#211 - Pure//Launch - Announcing Fusion and Portworx Data Services (Sponsored)

In this week’s sponsored episode, Chris chats to Alex McMullan, CTO International at Pure Storage. The discussion covers Pure//Launch and today’s announcements of two SaaS solutions – Fusion and Portworx Data Services. Fusion is a new SaaS management plane for administering and optimising Pure Storage hardware and software products, including FlashArray, FlashBlade and Cloud Block Store. Portworx Data Services enables customers to deploy and operate managed databases using the PX-Enterprise platform. Together, these two solutions provide an insight into the next stage of evolution and growth for Pure Storage.

There’s a lot to unpack in this week’s podcast. Alex starts with some background on why customers are demanding a more cloud-like consumption model from vendors. The conversation then deep-dives into the details of Fusion and Portworx Data Services, finishing with a summary of the new solutions and how they highlight the next growth decade for the company.

You can learn more about today’s announcements through the following links:

Elapsed Time: 00:52:17

Timeline

00:00:00 – Intros
00:01:46 – What is //Launch?
00:02:45 – How are customers’ requirements evolving?
00:05:00 – Cloud has changed the demand model for customers
00:06:20 – What are Fusion and Portworx Data Services?
00:08:06 – Both new offerings are SaaS
00:08:42 – Digging down into Fusion
00:11:00 – Fusion optimises the Pure Storage “fleet” of storage platforms
00:14:15 – What features in Pure products enable better SRM?
00:18:00 – Fusion uses Storage Classes and Protection Policies
00:19:30 – How will Fusion mix multiple commercial business models?
00:22:45 – What is the charging structure for Fusion?
00:24:30 – What backend support work is required for Fusion?
00:26:15 – Observability is a big part of Fusion
00:28:40 – What is Portworx Data Services?
00:31:45 – What will the Portworx Data Services “experience” be?
00:36:30 – PDS enables “complex” storage deployments
00:39:00 – Portworx Data Services uses a local management “Operator”
00:40:40 – PDS will aid DBAs, not put them out of a job!
00:42:15 – How will Pure1, Fusion and Portworx Data Services integrate?
00:44:10 – Will Portworx Data Services work in private and public cloud?
00:46:30 – Hardware is not going away?
00:51:45 – Wrap Up

Transcript

[bg_collapse view=”button-orange” color=”#72777c” icon=”arrow” expand_text=”Show More” collapse_text=”Show Less” ]

Speaker 1:
This is Storage Unpacked. Subscribe at storageunpacked.com.

Chris Evans:
This is Chris Evans recording the Storage Unpacked Podcast. And this week, it’s just me. Or rather, just me with a guest, actually. And I’m joined today by Alex McMullen from Pure Storage. Hi Alex, how are you?

Alex McMullen:
Hey, Chris. Good morning. Looking forward to the conversation.

Chris Evans:
Absolutely. So we’re here because today you’ve had a big announcement from the company, something that’s called //Launch on all the publicity that we’ve seen, which is a great name for me to try and remember every single time. However, it’s quite a big launch and we’re going to dig into that in a second and find out more. But before we do that, could you just give people a bit of background about yourself? And then we’ll chat about what you’re actually announcing today.

Alex McMullen:
Sure. Morning, everybody. My role at Pure is fairly an interesting one. I’ve been here now just on seven years. My job title as it stands is CTO international. And I represent the office of the CTO outside Mountain View along with a very talented team of folks in all of the theaters. And our really big push for this year has been to get the modern messaging out around Pure. We’re really focused on making sure that customers understand why Pure is doing what it’s doing, but also more importantly, why we believe that’s relevant in the hugely rapidly moving technology world that we love to be part of these days.

Chris Evans:
Brilliant. Today we’re here because there’s a big launch event. It’s not a product launch event. It’s actually been very interesting watching some of your pre-event media saying, this isn’t about new hardware or new boxes and things like that, it’s a different approach. So what exactly is Launch about and what are you, very briefly, going to launch or have you launched today?

Alex McMullen:
Yeah. So this is super Tuesday for us. It’s going to be quite interesting to see how the market wants to respond actually because traditionally, we’ve come up from that storage control plane, if you will, since 2009 and we’ve iterated our product line since then. But really, this is our first foray into the real disclosure of Pure’s actual capabilities. So this is very much a focus for us on software as a service on modern cloud agility, but also really solving for the problems of the 21st century, which many of our previous competitors even have not quite gotten to that point yet. So this is our SaaS control plane for a different set of our product lines and we’ll get into those details as we go forward.

Chris Evans:
Fantastic. For me, that first piece, I think is quite interesting. The fact that we’re talking SaaS here and this seems to be a big part of the way that the market is changing in general. And I think this is worth touching on very briefly because it’s something that you must be seeing with customers all the time who want to try and evolve their business, not to be thinking about the management of infrastructure, which, who wants to spend all that time doing that? And more about allowing that to be translated into a service model. So what are you seeing out there in the market in terms of what people want and how this has evolved since, like you said, 2009, when the company first was founded?

Alex McMullen:
What we’ve seen in particular since, I guess the creation, even of the iPhone and the App Store back in 2008 is the rise in influence and capability of software developers in every company. And what that’s really driven is the appetite, the ambition for pretty much everyone who is in technology, and some who are not, to go faster, go further and to be more creative, more intuitive but also to give that cloud consumption experience as well as doing it in a more elegant, more simple way.

Alex McMullen:
That’s really what we’ve learned and that’s how Pure has a great track record in terms of not just predicting what customers want in future but also making big and bold bets in getting there in the first place. And of course, we have a track record in doing that in terms of starting with all FlashArrays and then putting data reduction on but more importantly, our Evergreen capabilities and also the concept of having a SaaS portal, which is Pure1, even back in 2014, where you could see the entire fleet status of every Pure device you owned.

Alex McMullen:
And we continue to iterate down since then, in terms of all the clever things we’ve done with creating our own MVME drives, which allows us to be much more agile with use of the medium and then that reusable [inaudible 00:04:16] capability with FlashBlade and FlashArray, of course. But really what you’ve noticed over that time is incremental capability has all being taking us down a path. And really now we’re starting to show the cloud-like economics and cloud-like capabilities that we have in play.

Alex McMullen:
We dealt with Pure as a service last year, utility consumption for the cloud. And now with the acquisition of Portworx, we’re able to solve for that not just in traditional apps but also in any control plane or any public cloud or any hyperscaler with the capabilities that Portworx brings. And that’s really what brings us back to the announcements for today.

Chris Evans:
I think the evolution of the industry is really interesting in the sense that cloud, and by that we mean probably public cloud more than anything else, has driven people to realize that they don’t really have to care about the underlying infrastructure. I think you look back to virtualization in that initial step where people thought, “Ooh, I’m not sure I really want to trust the virtualization layer will do what I need it to do.” Very quickly people were like, “Well, it works, why are we even bothered about this?”

Chris Evans:
Cloud has formed that similar approach for people where initially there was a lot of discussion about whether we could trust the client, but then fairly quickly people realized it was reliable, it was trustworthy. And then I think people question, “Well, why do I need to spend all my time managing this infrastructure when I could have a vendor or somebody else do it on my behalf?” And that, to me seems the story of where we’re headed today with the announcements, which I guess you’re about to tell us.

Alex McMullen:
Yes. I mean, I like that point as well. Of course, if you go back to even the days of RAID, Storage gets bad press for being slow and not particularly creative, but storage did virtualization before any of the other guys, you could probably argue maybe mainframe partitions. But I think if you look at that and going back to the early days of the work that Gibson did and Bianca Schroeder are falling on from that in terms of their liability side, we’ve been very good as an industry in terms of federation, virtualization, leading that technology charge but doing it very quietly. And that’s the ethos and the mindset that Pure has taken forward here. And that’s really what we want to talk about today overall. So how do you want to play this, Chris? Where should we start on all these whole feast?

Chris Evans:
The feast of announcements. Why don’t you just start by giving us a high level view of the main components that have been talked about today?

Alex McMullen:
So the two main things that we’re here to talk about today, firstly, is a SaaS product offering on our existing FlashArray/FlashBlade capabilities. And what that brings us really is a cloud-based portal, which allows you to manage, federate, maintain, monitor and also workload balance. All of your internal workloads within FlashArrays and FlashBlades, but also doing the same thing with Cloud Block Store instances in the public cloud.

Alex McMullen:
So really that’s a big change for us because what’s really happening here is you’re now seeing a control plane running in the public cloud, which is actively managing, monitoring and controlling infrastructure that’s running on-premises or in the public cloud. So that’s a very much a multifaceted from how traditionally we’ve looked at infrastructure, but what we’re doing here is giving that SaaS level experience for fast moving agile, but also very efficient infrastructure.

Chris Evans:
Okay. So that’s the first one.

Alex McMullen:
That’s one. And the second is, doing something even more ambitious on the containerized side. We’re very fortunate with Portworx in that it already had many of these, what I describe as a service capabilities because of its work with all the hyperscalers, but we’re taking that step even further with that same ambition of simplicity, cloud-like consumption and allowing again with a SaaS portal running in the public cloud, to support the ambition of any Kubernetes cluster to automatically deploy and manage a number of SQL and no SQL databases. So it was database as a service for Kubernetes applications. And again, that’s based on what we’ve seen in the market directionally, but also based on what customers are asking us for.

Chris Evans:
Just to qualify and just to make sure that was really clear, both of these are SaaS offerings. So there’s no “New” hardware products here or anything like that. This is all about SaaS, all about service delivery.

Alex McMullen:
Exactly. That’s the ethos. Of course, we’d love you to buy more stuff at the same time, but it’s quite happy to work with your existing deployments and that’s the key thing here. On the Portworx side, we want to remain Switzerland in that whole story. Portworx is software defined storage, and we’re not locking this into Pure platforms. We consciously made the investment decision with Portworx to continue to work with the wider industry and with white boxes and with the hyperscaler hardware.

Chris Evans:
Let’s dig down into Fusion first of all and understand a bit more about that. Now, the name itself gives it away somewhat, doesn’t it? Fusion, the bringing together of a solution that allows you to manage all of your existing, let’s call it storage layer products. I know in some of the presentations that you’ve used, you’re using the idea of a layer cake. I’d never heard of a layer cake by the way, until it was mentioned on the bake off a few years ago. But now I know what a layer cake is, but you’re sort of using this analogy of the layer cake or even just think about things like protocols, like networking, where they have layers already. And at the very bottom here are the physical components like the infrastructure like FlashArray, FlashBlade and Cloud Block Store sitting on the public cloud. So the idea here is to bring these together in a federated manner so that you can actually allow customers to, I guess, abstract, simplify. I’m probably putting words into your mouth. So maybe you could go into a bit more detail as to exactly how this would work.

Alex McMullen:
Yes. So what we’ve really been doing here and building up for the last few years is that series of layers, if you will, which if you want to look at the OSI model, it’s something similar. The lowest level functionality is the hardware platform and the operating system code that runs on that. And what we have been doing is adding those layers accretively, which give us actual layers of functionality over the last few years. Some hardware, some software, but really the big steps forward have been with Pure1 and now with the Fusion product line.

Alex McMullen:
Like many of us in the industry, some of our product naming strategies leave us looking a little perplexed, but I think Fusion is actually one of the ones we’ve got spot on. The way in which that brings that mental image of that molding, that bringing together, the automatic lovely engagement of all those different layers together is very much the focus here. It brings together the whole cloud operating model. It’s a SaaS portal. So there’s no infrastructure or no extra management, no VA to take care of, none of those kinds of things. What it really is doing is taking that one step further.

Alex McMullen:
Our product lines today already have great rest APIs, but we’ve built in those functions like sync replication with our active cluster product to move LUNs. We’ve been doing that for a few years and some customers do that with their own Python scripts today already. But what we’re talking about here is that Fusion layer that listens to the telemetry from all of the Arrays that are already coming back home or new ones as they come forward. And what it does is essentially based on rules that you as a customer want to define in terms of latency or capacity or performance or cost, it will then seek to optimize the deployment of all of those Arrays.

Alex McMullen:
And if we look at that from a high level, what we’re really doing is separating that layer cake in terms of the people that manage the infrastructure and taking that away in a separate layer from the people who want to consume the infrastructure. And what that means is, if you eat cake the way I do, you always eat the icing bit on the top and then get down to the good stuff afterwards. But what this means is, the personas who consume storage via software, whether that’s TBAs or whether that’s data scientists or engineers or researchers, they make a rest API call to get some capacity within their tenant space, because Fusion brings the same concepts as they’re used to having in the public cloud. So it brings you region availability zones, it brings you the policies and classes of the capabilities that are available.

Alex McMullen:
And there are several layers of obstruction in that so that Fusion brings you all the great things you want in terms of, I’m responsible for my own destiny, I’ve got my own piece of capacity that I get to consume how I want and I get billed on that basis depending on the usage profile for me. So it’s cloud-like personas, interacting with concepts that they’re familiar with, but also being done completely with on-premise infrastructure in the first phase and then public cloud, of course, as well.

Alex McMullen:
But all through that SaaS portal, I don’t want to call it AIOps because everybody goes, “Oh really? AIOps, here we go.” But it’s actually based on machine learning experience that we developed over the last few years within Pure1 and Pure1 Meta and giving that whole stratospheric view of, here’s my fleet from an infrastructure management point but more importantly as the developer or the consumer, here’s how I get to use my piece of capacity and here’s how it gets better, faster, cheaper over time. And if I want to move the policies or change the policies, that all magically happens behind the scenes going to the higher capacity platforms or new protocols as they’re added, et cetera. So that’s the 10,000 foot view, I guess, Chris, where do you want to go?

Chris Evans:
I’d just like to point out some really interesting things within this. First of all, probably 10, 15 years ago, I’ve worked at a large, let’s call it a large financial organization, probably one of the ones that is the largest in the US at the moment. And we spent a lot of time trying to work out how we were going to do deployments. And even then when we looked at some of the SRM tools that were floating around in those days, that were pretty average, most we’ve never really had any SRM tools that have really done the job properly. But most of the time it was fairly obvious that you had consumers who were sitting at, let’s call it, above the line, who wanted to actually just come in, use resources and needed an API that was very focused on their ability to actually request and use those resources.

Chris Evans:
But then you had people, let’s call it, below the line, who were the admins who were sitting there thinking, “Well, I’ve got to make sure there’s enough capacity that I’m deploying stuff when I need it, I need to be able to block out the Arrays that might be being decommissioned so people can’t keep allocating on them but I don’t want to do that in a manual fashion, I want to try and automate this.” And what you’ve described in the initial implementation here at Fusion is exactly that thing that we’ve been trying to do for probably 10 to 15 years and hasn’t been possible to do. So why do we think that we’re going to manage to do that now? What has changed within the product set? What’s allowed us to get to that point where in fact, these types of SRM tools are going to actually work.

Alex McMullen:
A number of things to touch on there, lots of good food for thought on that side. We don’t really see Fusion by the way as what you would call an SRM layer, this is more of a federation. I don’t want to get into Star Trek analogies this early, but I’m sure lots of people will be joining the dots there. Really what we’re talking about here is an intelligence layer, if you will, which allows a presentation layer for consumers and a management layer for the infrastructure managers, the data center owners, those kinds of folks too. So we’re not losing sight of that.

Alex McMullen:
What really jumps out here is that Fusion leverages a very high capability set of products in a very thoroughly implemented rest API, which themselves are concepts that we’re selling. I was used to, as we should have done. Back in the day things that popped up, we had various virtualization capabilities, everybody from Hitachi and VSP and USP, and IBM with SBC and the B-series. Even down to things like EMC ViPR as well, but they all tried to minimize and standardize the level of capability on the products they sat in front of.

Alex McMullen:
Fusion is the antithesis of that in terms of, it leverages the full capabilities of the platforms, hardware and software that it sits in front of. The capability to move LUNs around between Arrays without anybody noticing. The ability to move from one class of device to another, from FlashArray//X to C and to FlashBlade. Those are things that nobody else in the industry can do even today. So what Fusion really is doing is bringing in best of breed. Of course, we have a view on why that is, to the customer personas and allowing them simply to do what they want to do. It comes back to that simplicity messaging, the cloud-like messaging.

Alex McMullen:
Nobody wants to get into conversations about LUNs and zoning and the number of paths and port over subscription. Those are conversations are no relevant anymore in the public cloud ecosystem. So this is very much about the simplicity, the cloud-like consumption, and Fusion will continue to add those capabilities. We already have things like monthly billing, those kind of integrations with Prometheus and Grafana. So it is fully modern in terms of everything from monitoring to observability, which is a very much a growing trend as well there. So we look at Fusion really as the intelligence layer, rather than an SRM, because I think in terms of ambition is much more broad and much more aggressive than that.

Chris Evans:
The term SRM is massively loaded from history-

Alex McMullen:
Oh, yes.

Chris Evans:
…in terms of the way that we think about it. And in some respects, that was a deliberate, let’s call it a deliberate ploy to use the term SRM there because people will be familiar with that and not necessarily be thinking how that translates into something higher. Clearly one of the things that we’re definitely very familiar with inside the cloud or I think even just through things like virtualization is, the concept of policy. And when you look at policy and when you look at things like storage catalogs or any sort of catalog that you build for resource consumption, you start realizing that you actually need to abstract away from the physical infrastructure that sits underneath and start talking about things that are more application-focused and business-focused. So how does that fit in with the way that Fusion is been deployed?

Alex McMullen:
Believe it or not, the conversations around CMDBs and ITL were actually a formative part of these discussions. Really what Fusion is delivering from a consumer perspective is two things. It’s storage classes and protection policies. And when you marry those together in whichever combination you wish, you then are able to define a series of use cases that are actually relevant for every business, not just traditional things like production and development, but also different capabilities by region or by cost profile. Maybe it’s cheaper in Azure than it is on-premises today so I’ll have all my backups, snapshots being redirected there, for example. But really this is very much that policy based method of consumption of the future.

Alex McMullen:
The persona that’s actually funding and driving utilization of devices in this use case, isn’t interested in infrastructure. They’re interested in the capabilities that it can bring to help them in their day job. And that’s really where we see Fusion being so powerful because it allows the storage and the admin and the data center personas to define the capabilities of the classes the stores are willing to offer in every region, in every availability zone. And then they also in conjunction with whether it’s your internal compliance team or their legal team, they define protection policies that are also available. And then by marrying the two of those in the different classes of storage, Fusion allows customers to pick and choose the ones that suit their business requirement. And that I think is a very clear, simple, but also hugely powerful message.

Chris Evans:
Absolutely, I agree. Now, imagine I’m a customer, I come along to you, and I’m a customer who, as of today, when you’re doing this launch, I’ve maybe bought a few products from you and I’ve got them in the data center. And maybe I’ve started to look at the idea of maybe taking things as a service and not actually buying the hardware. How am I going to go forward with the idea of Fusion with this mix of different technologies that some might be owned, if you’d want to use that term, some might be actually just a consumption based model. How’s this going to all fit in to allow me to, A, balance all of that out and make sure I’m not under-using my own resources, but I guess work towards that transition that says, eventually at some point I want to get to a fully service model. How’s that going to work with Fusion from today?

Alex McMullen:
I guess if you’re a Pure customer and thank you for your business, obviously, you’ll already be familiar with things like non-disruptive updates and hopefully you’ve done an Evergreen cycle because once you’ve done an Evergreen upgrade, that’s when customers really start to get why Pure is different. It’s that my RA is three years old. Oh, hang on. Now, it’s really new again and nobody noticed. So that perpetual or long-term depreciation cycle of 10, 15 years really has changed that game.

Alex McMullen:
But the real conversion theory we’re talking about here is that the power of combination of Evergreen and Fusion is that, if a customer wants to run future purchases as a utility, that’s fine. If you want to run existing hardware as is without further charge, then that’s also fine. And in further waves of the product, will actually allow you to have part of the Array or series of Arrays in the Fusion persona and some of those in the traditional personas. So the Fusion software only manage proportions of the Arrays, and that’s how we’ll retrofit it into existing deployments where let’s say the Array is 90% full, then maybe Fusion will manage 5% until you want to migrate things away or move them around to make more space.

Alex McMullen:
So the great thing about Pure software flexibility is, we’re able to cope with a whole range of the different commercial challenges around. And quite honestly, if a customer wants to with their existing fleet, convert all of that into utility-based running and purchasing, we have a financial structure to do that too. So there’s no lost investment. Pure is very proud of its long-term and longstanding customers and we’ve always been very focused on maintaining the same level of capability with them as we have with new customers. And those terribly old cliched adverts of brand new customers only. That’s very much the antithesis of Pure’s view of the world. So people with the deployments they have will be able to have partly or all in Fusion if they wish, and then go forward with more traditional CapEx purchases or on a utility basis as well. It’s completely up to them.

Chris Evans:
Brilliant. I really wanted to just emphasize that because I think in the way that we’re moving forward, it’s very easy for people to just look at the technology view of this. But in reality, we’re moving further away from the technology view. Although the technology’s important, it’s becoming more hidden, shall we say, more behind the scenes, more going to potentially be managed by companies like yourselves.

Chris Evans:
So what’s going to be more upfront is going to be the business relationship, is going to be the consumption model, is the cost management from the business and the customer to understand how they actually can best use the resources available but also come to you and say, “Well, what’s the best route forward as I evolve the fleet of technology I’ve got?” So how will customers be charged for using Fusion? Will it become part of their existing Pure1 that they get for free? Or is this going to be additionally charged? How do they optimize what they can be paying?

Alex McMullen:
We’ll finalize the pricing structure once we complete the early access program. In the early days, that will be something we’re actually most interested in talking to customers about. Are they interested in doing it on a per device basis, on a per gig per month basis or some combination of the two? I think what I will say right now, I’ll be confident in stating that whichever way we go with it, customers and existing Pure customers will be happy about that. It’s really one of the things that we find most interesting about the discussion is, how do customers want to be charged for this capability? We’re happy to do either at this point in time.

Chris Evans:
Okay. And we’ll wait to see what that turns out to be then. I know that we’re talking today and today’s the announcement point for all of these products, but there’ll be an early access program and eventually there’ll be a general availability at some point. Early access is where we’re going to be starting first, isn’t it? For a few months I see.

Alex McMullen:
Yes. This is a very sophisticated piece of software with lots of different components. Some containerized, some web front-end, some on-prem. So it is one of the things we want to get completely right and because obviously with the security aspects in terms of control from the public cloud within the perimeter of our customer base, we want to make sure that link is also 100% perfect. So it’s a very structured EAP, early access program that we’ll be starting. In fact, it’ll be in two waves. The first wave is more likely to be the Portworx Data Services side, which we’ll talk about in a moment, but we anticipate both the programs will complete before the end of the year. And then we will launch them early next year.

Chris Evans:
Great. I just want touch on one little thing before we dive into PDS, if you want to call it. Partition data set, which is all I ever see when I see PDS. That shows how old I am. And that’s really to just talk about the backend work that you obviously have had to put in to make this work. It’d be good to understand where Fusion will be running, because I think people even though it’s a SaaS offering, will have reservations about understanding where that was sitting. But secondly, just to understand how much additional work you have to now have going on in the background with these new services, in order to be able to make sure you can run them 24 hours a day, be responsive to customers and so on and in a global environment where people could have equipment that’s in every time zone around the world. So what’s changed within Pure to get you to that point?

Alex McMullen:
I think the biggest, I guess, change of the way we look at the world has been in terms of the transition into effectively an SRE mindset for not just the dev team, but also the support teams. Because obviously there’s lots of new concepts that they have to learn as part of this whole Fusion layer. So our focus has been primarily on the machine learning, the analytics side of things, the telemetry, and that transition from Pure1 being primarily a monitoring aspect to now being not just observability and predicting the future, but also in terms of active control of devices over a network.

Alex McMullen:
So the way we’ve looked at this is, we already know the way that the Array behaves in phones home telemetry and things like that. So that’s all taken care of but the aggregation of that into what’s happening within an availability zone, or in fact, even a region for those layers, as well as seeing the plan pipeline of data movement that’s being intended by Fusion as part of this workload balancing or new workload deployments, all those factors have made us focus a lot more on the observability side of the house. And that’s really what’s being, for me most interesting is watching that change in shape for engineering, moving to faster merges, moving to that focus on security of links.

Alex McMullen:
The key thing for it is obviously, whilst the application, the SaaS portal layers run in public cloud, it needs to be able to maintain those controls. So we have a focus on making sure the application remains available. If we did lose a number of cloud regions, then obviously customers won’t be able to make changes. They’ll be able to see what’s happening and the current connectivity will continue to remain, but until the cloud then comes back, they’d obviously be without the ability to make any more changes. So we have to factor those aspects in.

Alex McMullen:
It’s become a much more worldwide challenge I think Chris, in summary. It’s very much more a global 24/7 picture. We’re now focusing on much more of a life lesson in terms of how containerized apps work in multi-region basis and of course the security aspects that go with that given the way the world is focused over the last 18 months, I guess, in terms of supply chain and ransomware and zero day disclosures. So there are many more things for us to think about but that’s just a quick broad sense of some of the things we’ve now taken on board as part of it.

Chris Evans:
Great. I think this is a nice little segue actually in terms of a transition there. But I think when you talk about that ability to be able to make changes or do things to the infrastructure, I would suggest that as you head forward, those sort of changes are not necessarily going to be happening at that physical hardware level very often. And part of the reason for that is that you’ve started to obstruct up certain features into things like Portworx and the Portworx platform. So rather than having a high churn on things like creating new volumes and LUNs and restructuring the data, a lot of those services are being pushed up to a slightly higher layer and we start talking about that next layer up in our layer cake, or maybe a few layers up where actually the infrastructure might be more stable, more static, but actually other pieces start doing that work. And this leads us into the discussion about Portworx and Portworx Data Services. So I would hope that most people know that you acquired Portworx last year, or the year before. I can’t remember the exact date.

Alex McMullen:
Last year.

Chris Evans:
Last year. Gosh, I forgot where we are in terms of [inaudible 00:28:19].

Alex McMullen:
Yeah, you lose a year here and there, don’t you?

Chris Evans:
You’re not kidding. Yeah, you certainly do. Obviously you acquired Portworx, Portworx is a container attached solution or a obstruction layer at the contender layer for storage. What is PDS?

Alex McMullen:
PDS is our second SaaS product announcement of the day, and really it’s that SaaS layer to deploy database as a service within containerized applications, which are managed by Kubernetes. So think about the next level of challenges. As you said Chris, Portworx itself is software-defined storage for containers, and it already has a number of very sophisticated capabilities. Some of which, frankly, we’re bringing into Fusion as a reverse segue. So it knows today how to do workload balancing, how can we do data movement, how can we do again, predicting for the future.

Alex McMullen:
And some of that is being driven of course, by the Kubernetes cluster itself. But really what Portworx Data Services here is bringing to the container world is the ability to deploy a range of modern SQL and no SQL databases automatically into a Kubernetes cluster, but also much more importantly, it’s able to fulfill the day two operations that go with that in terms of high availability, backup, restore, protection and a whole range of other things you’ll see as we go forward. So very simply Portworx Data Services database is a savers layer for Kubernetes clusters.

Chris Evans:
Now, I’m really interested in this and the reason I say that is because we’ve been talking about container attached or the software defined storage layer that sits above our hardware for a while. When we first started talking about using things like CSI to administer storage Arrays, it did make me think, well, this isn’t really likely to work very well because the first thing you have a problem with there is that usually, in this type of environment, there’s a higher churn on creating and using volumes. And there would be at the physical layer and the storage platform and most storage platforms just aren’t designed for say, hundreds of LUN creations an hour or even thousands of LUN creations an hour.

Chris Evans:
The Portworx solution has that nice abstraction layer, but it obviously is a lot more than that. And as a result, you now got a situation where you’re building that next layer up, but you’re able to add in those additional features that actually are more application specific. And now you’re deploying the actual applications at the same time.

Alex McMullen:
Yes, very much so. And it’s again an echo of feedback from the customer base, as well as watching how the technology world is changing. One of the great lessons that we saw pretty early on after the Portworx acquisition last September was really the view from some of their big customer deployments. As you said Chris, the rate of change of objects within high-performance Kurbernetes applications, whether that was Royal Bank of Canada or roadblocks, or some of the airlines, it really brought home to us. It was that really you’re adding and deleting thousands of these guys a second. We don’t have a story for that. So it was very much accelerating our own decision to bring Portworx as that layer and have that Portworx capability deployed as standard within Pure devices and that absorbed our CSI functionality. And that’s the way we go forward, because it is very much about embracing the modern requirement and that’s how we got to this point.

Chris Evans:
So exactly what will people be able to do with PDS? Are they going to just be able to pick a database from a list, deploy it and have it just be spun up? What’s the user experience going to look like?

Alex McMullen:
Very simply, Portworx Data Services again, as a SaaS offering, you had a portal which is hosted in the public cloud, which has all the usual Portworx support credentials that allows you to log in. That gives you the availability to register one or more of your communities clusters with the Portworx API. And then by doing so, that allows you to first obviously install the Portworx data service operator, which is where most of the brains lies here. And that will then allow you as that customer to deploy from a curated list of database applications, which are tailored toward a different range of use cases in that containerized world. So we’ll do some for streaming, some productive management, some for time series, some for relational work. And really as a customer, you say, “I want that database, I want it to be called this and I want it to be this capacity.” And then Portworx Data Services does the rest.

Alex McMullen:
What you get back from that is, essentially a connection string in the API, which allows you then inside your app to go and add, modify, delete data in all of those databases. The most important part of this really is though, it’s not so much the deployment because that’s something you can do on a manual basis. But what it does do is, deploy repeatably but also then using that operator technology that we’ve written is the day two side of things. So using the Amazon day zero, day one, day two analogy. The operator itself will actually monitor, maintain and protect the database that you’ve just deployed, which is unique in the industry. I believe that’s an industry first as well.

Alex McMullen:
So it takes care of all of the issues in terms of, oh, it seems to be broken, all right. If it’s a shorter database, do we have the anti-affinity to make sure it’s all running on the same nose. And then backup recovery, it’s one of the biggest challenges in containerized applications today is data protection and that’s all taken care of by PX-Backup, which we’ll come back to also. So it’s not just the deployment, it’s the day two capability. The ongoing again Prometheus metrics, again, with PX-Backup, again with the ongoing, making sure the lights are all still on.

Chris Evans:
This is a really interesting part of our industry I think in that, every time we come up with something new and we use the virtualization example is a good one. So virtualization and then originally Docker, and then Kubernetes as part of this container evolution, if you like. As we look at all of these things, the first thing we say is that they come to the market and people go, “Brilliant. Wow, that’s amazing. That’s great technology.” And then you’ve got to start thinking about, well, actually operationally, how does it fit into the way that I run my business? So I can’t do something unless I can guarantee I can protect the data, I can potentially encrypt the data, I can manage it so that I’ve got high availability and all of these things have a habit of coming along a little bit later on.

Chris Evans:
And I suspect that we’re now in that period where we’re starting to see the adoption of containerized applications, getting to the point where people are saying, “How do I deal with these pieces of the infrastructure? How do I manage the,” as you call them , “The day two pieces?” And certainly I would suspect that most developers really couldn’t care less about having to worry about that if they could avoid it and being able to push that off to a component that actually delivers that as a service means, they can be more focused on what the application does and less focused on managing the infrastructure, hence the reason why we are where we are.

Alex McMullen:
Yes, very much so. And the whole driver for Portworx Data Services going forward as to widen that list of databases that we will support, deploy, manage. The key thing about it is really that one of the really great things about having container registries and having that curated list of images that you can pull down, is it all nicely secure, nicely access controlled, but it’s really that ongoing focus on future challenges, modern problems, today’s developer issue, tomorrow’s data scientist issue. As you say, they just want to deploy whether it’s a Kafka Stream or a Mongo instance to suit their application in that 12 factor mindset of having the database as something over there that’s perhaps not relevant for my application, but I need it, I need to use it.

Alex McMullen:
So the concept of bringing back, for example, the connection string and putting that into the CRD, letting them consume those credentials via the standard community’s APIs. We’re giving them the things in the way they want to be used rather than how the use has evolved over the last 20 years. Again, taking that big step forward in simplification and that standardize, yep, I can use this to do my day job approach rather than the complexity that sits underneath.

Chris Evans:
And to a certain degree, I think you’re effectively moving up the stack, but at the same time, following to a certain degree, the same concepts as you would do if you were consuming physical resources. So if you want to consume physical resources, now you can do that via an API, you can, in your instance, use Portworx to do that and say, “Give me a volume as part of the application starting up.” Now, we’re saying, “Well, I don’t just want the volume. I want a complex piece of storage. I want a piece of storage that actually understands how to manage data to a different type of protocol level.” And this instance, a database protocol. So what you’re actually giving me is, you’re giving me another object for storing data, which is a bit more complex, but actually it’s still requested, managed and delivered to you via an API and then you just consume it from that point onwards.

Alex McMullen:
Yes, very much so. I don’t want to get ahead of myself here, but some of the things, the problems we’re hearing from developers today in terms of, how do I clone that database that I’m working on? How do I wind it back to yesterday? Again, that [inaudible 00:37:11], I guess modernization of CI pipelining, those are the sort of things we’re looking at now, how do you manipulate a stateful set into something that can be used in exactly that way? Those are all the problems we’re looking at next.

Alex McMullen:
But the focus for today is on bringing together that ruthless simplicity that Pure is famous for, but allowing incredibly capable product like Portworx, which has a number of enterprise features already and it can do data move and data migration, and it can do snapshots already to bring that up a layer to solve database problems and consumer problems as well of course. That’s really the big focus. And that’s why the abstracting of all this into that SaaS layer, that top layer on the layer cake, if you will, that’s what really brings it all home and smooths over. Well, let’s be honest. There are still some cracks underneath in terms of Kurbernetes manageability and simplicity and security as well. But what we’re doing here is, smoothing out the road for the people trying to consume it as best we can.

Chris Evans:
I’d like to just ask the question about what managed actually means because manage could be as wide and deep as you’d like to think of it. So it could be anything from in-place upgrades to, as you said, correcting corruption issues or correcting resiliency issues, all sorts of different things. So in your first instance, what will managed really cover and it’s like then they’re unlikely to expand over time.

Alex McMullen:
Yes. We’re broadly following the same guidance as for example, Amazon does with Redshift and with various other database products it has. So what’s the Portworx Data Services operates. So it’s an operator that does this in terms of their container terminology, it essentially collects different metrics depending on which database it’s actually managing and monitoring at that point in time. They get phoned home to the SaaS layer and if there was something in the logs that we don’t like, or that we think is an issue, then the operator will take specific steps to correct whatever it thinks that particular aspect is.

Alex McMullen:
But just to be clear, if we encounter a bug, for example, I’m just picking one now, if I encounter a [inaudible 00:39:13] bug, you as a customer, still need to resolve that in the usual way because that’s not something we can deal with. We can only deal with runtime issues that you would encounter on a day-to-day basis. So it’s looking at the health state of database. It will do auto expansion on the capacity side, it will solve for the usual in terms of the node has gone, the application has failed. Those will get restarted, re-corrected. Shards will get moved as required if it’s sharded, but for software issues within the product itself, you go via the usual route.

Chris Evans:
I’d like to put a comparison in here because you mentioned earlier when you talked about RAID and I had to bring in the mainframe, but I’m going to bring in the mainframe as an example.

Alex McMullen:
Wow, okay.

Chris Evans:
You look back to say, when I first started working in the mainframe world, we very much physically, as in storage administration, would be responsible for making sure that data was recovered because there was no red built into that infrastructure. And it was very hands-on, very specific and you couldn’t really manage that much in terms of capacity. The introduction of things like RAID took away huge amounts of the tedious side of work, of having to recover data. You trust that the Array will do that for you. And over time, I would suggest that a lot of the more, not menial, but certainly the more repeatable tasks that could be automated have been phased out or dealt within in the hardware and the software.

Chris Evans:
And this seems to me that what you’re offering here is the same thing too, because you can imagine DBA is thinking, “Oh my God, I’m out of a job.” Because there’s now all of this automated deployment and management. Well, actually in reality, it’s more likely to be that you’re taking away those more basic tasks of deployment and management and upgrades and fixing that allows the DBA to go and focus more on the data and those more high level functions. So you’re not doing anybody out of a job here. You’re just actually doing exactly what we’d like to see happen in the industry in general.

Alex McMullen:
Yes. So having worked at a number of investment banks in the last couple of decades, I can tell you for sure that the jobs that DBAs hate most are database refreshes, database restores, new build deployments and getting storage allocations and building all that layer up. They want to do database level tasks. They don’t want to be involved in all that infrastructure stuff. And many of the investment banks spend a lot of time and investment engineering-wise to give utilities that would do all of those things that they could then go and run.

Alex McMullen:
So this is very much not about making DBAs less useful. It’s simply allowing them to focus on the things that actually bring a business benefit. And honestly, if I could have offered the DBAs 10 years ago in response to a help desk ticket, click this link, there’s your Oracle database out of being the hero at that point in time. So this is very much bringing that level of capability into that containerized Kubernetes world and it’s really going beyond that. People in today’s personas don’t want to have a ticket into service now or into some remedy database, they want to click and go. And that’s what really is most powerful about Portworx Data Services here.

Chris Evans:
Perfect. And that’s exactly what I would agree with the way I see it too. So how does this now integrate into Fusion Pure1? Can I now see all of my managed databases within that same infrastructure? And will I get a holistic view of all this?

Alex McMullen:
Yes, you will. In terms of the integration points, all of this is being driven by Pure1. Pure1 is that go-to portal for SaaS layers for utility billing. It’ll be for management on the Fusion side as well. So you will expect that single picture. In fact, there will be screenshots in some of the material that goes out today that show communities clusters being run and this structure being shown within Pure1 as we do today already with VMware and the VM analytics side of things. So you’ll get exactly that same picture being brought back to you. And of course it’ll be Grafana dashboards, all the good things that come via Prometheus as well. Is that very much modern interface to the modern application and we’re not trying to go back to the days of a VT320 and green text on a black background. This is all modern, elegant, as you’d expect in that cloud-like persona that we very much have here.

Alex McMullen:
In regards to how Fusion works with Portworx Data Services the thing that we want to make sure we have most is complete integration and not getting ahead of the CSI spec on the container side. So we do want to add functionality that will then either be different in CSI or not in CSI as well. So the cadence at which the Portworx Data Services extra functionality with Fusion will be adopted, will depend on the rate of growth of that spec. You could certainly be 100% confident that you’d be able to run all kinds of things, whether it’s vVols on Fusion with Kubevirt with some other weird obstruction layers as well, they will work perfectly together. Yes.

Chris Evans:
Great. I think this is a really interesting evolution of the technology. And just from what we’ve said already, I think it’s going to be fascinating to see. What I’d like to just, I guess, finish on in this part of the discussion is to understand exactly where this will be deployable because obviously in terms of Fusion, that’s a management of Pure Storage products fairly clearly. Portworx to a certain degree is very much independent if you want it to be from the hardware platforms. So will I only be able to use PDS to deploy infrastructure that’s sitting in the public cloud as well as on-premises? Is that the reason why you say that you’re trying to keep within the CSI spec so that you don’t break anything for customers who might be looking at the public cloud for that deployment?

Alex McMullen:
Very much so. The Portworx ethos and our strap line there is any, any, any. Any application, anywhere, any cloud and Portworx Data Services aims to echo on that. In fact, it builds on top of Portworx enterprise. So anywhere that Portworx enterprise will run, you’ll be able to run Portworx Data Services. Whether that’s AWS as your Google Cloud in hyperscaler or colo data center and of course on-premises as well. So Portworx is software defined storage, anywhere it runs, you’ll be able to deploy on Portworx Data Services. The only thing you require is the ability to permit Portworx Data Services to access your Kubernetes clusters. And that’s the only correlation required.

Chris Evans:
Perfect. And dare I ask about pricing and early access programs in the same way that we talked about Fusion because I suppose we have to ask that question, don’t we?

Alex McMullen:
Yes, we do. So the early access program for Portworx Data Services starts today. The first day is today. So anybody who has an interest in deploying databases as a service within a Kubernetes cluster then, click on the links that are at the end of the show, or obviously watch the webcast that are going out live today as well. The big takeaway here is, it’s really, really about the application for the future. And it’s really down to… The only limitation is with you as customers in terms of how ambitious you want to be within your own infrastructures.

Chris Evans:
Alex, it’s been really interesting to understand the two main features you’re delivering here and this appears to be part of what I can only, I think you have used this term digital experience. The way the company’s transforming to give you much more through software and make it easy to consume but you’re not give up on hardware, are you? I mean, what does this say about the direction of where Pure is headed and how the strategy in a play out for the next 10 years, what can we expect to see?

Alex McMullen:
No, we’re not going to stop doing hardware anytime soon. But let me just summarize then I guess what we’re talking about here. Pure, its heritage has been in terms of its software strategy. We took the business decision in, I guess, 2013, ’14 to make our own hardware platform. And we’ve done that for reasons that are very obvious now for our customer base in terms of that perpetual blade chassis capability and that modern refresh every three years, which is so incredibly powerful. We remain fully committed to hardware and we make our own drives, we make our own compute blades. So that will continue.

Alex McMullen:
Our platform BU, is world-class and we believe our hardware solutions will continue to embrace all the modern, great things, not just in terms of the flash side, but also developments and PCIE buses, the CPU roadmaps, and some of the other DPU, other abstract capabilities that we want to embrace where it makes sense. So absolutely we are still a hardware company. The reason that we’ve been so successful is the ability to evolve our software capabilities on top of that. And really what you’re seeing here today is the first real site of Pure with its cloud ambitions, with its software as a service ambitions, doing that across all of its hardware fleet, doing it in the public cloud as well, and then doing it for containerized applications for Kubernetes as well. That’s an incredibly powerful message for those folks who had us originally tagged as, oh, they must be people that make boxes.

Alex McMullen:
We do make boxes, they’re the best boxes out there, but also they have world class state of the art software, not just on the platform, but you’re seeing that bridging layer across that, embracing the public cloud and embracing those cloud methodologies and capabilities in the same way they’ve always done, with backward compatibility, with commitments to the other parts of the industry and remaining software defined with Portworx. So pretty broad ambition for us. And we could talk about some of the long-term strategy things too of course.

Chris Evans:
I’m glad to hear you’re not giving up on the hardware and I didn’t think you ever would but that’s been a real piece of the story that we’ve talked about many, many times before and some of those features that are in there that are really relevant to how you now deliver the software. And I think the message for me is, I think, looking at this is that the two things need to be fairly closely coupled. You can’t just say, “Well, I’ll just take the products I was selling to the customer on-prem last week.” And now say that they’re all cloudified and you can buy them as an on demand and think that’s going to be an efficient way to deliver technology. It just doesn’t work like that.

Chris Evans:
We know there’ve been lots of different things in the technology that’s got us to that point. And I will, at the end of this, I’ll link to some of the other pieces where I’ve discussed that in the past and we’ve talked about it. I guess, we’re seeing an evolving company here, but a company that still has a strategy that’s been there for a while, as you said, 2013, 2014. And that perhaps reflects what we’ve said at the very beginning of this discussion that customers are looking for something different in terms of their experience. This is all about providing what the customer wants because the customer is adapting to using technology in a different way.

Alex McMullen:
Yes, they very much are. And it’s also much more societally influenced as well. If you think about what’s happening in the wider world, one of the reasons that Pure’s message is so powerful is because of its sustainability position, not just in terms of saving data center power and cooling because we’re small, you only need to 1,000 watts to run your storage Array rather than 15 or 20 as it used to be for the other folks. But it’s also about the supply chain side in terms of reusability and keeping that same storage Array and drives for 10 years, if you wish.

Alex McMullen:
So cutting down on waste, limiting recycling and that minimizing our carbon footprints is a powerful and strong message from many modern CEOs who are asking, “I’m building my own company for the future. What are you as my partner, Pure Storage, doing about commitments to the environment and to sustainability and carbon sequestration, et cetera, et cetera?” And we’re working very hard on all those spaces. So having that story, not just a veneer, but an actuality has been a very compelling part of our company vision, our company position for the last few years. And you’ll see us increasingly focus on it also.

Alex McMullen:
So keeping it modern, but also keeping it in a way that’s sustainable for, the wider planet as we continue to change shape over the next few years. We will do more software, we will do more hardware platforms, but they will work backwards and forwards. They will work beautifully together and we’ll continue to operate with our key technology partners, not just in the cloud, but also for data protection as well, for example. So that’s really why we think it’s keeping itself modern and relevant for today’s consumer.

Chris Evans:
Brilliant. It’s been a really interesting discussion. By the way, on that whole reusability and carbon footprint and all the rest of it, we did actually think about doing a whole podcast series talking about that because there’s a whole raft of things that can be talked about in that area. And when you look at last week and we’re recording this in the UK, you look at the issues that we saw last week around fuel and the gas supply and costs going up, the cost of actually deploying and running infrastructure is now becoming a really significant thing to consider.

Chris Evans:
So all of those messages I think, resound and are very important in what we’ve just discussed. So really interesting day-to-day to see all this stuff come out. If people want to find out a bit more, we’ll put some links in the show notes, but where should we point them to from your perspective at this point?

Alex McMullen:
Well, I think the easiest thing quite honestly with Chris is knowing how marketing teams work. I’m just going to say, look at the Pure website. I’m not going to try and spell URLs because I’ll get them wrong. So start with purestorage.com. I’m very confident it’ll be there in big splashes, details, messaging, pricing, structure intent, as well as the broader capabilities of both Fusion and Portworx Data Services.

Chris Evans:
Perfect. Alex, thank you for joining me today. It’s been a really great discussion. Congratulations on this launch. And it’s really interesting to see the evolution of the company. And guess what? We’ll catch up in six, 12 months time and talk about this all again and see how it’s gone.

Alex McMullen:
It’s been a pleasure Chris. Thanks for the time.

Speaker 1:
You’ve been listening to Storage Unpacked. For show notes and more subscribe at storageunpacked.com. Follow us on Twitter at StorageUnpacked or join our LinkedIn group by searching for Storage Unpacked Podcast. You can find us on all good podcast catches, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and Spotify. Thanks for listening.

[/bg_collapse]

Related Podcasts & Blogs

Alex’s Bio

Alex began his industry career after Bachelors and Masters Engineering degrees at Liverpool University. He started by writing flight/test software at British Aerospace, CAD 3D modelling software at Parametric Technology and the RDBMS engine at CA for Ingres before moving into infrastructure design and implementation. Alex transitioned into professional services at Sun and VERITAS through a consulting partner with numerous assignments designing and implementing large scale UNIX and storage systems in financial services. Alex then joined UBS Investment Bank to manage the storage and distributed computing infrastructure for the bank, as well as assessing innovative and emerging technology in Silicon Valley. From UBS he moved to Barclays to run the storage, database and data warehouse engineering divisions and spent 6 years there before joining the Pure Storage team in 2014 where he holds the role of VP and CTO, International.

Podcast (storageunpacked): Play in new window | Download