 Live from the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2016. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. It's legal. Yeah. Everything's legal. Well, welcome inside, Mandalay Bay, John Walls here on theCUBE as we continue our coverage here at VMworld. Once again, we're back for what is going to be an exciting three days here in Mandalay Bay. And I'm joined by my partner in crime, you might say, Mark Farley, the producer of Vulcancast, a host of Vulcancast. And tell us about Vulcancast real quick, Mark. Well, you've seen comedy in cars. You've seen singing in cars with Carpool Karaoke. This is discussions about technology in cars. It's tech talk in cars. And you can see it on. You can see it on Vulcancast.com. What a novel name for a website. For you. Full figure. It's been all day coming up with that one, didn't you? Yeah, but it's cool. You know what it's like to look for a name. But it's a neat concept. Tech talk comes to cars. You're kind of like the James Corbin of tech. There you go. Except we don't sing about it. I'm more like the Jerry Seinfeld. Maybe that's the next step. We're joined by a couple of guests who are, they become partners too, more or less here in the business sense with Vaughn Stewart, who is the enterprise architect and chief evangelist. I love that, by the way, Vaughn, of Pure Storage. You've got that evangelist look. You do have it. You're carrying the whole thing today. And Ken Barth is the CEO of Catalogic Software. Gentlemen, in all seriousness, thank you for being here. We appreciate that. So if you would, start off by telling us a little bit about your individual companies, you know, what you do. And then the marriage, you two have partnered up here for the past four months, came together pretty quickly, and what that's all about. And if you would, Vaughn, why don't you go first? Sure. So Pure Storage is recognized widely as being the number one independent all flash storage vendor. We've been recognized for three years as being the leader in Gartner's Solid-State Array Magic Quadrant. We've really allowed flash to be consumed by the masses, by making it more affordable than traditional disk-based storage arrays and deliver all the promise of the performance of flash. And in a nutshell, Catalogic Software is a spin-out three years ago from the SyncSort company. And what we've got about 29 patents, we're working hard. What we did is we evolved our technology into this whole copy data management space, which is very exciting. And when you marry copy data management to flash technology, you drive some really serious OPEX and CAPEX savings for customers. So it's kind of a peanut butter and chocolate thing, we have going on here, right? It goes together. It really does. All right, so let's talk about your relationship then. This has only been four months in the making. You've known each other for a long time, but you put together your business venture here very quickly. What brought it together so fast? I mean, how did it make that kind of sense that, boom, it just happened almost overnight? I'll take that to start your run with the kids. Listen, we were lucky enough that these guys actually found us at a trade show. It was a mug event, a V-Mug event in Austin, Texas. They found us at a trade show. They have been absolutely brilliant to work with. In the business that we're in, we're what's called in-place copy data management. And why that's important is because we get to pick our partners. And it's a lot easier to build a technology if you have a partner that cooperates. And these guys have been so cooperative, that's what made this thing tick. They saw a gap that we could fill. They were kind enough. They sent us a box up to work with. The team culturally has been aligned. I mean, we kind of do things all up and down the stack the same way. Pricing, I think we're very similar. Channel-driven, we're similar. The way we look at working together is very similar. So they've just been brilliant. And that's kind of what it is. It's a need at the end of the day and to try to squeeze the OPEX and CAPEX savings out for customers. That's kind of the deal. Yeah, and we're also seeing a lot of requests from our customer base. We have a large number of joint customers, as well as customers that were interested in purchasing the other technology, but were waiting for a point of integration. And so as we're seeing this shift in the mid-market and the enterprise to a more DevOps-centric model, more of infrastructure teams converging their server and their compute management or application owners owning the entire stack, there was this need for taking the data management constructs that we had and allowing an end-to-end ecosystem enablement so that dev teams could just, at the push of a button, refresh their data sets, move their development efforts forward, and get rid of all the old legacy time-centric-based provisioning models. Yeah, I mean, CDM has kind of become one of these hot buzzwords, right? All of a sudden, as our data storage has become more capable and has become cheaper, we tend to hoard more stuff, right? All of a sudden, we're hanging on things a lot longer. So what is the gap exactly you're talking about that you're filling? What's the need that you're addressing specifically then when you have all this data at your disposal and I guess with Flash moving? Great question, John. So what happens is when you, first of all, let's talk about what's driving the Flash analogy, right? Why Flash is so popular right now? Everybody that we've talked to is either moving to Flash or thinking about moving to Flash simply for their primary applications. So those are things like databases, virtualization, filers, you know, SharePoint, right? And as you start to move, you get really good benefits around OPEX from using your Flash because the speed and the performance, particularly with what they do, they've got some compression stuff that's unbelievable. And then what we do is we overlay that. So if you take CDM, which was your question, if you look at CDM, what CDM does, copy data management, it allows you to deal with all of these copies, in the world today, you've got so many of the vendors that are taking different snapshots at different times and you end up at any given time, I think IDC did a study, what was it? Like 50 versions of an email that you've got floating around at any given time floating in your organization, right? So what Vaughn was referring to, let's take one example in a test dev environment, right? We could drive home on that, which they do a lot more than that, but if you take the test dev, and let's say you're a developer and you have an Oracle database that you really want to test the latest data, right now, without Flash, without CDM, what happens is you make a copy of that database, you move it to the developers and getting that copy, if you're a developer, getting that copy away from the internal IT infrastructure department can take you hours, can take days. Go ahead. We've got customers whose current copy data management process is fulfilled by either a full-time employee or a staff that runs around doing R-Man Restores or Restores from tape and development teams have to try to anticipate weeks in advance when they'll need a new copy of the data. That model has been the de facto standard in the industry for a decade or more and what you're seeing from all conversations around DevOps is agility. It's time too. How can I increase the rate at which we innovate? Part of it is by bringing agility into your development process. This is a real nice pairing of technologies. The performance capabilities within a Flash array allows you to scale a large number of instances. The instant ability to clone the dataset gives you the agility, but it's just an engine. I still have to take care of the rest of the stack. I got a role-based access. Which users get to see which data? Do I need to data-mass the data or do they get direct access? Are they having a virtual copy or a physical? Best part, can I make it a portal or can I make it right into their native workflow so they never hit the storage team or even the infrastructure team? So let's talk about how customers are going to use this. Pure has been a big leader, not just in Flash but also digital efficiency, capacity efficiency. And you've had to be that, right? From the get-go, people were saying, well, how am I going to be able to get the cost and the effective cost down of this Flash? Well, you have D-dupe and you have compression. And now you're adding this application layer or higher layer, if you will, another layer of the stack towards data density. Do you think this is going to, have you run the numbers on what kind of percentage or anything like that that customers will see? Absolutely, can I say? Absolutely, Ken. So I'm actually doing in the solution booth, I think 4.30 tomorrow, solution A, the VM world booth, we've got a customer, six flags, theme park operator that doing this test dev case, we saved 90% OPEC efficiency for these guys. So there's some really solid numbers. What was that number again? 90, 90%. That's a big number. Well, it's a huge number. But it's what Vaughn was trying to say, if you start marrying the workflow, if you take their ability to make the storage and the moving the data more efficient and you lever their tool, and then you overlay it with our APIs, we have REST APIs that you can tie into a customer environment. And then we've got a workflow, this workflow engine that we call full stack automation. The customer can start automating a lot of the stuff that they're trying to do, and it's a home run. Yeah, it's really a home run. So let's get a little bit in greater depth here, but not too deep. These capabilities have existed in market for a long time, but the customers had to assemble and build their own scripts and tools. And again, we're not talking just copying of the data. We're giving you an efficiency in the copy data engine running on the flash array. What CataLogic is doing is giving you a single interface, either via portal or API, for the entire orchestration of the entire stack, the test network, the virtual machines, the physical servers, the volume managers, all the way down to the copy of the data. Absolutely. So I'm gonna dive even deeper, Vaughn. What kind of skill set? Be careful. What kind of, yeah, I'll get wet. What kind of skill set does a customer need to have to take advantage of this solution? So that's a beautiful question because it goes back to the synergy between our two companies. We're known for being able to set up storage in under an hour that requires no administrative skill set. Nothing to tune, very much like an iPhone, kind of out of the box. There's no manual. CataLogic's in the same boat. You download an OVA, you're up and running in 30 minutes, you're connected to the pure array at 40 minutes, you're connected to AD in 50 and you're running. You're off to the races. We don't have any boxes, no appliance, versus our competitors out there. We don't have any agents to install, no appliances. It's just, it's the perfect match. Simplistic of running. And through APIs, right? We're getting consistent application, consistent copies of the data sets, right? And we're orchestrating through the built-in infrastructures that already exist, whether we're looking at vSphere or the rest of the ecosystem. So say a customer does their own development and they've got people that know how to use APIs, program for APIs. Will they be able to, will they be any faster or be able to do more with it? Or does it really not matter? Absolutely, what it does, this gets back to the OpEx issue, right? So with our REST APIs, they can tie it in and we've already got a lot of things that are tied in, like some of the development tools out there, Chef, Huppet, BlueMix from IBM. I mean, these are all things that we can kind of work with to complete the environment and allow them to lever his amazing platform. Does that answer your question? I think, yeah, it certainly does. So what about the market for this, right? A happy data management took a while to take off, right? It's one of those things and data management has always been a tough thing and it takes a while for customers to sort of get a, what am I going to say, a group thing, the critical mass of people thinking about it. It looks like you've had some help in the last year with other vendors getting in and popularizing it. You know, EMC has theirs and Commvault, I think is doing something and Veritas is talking about it now, you know, 18 months ago, those were the... Nobody did, but what started it, Mark, and this is, and that's a great question, is what I was alluding to earlier, once Flash comes on the scene and particularly Flash vendors that can do what they do that have got a huge capex savings or OPEC savings for the customer, then you can start working in their workflow and their processes and saving them even more money. What actually is copy data management with Flash storage can becomes almost a have to have versus in the other things that we were doing a year ago, it was a nice to have, what I call a nice to have, right? Because if you start looking at how to save yourself money from an OPEX perspective, you might as well look at how to go all the way and sometimes you can triple the 10 times your savings geometrically by adding the right CDM, what I call enhanced CDM, what our customers sometimes say is, they call us a CDM on steroids, copy data management on steroids, right? That synergies a big thing. Yeah, Mark, if you've looked at the industry historically, what you've seen as storage vendors put out their own homogeneous automation tools, and then you've seen a number of heterogeneous vendors deploy their tools, but they don't want to have any correlation with any hardware vendor. Right. Right, and so as a storage provider, right, and customers are looking to say, well, look, I don't want to get locked in these particular storage provider, right? So that's one aspect. As a storage vendor, we're sitting there saying, we'd like to have greater integration in your ecosystem so we can bubble up our value. Catalogics kind of hit that sweet spot and said, we're going to be heterogeneous, we're going to be multi-platform, and we're going to leverage the channel, right? 100% channel driven, and we're going to leverage the API and the data management ecosystem of the storage vendors. So they've kind of got a perfect storm going on in terms of a technology and market momentum, if you will. Okay, so let's talk about how this solution is going to be delivered. Do you sell it? Do you sell it? Do you sell into pure accounts? You talked about channel. We're going to meet in the channel. We're also talking about doing some more creative things, possibly. For right now, it's a meet in the channel. We think there's enough good networking. The teams are in touch with each other. You know, the value proposition proves itself, right? If somebody, when's it going to be available in another month or so? So there are demonstrations available both in the catalogic and in the pure storage booth here at VMworld. So we would encourage those who are interested in seeing the power of this solution to stop by either booth at any time. We're going to have some speaking sessions in each other's booths as well this week. Absolutely. And we are currently targeting for summer between mid to end September for a GA release. Right. And I need to say one other thing going back to this. The reason this works is because these guys have but one care and they are customer driven, right? They don't have an ego. They are driving to the customer and fulfill the need. Because as he said, it's sometimes hard for a heterogeneous vendor that controls a lot to be welcomed as much as we've been welcomed with this group. It's because they know they want to drive it through the customer and give the best solution in the world to the customer. So on the customer side, you've talked about the perfect storm of services and products. Who's the perfect customer? Who's the optimal customer and something like this? I think the low hanging fruit is any development team that has some requirement where they're taking copies of their current data set and are developing off of that platform. I think that's the low hanging fruit. I think at a more macro level, any organization that says they have a DevOps initiative and particularly if they want to turnkey DevOps platform to begin with and launch ahead versus trying to acquire talent to build their own, this is right within your wheelhouse. Good deal. No brainer. And if people aren't looking at that right now, they're not in this century because everybody's moving to Flash for the primary. Well, all the projections are going forward. They're going off the charts in terms of the growth of Flash and what's going to happen the next three or five years. So what's changed with Flash, where four years ago, Pure had to kind of get over the hurdle of the price barrier for Flash, right? And we did that with industry leading data reduction that's still 2x better than the rest of the industry. But as Flash prices keep coming down, not what you're seeing as a pivot around value is around making multiple data sets. I mean, if you get into a Dev use case and I'm making 10 copies of a data footprint that's already reduced by 5x, and you're getting to a price point that you can't meet with this because you couldn't drive enough performance on the disk. It's just not possible. Well, before I let you go, I want to tell you, it's just disappointing to us that you're not more enthusiastic. So it's really a shame. You were a little depressed today. We had a long night last night. Maybe tomorrow things will pick up. But congratulations on the business venture. And we wish you the best of luck down the road. Thanks for being with us. Thank you guys for having us on. Really enjoyed it. Appreciate it. Thanks. We'll be back with more from VMworld right after this. Here on theCUBE.