They call it backup, call it recovery. So it's all about fast and near instantaneous recovery. Why is that important? Because as companies move toward a digital transformation, and what does that mean, what is a digital business? Digital business is all about how you use data and leveraging data in new ways to create new value to monetize or cut costs. And so being able to have access to that data and recover from any in access to that data in a split second is crucial. So Pure can participate in that. Now Pure's not alone. You know, it's no coincidence that Veritas and Veeam and Cohesity and Rubrik, they work with Pure, they work with HPE. They work with a lot of the big players, and so Pure has to work to do to win its fair share. Staying on backup for a moment. You know, it's interesting to see behind us, Veritas and Veeam have the biggest sort of presence here. Rubrik has a presence here. I'm sure Cohesity is here maybe some way, somehow, but I haven't seen him in a big way. Maybe they're not here. I'll have to check that out, but Veeam is actually doing very well, particularly with lower ASPs. We know that about Veeam. They've always come at it from the mid-market and SMB, whereas Cohesity and Rubrik and Veritas traditionally are coming at it from a higher end. Certainly Cohesity and Rubrik on higher ASPs. Veeam's doing very well with Pure. They're also doing very well with HPE. It's interesting, so Cohesity announced the deal with HPE recently, I don't know, about six months ago. So everybody thought, oh, maybe Veeam's on the outs. No, Veeam's doing very well with HPE. It's different parts of the organization. One works with the server group, one works with the storage group, and they're both companies are actually doing quite well. I actually think Veeam is ahead of the curve because they've been working with HPE for quite some time and they're doing very well in the Pure base. So it's by partnering with companies, Pure is able to enter that market much in the same way that NetApp did in the early days. They have a very tight relationship, for example, with Commvault. So the other thing, I was talking to Keith Townsend last night, totally a non-secretary here, non-secretary, but he's talking about outposts and how Amazon is going to be challenged to service outposts. Outpost is the on-prem Amazon stack that VMware and Amazon announced that they're co-marketing. So who is going to service outposts? Is it not going to be Amazon? That's not their game in professional service. They're going to have to be the ecosystem. The large SIs or the VARs, the partners, VMware partners, because that's not VMware's play either. So Keith Townsend's premise, I'd love to have him on theCUBE to talk about this, is they're going to have trouble scaling outposts because of that service issue. So believe it or not, when we come to these conferences, we talk about other things than just Pure. There's a lot of stuff going on. New Relic is happening this week. Oracle Open World is going on this week. John Furrier just got back from AWS Bahrain and of course we're here at Pure Accelerate. We are, and this is our second day of two days of coverage. We've got cause on next, so I think it's never been on theCUBE. We've got kicks on later, a great lineup, more customers, Rob Lee's going to be on, so we're going to be digging more into Pure's cloud strategy the next 10 years, how they're going to accelerate that and pack it into the next couple of years. I tell you one of the things I want to do, Lisa, I'll just call it out. An individual from Dell EMC wrote a blog ahead of Pure Accelerate. I think it was last week, about four or five days ago. And this individual called out like, they were one, two, three, four, five things that we should ask Pure. So we should ask them, we should ask cause, we should ask kicks. There was criticism, but of course they're biased. These guys, you know, we always fight, they have these internacing wars. Sometimes I like to call them, no I won't say it. So scale out, question mark there, we want to ask cause about that and kicks. Pure uses proprietary flash modules. They do that because it allows them to do things that you can't do with off the shelf flash, but I want to ask and challenge them that. I want to ask about their philosophy in tiering. They don't really believe in tiering. Why not? I want to understand that better. They've made some acquisitions. Compuvera is a one acquisition, it's a file system. What does that mean for FlashBlade? I want to ask that. And we didn't hear anything about that yesterday, so that's a good point that we should dig into that. Yeah, so we'll bring that up. And then the Evergreen thing, competitors hate Evergreen because Pure was first with it. They caught everybody off guard. I said yesterday, competitors hate Evergreen because competitors live off of maintenance and if you're not on their maintenance, you know they just keep jacking up the maintenance prices and if you don't move to the new system, maintenance just keeps getting more and more and more and more expensive and so they force you, you know, they locked in, force you to move. Pure introduced this different model. You know, you pay for the CapEx upfront and then, you know, after three years you get a controller swap and, you know, so. To your point, competitors hate it. Customers love it. We heard a lot about that yesterday. We've got a couple more customers on our packed program today, Dave. So let's get right to it. Let's wrap up so we can get Kaws on stage. All right, awesome. All right, for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Pure Accelerate 2019. Day two, stick around, Kaws, John Calgrove, CTO and founder of Pure will be on next.