 Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Veeamon 2019, brought to you by Veeam. Hello everyone, welcome back to Miami. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverages, day two of our coverage of Veeamon 2019 at the Fontainebleau Hotel in sunny Miami, Dave Vellante with Peter Burst. Trevor Starnes is here, he's the director of systems engineering for Pure Storage. Trevor, great to see you again. Hey, thanks for having me. You're welcome, we've been following Pure since the early days. I remember interviewing Scott Deetson at some SNW way back when, and seeing the ascendancy and the rise. Pure hits escape velocity, goes public. Just been an awesome ride. You guys have really kind of transformed the industry. Started out as the flash play, but now really getting much deeper into sort of data and data strategies and data protection is one of those. So we're here at Veeamon. What are your impressions so far this week? Oh, the conference has been great. A lot of great interactions. Veeam has been an incredibly strong alliance partner for us. The synergies are just incredible because, as we've evolved, as you mentioned, from a singular product in all flash array and disrupting the market there back in the early 2010s, evolving into more of a data platform company and data protections actually turned out to be a great business for us. It's growing incredibly fast and like I said, a lot of great synergies with Veeam. So the systems engineering role has always been a critical part of the sales process. The SES is like, I need an SE. And then you guys will go in, help the sales team really understand what the customer needs. You'll help solve problems. But how was that role to find it pure and how was it evolving in the industry? Yeah, absolutely. And I think similar to our products in the early days, we hired a lot of folks who were storage specialists and we've evolved into having to go far beyond that, right, into the different realms around things like AI, machine learning, data protection, virtualization containers. And so it's definitely evolving. It's challenged us as a company. And we're certainly trying to not maintain a status quo. We want to continue to disrupt and do that in adjacent markets. So how do you work with Veeam just in terms of taking your platform and their software and making a solution that's kind of simple for customers. It's not stove piped, single throat to choke. Describe that whole process. Yeah, yeah. So we recently, earlier this year, maybe it was late last year, we developed some integration with Veeam to where we actually integrate with their universal storage API. So Veeam can control pure storage snapshots which you're probably familiar with, pure snapshots on FlashArray are incredibly powerful. It's a very powerful metadata engine in purity. And which means we can take thousands of snapshots with no performance impact in their near instantaneous. With Veeam, we can instantly integrate that into Veeam backup and data protection workflows. And Veeam can completely control pure storage snapshots both on array and off array, which we'll talk about without having to have a storage administrator log into Pure at all. Okay, and so talk more about how the system plays with your customers. I mean, when you're in with the customer and you're sort of scoping it out, how is that conversation changing is just in terms of, as you say, you went from, okay, here's an array and Flash, now there's all the spectrum of other things that you're doing. What's the data protection conversation like? How does it relate to their digital transformation, their digital business? Where do you guys fit there? Well, operationally, we've seen a huge trend from customers that a decade or so ago, you saw the trend of going from disk to disk to tape. Tape for long-term archive. What we're actually here at the conference really promoting is this idea of the next big wave of evolution there, which is we see customers going from Flash to Flash for the first step in backup and then instead of off-site tape going to the cloud. So that's been an incredibly successful message for us early on. And so that actually started with, I mentioned the pure Flash array snapshot integration, but actually moving those snapshots off of Flash array to our second product, which is FlashBlade. FlashBlade's a really unique product. It was originally designed with the next big wave of innovation in mind around things like containers and deep learning where high amounts of bandwidth and parallelism are just absolutely critical. Billions of small files, it just so happens that actually caters really well to backup performance and restore performance. Backing up to disk was a big success for a lot of customers, but what they're seeing now and what we're seeing as workloads continue to get more diverse is that there's a restore challenge. So we have customers that are backing up to disk, but they're seeing massive challenges around getting their data back and getting back online. The recovery time objective pressures from the business are becoming more and more important. This actually started for us in the SaaS industry where one of the world's largest SaaS providers out in Silicon Valley had to do an increasing amount of restores and they actually started using FlashBlade as what we call a rapid restore platform. So they're able to near instantaneously restore these databases and what we've found is nearly across the board and all other industries that there's a large number of customers that have that challenge. More so than we find going to market with FlashBlade for like AI, for example. There's not as many people doing that yet. We've been successful in the ones that are, but across the board, healthcare, legal, high tech, you name it, there's a restore problem. And with FlashBlade, we've seen people go, for example, one of our really other customers outside of the SaaS world is in healthcare space. The industry's number one cancer center in the world is actually leveraging it for rapid restore for databases, but they're also doing some other neat things because FlashBlade's not a purpose-filled backup appliance, it can be used for other things. Anything file and object works great, so what you can do is you can combine the use cases and that's been really powerful from a TCO perspective. You might say, customers might say, well, Flash is too expensive, but if there's a restore problem, that may not matter. And then if you combine it with other use cases, we call that our data hub story. It's even more powerful and the TCO becomes really attractive, so that healthcare using it for packs and rapid restore, there's other industries like the online gaming industry, like I mentioned high tech, so that data hub message has been really powerful. That's returning an asset and asset leverage. Oh, absolutely, and one of the things I'd like to talk about, Trevor, is relating to that, is there are a lot of ways of describing some of those fundamentals, some of those really contingent and essential changes that are taking place in the industry today, but one of them clearly is FlashLaws is to move from a data storage orientation of record and save the data to one of deliver the data to new applications. Pure has been at the vanguard of that and has seen a lot of these new use cases. As we think about return on data assets and whatnot, how is your visibility into those new use cases changing Pure's perspective and Pure customer's perspective on data protection? Because it seems like the notion of data protection, which has been around for a long time, is starting to fray, as these new use cases say, it's not just protecting about what's happened, it's setting me up for doing new types of work in the future. So how is Pure seeing that, how is that conversation about data protection changing because of some of the drive that Pure's got in the marketplace? Yeah, and I think the first step is, hey, I can back up my data, but if I can't use it, it's kind of worthless, right? So being able to use that data much, much more rapidly, but also repurposing that. This idea of data silos has been around IT for years, and with FlashBlade and that data hub story, we're really breaking down those silos to be able to say, hey, the same platform that you're storing your data protection data, as well as other data, it's the same platform that I might be able to spin that data up. So Veeam's got a great story with data labs where you can actually spin up these virtual environments and run, and on a purposeful back of device, it's questionable if that actually works, right? And having to pull that back over the network to another silo with FlashBlade and the data hub, it makes that realistic, and getting so much more out of the data, delivering that back to the business, and actually being able to deliver these key insights into what my data is actually doing and be able to make better business decisions is what the output would be. Do you see kind of an analogy of a relationship between previous to now where storage was about persisting data, and therefore it was about protecting what has happened to Flash being about delivering data to new applications, and therefore there's some new concept. Our customer is pushing you guys towards something that goes, that's bigger than data protection. I mean, it's something that we're struggling with, and a lot of the customers that we have are struggling with. How do I talk about what these services are when I'm spinning up Kubernetes clusters like that? That's right. So is there some new conversation that you're starting to see? You guys were one of the first to have a conversation about data, you know, Flash data for AI. Are you starting to have conversations about, you know, deliver data something more than protection? Yeah, near real time, the ability to spin up development environments, CI, CD pipelines, all of those things. We actually have a product that, as a peer customer, you get as inclusive of a maintenance contract called Peer Service Orchestrator, which can actually help provision end-to-end container environments, and being able to repurpose that data for, like I said, test dev, development pipelines, and those kind of things. And we're also, as you've probably heard, we're tying that into a cloud strategy as well. So there's products we've announced, Cloud Block Store on the Block Storage side, as well as Object Engine, which is a product we haven't talked about yet, which enables customers to truly see the benefit of a hybrid cloud scenario. So they may be developing an application on-prem and pushing it to the cloud or vice versa, and we're actually going to give them that capability to do that. Talk more about Object Engine, specifically what it is. I mean, I'm inferring Object Store and, you know. Object Engine, you know, you hear the name, it could mean a number of things, but clearly it has to do with Object Storage. So, Object Engine was actually a technology that was born in the cloud. So it was a cloud-native application that was really designed around data reduction for cloud workloads. What we've done, as part of that product, it folded into purers. We've actually, ironically, that's not what we used it for first. We developed an appliance, and we call that our Object Engine appliance. That's just phase one. So what Object Engine delivers is a highly scalable, highly performant data reduction platform. We're starting with backup and data protection workloads. So Veeam obviously does their inline data reduction technology. If the customer finds that they need something more scalable, they can actually leverage Object Engine to do that, and then FlashBlade on the back end as the initial tier. And then the future vision for Object Engine is that it's going to give you the cloud connectivity to be able to say, okay, I want to automatically push my backup workloads from an archive perspective out to the cloud. We're starting in AWS. We're going to do Azure and others as well. So the next big wave of that that you'll see is actually running Object Engine in the cloud in a hybrid scenario and be able to move those workloads back and forth. So kind of envision the near-term backup and restores. Most of the restores happen within a week or two on-prem, and then 100% also stored in the cloud for more long-term archive. So that really completes the flash-to-flash-the-cloud story, but we're not going to stop with backup workloads either. And where's your sort of value add in that equation, and where's Veeam, and where's the connection points there? Good question, good question. So I think, again, I mentioned Veeam obviously has their in-line data reduction technology. Where we insert Object Engine is really one of two reasons. One, if our data reduction offsets the cost of the whole solution without using it, with just using Veeam's data reduction, because it's a hardware offload essentially. And then the second one is, if you need a large amount of data that you want to push out to the cloud as our kind of phase two of that product. Right. Okay, I want to ask you about the partnership from the standpoint of values. Sure. The values of pure, you guys are a fun company, you love orange, you go to pure accelerator, everybody's wearing orange, you come here, everybody's wearing green. So you seem to be kind of birds of a feather, but we just talked about value add. What about the values of your company and sort of how are you guys getting along? Yeah, we're getting along great. I like I said, there's a lot of synergies from a solution standpoint, but just from a go-to-market standpoint, trying to be a disruptive company, a disruptive technology, disruptive solutions, what is that next thing, right? Not being a me too player in the market. And so I think we share a lot of those same values, but also customer success. We really focus on the outcomes and the happiness of the customer. And that's down in the core of our engineering. Same thing with Veeam. Where I think we can really help each other is, Veeam has a big push right now to move up market into the enterprise. And we feel like we can help Veeam in that respect. We've been very successful in enterprise. And likewise, Veeam obviously has a major presence in Amia and that's a market that is growing for us substantially, but we've got a lot of upside. So we really think we can help each other there. And I actually failed to mention the very first object engine flash blade sale we did was with Veeam. So, it was just natural from that perspective. And I think pre-object engine and before this whole idea of rapid restore really took off with flash blade. It was just the flash array protection and even that's still pretty new, but now it's much more comprehensive. So we've got common competitors as well. And pure accelerates coming up in September. It's in Austin, your hometown, right? It's my hometown of Austin, Texas. So yeah, we'll be there September 15th to 18th and we're going to be talking about a ton of stuff. Obviously flash to flash to cloud, but well beyond storage as well. So even if, you know, don't think of it as just a storage conference. It's always fun event. We've covered now, I think twice. This will be our third year. So in Austin, it's a great, great town. And looking forward to that. Trevor, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Loved it, loved it. Thanks for having me. You're very welcome. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. Right after this short break, I'm Dave Vellante with Peter Burr's VeeamON 2018 from Miami. Right back.