 We'll run, welcome to theCUBE Studios here at Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE. We're here for special news conversation with Prakash Darje, general manager of the Flash array business at Pure Storage. Some exciting cloud news for Pure Storage. Great to see you Prakash, thanks for coming in. Yeah, thanks for having us. So you guys got some big news. So I'm excited by this because I've been ranting and raving about how cloud native has been impacting the enterprise. It's pretty well documented that everyone's going cloud operations. You guys are announcing a kind of a historic milestone for Pure Storage in that you guys have been doing great on the storage side. We've been covering you since inception. But now as you guys continue to grow, you now have a new offering that's in the cloud. This is new for you guys. Talk about this announcement. What does it mean? You're an on-premise of storage has done great. The growth has been amazing, gone public. But now with the cloud growth, you have a cloud offering. What's going on? Well, interestingly, people were looking at storage for performance cost and reliability reasons. That's kind of the three holy grails that everyone expects out of storage. We added a fourth dimension in simplicity. Storage didn't need to be hard. And that's kind of the brand of Pure. And as we took a look, there was a fifth dimension that we realized was somewhat missing. While we made things simple, we didn't have the agility that public cloud offered. So as we were taking a look, we were like, okay, public cloud brings to this instant available capacity agility model. But do you have to trade off on the other dimensions? Performance, cost, reliability, or simplicity? And our goal to bring customer value was to avoid trade-offs. So why would you have to trade off on any of those dimensions? And then the second piece was, why do you have to choose? Why do you have to choose between on-premises or public cloud? And if you make the wrong choice, how do you have freedom to move? So the problem set that we were trying to address was that unification across all those dimensions, the onboarding of agility, and frankly, the ability to avoid people having to choose between them and use the best of what's available where. You know, I think you nailed something important there. And I want to get into the why you guys are doing this a little bit deeper. But this notion of trade-offs is an old IT kind of philosophy. I got to trade this off to get that, whether it's, you know, I want compute and stability or flexibility, agility. But with cloud and cloud operations, the operating model now is you choose, as you said. So this cloud operations on-premises and cloud has to look the same. This is what we're hearing from CIOs and practitioners, cloud architects. They're re-architecting their enterprises now because, you know, the three main components of IT, storage, networking and compute never go away. It's just changing. This is a critical, fundamental piece of the re-architecture of IT operations. Why now, why cloud, was it a custom demand? Was it a natural progression for you guys? Explain the why now. Well, I'll start with not the storage, compute and networking, but what they're used for. And fundamentally, the world's using those three dimensions along one of two sides. Either building applications or building automation. That's kind of the two major trends in the industry. Now, if we take a look, if you were running an application, primarily you would choose, am I running it on-premises or in the public cloud? And as the journeys emerge, like public cloud, probably introduction of I as around 15 years ago. But initially there was this enamored everything's going there. And then people settle down to some things will go here and some things will go here. But we believe that's a middle state. What people are actually trying to do is deliver applications that solve problems. And we believe that future is a hybrid application. Now, what is a hybrid application? Today, if you've got an on-premises finance system, should you be able to use AI algorithms from Google's cloud? Did book journal entries for a month and close? Yeah, because it's now not a choice of am I using Paz for the, that doesn't mean the whole application needs to sit in platform as a service. You should be able to use the best capabilities of what's available where. The same way today, anyone who's selling anything and using Salesforce CRM needs to ensure that what you've sold is booked in a finance system. That could be an SAP finance system on-premises. So, what is the app? It's an app without borders now. And these are modern-day hybrid applications. Now, bringing that down to compute storage and networking, trying to bring that together and actually deliver that in a consistent and operational way is difficult. It's difficult across your application architectures. They're different. It's different across your management, even your consumption and how you bill, cap X versus up X. But the big difference is at the storage layer because the application architecture on-premises relies on your storage for your reliability. But in the cloud, they've actually moved that reliability characteristic to the middle tier. You're sharding and doing scale out distributed application because you can't rely on the same characteristics out of your storage. And we found this as an opportunity to bring these two worlds together. We call it the cloud divide. Talk about the cloud divide. I think something's important because one of the things we talk with a lot of end user customers, your customers and others, their challenge is again to focus on the outcome that they want. The application is going to drive their business and the value, not so much what the infrastructure, they have them create an infrastructure to enable that. What is this cloud divide when it comes to storage? In your mind, what did you guys discover? What were the key pain points? What was the customers telling you around? And what is the cloud divide? No, the cloud divide coming back to it is how you deal with applications, how you deal with management and how you deal with storage are different between the enterprise and the cloud. We like to say the enterprise is not very cloudy, meaning you don't have instant available capacity and the cloud is not very enterprisey. Now what does that mean? What do we call enterprisey? And there's a how it works with the rest of my landscape, what the APIs are, what the reliability characteristics are, performance and cost characteristics are also different. So if you want to adopt public cloud, you have to go ahead and say, I got to do a hard left, right, because you're kind of going down this way and you got to choose a different path. And if you choose that hard left, you're now stuck on that road. It's a one way road. And what we're trying to do is say, you know what, what if we could bridge these environments? Like let's dig into the application architecture on the cloud divide. Pretty much people are using scale up or scale out as application architectures and then they're deciding, you know, VMs or containers. Yeah, those are common application development paradigms. What if you could use either one anywhere, right? Those technologies now, if you look at what VMware is doing with VMware cloud and you look at what Kubernetes is doing across on-premise and cloud, there's now a unification happening at application architecture. Across management, what if you could have a seamless API and a seamless pane of glass around how you manage your applications? That's emerging. But as we looked around, no one was unifying the storage paradigm. And actually that was the hardest. We thought that to unify the hardware or the storage paradigm, you have to build a data-centric architecture. And that's what we've been focused on doing. We've introduced our concept of data-centric architecture a year ago and we're now extending that concept to the public cloud. What I like about what you guys are doing here and I want to get your thoughts on this because this is, I think, the trend that's really big in here is that you guys have been great storage provider. Again, since inception, we've been following you guys. And you have hardware. And hardware has been a rack-and-stack kind of enterprise paradigm, enterprise-y. We got gear, we protect it, we secure. But now with public cloud becoming more secure and more mainstream, and with the DevOps application environment developing, you mentioned VMs and containers with Kubernetes, you're now having an operating model that's changing. You guys are doing software. So it's not a box, you're not ship boxes to Amazon. They have storage, you got S3 and a variety of other services. You're now extending the software component of your business. So I want you to take them in to explain for the people that might not know the extent of the software business at Pure and specifically the cloud component software piece. It's not hardware, it's software. But it works with on-premises. Talk about that dynamic of software in the cloud and the impact of the on-premises piece of it. Well, I'll rewind a little back into what Pure's been known for. Pure's been known as kind of this all-flash company. But if you unwind that, when I took a look at it, as I've joined Pure actually about six months ago, what I realized is the unique skill that Pure has is software engineering to get the best out of any infrastructure that you give it. The medium happened to be flash initially. So what we've built with our direct flash and NVME and a lot of the advancements in our software has been to deal with the flash medium. But the core skill in IP we have is software development to get the best out of a medium. What we've introduced is another medium. This medium is infrastructure as a service. We treat that as another medium. And we believe that we're uniquely qualified to get the most out of that medium. Which is the cloud. All right, so I want to get into the infrastructure piece. You guys are well-known to being a cloud data infrastructure component or data infrastructure. You mentioned the history of flash and storage. It's been a great place to store data on-premises. When you get into the cloud, you guys call this cloud data services. I'm going to get another video on that on the details of that. But when you hear about cloud data services, what pops in my mind is more data is coming. You need to store it somewhere. You need to manage that data for applications, hybrid applications, you need to store to protect that data. You need to make that data available. You have to be able to recover all the same things that get done with data in the past on storage has to happen at a whole other level. Describe what is cloud data services mean? What does that mean to you guys at Pure? And what does it mean to your customers? If you back up a little bit, where we started and where a lot of our initial customers were at were SaaS customers. And what we delivered to them was what we called cloud data infrastructure. That cloud data infrastructure allowed some of the largest SaaS companies, either consumer or enterprise, to go ahead and use Pure to build their SaaS applications. Companies like ServiceNow work day those types of companies. But what was missing was how do you get that same value on infrastructure as a service environments, AWS, Azure and GCP. So what we realized was the consistency model was not the same, the APIs were not the same and you had to choose or not and. So our cloud data services are a set of services that give you, for example, the same block storage that you had on premises in the public cloud gives you the same API. And from a management and operation standpoint, we have Pure One, which is a cloud data management solution where all of your data, wherever it sits because as you said, data is growing, you can see all of your arrays. It was interesting as we built the software, when we first built it internally, we realized that, hey, we went into Pure One and we see all these storage volumes, but we didn't know which ones were on premises or cloud because our software was the same. We actually had to do some engineering to make it look different. Like, hey, let's color the cloud volumes differently. We had to actually think about that because we started from the place of driving consistency. And then we've extended the cloud data services to go ahead and say, not only can we allow you to run in either place, but how do you extend that to data protection? Because today, as you mentioned earlier, on premises people have workflows for backup and data protection and initially those workflows could have been disk to disk to tape to truck. And we see that there's now a more modern way where you can do flash to flash to cloud where you can have your primary mission critical applications in flash. And if you want one hop for backup, people looked at backup as an insurance policy, what happens if something goes wrong? But what's really important is when something goes wrong, how quickly can you recover? So providing flash in that second medium and then third, extending the step for cost optimization by leveraging public cloud in S3 allows us to drive a consistency model and we can drive that same workflow on premises or in the public cloud. So the consistency, let me put you on the spot here. So on consistency, are we talking about if I'm a pure customer and I'm running pure on premises and I'm using all the management, so I'm using pure one, all those other great stuff and I want to use cloud. Does my job change, does it look the same so as a dashboard into the storage and the data? Because I want persistent data, I want AI and I want analytics. Now I got cloud going on, there's a lot of things out there, SageMaker, TensorFlow on the AI side, a lot of things goodness out there. What changes for me or does it change and how do you guys solve that problem? Because what I don't want is I don't want to have the higher developers to go do an integration with Amazon and Azure and Google Cloud. I want to have a single consistent environment. Do you guys provide that? From a data standpoint we do. So this is a journey because when you start, you need to ensure that your data consistency and management across all of those environments, AWS, Azure, Google and on-premises is the same. So we're introducing our solution, cloud data services on Amazon first, but we are planning on extending that to the Azure and Google environments in the future. But from a cloud standpoint, so let's take Amazon. So I say, hey, I want to use some of that cloud. I just go to Amazon, it's extensible, fully extensible as if I'm using pure on-premises. We have a cloud formation template on Amazon, you just go in, it's there, you can pick it up, you can choose it, use it, and then what really is the difference is your platform services at a higher layer may be a little bit different. Because some of the things you mentioned on the Paz are Amazon specific. So if you start using Paz services, it could impact your application development architecture. But the good news is if your goal is to drive the ability to use what's the best thing that's available where is you take a look at evolutions in VMware cloud and Kubernetes combined with our cloud data services, you're now able to put together a use best of what's available where. But I think you guys, that's the application side. So you guys are providing a consistent layer for the data and the storage. Absolutely. That's going to, if I'm building an Amazon as a developer, I'm going to use those anyway. So it's not like it's a dependency per se, it's just you're going to allow for those hybrid apps to run across premises and in cloud and all the data takes care of itself. Is that to take that right? Yeah, and what's great about it is we've learned some things along the way. For example, we've been trying to get the best out of the flash medium in the past by enhancing performance characteristics or efficiency characteristics for cost optimization. We can bring some of those same value props to the Amazon world. So if you need to aggregate IOPS, we can do that. If you need to go ahead and drive efficiency, we have techniques to drive efficiency around thin provisioning and those types. It kind of opens up more use cases for the customer to add more policy-based things to their application. Makes data programmable. Well, what's interesting, there was one customer that we were speaking to as part of our alpha usage and it's an online education company. They do curriculum development and that type of thing. And they brought this use case to us. They have their app that they've built for their curriculum on Amazon and then they want to take a lot of snapshots. So what they, one of the technologies we have is space saving snapshots. So they're like, oh, that'd be great if I could use your cloud block store data service on Amazon that way. But then they thought about it and they're like, well, every time we develop a new curriculum, we have to send a snapshot out to a different location and site. And what we could do is set up your hardware in a direct attached way to Amazon because your software is the same. And we have active synchronous replication technology where we can now synchronously replicate between the public cloud and this private hosted direct attached version. And then they can do work here or even take snapshots from here. And the reason they were doing it was to go ahead and use that space saving snapshot to reduce their overall cost profile on exports. That's a great example of cloudifying, being cloudified. A lot more options. This brings up the question about competition. How do you guys compare versus the competition? So it's the first move for you guys in the cloud within this operating model, which is consistent, pure on premises and on the cloud. Get the consistency, love the agility, love the ability for applications to get all that goodness. What about the competition? How do you guys stand versus the competition? Well, when we take a look at what was going on, I think a lot of people wanted to check the box on cloud. So let's throw something out there and see how people use. As we've done this market introduction, we've been very careful about that because Pure has a certain brand reputation. Around when we say we're going to deliver some of these characteristics, we deliver and deliver those characteristics. And we didn't want to lose the value proposition of simplicity and agility. So as we launched this, we didn't just say, let's throw it out there and see what happens. We did it with the deliberate intent of saying, we want to provide agility as a characteristic that people could use. And we want to deliver that agility with the same simplicity that they've come to know and love with Pure. So those are the principles that we're focused on. And as we take a look at the competition, they've thrown their software out there, but we don't see that it's been broadly adopted. And then there's still the trade-offs of should I go on premises or public cloud? So they're stuck in the divide. They're in the cloud divide on premise different operating models. And our goal is to really enable hybrid applications. Those guys are stuck in the divide? Yeah, and if you think about these hybrid applications that we see the world moving to, think about it this way. The world's evolving where you're going to have more application to application integration. Gone is the days where you're going to have one monolithic application doing everything. So what's evolved is the application to application integration is exponentially growing. Now, if you assume that, if you need to do a production to dev test copy, do you need to do it for one app or for that entire set of apps that you treat as one monolithic entity? Because now they're all connected. Otherwise you have to decide, okay, I'm snapshotting this one and then I got to choose this one and I got to choose that one. So there's now a need to go ahead and consolidate a lot of application workloads and treat the management and operations of that as a unique entity. So hybrid apps are actually making you rethink how you deal with management of compute, networking and storage. Yeah, I think that's a great example. I think application, application integration and totally agree with you is going to be happening at much accelerated rate, but it changed the role of data. The role of data is central to that because as you mentioned in another example, if you're doing a financial app and you want to use some AI from cloud over here, the best tool for the job needs to be integrated in seamlessly and storage shouldn't even be part of that conversation. It should just be stored somewhere. That's what you guys are doing with this announcement. You guys are bringing that to the table. So I guess I'll ask you the final question here because it's exciting news. You guys are cloudified, you bridge the divide on the storage, cloud storage divide. What's the bottom line for this announcement as you look at this impact to customers? What's the impact to pure customers and what does it mean for prospects that aren't yet pure customers? What's the bottom line for this announcement? Well, I'll give it to you from each perspective. For existing pure customers, this adds the agility tool set to their bag of tricks. They've got, and it does it in a way where they can start, get that instant available capacity. And if they want, they can go ahead and now start benchmarking across both environments without having to re-architect because the APIs are the same. And for net new customers and prospects, it's interesting as we speak to customers, we find that people are on a different education journey in the public cloud. Some are already using the public cloud and as we've been discussing this with them, they're like, hey, this could improve on some of these characteristics. Either I have performance challenges or cost challenges, reliability or manageability challenges. So we find that the customers are the prospects that are most educated are the ones that have already leaped, right? They've jumped in the pool and now they realize, hey, you know what? The water's cold and I need something. And there's another set of customers that are still haven't jumped in that pool. And what we're saying is for those customers, you have to make a choice right now. You have to decide between multiple public clouds. You have to decide between on-premise and what we're doing is we're de-risking that choice by allowing them to get the best of what's available where and most importantly ensuring that if they've chosen something, but one of the other choices evolves or matures to be a better option for them, they have the ability to move. And I think also the focus we hear from the practitioners is that they are investing more and more of their time and energy on building applications, hybrid applications as you're calling them, ones that are going to be in the cloud more on-premises but solving a problem. They want to shift their resources and attention from mundane storage admin-like maintenance problems and make the storage invisible to them. So the developer, they said, I know my things work great in the cloud. One of my apps are productive, my developers are programming and the storage resources are invisible and there's never a headache. That's kind of what you guys are getting at here. You're making storage pervasive and important to the developers and the IT so that it kind of goes away. In their mind, doesn't it sleep better at night? Well, to take Kubernetes for example, a lot of application developers using it but storage is not necessarily transparent. Six months ago we introduced a peer service orchestrator that made storage transparent. So you have a block file object interface, you just call and use storage, spin it up, use it as you need and let go but you should not have to worry about let me go phone someone, create a volume, so you need that transparent and elasticity and we've been focused on delivering that and now if you modernize where kind of application development is going, we can provide that it's always on, it always works, it's globally consistent, it's shared and it's easy to manage from wherever you're sitting. Prakash, thanks for coming in and sharing the news on the new hybrid cloud applications that are hitting the market and of course having the right solutions and having the cloud data services available from peer storage. I'm here at Prakash Darjeet's general manager of the Flash, Arabism and Peer Storage. This is a special CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.