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Hello, everybody and welcome to this month's Coffee Break uh plans useless planning. It's indispensable storage as a service and you. Uh My name is Andrew Miller. You're producer and host, lead, principal technologist here at Pure for the Coffee Break series. I'm joined today. Excited to be joined by John Brett, a senior director subscription portfolio and I think I
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got it right. As always, this is a series. Thank you for joining us month after month. Uh You can find all the previous recordings which in my not so humble opinion have aged better over time because as you'll see if you're joining for the first time, we try to take more of a solution focus. The goal is for the first half to be more kind of educational or podcast and webinar.
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And then actually in the back half, we talk about what peer does in this space logically, of course, the cop cards and you know, paying for Zoom has to come from somewhere. You can find this on the pure storage website along with a bunch of other great series tech talk slash group, et cetera, just pure storage dot com slash events. And actually then you can even go back and find previous ones.
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I've intentionally left some of the older ones you can see, I took a screenshot, you know, back in October, November et cetera previous times. Now, one I do want to make sure to properly, uh, advertise pure accelerate. I mean, I, I get a paycheck from somewhere so we gotta do it right. So, June 14th or 16th,
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it's going to be at Resorts, Resorts, World Las Vegas. And rather than say anything else, I'll just roll the video. I feel like I ought to wait for the last hit there on the maybe it's a marimba I think. Of course, there's a little bit of housekeeping here. Um Thank you for joining and sometimes it's, it's for the content.
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Sometimes it's for the copy card. If I get that, you'll see those about a week within the next week or so. There will be a drawing. Some of the folks that are listed there. We, we love you and appreciate you attending. You know, you can't receive these, receive the items.
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I am your host, Andrew Miller, lead, principal technologist. In this case, as I'm here every month for better or worse, I don't fully reintroduce myself though. Customer for a while, partner for a while, tech marketing. I think for this topic though, what I want to do is call out a little bit of as I've gone
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along in my career, what I found more and more is even as I've tried not to lose my technical soul, you've got to embrace the business side and it's more about outcomes than it is technologies, right? Even as the technologies have to be legitimate and better and differentiated. And, and I frankly saw it even as a customer, I would have times where I didn't actually align
03:05
well enough to the outcomes of the people I was supporting and the projects that I thought were really cool didn't get approved. And you felt like, man, why did I do all that work? Well, part of it is like understanding what drives business from an outcome standpoint, John, do you mind briefly introducing yourself? Of course, part of the first section here is more of that,
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but over to you. Yeah, of course. Uh Happy to be here, Andrew. Thank you. So John Brett, um I have been uh happy Puritan now for 2.5 years. Uh happy to say they're happy years. Um Prior to joining Pure, I spent the entirety of my career really on the client side of the
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table, as I like to say Pure is my first technology solutions company. And um when I was on that side of the table, I spent um really um the entirety of that time, almost the entirety in the financial services sector where I worked at uh some of the bulge bracket investment banking houses in their technology departments for for many many years and for the 12 or so years preceding immediately proceeding.
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Joining pure, I consulted to many of the same uh companies I previously worked for and others in technology servicess uh helping them with a variety of technology transformation initiatives, everything from early cloud adoption strategies to digital transformation initiatives, even some large scale technology outsourcing engagements. Uh That's enough about my career, history. The uh the lovely young lady that you see in
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the picture with me is my darling daughter, Ava, my pride and joy. That is uh a picture from her 21st birthday celebration. Not a few years back now uh where she insisted being of legal drinking age that I take her to an establishment and buy her a cocktail and I relented and I did so and she, I remember she joked, looked at it's my very first alcoholic beverage uh to which I replied
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that has about the same probability of that being your first alcoholic beverage as the one in my hand being my first alcoholic beverage. We know that probability is zero. So um it's, I don't know, Andrew, what are you, what are we gonna do with them? I I have a feeling that there's there's some intend intended uh uh lack of awareness at times as parents maybe is the best strategy just to a certain degree next month.
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Thank you, John. Uh Next month, I'll actually be joined by actually another John Jonathan Carnes. Uh We're gonna be diving into a truly unified storage array. Uh This is actually talking about flash ray file, our approach to unified storage, having a little bit of fun with themes there. You know that Tetris is amazing but not for
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your storage about having to move things around and try to figure out how where does this fit and car off this resource in that way and that kind of stuff. It's even some of my own personal history there too. But we are here to talk about storage as a service and new plans versus planning. So the agenda is always a little bit lightweight, you know,
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not too much. We're gonna start off with doing a little bit around storage as a service and actually looking at it both from kind of a history standpoint and actually really a little bit of a reality check too, you know, kind of what really is it because sometimes these terms get a little bit mushy. Then you heard John mentioned part of what you used to do in the past was actually helping
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folks write. I think you said this. Listen, listen, my brain freeze here, but you did actually used to help folks write. Actually RFP the requests around these kind of projects. Like officially like a consultant, you got paid money to do this. So we're gonna go look at market comprehensive
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comprehension principles that you can use hopefully as your value in space. Then of course, we'll dive into what pure offers here and then go into some of the most recent developments because we've been leading in this space doing a lot here. And hopefully, as you have questions, please feel free to put them both in, put them into these uh Zoom Q and A section.
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Uh We have folks both Matt and Arrow and Olivia here to help with that. Thank you all as well as of course, feel free to put just general commentary into the chat too. You know, it's always fun to kind of watch the stream of commentary as it goes by. But uh, before we dive in, uh Olivia, do you mind launching the first poll there?
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We're not gonna be uh quite as goofy as last month where we're asking what's your favorite dinosaur? You know, we kind of go back and forth to the level of the poll questions. But this one, how predictable are your storage demands? Uh, can usually plan well, year by year, regularly, unbudgeted, year over year growth, you know,
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where this stuff is moving to the cloud. Something else, please, please go ahead and put that in the chat and actually I appreciate the folks who are asking how Emily is doing. She is still here. She's doing lots of great stuff. Olivia is doing lots of great stuff. The team keeps growing because we keep having more to do so,
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you know, and I appreciate that too. It's cool. But John let's go ahead and dive in as, as all, as often as the case, we're not gonna start with a, with a ton of slides here, but storage is a service. Um, there's been some evolution over time, some, some claims made in the past,
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you know, kind of what's, what's real and not. Uh, do you mind just kind of starting off off with a little bit of the, you know, kind of the history of the storage as a service landscape? Sure. Yeah. And, and from my recollection when I go back to the earlier parts of my career, and maybe this is a particular trait to investment banking
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technology, but I, I doubt it. But there were these moments, I'm sure it applies to every industry. There were these moment moments of first mover advantage and um you know, the the the trading departments would um would get uh really focused on a particular trading strategy, whether it was algo trading or high frequency trading or whatever the trading strategy was. And, and they would pour a mend this amount of,
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of, of capital into the space uh including technology infrastructure to support that, that, that business objective. Um And, and sometimes the gains were, were really impressive, but ultimately competition would kick in and, and trading volumes would shrink or certainly the trading profits would shrink and the business would come back to technology and say, look, our cost base is,
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is too high. Uh And and we would say, wait, you know, we, we thought you had this runaway train. You know, we, we could hardly keep up. It's a sunk cost. I, I don't know what we can do for you here and, and, and to be fair, sometimes it would be just the opposite. Right. The business would,
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would have a, we already have a tiger by the tail and, and, and we'd have a serious problem trying to keep up with deploying infrastructure in time and, and that would represent a real opportunity cost because we couldn't deliver um at the pace they really needed to. And so we, we looked around for answers and naturally turned to our technology providers for some
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help there and saying, look, you know, we have these, this waxing and waning of, of consumption and, and we need help in solving it. You, you, you call yourselves our partners. You know, what, what can you help us with here? And you know, the earliest requests out to the technology partner community was met,
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you know, and I'm talking about the suppliers and met with ideas around leasing and financing proposals and, and, and leasing obviously had been around forever and has proven value in, in what it's good at managing cash flow, preserving capital, et cetera and host of other things. But, but when it comes to trying to deal with a variable consumption, it's almost a tone deaf response.
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You know, it's, it's ok. So you've flattened my cost, but my consumption is is peaking and trough and, and you're really not helping me with the the problem that, that I put forward, right? I I have changing demand. You're just giving me a flat cost curb and that helps. Thanks. But I have a changing demand and I need help with that.
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I need a consumption driven solution and we pushed and pushed and ultimately we saw the advent, the introduction of things like capacity on demand and capacity upgrade on demand. But honestly, they were half measures at best. They were blunt edged instruments that, that, that had so many structures uh that it they it rendered them almost useless, right?
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They were very, very chunky in nature. They didn't really have the flexibility, the agility to address, you know, changing consumption patterns that were often changing, you know, on a moment's notice. And, and that was principally because they were still leases.
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It's just that instead of the clients carrying the leases, it was the suppliers who were now leasing it and, and it was behind the scenes, but it was very, very limited in the flexibility it could offer. Um And you know, the the time has passed and the, and all of this unmet demand for true consumption based models uh accumulated and ultimately some very smart
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people at some very large companies with some very deep pockets uh said, hey, I think we have an idea for that and they started to build the public cloud offerings. Uh, and, and they're great, you know, they have a dimension of consumption. They, they have a, a dimension of uh operational excellence, excellence to them, which is important as well, even a,
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even a superior customer experience, but they are over there. Right. They're, they're not being delivered to you. You've got to go get them and, and sometimes public cloud adoption is a bit of a heavy lift um for, for certain clients for a variety of reasons that could be uh an entire um uh coffee break hour in itself, you know, so we don't wanna go there,
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but clearly there are some challenges with, with adopting the the public cloud and, and and reaping the rewards of, of everything that it promises. So, you know, it's been this slow march towards improvement but, but very, very um almost a foot dragging in the in the supplier community when it comes to delivering a true storage as a service solution or as a service solutions in general when it
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comes to technology. Well, we were talking about this and as everyone knows who joins, I think what we prepare for this is not scripted, right? But we prepare, it's about respect to the audience. But when you and I were chatting, uh we're thinking both,
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you know, if anyone remembers Nicholas Carr writing about utility computing, you know, some of the that it is becoming gonna become entirely commoditized there's been some of that but there definitely hasn't been some of that. Right. There's still differentiating pieces there. And then even from a public cloud standpoint, sometimes it's like,
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it's, it's what we, it's what we all as an industry want, but it's not necessarily what we want from a consumption standpoint, but it's not maybe where we want it or there's all these other things we have to think about, like application refactoring that we're not necessarily thinking about what we got to go do to get some of the other benefits. And it's like,
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hm, that drags along a bunch of other work to do it. Absolutely. Yeah, I think, let me even if you don't mind. Oh, and actually there's another company, I mean, we think about five year planning. I mean, that is just almost impossible today. I used to get asked for 3 to 5 year plans as a customer, but I don't, I don't know how you do that today even.
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Yeah, I think, you know, all the reasons that drove us to ask for these consumption models back then. They're, they're, they've almost been magnified now, right. So the, the, the planning timeline is, is much shorter. There's so much uncertainty in the environment, you know, geopolitical unrest and uh economic uh
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chaos and sprinkling and an occasional pandemic and, and hopefully occasional, hopefully very occasional. Um, but sorry, Andrew, I just to close off the point it just makes for you know, so much uncertainty that it makes for a five year uh planning just, just almost impossible.
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Let me even shift the gears a little bit so personal. Sorry. Thank you for the, the kind of the history review. Uh Before we even kind of shifted section number two, I may pull together pieces here, but there, there was a story or two here where this is not just, it's not just history like, you know, we we're in school and you know,
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reading the history book. I think there was both a an example for you of even a personal one when you were in an operational role, but then also even someone almost maybe having kind of a nervous breakdown of a large bank anonymized that you were working with, you might kind of weaving those in here too. Yeah, of course. So you know, the we all you know,
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that that achieving that alignment between the cost of technology and its actual consumption is is one aspect of as a service models. But and we all want to do right by the company and spend its its money wisely. But um when it really gets personal is is when you get into the operational aspects of this. And, and that's where again, I found it incredibly frustrating in, in a part of my career and working with technology
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suppliers um around operations. You know, I did my time, my share of operational roles and I I would take the late night phone calls. I would be on those, those weekend long outage, recovery calls. And let me tell you, Andrew there. Everybody says weekends are too short. There's no shorter weekend when you're trying to recover from a mission critical outage.
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And you're on the, in my case, I'm on the east coast of the US and we're trying to fight, you know, the startup day, which in, in a a is our Sunday night, right? So you've got this tight window and it's just this painful existence and, you know, things just snowball and one thing leads to another. And you're, it's, you wonder where your technology suppliers are in those really
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critical operational moments. And, and in my history, it was a very frustrating uh experience to, to get them to participate, to, to, to deliver the operational value they'd already promised, you know, and, um I think you alluded to a more recent experience when I was consulting to um uh a global bank and on their institutional side, I wasn't even involved directly in the
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particular project, but they were doing a, a massive refresh of their payment systems, infrastructure, principally around their storage infrastructure, one of our competitors and lo and behold, they were forced to do a forklift migration. Um And it didn't go terribly well, it got done to be fair. Ultimately, it got done. Um But over, you know,
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over a long period of time with much trial and tribulation. And I noticed that the, the lead um storage architect engineer who was principal for delivering the project at that layer, he kind of disappeared for a few days, kind of an unofficial leave of absence. And I gave it a day or two. But then I, I gave him a text and they say, hey, you know,
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I know that wasn't easy but, you know, you must be relieved, it's behind you, you know, job well done. It didn't go perfectly but they never do. Uh, and his response was, you know, all he could think about in, in 18 months time is he had to start planning to do that all over again. And, uh we both decided that whoever was going to do that job in 18 months time,
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it wasn't gonna be him that we would both make an effort over 18 months to get him out of that role because just for his own sanity, for his own health and welfare, he, he could not go through that again. So I know and we're, we're gonna continue exploring this as we go a little bit. I mean, I, I noted your MB A. Um I'm not, my father was,
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I grew up sharing some of the terms, but as we continue, we're gonna explore some terms kind of around derisk in full business case. I think though, I'm gonna go ahead and close the poll here and I will share the results as we move into section number two here, I will end that and I will click the share button. So for anyone who is curious, this is actually hopefully this is like interesting for you too.
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You know, if you have 1000 plus folks or your, you know, peer is almost on. Um So 41% good for you, you're able to plan well year by year, that's actually frankly, maybe higher than I expected. I'm looking at the camera. I really am too.
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Um, but that's still a minority I'd say compared to unbudgeted requests, growth is higher than expected. Those two would add up. And then yeah, on prem to cloud, it's a, it's a real factor in something else to put in the chat. Uh I will go ahead and I'll stop sharing that. I'll move into section number two here.
18:38
So this is where uh we wanted, I think going back to do a little bit of your consulting days. Oh, actually, before we do that, uh we are gonna go ahead and actually Olivia, if you don't mind launching poll number two and we will just go ahead and leave that one up there. So for you joining us today, you know, kind of a question around really just your knowledge of as a service consumption models.
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And if you're looking at storage as a service doing it now, et cetera, that's kind of self explanatory. We'll just leave that up as we, we go through this. So thinking about kind of market comprehension principles and there were, there were four or five that we put in here as, as I think worth talking about just to help understand.
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So you can read them here. I chose not to do builds on the slide. Hey, y'all can, y'all can read the words and stop paying attention to us for a second if you want to. But Johnny, but um I'll chime in here periodically but let's just start off with, you know, what is as a service? Really? What does it actually mean?
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Well, it's a particular pet peeve of mine. Right. So many things now are labeled as the service only because they, uh, relieve the person or the company from owning an asset. You know, everything that isn't owned is now as a service, but there's so much more to it and we alluded to it in the early part of this conversation,
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right? I mean, I'll take the very simple example and, and I know it's a bit trite, but just, just by way of example, just, um, everybody loves a good analogy, right? So the, the, the rental car companies versus the rideshare companies, right? They both deliver a service.
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They both have utility, they, they're even consumption oriented in their own, uh, fashion to a greater or lesser extent. You know, if a rental car company you pay by the day or maybe by the, by the mile, uh, maybe not as consumption driven as the rideshare companies, but they have a consumption dimension. But only one of those is an as a service
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solution in, in my view, um The rental car companies certainly provide you with the means to achieve an outcome, getting from point A to point B but they're not involved in reaching that outcome, right? That, that is on you, drive the car, get the gas to fill up before you go back to the airport. Exactly.
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Ride share company. Different story, right? They are, they are involved, they are, they are there with you trying to achieve the, the, the targeted outcome, getting you to, to point from point A to point B and to me, I know it's a oversimplification. I know it's a tried example but for me, it, it, it, it is um illustrative I think of, of the difference and,
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and I see all too often just because you aren't buying something that a company would say. Well, now it's as a service because you're not purchasing it but they, they lack that vested interest in, in delivering the outcome uh for a true as a service model. And I think I'm gonna key off that and, and go out of order a little bit here because in some ways or out of order on the slide,
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you know, it's, it's our presentation, we can order. So what is it as a service? Sometimes the way, you know, if it's really as a service is what it looks like when you exit. Do you mind kind of describing that and linking that to how you can kind of have a clue if it's really a service based on the exit?
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Yeah, I mean, if, if you think about it, you know, if you're acquiring a service, then then when you put your hand up or when the, the service comes to its natural end, you should be able to walk away um freely and, and without encumbrance, right? And, and I think it's important for um a lot of the as a service model is being pitched, especially in the technology space to look at
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what happens at the end of a, of a service term, right? We all agree to commit for a particular period. But what happens at the end of the term uh to your point? It's, you know, are you free to walk away? Is it, you know, thanks for the service. Now, I'm done. Is it as simple as getting out of that Uber and walking away or is there something more
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involved that, that you've been tied into by this um head commercial language that uh adjudicates the, the end of a service term? And that, that to me is, is one of the telltale signs, right? And it's, it's the kind of thing that sometimes, unfortunately, we, we forget to look for in, in entering into these agreements is what happens at the end of
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the term, you know, are you able to walk away without any encumbrances? Are you just do, do you just walk away? Um No hard feelings and, and be on your merry way and, and I think in this time of uncertainty, going back to that short planning horizon, you, you need that flexibility, you need that freedom to say thanks. It's been great.
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It's enough. Um I don't want this to be a messy breakup, but um you know, the service was great. It's time to move on. You don't want to have that, that heavy commercial burden at the end of these terms. So I may, I may in a minute, I may kind of run through flexibly and on demand, but I, I wanna make sure to have you focused a little bit on SLGSL A and their acronyms we all
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live in acronym, you know, life and even the idea of de risks. Do you mind parking there a little bit before we wrap up? Section number two. Absolutely. So yeah, so you know that what is, you know, when you want to have someone, a technology supplier really committed to your cause really vested in, in your, in your outcomes,
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there is no better way than as a service model and, and part of an as a service model is to make sure that there are true service level commitments, right? That is how uh a service provider puts skin in the game and I'm not talking here about a full managed service. We know they exist and, and, and they are, you know, very good at, at, at what they're aimed to,
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to provide. But sometimes uh companies just need an as a service solution to allow to, to get the supplier to live up to all the promises they've made around the, the the solutions that they offer, you know, service level, guaranteed service level commitments. You know, some aren't worth the, the paper that they're written on because they have no
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repercussions for the supplier if things don't go according to the service level commitments, right? So that's where you really need to, to understand that, you know, in a, in a shared risk model, you're not trying to shift all the risk over to the supplier, but in a shared risk model, there, there should be some skin in the game,
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some real skin in the game, not just promises, you know, not just uh not just marketing but really clearly stated. What happens if you don't live up to your end of the bargain? This even to me links to like, you know, if you go to a classic executive level or maybe a CFO level, there's three reasons to do something uh to make money,
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to save money or to remove risk. And so even for you, now, this is a common kind of common to the audience, maybe in a little bit of a career coaching comment thinking in terms of risk and even de risking that can resonate further as you talk to people at the ORG chart or maybe you move up the ORG chart yourself. Yeah, absolutely. In, in the financial services industry,
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risk is a very quantifiable entity, right, a quantifiable element. So, so de risking is, is, is an important and it it's it's a sign of value, you know, it's it's important to, to ensure the outcomes that companies are seeking to achieve. I think I'll pull these last two together if you don't mind, John. So just thinking about flexibility and also
25:45
kind of on demand. So so flexibility there has to be obvious often there are some kind of minimums uh but you don't want them to be too low than certain ranges. So you can roll with the punches and have it actually be consumption based. Consumption based is a is a key principle there as well as the ability to be on demand versus always locked into a certain reserved commit.
26:06
And this is where signs the let's be contrarian and sometimes conversations that you and I have John. It's like people like, oh I I wanna always, I never want to have on demand pricing. Maybe say a reserved commit is at a certain more discounted price level on demand is not discounted. This is like even a common cloud model.
26:20
The catch is if you never consume on demand at all, it means you are overpay all the rest of the time. So being in on demand territory on demand pricing level, it's not good like all the time, every single day or crazy amount, you wanna be able to be able to move up the reserve as your, as your utilization grows. But if you're never on demand,
26:38
it actually means that you're overspending what you need to be relatively. This is classic sizing stuff. You know, we're never gonna get it. Exactly right. We're gonna be too high, we're gonna be too low, but we don't want to be too far off and on demand can actually help with that. Absolutely true. We, we, we found clients that enter
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subscriptions into our as a service solution and, and they openly state, you know, I wanna set my reserve at a level that I'll never have to worry about, you know, breaching into the on demand and paying that and, and we try and, and express to them, well, you might be thinking about this wrong over time. They start to realize that by being so far below that committed level of consumption,
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they're just leaving money on the table. Right. And, and, um, and they come to understand that and, and they come to appreciate that and, and they get more wise and, and the one and the clients who have been in the model longest are the ones that do exhibit, uh, a more regular consumption of, of the on demand the variable portion and they are reaping the rewards for it.
27:35
That's the most financially efficient way to, to use these models. Now, if you're wondering, is there more in this area there? Absolutely is. And we actually published a RFP guide storage as a service. You can see the table of contents there. Um I'm actually gonna go and I think I had this, I can put the,
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I'll put the link into the chat. Uh If, if you download this, it is literally a PDF that looks like this. You know, you can see the table of contents, you can see a bunch of the questions. Let's be real. It's got a pure logo on it. But, you know, there's questions in here that you can and should be asking that really don't
28:07
have anything to pure, you know, is it linked to an identified asset who truly owns the hardware? If there's dramatic change, you know, of course, we've thought about these things for our models, but these are questions that I would strongly recommend that you look at you think about and, and, and use this guide, you know, whether, whether it's you,
28:21
you're looking at pure or even possibly other, even outside of storage as a service, offering some of the supplies to as a service in general. Moving in to section number three, which is where we are going to dive into as you might have guessed, uh to what pure does in this space. I think I'll just go ahead and close. Poll number two for folks and you can,
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I'll share back the results here. So my knowledge of as a service, uh this kind of feels right medium, I'm familiar, but I want to know more. It's probably why people attended, you know, aside from the coffee cart. So, and then are you looking at storage as a service on Prem? And that's, that's fascinating to me,
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John. That's almost, it's not quite evenly split, but pretty close interesting, isn't it? Wow. So, and some folks that are still fully purchase assets, understood. And there's absolutely companies and business models where that makes sense, but either it's, you know,
29:12
using it now, six months, 12 months, et cetera. OK. So let's move into now. What pure does in this space? Uh You may remember we actually had Paul Ferraro on a while back. I'm actually gonna pull one slide out of order here. So if you remember exploring the service economy and Paul and pure storage back in May
29:30
of 21 actually, right on two years ago. Um and there's some humor there too because I think uh John, when, when Paul called you, if you wanted to come here, you said you'd had too many scars looking for consumption models like it couldn't be true. Yeah, Paul Paul is my manager today and, and he uh I actually consulted to Paul when he was at.
29:49
He was also investment banking and, and uh did some work for his company and Paul, um and he thought, uh very kindly thought of me when he arrived at Pure reached out and said, hey, I, I think there's something you should hear about. And uh, and I said, Paul, I'm, I'm happy to listen to you um in deference to our history, in deference to our friendship. But just know that,
30:10
you know, I bear the same scars that you do in, in trying to find these consumption based models. I don't know why you think pure has the better mouse trap. But uh again, in deference to our history, I'll, I'll hear you out. And the more I listen to him and others he put in front of me, the more I became convinced that Evergreen won uh was the real deal.
30:29
Um And we've been kind of dropping hints about the characteristics, a quality storage as a service solution should have. So, yeah, why not take a look at what good looks like? And there is no better example than pus Evergreen one. Evergreen one is a true a consumption based storage as a service solution.
30:48
And it offers foundational black file and object storage services, but it places a focus on data and its consumption. Uh not on capacity capacity models for acquiring technology, resources have been around since the dawn of the technology age and uh and proven themselves time and time again to be not only incredibly inefficient but incredibly ineffective at
31:11
managing that risk that we've been talking about. Um Evergreen one is a, is a true service subscription leading to its ability to qualify as Opex not Capex. Uh And because customers are subscribing to a flexible service and not just buying a product buying hardware, there's always gonna be a more direct alignment to the business outcomes that
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they're seeking to achieve. Even when the targeted outcomes change over time. As is the case with everything pure offers, it's simple and it's fast, it offers transparency and predictability in the unit of measure that it uses and agility and efficiency in its ability to scale that unit of measure up and down as needed as the consumption curve changes.
31:53
Um it removes the risk related to platforms that can't deliver consistent performance levels and and eliminates tech debt and technology obsolescence risk in general because it is backed by pure evergreen, non disruptive upgrade architecture. Uh Everything is included in the unit rate that includes access to all features available in purity at the start of a term and any that are released during the term,
32:16
the full term, all a client need to do is upgrade to the level of purity that has the feature they want and it's theirs for the taking, not the asking the taking no additional charge. Uh And at the end of the term, as we alluded to earlier, Andrew, there is never an exit penalty. You just walk away. Uh And, and you, you uh have no further obligations to pure now because it is a
32:38
subscription to a service. Uh As we've been talking about, it's backed by true slas with commitments from pure and it's organized around a catalog of service tiers, each of those tiers backed by virtually unlimited access to on demand consumption to promote that true variable consumption dimension. Uh As you see on the slide ever in one can be
33:00
consumed in a customer's private data center in a colo location facility. We work with them all anyone you wanna work with um or indeed out in the public cloud uh wherever really, wherever the client wants to run their technology operations, we can deploy every green one and and clients will often ask, well, what does that mean that evergreen one can uh can be used in the public cloud.
33:21
You're not deploying physical arrays out in the public cloud domain, are you? And and no, we're not. But our cloud block store software solution can be deployed into Azure and AWS drawing on the on the cloud service provider, native resources to instantiate uh a virtualized but fully functional flash array out in the in the cloud domain.
33:43
Um And because CBS is deployed under an evergreen one agreement, it allows for the creation of, of unified subscriptions that are perfect for those hybrid cloud apologies uh or public cloud adoption initiatives, host of other scenarios, uh the subscription is extended or stretched between the on premises. Evergreen one deployment and the public cloud CBS instance,
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and as clients are moving workload from on premises out to the public cloud or back again, the evergreen one subscription costs don't change. Uh In the unified subscription model, we don't care whether that consumption is happening on premises or out in the public cloud under CBS. Uh and maybe best of all, sorry and no, it's one contract keep going on.
34:27
And maybe best of all using CBS in the public cloud clients are, are gonna be paying far less than they would if they were just using native Aws or Azure storage resources. Because of the superior data dedo and compression we introduce out into the public cloud. So in a real sense, uh not only have we brought the best of cloud operating models on premise
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into the private data center into the private cloud, but we, we've also brought through CBS, the best of enterprise storage technology out into the public cloud domain where it's sorely lacking. So things like thin provisioning data at rest encryption D do compression replication solutionss, all those things are made available in the public cloud through CBS.
35:12
Uh And that gives clients a, a wide variety of choice to build a robust hybrid cloud topology that best supports their cloud journey. And it's these innovations that we believe constitutes really the minimum viable product for a true enterprise class consumption based offering and we hold that belief for a variety of reasons, but chief among them is the ability of Evergreen one to help clients manage risk.
35:38
Uh And we've been talking about that, right. So risk elimination or de risking service delivery and operations, it's a recurring theme when you start to understand and appreciate the power and benefits of an Evergreen one subscription. And you start with financial risk management. All that uncertainty, uncertainty we talked about facing clients causes them to pad forecasts and over buy when
35:58
they use that traditional capacity oriented approach to procuring storage resources, incredibly cost, inefficient. All that excess capacity translates into excess spend that will never deliver value to the business contrast that with evergreen one, which as a consumption based pay as you go model, uh it eliminates that overspend and and dramatically derisk the financial profile of
36:23
storage operations, but that's just one way in which Evergreen one can eliminate risk or or transfer it back to pure and from a client's perspective, that's just as good, right? As long as I'm not holding the risk fine by me. And so technology obsolescence risk is eliminated. Evergreen one is a service subscription and it's backed by pure Evergreen architecture.
36:44
So pure is responsible for ensuring that underlying service infrastructure is never at risk of end of life, never at risk of end of service. And uh and we'll never need downtime in order to keep it current uh service level risk related to availability and delivery. Transferred to pure. Not only does that evergreen architecture deliver continuous availability.
37:04
But the on demand buffer means that provisioning lead times will never suffer due to the lack of the necessary infrastructure. Right? The on demand buffer is on the floor waiting to be used uh but never paid for unless it is used. So you can respond to service requests quite rapidly. And then finally service level risk related to performance again,
37:24
transferred back to pure. Pure is on the hook to maintain performance levels throughout the term of the subscription. And we're gonna do what's ever necessary for us to live up to that commitment, that commercial commitment swapping out controllers, adding dis packs, adding a raise what's ever necessary. Uh And sure as a true storage as a service subscription backed by unparalleled technology,
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every one offers this risk, uh this rich risk mitigation capability to clients that extends from the economic dimension to the operational dimension uh and beyond. And, and you probably heard me allude to it a number of times, but it's, it's all made possible by the underlying Evergreen architecture here. Andrew. It's uh it's, it's what makes all of this
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possible. And I think actually, I almost heard you doing like uh we were like 234 dimensions, you know, maybe five dimensions of de risks. Uh There's a great comment from Ernesto and the Chat act about ever being Evergreen being one of his favorite things about pure storage, maybe probably the favorite thing underpinning all of this. Sometimes when we talk about evergreen,
38:25
we are referring to it from a consumption model standpoint evergreen one. Truly that's it's in the name, but there's also the core Evergreen technology under the stack that underpins everything from a pure standpoint, whether you're choosing to do it via an outcome consumption based model evergreen one. So that's um you know, long life chases upgradable expandable flash.
38:45
There's no natural home for the flash. You can actually do non disruptive upgrades in family and between family on controllers, we've seen that as well, then I think I'll just kind of pull this together to, to get us to section number four, John, there is still as many of some of you listening may be on what we call Evergreen Forever previously, that was called Evergreen gold.
39:05
That was kind of a classic better than average Capex consumption model because you pay flat maintenance and it keeps going forever. That doesn't feel like normal purchase, but it's better than average. And flex is then somewhere in between the two of those in a way. Although it's more, instead of being a term based license,
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it's a usage based license, we'll explore flex a little bit more in the next section in the what's new, but just making sure that this is not a we're not moving away from any of the stuff we've done in the past if anything, we're adding more flexibility uh as even as part of flex. OK. I think if you don't mind John, we'll jump to the third pole here.
39:40
So Olivia, if you could launch the poll number three regards to as a service curious, what's most important to your organization? Not gonna read the answers. You can do that as well as what are some characteristics of a true storage as a service to you? Um, and we had a little bit of fun with that question. We'll, we'll see, we'll see what it means to
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you, but I'll go ahead and leave that pull up. Let's go into section number four. Um, Andrew, I wanted to vote on that poll. I, I think I know what your vote's gonna be. We, we, we, we'll tease that at the, we'll tease it. I'll say what it is at the end because I, I'm pretty sure I know what yours is the last one, what's new in this section.
40:17
So some of what you just referred to John, some of it is what we've been doing since the very beginning. Actually, when he was even called um, pure as a service when Paul was covering this two years ago. But there's been improvements there and then changes and editions, even what you covered.
40:30
But let's just dial in specifically on what's new, maybe specifically around Evergreen flex. I'll, I'll let you hit on that and, and then I may hit on some of the other ones to compress them a little bit to to bring us home and apologies will be folks. We'll be going a little bit past the 45 minute mark, but usually everyone stays around the Q and A. So hopefully that feels all right.
40:48
But I always like to flag that when I I can sense, we'll go a little bit longer. John Evergreen Flex. Yeah. So when you look at the enhancements and updates to the subscription portfolio, uh it speaks to the level of seriousness with which pure treats the subscription business model and it starts with the addition of a brand new subscription modality in Evergreen Flex. Um We had a lot of customers that recognize the
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value of a consumption driven model to help them better align uh the cost of technology to its actual consumption. But for a variety of reasons, they couldn't exercise the use of Evergreen one. maybe that was driven by the need to retain ownership of the hardware because of regulatory oversight mandates. In some cases, they were driven by just a desire to carry assets on the books for
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financial reporting purposes. Uh Some clients presented us with a problem of of they often found themselves um with islands of stranded capacity and and they wanted help with that. Um And and frankly because Evergreen one is a true service subscription, we aren't yet able to offer it everywhere in the world.
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So clients would approach us and say, well, if you can't offer Evergreen one in this particular location, what else you got as a consumption driven uh dimension? Um And, and that's why we uh introduced Flex, you know, with that list of client requirements, Evergreen Flex was developed to, to slot nicely into that space.
42:10
Uh It allows clients to own and control the hardware with the flexibility to pay for the subscription based on utilization of purchase capacity. Uh It has a nice feature for data pack mobility to address that stranded capacity issue that I mentioned earlier. It even allows clients to uh book the asset for financial reporting purposes and clearly we can
42:33
offer it in locations where we can't yet offer evergreen ones. So they get at least the the value of that consumption element, even if they don't get the full rich risk mitigation that comes with a full storage of the service uh offering, they get at least the consumption uh element of it that helps them with financial management risk.
42:53
You joined us last month. Thank you, John. You might have heard about this product called Flash Blady. It's all we talked about last month actually around like hard drives and just dinosaurs and all that stuff. So if you're wondering how is that reflected in the Evergreen one service catalog?
43:08
Well, here you go until a couple of months ago. Uh This had, let me let me see if I can get it right. Seven columns here, maybe eight with the title column, you know, kind of thing. So there's 1/9 column added in the service catalog around UDR unstructured data repository. And I got that right. Uh That is targeted toward the profile of where
43:25
flash blade E fits within our portfolio, but available at a full consumption basis. And you may even remember Ju Justin mentioning this because he talked about how if you purchase flash blade e you know, it's 468 terabytes raw, of course, that's less usable from a consumption standpoint. It's actually a little bit lower if you go on a consumption basis,
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you know, kind of thing or at least the the the minimum, the minimum entry point. And we introduced it on the same day, Andrew that Flash Blade was announced. That's how serious we are about making sure our our storage as a service, customers have access to this important underlying uh technology capability. It sounds like a good product launch kind of thing to do.
44:00
You know, you put it in all the different consumption models day one as well. Uh Let's see now it's uh it's actually it's in January had Brian gold on and we were embracing sustainability and some of the efficiency claims seem too good to be true for pure. And how are those actually true? We dove into some of the better science content, both with Brian and with Justin, there's actually when we talked about slas and kind of
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de risks. There's now John, not just the, I mean the availability capacity performance because it shouldn't just be capacity, but there's even an efficiency here you want. Commenting on that. Yeah, the industry's first and only efficiency sl a we are guaranteeing a power consumption profile for qual qualifying subscriptions. And if we find that we're in breach of our
44:41
efficiency, service level commitments, not only will the client receive uh service credits commence with the length of time that the solution is exhibiting a, a higher power consumption profile than we've committed to. But we will come in and remedy the situation by doing data pack consolidations or other means at no cost to the client. And of course, with no interruption of service,
45:02
I mean that that is how committed we are to helping clients meet sustainability goals that we're, we're putting money on the line here. Watts per actually, it's Tiba byte but you know, watts per terabyte, the amount you consumed. The last one here is, and it's, this is almost worth this whole other topic because that's actually what we did with
45:18
Sandy back in March covering Pier one. But there's a whole aspect of pier one here that is actually meant to help support visibility and flexibility for customers who are choosing to do Evergreen one. Do you mind kind of giving a summary here of some of the changes and then I'll, I'll go through a couple more screenshots who are a litany of enhancements that have already
45:37
been made to pure one management interface to support the evergreen subscription portfolio. We, you know, we are committed to the belief that our subscription portfolio should be every bit as easy to monitor and manage as our flash array and flash blade products are. And that's why we, we poured so much effort into making pure one an effective subscription management platform where our clients are able to monitor our our performance against those
46:01
service level commitments that we've made uh perform simulations uh to get the impact analysis of taking certain actions against the subscriptions. As you see on the screen here, even initiating subscription management actions such as expansions, extensions, renewals and more. So just a a powerful complement of capabilities in pure one today with many more on the horizon, all with the idea of making pure one that's
46:26
smart and easy to use subscription management platform. You mentioned subscription management. Hopefully this big enough folks, folks can see it. You can actually find more of this online. Uh Thanks to Matt Bradford, who's kind enough to provide some of these. So managing all the aspects of your subscriptions, multiple ones there.
46:42
Um even asset management, that's not never the I don't know that anyone uh wakes up wanting to do asset management, but it if it's not done well, it can be very painful. So you be able to track the contracts, the life cycles and alignment of all that stuff even planning, that was actually the previous screenshot. So you can kind of see what's the projected growth.
46:59
Where is it gonna be? Do I want to go and increase my reserved commit, et cetera? Because on demand isn't bad, but periodically you may want to move the commit up as your environment grows and then even self service upgrades that you still can control. Even as an as a service consumption model, you can control and request self service upgrades either to push forward in new features
47:17
and capabilities or, or otherwise I think with that John, we made it through, it was a lot of stuff there. I see some good questions in the chat which we're gonna hold. Thank you so much for being a great guest. II I knew that you would be, you know, and I appreciate the preparation time.
47:34
Any, any final thoughts on your end before we go to the dr Sure. First of all, I want to thank you for letting me join you on coffee break. It's uh it's been my pleasure and my honor. This is a big deal for me. This, this is like a buck list item for me Anderson. That's awesome. And, and of course, I wanna, I wanna thank the
47:49
viewing audience uh as well and, and just thinking about the, the title of, of the the Break that's on screen, which is a great title, by the way, I forgot to mention, really captured the essence of the problem in a well that a well constructed storage as a service solution can address. But I just leave the audience with this thought that maybe it's an endearing attribute of human
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nature to, to have a cognitive bias towards optimism towards overestimating the the likelihood of positive outcomes. But even the best design plans never go according to plan and and when obstacles present themselves or course corrections are needed, you need a storage as a service solution that has the right level of flexibility and risk mitigation capabilities and a technology partner that will stand behind
48:35
it. Uh And I would submit that evergreen one. Is that solution and pure storage is that partner? Awesome, awesome clothes, man. I don't think I have anything to add to that. So, but that's why I had you on, but it's um some folks I know were staying around for the drawing. So just in case you were, oh, we actually
48:54
changed it up this month. You might have noticed it's an ember 12 ounce travel mug uh retail value 1 99 the kind you can control with your phone and it's easier to travel with. I actually need to go figure out that means, but hey, you can figure that out yourself. If you're the winner or not, maybe you just want to go get it anyway.
49:07
I appreciate. And I'm looking here, the today's Raffle winner is Charles M from California. Uh Olivia will be reaching out to you and I'm making sure to get that to you as well. Since this is a series, please make sure to join us again next month. Tetris is amazing. It still is amazing, but,
49:25
but not for your storage, you know, truly unified storage array being joined by John Carnes and with that, we are at the end, but as always, we will hang out here for about, you know, kind of 5, 10 minutes however long y'all, all of all of you want to hang out with us. I'll kind of pull the music back up here a little bit. Let play in the background.
49:43
This is where I'm, I'll just say for me, it's where I let my hair down if I still had enough hair to let down. So I won't, I won't presume on you John, you know, but we kind of let it relax a little bit and actually usually we'll see folks saying so let's actually pull up some Q and A. Um I'll toss this.
49:58
We're AOL and Matt have been doing a great job with the Q and A but I think so. I may pull a couple back here. Uh There was one question I want to scroll back. This was in the chat actually, all the thank you for everybody, you know. Thank you. Thanks for the thanks. We appreciate it.
50:13
The it was around Aws and I think I'm just about back to scrolling on it. Um, and so the question is basically around, around, if, if you're in Aws, can this apply and you hit that? Is it possible to use with Aws or maybe even Aws only? I'll just toss that directly to you. Absolutely. Yeah, you can use cloud block store in a w
50:39
without, um, a deployment onto your, into your private data center or anywhere else. Really? So block store does work uh in, in isolation with the cloud service board with, with Azure with Aws as well. And it's a very effective solution that we've really been catching on really gaining traction, a land. Uh We actually have a very large health
51:00
organization. I don't know if this is going to be a public case study or not, but you know, it's in the, in the 78 figure range. So we're not just making this up. Oh, thank you. Actually, that's a uh I forgot the poll, third poll result. We'll do that in just a second. Thank you Lily for ending that.
51:15
But what we are actually not, we're not just making this up. We're seeing some very large movement in this direction even in a solely public cloud arena. Uh 78 figures, you can figure out what that means, that kind of thing, but they're big numbers, people really buying into this. Ok, quick pause. I forgot to share the poll.
51:30
So for those who stayed around, hey, you get to see the full results. Let's share them back out. Uh John. Uh Well, actually let's do question number one first. So question one, what's the most important for your organization?
51:42
That's a pretty even split again with operational agility coming out on top. Financial. The money didn't come first. Yeah, it makes sense. You know, they're all important, you know, too often it's reduced to just a financial engineering solution, but it's much more than that, you know, it is about the operational aspect,
52:01
it is about sharing the risk. Uh and clearly our audience kind of gets that already. So it's impressive question. Number two, what are some characteristics of a true storage as a service offering? So uh what, what was your answer there? John, all of the above.
52:16
I can't, I can't remember the the options that were in there. Um So we actually we had a little bit of fun with this because because being real from, from our perspective, it should be all of the above. It's not any, any one of those, any one of those matters. But if you don't have all of those, you don't actually have storage as a service.
52:34
So we're we're being trying to be too annoying. Oh, with the poll question, because I was curious to see how people responded. So 28% said all of the above uh 13% said, you know, flexible for changing requirements. 20% always non disruptive that matters. 24%. Consumption driven, 16% you can exit at the end. Walk away, no harm,
52:53
no foul. We're done. I will think I'll go ahead and stop the share there. That was long enough to let folks see it. Hopefully there were a couple more questions I'm gonna go and pull up here and even in some cases, ones that were already answered just because I feel like they're, uh, you know, they're worth pulling back out.
53:10
Uh Let's, let's go to a totally non techology question from Norman. Uh What is your favorite grind? Coarseness, John, we, we said at the beginning we go back, I have to go back and check. Uh So am I allowed to mention the manufacturer of the grinder that I, that I, so I, I do a pour over, I do a pour over and the manufacturer which is a company
53:32
called Bellow. Uh they make an old grinder and they say if you're doing the quote over or over, set it to this and I did it ages ago. I forget what I said it to. Um But it's I use a pore over coarseness, I guess without being able to specify them the actual size of the. What's too funny is to Joseph who actually uh
53:52
attended as a, as a guest, listed as a guest, he actually guessed that it was what you were using. So that's pretty amazing. Or maybe he just knows you or I, I don't know where that amazing. Um Another question. So are there equivalent cloud products for all pure on prem products?
54:11
So kind of you want to take a first shot at that or I can't? Yeah. Um Yeah, please jump in. I mean, certainly cloud blocks store is aligned to our block solutions, but there's a fair amount of interplay between our file and object or UFFO unified file and object solutions in the public cloud as well because of our ability to do snaps to native S3
54:33
formats. So we can snap, we can do AAA snap straight to the to the cloud S3 bucket um as well or you can. Um Yeah, what am I? What am I missing here? Well, the other face that I go down sometimes is there's the there's the aspect of what we can actually truly run in the cloud at the software level.
54:52
So that would be cloud block store, you know, virtual flash array. But you know, better than just being a virtual appliance. We did more work to make it a real virtual storage array. What I also see in this space is when you pair up evergreen one consumption based stuff across any product in our portfolio, even the physical products, if you put them in a colo environment
55:10
like say an equinox that has high speed interconnects into the cloud that aren't metered. So this is like express through direct, I'm losing my terms here with Aws and Azure that actually allows you to consume all the cloud services have the data live on something that has a very similar kind of cloud type billing model.
55:26
And so even though it's technically pure hardware, the actual total experience is I'm using cloud services. I control my data data gravity working for me hopefully and all the billing and consumption and all the other pieces at a storage level feel cloudy like you would want them to be. So it's not quite equivalent cloud, but it gets the same outcome. That's the goal.
55:44
Yeah, and that's uh we eat some of that very same dog food, don't we in our own operations here up here? And it works very well. We do maybe the last one here just because uh last one or two. So there was one question here where someone um said, you know,
55:59
so is this Adam sorry if I missed this? Uh But what are the included hardware upgrades? And there's a little bit of, I don't know that I can give a straight answer there, but it's just that we are responsible for keeping the hardware upgraded to match the outcome, the service level agreement. Like if you actually go back and look at the
56:18
various tiers, think I can get there, the tiers actually have some performance things behind them. It's not shown on this slide necessarily. Uh We will make sure the hardware is that state we can do that. Anything else you want to add there on the hardware upgrade aspect that we're, I mean, obviously there's, there's at least two dimensions, probably more than I'm forgetting a
56:35
to your point, living up to our service level commitments around the performance levels that we are guaranteeing they see as well as making sure they're never in a position of being in AAA technology obsolescence situation. Right. So we'll come in and upgrade the controllers, you know, won before there's any risk of end of service end of life. And you know, that's not something clients have to worry about because it is a service,
56:59
right? They can forget about that, that burden, you know, they, they leave that work to, to us because in a service subscription, it is the responsibility of pure to the that's our job. Um And actually I will make this the last one just because it actually gonna put two together one from Eric. It's a question.
57:16
It's a great one actually glad someone asked us about his usage before or after data reduction. And then, you know, kind of a question about um entering base storage capacity in uh do I put an optimized utilization or raw capacity? We, we chose not to go into uh some of the usage capacity? Um I know I've got a short version of this John, I'll, I'll let you go first though if that's all right,
57:38
unless you want me to. Of course. Yeah. So, you know, we had a choice to make when we designed Evergreen one, we could build on the free data reduction values or the post data reduction values. For us, the most transparent way to allow clients to understand exactly what they were paying for without the variability of changing data reduction ratios was to build them on the
57:58
host written data. That that is what we meter and measure. Uh And for us, it's been the and, and it's been the actually it's a also an industry trend. So a lot of people who didn't start that way and claim to have storage as a service solutions or at least consumption based solutions, they have switched now to pre data reduction units of measure.
58:19
Again, it takes that extra variable out of the charging equation. So there's never any surprises during invoicing about unexpected, unexpectedly large amounts because the because the data reduction ratio has shifted against the client. I mean, there's I mean, that's the key. It's about that transparency and predictability. Yes, pure rays are doing compression or
58:42
duplication or everything is under the covers. And that helps to even to that, you know, to that efficiency guarantee that we're putting out there, right? And I think from a a watts per Tiba byte standpoint, but for you to know ahead of time what that's gonna be, that's almost impossible to predict. I think.
58:56
So the goal is not to be like, oh, we're taking all the benefits of that stuff. It's like, well, what model can we offer you? That is predictable and transparent as far as how it actually works. So with that, I think we are, we are right at time. Please make sure to join us next month for what it shows there.
59:12
Uh with John talking about Tetris is amazing, but not for your storage. John, thank you, John Brett. Not John Carnes. John Britt. Thank you once again, uh my name is Andrew Miller. Thank you on behalf of the entire coffee break team for joining us for this month's coffee break.
59:28
Please make sure to tune in next month. Have a great day.
