 From Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE, covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2019, brought to you by Pure Storage. Howdy y'all, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of day one of Pure Accelerate 19 from Austin, Texas. I'm Lisa Martin, my co-host is Dave Vellante. We got a couple of gentlemen here chatting with us next. We've got one of our alumni, Mike Mundy's back, head of Cisco Worldwide Alliances for Pure. Mike, welcome back. Thank you. Sporting the very dapper. It's not ours today, but it's enough. I like it, it's very subtle. And we've got Andrew Tennant joining us for the first time, Senior Manager of Worldwide Sales at Cisco. Andrew, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for having us. So we know we've had lots of conversations with Cisco and Pure at Cisco Live. Just a few months ago, Mike was on with this bright orange blazer. You guys have been partners for about four years now. Mike, let's start with you and talk about the evolution of that partnership. From a go-to-market, a field, a sales perspective, overall partnership, how are things going? Well, things are great. From a momentum perspective, we're on track to eclipse. I'm not supposed to talk about a lot of numbers, but in the next year, we will eclipse together a billion dollar run rate with this partnership, which is tremendous in a four to five year run. So things are well. It started from the field and what customers were requiring. And now in the last year, we've added about six new CVDs. We're up to 22 and we have three in the queue between now and the end of the calendar year. So in terms of the growth, the product development and momentum, it's tremendous. And what we'll talk about today will be kind of one of the next generations and eras that we'll hit on regarding this. And you guys are also, we had a conversation a little bit ago with Nathan Hall. Really, this partnership with Cisco and Pure is now getting started in the field, as you were talking about, but it's all the way down into the engineering level. So in terms of being very pervasive throughout, you guys have really achieved that. Yes. Yeah, top to bottom, right? From that field engagement that began, it was watching our customers embrace pure innovation, right? And everywhere you turned, Pure was showing up. And it was really the field saying, hey, we got to get on board with this. And Tim Shanahan, who's part of our commercial organization on the DIT Center side, said, hey, this is a big deal we need to get in front of this thing. So that's really, as you mentioned, where it started. And now we're doing everything from integrating products, right? Integrating management tools to try to bring that together for our customers. And it's an awesome partnership. Absolutely. So where's the product focus? Where do we start? Yeah, so you joked, right? FiberChannel, I think I remember FiberChannel from many years ago at Cisco. And then you look back and suddenly it's not dead, right? The truth is, FiberChannel's the best protocol for mission critical storage traffic that's ever been built. It's probably the best protocol out there for that. Now, it's not sexy though, right? So we kind of took our eye off the ball at Cisco. But as we now develop these next generation storage technologies, there's never been a more important time to bring that switching fabric into play, right? It's absolutely critical that we have the right tools to accomplish what our customers are trying to deliver from an application standpoint. So the agility, the visibility, just the overall performance is more important today than it was back in sort of the heyday of FiberChannel, if you will, right? So the partnership that we're working on right now is making sure that we're maximizing the outcome of these investments customers are making with all of Pure's storage offerings, leveraging a sand infrastructure that's compatible with it and really going to make it sing. And you're right, Andrew. I mean, you go back 10 plus years and it was sort of ice guzzly was coming in, but you had some FC bigots that said, I will never, they were hanging on to it. I think you had FCOE. Now you got NVME over fabric, we'll talk about that. But so from Pure's perspective, you've always had to pay attention to that segment of the market. You guys went hard after the high end of EMC's business, which was heavy FiberChannel in the early days. Yeah, I mean, four out of five of our arrays are attached FiberChannel to a customer's environment. It is core to what we do, and we're excited about the resell opportunity that we just started with Pure, because Andrew and I joked last week, but we put pen to paper in terms of, we believe our introduction of this as a resell can help them grow their sand business by 35, 40%. And that's the kind of disruption that we're seeing with our arrays in the market. And we think because of how we're evolving customers to modernize those networks, that we can drag the Cisco FiberChannel business right along with it. So this is a, sorry, Mike, this is a resell, Pure reselling, the MDS. Cisco's sand MDS product line, absolutely. How is the Pure channel responding to this news? They love it, because it's a new buying center that they're getting to talk to, and it helps us establish more understanding of the customer's whole business, not just from a storage perspective, so. So how is NVMe changing the landscape? What are you guys seeing there? I mean, you guys were, I think the further than other first, Charlie didn't mention it today on stage, but there's so many firsts, it's hard to keep track of, but how is that affecting what's going on in the field? Yeah, so, I mean, again, it's the timing of this generational shift to next-gen storage, NVMe being probably the most critical of that, right? If we look at what happened with all flash arrays, for example, all of those ended up on critical, mission, critical workloads, and all ended up on fiber channel, probably 85% of those ended up on that legacy technology because it was so capable of getting the job done. NVMe is going to take us another leap forward, so customers are going to be challenged to have something that lives both in what they have today and bridges them to that future proof state, right? So it's absolutely critical that you have tools that are going to let you adopt NVMe, as it makes sense, and carry it operationally alongside the same modality that you had for those workloads in the past, right? That's the key, is that the folks who are going to own this stuff going forward are the ones who own it now, right? Just with maybe older technology. And the business impact is what? You can do more with less performance, lower cost. I mean, that's what I'm saying. More less performance visibility, right? So you can help troubleshoot. I mean, we had a situation not that long ago where a customer had an array, not it was a competitive array, right? It was getting hammered and it was locking up. And when they looked at the forensics coming off the array, it said they had 4,000 IOPS off of that array, a very nominal amount. It shouldn't have been the problem. It shifted the focus elsewhere. Well, using some of the telemetry built into the MDS platform, it was obvious that there were 25,000 IOPS hitting that array because VMware was doing a lot of command and control traffic to the array. So having that visibility at these scales and speeds, if you don't know what you're doing, you can't see what's going on, you can be flying blind and struggling and everybody loses there, so. You know, we're excited about this because we don't want to bring our arrays into an environment that's not suited for high-end performance and reliability because that's what we've kind of made our brand on when it comes to customer networks, especially with the X60 and 90s that we launched a year ago. They're all NVMe ready. So we want to make sure that as we deploy that, that the entire infrastructure is ready. And Cisco, in my opinion, has the best-to-be product, is 64 gig capable. It's NVMe today. And so we're ready NVMe end-to-end, if you will. So when the hosts are ready to take advantage of this full network and full storage system, we're ready. And Andrew also mentioned analytics. So we extrad ourselves on the analytics capabilities of our system as it works today with Pure One. And so that allows us to, you know, very quickly using machine learning solve most of our customer's problems. In fact, we open about 85% of our own customers tack cases for them because we predict when things are going to get rough and bumpy. So as we extend and bridge that together with what Cisco has in their analytics capability, it's going to make the experience way different than it would be on a competitive sand fabric and a competitive storage array, whether it's flash or not. So that's what we're doing together which makes fiber channel better and more unique than it has been in the past. In terms of adoption, you mentioned, when the host guys are ready, what's the blocker there? Is it just silicon? Is it just adoption? I think, you know, you could take Cisco's example. You know, they're looking at the new memory technology and how do they apply that to the interface adapter and how do you handle that situation? So, you know, as they evolve their next platform, it will be pervasive in that. And I'm sure that the other, you know, host providers are going to be doing the same. It's a standard space. Yeah, it's a timing issue. Low-hanging fruit was NVMe over converted to Ethernet, right? Because that was kind of the first place to start. But reality is we can, we're the only vendor who can provide both of those in the Cisco side, right? So we have the same tooling and the same actually administrative tooling on either, right? So that's a terrific benefit. And it's not just the infrastructure from the host, it's the operating system as well. So, you know, Linux can take advantage of it in a different way. So, you know, we're seeing most of our deployments today are fiber channel over Ethernet because the customer base that are deploying that are purely a Linux-based environment. So they're able to do that. So as, you know, not all of our enterprise and commercial customers run that environment. So it's a little bit of the technology. It's a little bit of the Intel cycle. It's a little bit of the operating system. But the point is we're ready and there's a long, long roadmap, you know, for customers if they go this route with us. When should customers start thinking about this? So just in terms of... Immediately, right? I mean, ultimately, it's not a question of if it's a question of when, but if they're getting things ready now, if you're making an investment today, you can make an investment today that accommodates what you're doing today. Like back in the day, right? If we were selling a storage platform, the sand was just sort of this necessary thing behind the scenes that wasn't necessarily... You could actually let it sit there for a couple of generations of the storage it was supporting. That's no longer going to be the case, right? Because quite simply the evolution on the storage front end is so much faster that you need to make sure that the thing you're plugging it into. That's the simple question. For any customer out there, what are you plugging this into, right? Because at the end of the day, if it's just that old sand you have sitting around, it may or may not be capable, regardless of vendor, right? It's going to actually diminish the value you get and the time value of that investment you've made in this incredible platform. So where are you having these customer conversations? We talk about the joint go-to market in the field. It's not just about fiber channel and speed and storage, right? These are business critical workloads that are being protected and run and access to be able to extract all these insights. When you're talking with customers, where are you? You're not at the storage admin level. I imagine this is a much more business-intensive conversation. It's a great question. Go ahead. So I think people that are driving the cloud platform strategy for the infrastructure, they obviously need to understand how does this work in a hybrid cloud or multi-cloud environment? Then you've got the people that are developing the mission-critical business apps, whether that's Oracle, SAP, et cetera, et cetera. But it's also the non-traditional business apps that are coming into play. Things that leverage stores that are file or object-oriented or Kubernetes or things like that. It's so you're having discussions with the teams that are deploying the apps for the business and that will drive and dictate the requirements that we're trying to help the infrastructure and the cloud infrastructure teams adapt to. That answers your question. The multi-cloud piece gets interesting here, right? Because you're now talking about building massively scalable distributed systems and you're not going to be able to, you don't want to necessarily ship all your data around but you want to ship the metadata and be smart enough to know where the data is so you can go ship the compute to the data, right? And I think that's another interesting thing and a positive aspect of leveraging some things we've already done with Cisco is, they have the concept of ACI anywhere. So just like we're doing with Cloud Block Store of extending that storage capability into the cloud, Cisco's done the same with ACI. So it's not just, it's not just you're making sure the workload and the data payload are mobile but also the application. And that's, yes, that may not be the case today for Fiber Channel but the technology is there if the customer demands it. So that's, you know, 60% of Cisco's revenue in the data center comes from its networking core. That's what we're more excited about the next generation's partnership is we feel like we've done a good job and built momentum with the compute part of their business. And I think as we evolve into this part of the business it's going to be better for customers in the end, so. At the end of the day, customers are going to spend more time operating this than anything, right? And really that's all about visibility, you know, mean time to resolution, just how quickly they can make sure that those things are running and as proactively get in front of congestion and issues ahead of time if they can. So it's a complimentary hardware software problem to solve. You have to be able to do things at extremely high rates of speed with visibility we've never seen before. So analytics built into ASICs. Let me look, incredibly important stuff to get that streaming right out of the chip so you can tell what's going on at any level of the stack. Whereas like I said today, we've seen many cases now where there are challenges in the network and in the sand and on the array and everyone's blind to it because we don't see it. Our engineers love it because the monitoring and the scoping capability that would require a lot of sand fabrics to deploy would require extra tools, extra tap kits. Cisco has that built into the ASIC so literally it's just enable that with software and you can do all the diagnostics you ever wanted to do at the wire and the fiber level. As opposed to a discrete probe. Exactly, yeah, a disruptive thing. Drives the costs way out, the complexity reduces risk, the troubleshooting floor space, you know the whole economics. It's also time based too. So today there's an issue last night. Hey, Mike, what happened last night? I don't know, let me know if it happens again. That's pretty much the ticket close, right? We can actually go back in time now, kind of a DVR and actually see now for the first time in a sand fabric what's actually happening and go back and reconstruct it to figure out how we proactively prevent it going on from the next time. So Mike, last question, we're out of time, but last question for you, everybody says future proof. Pardon? Everybody says future proof. How is Pure delivering that with Cisco? What is it going to mean to that business leader that I have an infrastructure in place that will truly be future proof? Good question. So, you know, evergreen is the term that Pure uses for what we do. So you never buy the same storage twice, right? And if you look at the platform that Cisco has for MDS, it is clearly capable to 400 gig capability and today most networks are purchased for 32 gig capable with 16 gig optics. So they have 32, 64, there's a long way to go here. So the platform and their innovation will continue this to be, you know, a future proof network that marries up with our evergreen story. So we're excited. We wouldn't get in this relationship if we felt that it was not going to provide the same level of benefits and standard that we have for our own customer, so. Terrific. Mike, Andrew, thank you for joining David and me on theCUBE at Accelerate. We look forward to hearing what happens in year five of the Pure-Sysco relationship. Amen. I know we'll probably stay tuned. So I know we'll see you again. Thank you again for your time. Thank you guys, thanks. For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Pure Accelerate 19.