 Welcome back to VMworld 2021. My name is Dave Vellante. And right now we're going to talk to one of VMware's partners and unpack how containers and cloud native development processes and tools are changing the way we think about managing storage. And specifically we're going to dig into the partnership between VMware and Portworx, company acquired by Pure Storage last September. And with me is Michael Ferrante, who's a senior director of product marketing at Portworx, which has said is now part of Pure Storage. Michael, welcome back to theCUBE. Good to see you again. Great to be here, thanks for having me. Now Michael, if you're in storage, you got to partner with VMware. So that's always been an important relationship for Pure. And of course that's carried over to Portworx. But how does Portworx work with VMware? Where does it fit within the VMware ecosystem? And what's your point of view on VMware's Kubernetes play? We'll come back to that, but how do you fit in? How do we fit in? Yeah, it's a great question. So, customers who are building modern applications are often doing it on Kubernetes platforms. And VMware has a fantastic Kubernetes platform with Tanzu. And customers, when they run applications that have data on Kubernetes, they have certain requirements around data protection, around data security, data mobility. And Portworx has a platform that solves those problems for customers on any Kubernetes platform in regardless of infrastructure. So, a VMware customer who's saying, you know what, I love the idea of being able to run Tanzu across my on-prem data center and my cloud footprint. And I want to do my databases or between those environments or maybe just take a backup of my database and put it in the cloud. Well, when they add Portworx into their Tanzu environment, they get the ability to do those types of things, data protection, data mobility. And so we help customers expand their Tanzu footprint by solving the requirements that come along with modern applications. Yeah, and that's important because as we've covered extensively in theCUBE in the early days of, well, containers have been around forever, but the early days of modern containers, if you will, the applications, the data was ephemeral, it kind of throw away, if you will. But over time, it's become more stateful, requiring better security and governance and recovery and the like. So, Michael, what's your point of view on VMware's Kubernetes play? You talked about Tanzu. It's a big part of the strategy. It's an ongoing topic of conversation in the community. And there's other solutions, of course, like OpenShift, which also runs on VMware. What's your perspective on VMware's progression, how they're innovating with Kubernetes orchestration specifically? Well, I think VMware is making a lot of smart moves and other players on the market should not discount them. I think there's a lot of interest in Tanzu and we're having conversations and we're kind of expanding our relationship with VMware to solve a broader swap of those use cases. So I think it's going to be a compelling offer in the market. That's what makes this ecosystem so fun is that there are multiple solutions from the cloud providers, from the kind of independent, kind of non-cloud associated platform vendors like VMware or Red Hat. And that makes it really exciting. Let's back up a bit. Maybe talk about some of the big picture trends and maybe some of the challenges. Portworx, you were early on in the management of storage for containers. And I got to say, you personally, and I mean that, you created a new distribution channel through developers and DevOps teams who they became really influential in storage decisions which they never were before. That was completely new dynamic. So maybe talk about the evolution of storage for containers that you've witnessed. Where do we come from? Where are we today and where are we headed? Yeah, I mean, what's interesting is that on a certain level, Portworx is a storage, a storage solution for containers. In fact, you can call this the gold standard of Kubernetes storage. Really proud of that. Love any time someone calls you a gold standard. But here's the thing. The people that buy Portworx don't typically buy storage. These are platform architects. They're DevOps engineers. And what they need is they need to consume storage the same way that they need to consume compute and network, but they're not storage administrators. And so what Portworx did and other companies in the ecosystem is they've given an API driven self-service experience for what were classically ticket-based infrastructure purchases. And that has accelerated developer's ability to build and run applications. And especially with Kubernetes being able to orchestrate that. And I think now even within the VMware ecosystem VMware clearly has stronger relationships with the typical infrastructure buyers. But now those infrastructure buyers are seeing what their DevOps peers are doing and they're saying, hey, we want that too. We want API driven. We want self-service. We don't like to continue more than you do. And so being able to kind of solve enterprise level requirements, whether it's around data protection or a data security, but in a model that allows for self-service in API drivenness. That's not a word. Really opens up a lot of possibilities. And I think in some ways it's a self-proclaimed prophecy. Cause when you can solve enterprise level requirements, but also provide agility and people want as much of it as you can possibly provide them. So that DevOps mindset, that train has left the station and it's got a lot of momentum. It's not, we're not going to flip that. So what happens in your view to the role of that storage admin that you talk about? Does he or she, did they widen their scope? Does that, does their activities, does it evolve? Does they go away? Did they become ops dev pros? How do you see that? Yeah, it's a great question. And we've been thinking a lot about this. We actually have a new product that I'll call for works data services. And what it is that data based as a service platform for Kubernetes. So imagine you're running what works on top of Tanzu. And what your company wants to do, what IT wants to do is provide a service catalog to developers internally where they can click a button and have an elastic search cluster or click a button and have a postgres database. What now these storage administrators can actually become SREs, which is kind of, that's what we call these really senior DevOps engineers in places like Google and Twitter and Uber where you're actually responsible for using code and software to run applications. And so with services like PDS, those individuals can up level deal and up level their value within the organization and provide a bigger impact. Yeah, I love that. So they're going from basically pulling tickets, putting out fires, dealing with paper cuts to actually having a much more strategic role within the organization. From infrastructure to applications. I mean applications is where the business value always is and you need agile infrastructure in order to run agile applications. But if you only solve, if you only have agile infrastructure, then you still haven't solved a business problem and PDS is enabling our customers to solve those real business problems. Well, that leaves me on my next question because a lot of organizations of course have renewed their focus on digital, I mean every organization has no choice. If you're not digital business, you're out of business. But what I mean there is we were kind of forced into digital last year and now organizations are stepping back and they're being more planful. So there's an emphasis on modernizing infrastructure and applications. What's the role that you see of Kubernetes and VMs in that shift to modernizing the infrastructure apps in the business? Yeah, so what we saw in the pandemic is companies that had to do more with less. And despite that, those that adopted Kubernetes were able to accelerate application development. They were able to scale their applications faster. In fact, we have one customer, Roblox, a massively popular online gaming platform for kind of, you know, between age kids. They actually IPO during the pandemic and in the first week that kind of that March timeframe the beginning of pandemic, they scaled in a single month, what they had scaled in the entire previous year. And the only way they were able to do that was with these modern architectures. So companies have had firsthand experience saying, okay, when we build cloud native, when we use microservices, when we use Kubernetes, we can scale faster, we can get to the market quicker. And so let's keep those learnings and let's accelerate them. And so, you know, the reason we're doing a pure validated design with Tanzu and for works is to help the VMware ecosystem take advantage as well of those modern architectures so that they can get the benefits, not just of the agile infrastructure staff provided by VMware, but also the applications here that goes along with it. So I mean, you made the point before it's all about the applications and take that further. It's all about the value, the time to value that you can get out of deploying applications. So based on what you just said about those with versus those without during the pandemic, you know, begs the question, why wouldn't everybody have done that? So the question is, what are the biggest challenges that you're seeing in terms of adopting and deploying Kubernetes in production? Yeah, so I actually have some data that I can share in this, we just did a survey of 500 IT pros across the US and UK with significant knowledge of their company's Kubernetes strategy who are currently running data services on Kubernetes. And so we asked them, how's that going for you? And what they told us is basically what I just said earlier that they're 55% can get apps to market faster, 50% play their developers more efficient and actually heard those say, in addition, we're actually able to reduce our IT infrastructure costs. But why isn't everybody doing it? And so we asked those questions and they're struggling with business requirements around backup and recovery, data mobility, data security. And I think that's the missing piece, which is when you can figure it out, and you know, if you're Uber or your Facebook, you can hire engineers to figure anything out, right? Given enough time and budget, you can solve anything with computers. But for the vast majority of organizations, they need a solution to enable them to have the same outcomes as the companies who can build everything themselves. And so with Portworx data services, by adding Portworx into your Tanzu environment, you actually get kind of quote unquote for free a lot of those business requirements that are holding back enterprise adoption of critical applications within the Kubernetes ecosystem. And as a result, then you can accelerate a larger portion of your application portfolio. Hey Michael, so one of the good things about virtual events, particularly, you know, VM world is you don't have to fly out on a Saturday or Sunday and come back on a Friday. The flip side of that is you don't get the hallway track, you know, so it's an awesome event. It really kind of kicks off the fall season. So help the audience. What are you looking for at VM world 2021 that's relevant to your space? Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, I'm interested in anything that really kind of, you know, helps customers figure out how to really embrace hybrid and multicloud. I mean, it feels a little bit like it's the infrastructure week of the political world that it's all, we're always talking about it, but it's never happening. But I'm actually seeing a lot of movement that suggests both in our own customer base as well and new products that are coming to market that are really helping customers take advantage of this multi and hybrid cloud world. So I think it's really happening. So I'm looking for announcements around that. I'm also always interested in security because I think, you know, the online world is just a more and more dangerous place every day, whether it's ransomware attacks or other more traditional security threats. And so I think, you know, as a community we need to figure out ways in which we can both enable customers to move faster, deliver apps more quickly, scale them more quickly, but also make them more secure. And that's why I was really hard in to see in our survey that when people apply automation through platforms like Tanzu or Kubernetes more broadly that they actually get security benefits in addition to kind of the scale and the productivity benefits. So I'm looking for more announcements to come out on that front as well. If I could follow up on that because historically the more secure you are the less flexibility you have. The reverse is true. The more flexibility you give users the less secure they are. Now, I'm hearing that that may not apply in the case of, well actually probably the answer is it probably does apply in the case of Kubernetes and containers but that's why they need Portworx. But square that circle for me. Because- Yeah, so there is usually a trade-off. It's, you know, we really value security. So we're gonna slow down and we're gonna take a very progressive approach to rolling out changers, to securing access, to limiting who can have access to data, et cetera. The flip side is, you know, it's, you know move fast and break things, kind of the mantra of Silicon Valley which you say that to our financial institution on East Coast and they're gonna kind of roll your eyes and say, where are you smoking? But there is a way to solve it. And computers can take the very, very deliberate approach except they do it extremely fast so it doesn't look as deliberate. So basically what I'm saying is you can build in securing best practices but then use fleets of servers to run all of those checks to make sure that the person who is trying to access the system is the one in my enterprise-off system that should be able to access that system. And so you can basically get manual people-based checks out of the way because you're leveraging automation that is doing those checks. It's not like we're letting things be open. It's just we're leveraging computers for the things that they are really good at and that's how you square that circle which automation enables you to put in place more checks than you can do manually but they happen a lot, lot faster. And so you end up getting the best of both worlds and kind of breaking this long-standing tension between agility and security. And a key linchpin of that I'm assuming is APIs that allow you to connect to whatever the best-of-breed identity governance and access management system you want to use. Exactly, so one example is we have PX Secure. So this is all about role-based access controls and encryption for your mission-critical data that's running on Kubernetes. Well, we have APIs for that. And we build it into things like forex data services and then build it into things like our storage classes. So all a DevOps engineer has to do is say, yeah, I want this app to be secure, meaning encrypted and that's gonna follow my role-based access controls that I'm defining in my corporate office system. And then it's automatically applying. That's really the key is something is only secure if you actually do it. And a lot of times because it's so cumbersome either developers look for work arrangements or they just, they simply don't do it. You can bolt it on at the end. The kind of phrase of art within the security of shift left, bring more of that stuff earlier. But I think it applies not just the security but also to data protection, to data mobility. Let's build all of that stuff in right from the beginning. I mean, that's one of the big design principles and four works. One of the discussions we're always having is, okay, we've seen this rapid shift to digital. This has so many ripple effects. What's permanent? So what are the big changes or trends that you think are going to be permanent or will dominate, not just VMworld this year but themes for the coming years? Yeah. So what genies are out of the bottle? And I think a big one is just from an architectural perspective is new to microservices. I mean, it just, it makes so much sense for so many reasons. How often do any of us get a maintenance and more from a consumer service that we use, whether it's restaurant delivery, whether it's streaming, whether it's even a health app that we're using, we don't. But that's very common in the enterprise that you would shut down the ERP system for three days, every six months to an update. So that stuff is going away. And the way in which we no longer have to issue the notifications is we have microservices that can be independently updated. That can use kind of specialized tooling that makes sense for the job. So I have an app that really needs the index and capabilities of Elasticsearch versus I have an app that means the very fast data processing of Cassandra. And so development teams can be more independent for one another, have less dependencies, develop applications faster, get those products to market faster. And I think the pandemic has demonstrated how, you know, I'll say Amazon wasn't successful because of the pandemic. A lot of people said, oh, well, of course they sell online. So this pandemic was a good for them. Well, they actually created architectures that were able to withstand the massive increase in demand that they got. Our customer Roblox is another example. If they did not have those architectures that enabled them to scale at those levels, then Roblox wouldn't have been able to IPO because they would have just been a story about everybody wanting to play Roblox. The website crashed, end of story. So it's about building architectures that allow you to take advantage of this movement towards digital. And I don't think that's going the way, but this is where solutions like hands would come in. You know, folks don't know how to do it. And they need platforms that make it easy. They need platforms that enable them to secure their data to make it available, to protect it. And so, you know, combinations of what works in hands we really saw some of the issues that come up in this ship to microservices. Michael, great stuff. Really appreciate your perspectives. And thanks for coming back in theCUBE. Yeah, my pleasure anytime. And hopefully we'll be able to do it in person in these days. I hope so. All right, thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante. You're watching the continuous coverage of theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2021. Keep it right there.