 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of VMworld 2020, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2020, our 11th year doing the show and happy to welcome back to the program, one of our CUBE alums, somebody that's going to VMworld longer than we have been doing it for theCUBE. So Vaughn Stewart, he is the Vice President of Technology Alliances with Pure Storage. Vaughn, nice to see you, how you doing? Hey, Stu, CUBE, thanks for having me back. I miss you guys, I wish we were doing this in person. Yeah, we always, we were in person, but as we've been saying all this year, we get to be together even while we're apart. So we looked you on little screens and things like that rather than bumping into each other at some of the after parties or the coffee shops all around San Francisco. So Vaughn, obviously Pure Storage, long, long, long partnership with VMware. I think back the first time that I probably met with the Pure team in person, it probably was around Moscone, having a breakfast, having a lunch, having a briefing or the like. So just give us the high level, I know we've got a lot of things to dig into, Pure and VMware, how's the partnership going these days? Partnership is growing fantastic. Pure invests a lot of engineering resources in programs with VMware, particularly the VMware design partner programs for VVols, container native storage, et cetera. The relationship is healthy, the business is growing strong. I'm very excited about the investments that VMware is making around VMware Cloud Foundation as a replatforming of what's going on on-prem to help better enable hybrid cloud and to support Tanzu and Kubernetes platforms. So a lot going on at the infrastructure level that ultimately helps customers evolve to adopt cloud native workloads and applications. Wonderful, well, a lot of pieces to unpack that. Of course, Tanzu, big piece of what they're talking about, but let's start, you mentioned VCF. You know, what is it on the infrastructure side that is kind of driving your customer adoption these days and some of the latest integrations that you're doing? Yeah, you know, VCF has really caught the attention of our mid to large or mid to enterprise size customers. The focus around, as I use the phrase, replatforming is probably not what VMware would phrase, but the focus on simplifying the lifecycle management, giving you a greater means to connect to the public cloud. I don't know if you're aware, but all VMware public cloud offerings have the VCF framework in terms of architectural framework. And so now bringing that back on-prem, allowing customers on a per workload domain basis to extend to a hybrid cloud capability, it's a really big advancement from kind of the base vSphere infrastructure, which architecturally hasn't had a significant advancement in a number of years. What's really big around VCF, besides the hybrid connectivity, is the couple of new tools, STDC manager and vSphere lifecycle manager, these tools can actually manage the infrastructure from bare metal up to workload domains. And then from workload domains, you're now handing off to consider it like delegated vCenter servers, right? So the owner of a workload, if you will. And then that person can go ahead and provision virtual machines or containers based on whatever is required to run their workloads. So for us, the big gain of this is that the advancement in the VMware management, they are bringing their strength in providing simplicity and end-to-end hardware to application management to disaggregated architectures, where the focus of that capability has been with HCI over, say, the past five or six years. And so this really helps close that last gap, if you will, and completes a 360-degree view of providing simplified management across dissimilar architecture, and it's consistent and it's standardized by VMware. So HCI, disaggregated architecture, public cloud, it all operates the same. So Vaughn, you made a comment about not a lot of changes. If I remember our friends at VMware, they made a statement, vSphere 7 was the biggest architectural change in over a decade, of course, bringing in Kubernetes, it's a major piece of the Tanzu discussion. Pure, your team's been pretty busy in the Kubernetes space too, recent acquisition of Portworx to help accelerate that. Maybe let's talk a little bit about cloud native, what you're hearing from your customers. And yeah, like Dave Vellante had a nice interview with the Pure and Portworx CEOs, give the VMworld audience a little bit of an update as to where you all fit in the Kubernetes space. Yeah, and actually there was a lot that you shared, they're kind of connecting the VCF piece through to vSphere 7, a lot of changes there in driving into Tanzu and containers. So maybe we're going to jump around here a bit, but look, we're really excited. We've been working with VMware, but in addition to all of our application partners, you are seeing nearly every traditional enterprise application being re-platformed to support containers. I'd love to share with you more details, but there's a lot of NDAs I'd be breaking in that. But the way for enterprise adoption of containers is right upon us. And so the timing for VMware Tanzu is ideal. Our focus has always been around providing a rich set of data services, one that provides faster provisioning, simplified fleet management, and the ability to move that container and those data services between different clouds and different cloud platforms, be it on-prem or in the public cloud space. We've had a lot of success doing that with the Pure Service Orchestrator, version 6.0 enables CSI compliant persistent storage capabilities, and it does support Tanzu today. The addition, or I should say the acquisition of Portworx is really interesting because now we're bringing on an enhanced set of data services that not only run on a pure storage, storage products, but runs universally regardless of the storage platform or the cloud architecture. The capabilities within Portworx are above and beyond what we had in PSO. So this is a great expansion of our capabilities and ultimately we want to help customers, whether they want to do containers solely on Tanzu or if they're going to mix Tanzu with say Amazon EKS or they've got some department that does development on OpenShift, whatever it might be. You know, the focus of storage vendors is obviously to help customers make that data available on these platforms through a consistent control plane. Yeah, Vaughn, it's a great acquisition, think a nice fit. Anybody that's been talking to Pure the last year or so, you've been, how do we take the storage, make it more cloud native, if you will? So you've got code, obviously you've got a great partnership with VMware, but as you said, in Amazon and some of the other hyper clouds, those clouds, those storage services, no matter where a customer is, so that core value, of course, we know is the software underneath it, and that's what Portworx is. So not only Pure's, but other hardware, other clouds and the like. So a really interesting space, Vaughn, you and I have been covering this since the early days of VMware. Hey, this software is kind of a big deal and cloud in many ways is an extension of what we're doing. Let's, I know, we used to joke, how many years was it that VMworld was storage world? There was, talk about like big architectural changes, VVOLs, when that finally came out, it was years of hard work by many of the big companies, including your previous and current employer. What's the latest? My understanding is that there are some updates there, when it comes to the underlying VVOLs, what are the storage people need to know? Yeah, there's a great question, and VMware's always been infrastructure world really, right? Like, it is a showcase for storage, but it's also been a showcase for the compute vendors and every Intel partner. From a storage perspective, a lot is going on this year that should really excite both VMware admins and those who are storage centric in their day-to-day jobs. Let's start with the recent news, VVOLs has been promoted within VCF to be in principle storage for those of you who maybe are unfamiliar with this term principle storage. VMware Cloud Foundation supports any former storage that's supported by vSphere, but SDDC manager, tool that I was sharing with you earlier that really excites large scale organizations around its end-to-end simplicity and management. It had a smaller, less robust support list when it comes to provisioning external storage. And so it had two tiers, principle and secondary. Principle meant SDDC manager could provision and deprovision soup to nuts. So the recent news brings VVOLs, both on Fiber Channel and on Iskazi, up to that principle tier. Pure Storage is a VMware design partner around VVOLs. We are one of the most adopted VVOL storage platforms and we are really leaning in on VCF so we are very happy to see that come to fruition for our customers. Part of why VMware partners with Pure Storage around VCF is they want VCF enabled on any fabric. And some vendors only offer ethernet only forms of connectivity. With Pure Storage, we don't care what your fabric is, right? We just want to provide the data services be it ethernet, Fiber Channel or next generation NVMe over fabric. That last point segments into another recent announcement from VMware, which is the support for NVMe over fabric with NVSphere 7. This is key because NVMe over fabric allows the IO path to move away from a Skazi-based form of communication one to a memory-based form of communication. And this unleashes a new level of performance, a way to better support those business and mission-critical applications or a way to drive greater density into a smaller form factor in footprint within your data center. Obviously fabric upgrades tend to not happen in conjunction with hypervisor upgrades but the ability to provide customers a roadmap and a means to be able to continually evolve their infrastructure non-disruptively is our key there. It would be remiss of me to not point out one kind of orthogonal element which is the new vMotion capabilities that are in vSphere 7. Customers have been tried for a number of years probably from vSphere 4 through 6 to virtualize more performance centric and resource intense applications. And they've had some challenges around scale particularly with the non-disruptive, the ability to non-disruptively move a workload. vMware rewrote vMotion for vSphere 7 so it can tackle these larger, more performance centric workloads. And when you combine that along with the addition of like NVMe over fabric support, I think you are truly at a time where you can say, almost every workload can run on a vMware platform from your traditional tier two consolidation where you started to looking at performance centric AI and machine learning workloads. Yeah, a lot of pieces you just walked through, Vaughn. I'm glad especially the NVMe over fabric piece, just want to drill down one level there. As you said, there's a lot of pieces to make sure that this is fully worked, the standards are done, the software is there, the hardware, the various interconnects there. And then, okay, when's the customer actually ready to upgrade that? How much of that is just, okay, hitting the update button? How much of that is do I need to do a refresh? And we understand that the testing and purchasing cycles there. So, how many customers are you talking to that are like, okay, I've got all the pieces, we're ready to roll, we're implementing in 2020? And what's that roadmap look like for kind of the typical enterprise which I know is a bit of an oxymoron? So we've got a handful, I think that's a fair way to give you a size without giving you an exact number. We've got a handful of customers who have NVME over fabric deployments today. They are not, the deployments tend to be application or workload centric versus ubiquitous across the data center, which I think does bear an opportunity for VMware adoption to be a little bit earlier than across the entire data center because most VMware architectures today are based on top of rack switching, whether that switching is fiber channel or ethernet base, I think the ability to then upgrade that switch, either you've got modern hardware and it just needs a firmware update or you've got to replace that hardware and implement NVME over fabric. I think that's very attractive, particularly that you can do so in a non-disruptive manner with a flash array or with flash stack. We expect to see the adoption really start to take hold in 2021, but you probably won't see large market gains until 2022 or 23. Well, that's super helpful, Vaughn, especially in a pure storage, you've got customers that have some of the most demanding performance environments out there, so they are some of the early adopters that you would expect to go into adopting this new technology. All right, I guess last piece, listening to the keynote, looking at all the announcements that they have, VMware obviously has a big push into the cloud native space. They've made a whole lot of acquisitions. We touched on it a little bit before, but what's your take as to what you're hearing from your customers, where they are with that adoption and to really modernizing and accelerating their businesses today? I think for the majority of our customers, and again, I would consider it more kind of commercial or mid-market centric up through enterprise. They've, particularly the enterprise, they've adopted cloud native technologies, particularly in developing their own internal or customer-facing applications, so I don't think the technology's new. I think where it's newer is this replatforming of enterprise applications, and I think that's what's driving the timeline for VMware. We have a number of pivotal deployments that run on pure, very large-scale pivotal deployments that run on pure, and hopefully, as your audience knows, pivotal is what VMware Tanzu has been rebranded as. So we've had success there. We've had success in the test and development and in the web-facing application space, but now this is a broader initiative from VMware, supporting enterprise apps along with the cloud native disaggregated applications that have been built over the last, say, five to 10 years, but to provide it through a single management plane. So I'm bullish. I'm really bullish. I think they're in a unique position compared to the rest of our technology partners. They own the enterprise virtualization real estate, and so their ability to successfully add cloud native applications to that, I think is a powerful mix. For us, the opportunity is great. I want to thank you for focusing on the fact that we've been able to deliver performance, but performance is found in any flash product, and it's not to demote our performance by any means, but when you look at our customers and what they purchase us in terms of their repeat purchases, it's around simplicity, it's around the native integration with VMware and the extending of that value prop through our capabilities, whether it's through the end-to-end infrastructure management, through data protection, extending into hybrid cloud, that's where pure storage customers fall in love with pure storage. And so it is a combination of performance, simplicity, and ultimately, economics. As we know, economics drive most technical decisions, not the actual technology itself. Well, Vaughn Stewart, thank you so much for the updates. Congratulations on all the new things that are being brought out in the partnership. Thank you, Stu. Appreciate being on theCUBE. Big shout out to VMware. Congratulations on VMworld 2020. Look forward to seeing everybody soon. All right, and stay tuned for more coverage, VMworld 2020, I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE.