 Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube! Covering AWS re-invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel, along with its ecosystem partners. We're back at AWS re-invent. This is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host, Justin Warren. This is day one of AWS re-invent. Rob Lee is here. He's the vice president and chief architect at Pure Storage and he's joined by Rob Walters, who's the vice president general manager of storage as a service at Pure. Rob, welcome to The Cube. Thanks for having us back. You're welcome. Rob, we'll start with, Rob Lee, we'll start with you. So re-invent, this is the eighth re-invent. I think the seventh for The Cube. What's happened at the show? Any key takeaways? Yeah, absolutely. Look, it's great to be back. We were here last year, obviously, big launch of cloud data services. So it's great to be back a year in and just kind of reflect back on how the year's gone for uptake of cloud data services on AWS. And it's been a banner year, right? So we saw over the last year, cloud snap go GA, cloud block store go GA, and just really good customer uptake, adoption and kind of interest out of the gates. So it's kind of great to be back, great to kind of share what we've done over the last year as well as just get some feedback and more interest from future customers and prospects as well. So Rob W, with your background in the cloud, what's your take on this notion of storage as a service? How do you guys think about that and how do you look at that? Sure. Well, this is an ever more, you know, increasingly important way to consume storage. I mean, we're seeing customers who've been, you know, got used to the model, the economic model, he has a service model in the cloud, now looking to get those benefits on-prem and in the hybrid cloud too. Which, if you know, you look at our portfolio, we have both of those, part of the pure as a service. Right, okay. And then so, pure accelerate, you guys announced cloud block store. Yeah, that's when we took a GN, right? So we've been working with customers in a protracted beta process over the last year to really refine the fit and use cases for tier one block workloads. And so we took that GA and accelerated. So this is an interesting, you know, you're a partner, obviously with Amazon. I would think many parts of Amazon love cloud block store because you're using EC2, your front-ending S3, like you're helping Amazon sell services and you're delivering a higher level of availability and performance in certain workloads relative to EBS. Absolutely. So there's probably certain guys at Amazon that aren't so friendly with it. So that's an interesting dynamic, but talk about the positioning of cloud block store, any updates on uptake, what are customers excited about? What can you share? Yeah, absolutely. You know, I'd say primarily we're most kind of pleased with the variety of workloads and use cases that customers are bringing us into. You know, I think when we started out on this journey, we saw a tremendous promise for the technology to really improve the AWS ecosystem and customer experience for people that wanted to consume block storage in the cloud. What we learned as we started working with customers is that because of the way we've architected the product brought a lot of the same capabilities we deliver on our flash arrays today into AWS, it's allowed customers to take us into all the same types of workloads that they put flash arrays into, right? So that's their tier one, you know, mission critical environments, their VMware workloads, their Oracle workloads, their SAP workloads. They're also looking at us from everything from, you know, to do lift and shift, test and dev in the cloud, as well as DR, right? And that, again, I think, you know, speaks to a couple of things. It speaks to the durability, the higher level of service that we're able to deliver in AWS, but also the compatibility with which we're able to deliver the same sets of features and, you know, have it operating exactly the same way on-prem in the cloud. Because look, if you're going to DR, the last time, you know, the last point in time you want to discover that there's a caveat, hey, this feature doesn't quite work the way you expect is when you have a DR failover. And so the fact that we set out with this mission in mind to create that exact level of sameness, you know, it's really paying dividends in the types of use cases that customers are bringing us into. So you guys obviously a big partner of VMware, you've done very well in that community. So VMware cloud on AWS, is that a tailwind for you guys? Or can you take advantage of that at this point? Yeah, no, so I mean, I think the way I'd look at it is both VMware, you know, pure AWS, I think we're all responding to the same market demands and customer needs, right? Which at the end of the day is, look, if I'm an enterprise customer, the reality is I'm going to have some of my workloads running on-premise, I'm going to have some of my workloads running in the cloud. I expect you, the vendors, right, to help me manage this diverse hybrid environment. And what I'd say is, you know, there are puts and takes how the different vendors are going about it, but at the end of the day, that's the customer need, right? And so, you know, we're going about this through a very targeted storage-centric approach because that's, you know, where we provide service today. You know, and you see VMware going after it from the kind of application hypervisor kind of virtualization end of things. You know, over time, you know, we've had a great partnership with VMware on-premise and as both Cloud Block Store and VMware Cloud mature, you know, we'd look to replicate the same motion with them in that offering. Yeah, I mean, to the extent, I mean, you think about VMware moving workloads, you know, with their customers into the cloud, that more mission-critical stuff comes into the cloud. That's been a, it's been hard to get a lot of that, those workloads in to date. Yep. And that's maybe the next wave of cloud. Rob W, I have question for you is, you know, Amazon has been kind of sleepy in storage over the S3, EBS, okay, great. They dropped a bunch of announcements, you know, this year. And so it seems like there's more action now in the cloud. What's your sort of point of view as to how you make that an opportunity for pure? Well, I've always looked at it as that there's been a way of getting your storage done and delivered on AWS. And there's been the way the enterprises have done things on-premise. And I think there was a sort of a longer-term bet from AWS. So that was the way things would sort of fall towards into the public cloud. And now we see, you know, all of the hyperscalers quite honestly, with on-prem, you know, hybrid opportunities, you know, with the like outpost today, et cetera. Absolutely, yeah. You know, hybrid is a real thing. It's not just something people said that couldn't get to the cloud, you know, it's a real thing. So I think that actually opens up opportunity on both sides, true enterprise class features that our enterprise class customers are looking for in the cloud through something like CBS are now available. But I think, you know, at Amazon and other hyperscalers, reaching back down into the on-prem environments to help with the onboarding of enterprises up into the cloud. So the Azure service side of things makes life a little bit interesting, from my perspective, because that's kind of new for Pure to provide that storage as a service. But also for enterprises, as you say, they're used to running things in a particular way. So as they move to cloud, they're kind of having to adapt and change. And yet they don't fully want to, hybrid is a real thing. There are real workloads that need to perform in a hybrid fashion. So what does that mean for you providing storage as a service? And still, to Rob Lee's point, still providing that consistency of experience across the entire product portfolio, because that's quite an achievement. Many other storage providers haven't actually been able to pull that off. So how do you keep all of those components working coherently together and still provide what customers are actually looking for? I think you have to go back to what the basics of what customers are actually looking for. They're looking to make smart use of their finances. CapEx potentially, they're moving towards RPEX. That kind of consumption model is growing in popularity. And I think a lot of enterprises are seeing less and less value in the sort of nuts and bolts storage management of old. And we can provide a lot of that through the Azure service offering. So we handle the capacity management monitoring. We've always done the evergreen service subscription so with software and hardware upgrades. So we're letting their sort of shrinking CapEx budget and perhaps their limited resources work on the more strategically important elements of their IT strategies, including hybrid cloud. Rob Lee, one of the things we've talked about in the past is AI. I'm interested in sort of the update on the AI workloads. We heard a lot obviously today on the main stage about machine learning, machine intelligence, AI, transformations. How's that going? The whole AI push, you guys were first, really the first storage company to sort of partner up and deliver solutions in that area. Give us the update there. How's it going? What are you learning? Yeah, so it's going really well. So it continues to be a very strong driver of our Flash Play business. And again, it's really driven by, it's a workload that succeeds with very large sums of data. It succeeds when you can push those large sums of data at high speed into modern compute and rinse and repeat very frequently. And the fourth piece, which I think is really helping to propel some of the business there is, as enterprises, as customers get further on into the kind of AI deployment journeys, what they're finding is the application space evolves very quickly there. And the ability for infrastructure in general, but storage in particular, because that's where so much data gravity exists, to be flexible, to adapt to different applications and changing application requirements really helps speed them up, right? So set another way, if the application set that your data scientists are using today are going to change in six months, you can't really be building your storage infrastructure around a thesis of what that application looks like and then go and replace in six months. And so that message, as customers have been through now the first, first and a half iterations of that really started internalized, hey, AI is a space that's rapidly evolving. We need infrastructure that can evolve and grow with us. That's helping drive a lot of second looks and a lot of business back to us. And I would actually tie this back to your previous question, which is, the direction that Amazon have taken with some of their new storage offerings and how that ties into storage as a service. If I step back as a whole, what I'd say is, both Amazon and Pure, what we see is, there's now a demand really for multiple classes of service for storage, right? FAS is important, it's going to continue to get more and more important, whether it's AI, whether it's low latency transactional databases or some other workload. So FAS always matters, cost always matters, right? And so you're going to have this stratification, whether it's in the cloud, whether it's on flash with SCM, TLC, QLC, you want to benefits all of those. What you don't want is to have to manage the complexity of tying and stitching all those pieces together yourself. And what you certainly don't want is a procurement model that locks you out or into one of these tiers or in one of these locations. And so if you think about it in the long-term, and not to put words in the other Rob's mouth, where I think you see us going with Pure as a service is moving to a model that really shifts the conversations with customers to say, look, the way you should be transacting with storage vendors, and we're going to leave the charge, is class of service, maybe protocol, and that's about it. It's like, where do you want this data to exist? How fast do you want it? Where in the price performance curve do you want to be? How do you want it to be protected? And give us room to take care of it from there. That's right, that's right. This isn't about the storage array anymore. You know, you look at the modern data experience message, this is about what do you need from your storage, from a storage attribute perspective rather than a physical hardware perspective, and let us worry about the rest. You have to abstract that complexity. Absolutely. You guys have all, I mean, simple is the reason why you were able to achieve escape velocity, along with obviously great product and pretty good management as well, but you'll never sub-optimize simplicity to try to turn some knobs. I mean, I've learned that following you guys over the years, right? I mean, that's your philosophy. Yeah, no, absolutely. And what I'd say is, as technology evolves, as the components evolve into this world of multis, multi-protocol, multi-tier, multi-class of service, the focus on that simplicity and taking even more of it on becomes ever more important. And that's a place where, getting to your question about AI, we help customers implement AI. We also do a lot of AI within our own products and our fleet. That's a place where our AI-driven ops really have a place to shine in delivering that kind of best optimization of price performance, tiers of service, so on and so forth within the product lines. What do you guys see at the macro? I mean, as I say, you've achieved escape velocity check. Now you're sort of entering the next chapter of Pure. You're the big share-gainer, but obviously growing slower than you had in previous years. And part of that, we think, is part of your fault. You've put so much flash into the marketplace. It's given people a lot of headroom. Obviously, NAND pricing has been an issue. You guys have addressed that on your calls, but still gaining share much, much more quickly than most folks are shrinking. So what are you seeing at the macro? What are customers are telling you in terms of their long-term strategy with regard to storage? Well, so I'll start, I'll let Rob add in. What I'd say is, we see in the macro a shift, a clear shift of flash, right? We've called the shots since day one, right? But what I'd say is that's accelerating. And that's accelerating with pricing dynamics, and we talked about a lot of the NAND pricing and all that kind of stuff. But in the macro, I think there's a clear realization now that customers want to be on flash. It's just a matter of what's the sensible rate, what's the price kind of curve to get there. And we see a couple of meaningful steps. We saw it originally with our flash array line taking out 15K spinning drives, 10Ks really falling, with QLC coming online and what we're doing in flash array C. You know, the 7200 RPM drive kind of in the enterprise, you know, those days are numbered, right? And I think for many customers, at this point, it's really a matter of, okay, how quickly can we get there and when does it make sense to move as opposed to does it make sense? In many ways, it's really exciting because if you think about it, the focus for so long has been in those tier one environments. But in many ways, the tier two environments are the ones that could most benefit from a move to flash because a couple of things happen there. Because they're considered lower tier, lower cost, they tend to spread like bunnies, they tend to be kind of more neglected parts of the environment. And so having customers now be able to take a second look at modernizing, consolidating those environments is both helpful from a operational point of view. It's also helpful from the point of view of getting them to be able to make that data useful again. I would also say that those exact use cases are perfect candidates for an Azure service consumption model because we can actually raise the utilization, actually helping customers manage to a much more utilized set of arrays than the over consumption under consumption game they're trying to play right now with their annual capex cycles. And so how aggressive do you see customers wanting to take advantage of that as a service consumption model? Is it mixed or is it like we want this? There's a lot of customers which is like we want this and we want it now. We've seen a very good traction and adoption. So yeah, it's a surprisingly large, complex enterprise customer adoption as well. A lot of enterprise, they've gotten used to the idea of cloud from AWS. They like that model of dealing with things and they want to bring that model of operating on site because they want cloud everywhere. They don't actually want to transform the cloud into enterprise. That's right, no, exactly. I mean if I go back 20 plus years to when I was doing hands-on IT, the idea that we as a team would let go of any of the widget tree that we were responsible for never would have happened. But then you've had this parallel path of public cloud experience and people are like, well I don't even need to be doing that anymore. And we get better results. Oh and it's secure as well. Oh and the list just goes on. And so now as you say, the enterprise wants to bring it back on-prem for all of those benefits. One of the other things that we've been tracking and maybe it falls into the category of cloud 2.0 is this sort of new workload forming and I'll preface it this way. The early days of the past decade of cloud, infrastructure as a service has been about, yeah I'm going to spin up some EC2, I'm going to need some S3, whatever, I need some storage. But today it seems like there's all this data now and then you're seeing new workloads driven by platforms like Snowflake, Redshift, clearly throwing some ML tools like Databricks. And it's driving a lot of compute now, but it's also driving insights. People are really pulling insights out of that data. I just gave you cloud examples. Are you seeing on-prem examples as well or hybrid examples and how do you guys fit into that? Yeah, I know, absolutely. I think this is a secular trend that was kicked off by open source and the public cloud, but it certainly affects, I would say, the entire tech landscape. A lot of it is just about how applications are built. If you think back to the late 80s, early 90s, you had large monoliths. You had Oracle and it did everything, soup to nuts, your transactional system, your data warehouse, ERP, cool, we got it all. That's not how applications are built anymore. They're built with multiple applications working together. You've got, whether it's Kafka connecting into some scale out analytics database, connected into Cassandra, connected. It's just the modern way of how applications are built. And so whether that's connecting data between SaaS services in the cloud, whether it's connecting data between multiple different application sets that are running on-prem, we definitely see that trend. And so when you peel back the covers of that, what we see, what we hear from customers as they make that shift, as they try to stand up infrastructure to meet those needs, is again, the need for flexibility. As multiple applications are sharing data, are handing off data as part of a pipeline or as part of a workflow, it becomes ever more important for the underlying infrastructure, the storage array, if you will, to be able to deliver high performance to multiple applications. And so the era of saying, hey, look, I'm going to design a storage array to be super optimized for Oracle and nothing else, like you're only going to solve part of the problem now, right? And so this is why you see us taking within pure the approach that we do with how we optimize performance, whether it's across flash array, flash blade, or cloud block store. Great, excellent. Well, guys, we got to leave it there. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your thoughts with us. And have a good rest of the event. Thanks for having us back. All right, pleasure. All right, keep it right there, everybody, we're back. To wrap, day one, Dave Vellante from Justin Ward, you're watching theCUBE from AWS re-invent 2019. Right back.