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22:49 Video

Cloud Economics in a Hybrid World

During this chat we will discuss the changing landscape of IT and why as-a-Service has become so important to IT organisations both financially and technically. We will discuss how customers are leveraging Evergreen//One and FlashStack as-a-Service to build flexible infrastructure plans for the unpredictable future.
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00:01
Mm welcome everybody to pure accelerate texas 22. Yeah, we have some really great content for you today. We hope you enjoyed this session. This session is really a conversation about the ship from topics to talk about the hybrid world, talking about on prem off prem how you can take advantage and how you can leverage your
00:22
solutions in both on prem and and my name is Eugene McGrath. I'm the field solutions architect, europe, you're everything, flashback, flashback as a service and I'm really really excited to be joined by john Brett director of subscription sales focused on everything in one. And my name is David stamina. Principal Field solutions architect focused on
00:41
our multi cloud solutions. Excellent. Thank you both gentlemen for joining us today. So really what I wanted to start with was this ibc prediction I. D. C. Had predicted by 2020 for a lot of our environment was going to be as a service and there's a lot of things that are driving this, Can you talk to us about some of those things. Yeah, so you know in this slide Mackenzie did a
01:02
really interesting study on the affinity that customers are having to subscriptions now, full disclosure. This included everything that could be labeled as a subscription. So all of consumer retail wine of the month club streaming services, meal plans uh you name it. But in spite of that breath, I still believe it holds some relevant insights for the technology
01:22
space and the first for me is that by and large subscribers are realizing the benefits that they expected to receive when they initially subscribed to these services. Uh, there might be some, some evidence of unmet expectations with the value per price dropping off from the initial motivation for signing up to the subscription to the reasons for retaining the subscription, but, but value for money is still the main reason for
01:51
retention also, um, the impressions of quality and, and convenience didn't really disappoint to any significant degree after the subscriber had had been in the subscription for a period of time. And something that's especially interesting interesting to me is that there's been an increase however slight in, in the customer service and flexibility dimensions, right?
02:12
They, they signed up for that to receive flexibility and customer service to a degree, they didn't have high expectations, but that improved once they were in these subscriptions for a period of time. So I found this really fascinating study by Mckinsey. It's very, very interesting. I think it's, it's also interesting coming through this,
02:29
this pandemic. We just came through that a lot of customers are realizing that these subscriptions also mean that it keeps the manufacturer on their toes right, always having to innovate, always having to produce more content in order to retain the customer. And so it always provides the best for, for, for our customers.
02:44
And so what I'd like to do is now go into that lightning round, let's talk about evergreen one, let's talk about cloud block store here and let's start off with a, with a with a question that everybody is dying to know the answer of. So there were predictions made years ago that as a service was going to be 100% cloud. That that our customers would be 100% cloud. And what's the reality of this?
03:05
Yeah, well, certainly, you know, I'm finding that uh and and we we kind of heard about it and then you see uh study that you referenced. Um you know, the public cloud has has been kind of the opportunity for many, many companies to to realize that consumption oriented service subscription, but it isn't right for everyone, right for some people it's a heavy lift and they still want
03:27
the the benefits of of cloud economics, the superior operations that the superior customer experience that exists in the public cloud. But they want it on prem as well. Where were significant element of their operation still exists today and will for for some period of time. So, uh they're still looking for that value for price but but they need to get it on prem as
03:50
well as in the public cloud. Absolutely. And I speak to a lot of customers and a lot of customers have either stalled their cloud moves that everybody has something in the cloud. If we if we if we face the facts, everybody has something in the cloud. But they stole a lot of those moves. And there are also some customers are pulling things back from the cloud because the economics of it are not advantageous.
04:09
They want as a, as a service. They want that subscription. But it's not always 100% cloud. They want that The same model for on prem. We're seeing a lot of that. A lot of customers either move workloads back from the cloud. Now there are offerings around that as a service or just limiting. It's a heavy lift for 100%.
04:25
It's, you know, it's it's not the Panacea. It's not a one size fits all solution for for for customers. Yeah. And I think one of the expectations is that storage is probably one of the number one costs in the cloud. So a lot of customers move all their data, their realize it's too expensive and then are looking for a solution that allows them to move back on premises.
04:44
And I think our as a service kind of helped solve that. Excellent. And that brings us that's a perfect segue to our next question. So let's talk about cloud block store and this is for you, David. So what are some of the challenges that that helps solve uh in the cloud that we help solve?
05:00
Yeah. So if you're not familiar with our product, we have a product called purity block store, which is essentially our software defined solution in the cloud. But when we think about a lot of those economics, there's a lot of reasons why customers are looking for alternatives to the native cloud storage because it's a different
05:15
location, but a lot of the same problems that customers once had on premises and I would say one of those more important things is cost. How can they get a better understanding of cost in the cloud? And so we kind of think about this is when I talked to this, I think about that there's kind of four little knobs, we have to turn, one of them is cost, one of them is performance and one of them is features.
05:36
And so if we think about, say, amazon over here on the left as you manage disk, most customers are using premium or ultra SSD s, ultra SSD s are the most expensive, but they're also the most performance. But then there's some trade offs when it comes down to features, there's no snapshots, there's no backups, there's replications,
05:54
so they have to think about those trade offs of what they actually need. If they need those features and they can move to a premium SSD, they're also a little bit more cost efficient, but there become a lot more inefficient at larger capacities, their binary disk sizes, so there every day every other or every binary gig. So once you kind of go from like 2 56 5, 12 terabyte, 248,
06:16
it gets very inefficient, very quick. I talked to customers who have a 4.1 terabyte database, their options are either four terabytes or eight terabytes. So if they go to that eight terabyte disk, 3.9 terabytes of data that they're really not using. So again, when we think about cost, there's a lot of sprawl there and there's a lot of stuff in, it comes down to features and performance and even on aWS side,
06:38
G P two is very good. G P three is very good. I 01 is very good, but it's not durable, which means that when you do have to provision those larger disks, just be able to get those performance, you're having to maintain a second copy of that data, which is essentially doubling your cost. So there's really a big kind of sprawl and kind of understanding all the different tradeoffs
06:58
between each disk and each cloud. And as you have customers who are moving towards this multi cloud environment, it's just not hybrid. It's multi, it gets can, it can get very complicated, very quick. And so those are some of the challenges that we try to solve here here by giving you the single pane of glass that and again, the as a service will stretch both private and public.
07:18
And so you get the seamless experience of both on premise and cloud and we'll talk about kind of some of those use cases and a little bit as well. Absolutely. So it sounds like we we address a lot of the trade offs you have in the public cloud between that cost and that feature set that enterprises need, which is great.
07:33
Yeah, because you have no right. So you can provision volumes large or small, you get snapshots, you get multi attacks, you get the duplication compression. So yeah, it's very, it's a very cool tool. Absolutely. All right, john so this one's over to you. So true or false as the service is always more expensive and it seems to be a very common
07:52
perception. And what are your thoughts on this particularly for pure? Yeah, I mean, I think we saw in the results of the Mckinsey study, right? Uh, subscription services as a service offerings, um, they offer great value for money. They're not disappointing the customers that are, that are subscribing to these as a service model.
08:09
So, um, I, I think that is a common misconception. Usually I understand why the questions up there, but, but it's a falsehood. People, people are realizing that value for money and the subscription services. Excellent. So can you walk us through through evergreen one? What is driving the adoption of evergreen one?
08:29
Yeah, well, let's, you know, playing off the last slide. The first is cost optimization. People are really finding the financial value of, of subscribing to a service and subscribing to a service in an evergreen one that allows them to consume in storage terms what they need when they need it and, and only for as long as they need it.
08:49
Uh Those are the those are the paradigms, those those are the principles that drove people to look at the public cloud and we're delivering that benefit to them on prem as well. Um in addition time to market right, we were keeping capacity on the floor in our subscription model so that when they want to dial up consumption, the capacity is already there, there is no friction from a from a procurement perspective
09:14
in order to reach additional consumption levels. Uh It's still underpinned by our superior evergreen architecture, non disruptive upgrade architecture. So it spells the end of technical debt, right? There's no more technology obsolescence risk that that customers have to deal with.
09:31
It is a true service level agreement driven agreement, right? We we have to live up to certain minimum performance levels, the ability to keep the availability of the environment, of the service infrastructure, supporting the subscription that's on us. Uh And and so and we'll do what's necessary, right?
09:49
If we have to come in and upgrade controllers in order to maintain performance, we do that and there's no additional cost to the end user. It allows for that hybrid cloud transformation because it's very closely linked to the cloud block store that David just described and it overcomes some of the some of the heavy lift the public cloud limitations that that that people aren't finding it easy to adopt public
10:11
cloud paradigms. So it delivers those benefits to where their operations run today on prem or in color facilities, for example. Yeah. And I think it kind of helps with that hybrid cloud because with evergreen one, when you get that license, well, it's a portable license so you buy your capacity on premises,
10:29
it's just to the cloud, so you're not buying your storage twice. And when you think about the public cloud limitations, just the solutions that we provide as a service, some customers move to the public cloud because it is that that affects they can kind of use as they consume it and kind of dial up and out. And so this is kind of, I would say a hybrid flexibility that you can kind of move your data
10:50
back and forth and you're not really paying for it um any more than once. Absolutely. And so like if I think of one word to really describe evergreen one, I think of the risk. So from the sls standpoint, you de risk the fact that the solution will meet your needs. You know, it absolutely will because there S L. A.
11:05
Is bound to that. The second thing is you never have to worry about your your company growing, you always have that excess capacity to grow into. And then the third is if your business direction changes and you and you have hybrid cloud in your mind and you're you're going more hybrid. You you can rest assured that you risk that entire situation through through using
11:22
Evergreen one. That's true I've heard of Yeah, I've heard of customers who have gotten evergreen one and they had an array on prem with the goal to move to the cloud within 24 36 months. Covid hit all of that stops. So they're more than happy that they had that on premises hardware. Now that things are, I wouldn't say it's over
11:40
but things are settling down. They now have the ability to ship that capacity and start going back to their cloud journey. Absolutely yes. There's so much flexibility for our customers. It completely de risks. It also the other thing I think it was a financial benefit. You're not spending all this money up front and
11:56
then the pandemic hit and and that money was going to waste. You, you had, you had the benefit of paying, you know, as you go and based on what you consume, which is which is great. So john can you walk us through some of these benefits to talk to us a little about Evergreen one. What do, what do our customers need to know
12:10
about Evergreen one better definition I guess is in order here. So I talked about the, the, the desire to bring the best of the public cloud economics operations and experience on prem and in colo facilities where where a significant element of their operation still resides today and that's what Evergreen one delivers Evergreen one is a, is a consumption based storage as a service model that provides foundational block file and
12:35
object storage services with a focus on data consumption, not capacity, it can be consumed in a customer's private data center in a co location facility at at an MSP Gs I location. If the customer has a provider relationship with one of those entities, uh and of course in the public cloud, through that cloud block store connection, it is a true subscription service leading to its
13:01
ability to qualify as apex and not Capex Capex because customers are buying a service and not just hardware, there's more of a direct alignment to the business outcomes they're seeking to achieve. As in the case with everything pure offers. It is simple and it is fast. Uh It offers transparency and predictability through its its unit of measure and
13:25
agility and efficiency and its ability to to scale up and down. It removes that business risk that we've been talking about related to platforms that can't deliver a consistent performance levels and eliminates that tech technical technical debt and technology obsolescence risk we mentioned earlier because it is backed by Evergreen. Um everything is included in the unit rate and that includes all access to features that are
13:50
available in purity or released during the turn of the, of the subscription and there's never an exit penalty because it is a true subscription to a service. It's it's backed by the service level agreements that we mentioned and and those S. L. A. S. Are true to form for for pure simple but meaningful.
14:09
Um It's organized around a catalog of service tiers designed to allow customers to align specifically to the performance needs of their workloads. Each of the tiers supported by unlimited access to on demand consumption. Hopefully what's what's emerging here is that pure has used its its history of innovations to make uh evergreen one unique in the in the industry.
14:36
Uh And it's it's it's these innovations that constitute the minimum viable product for a true enterprise class consumption based offering everything one has them and and it's unlike anything else in the marketplace. Excellent. And David, you have some thoughts about management and the cloud experience.
14:56
Yeah, I think that's important here is with Evergreen One, you have that single experience. So traditionally when you think about on prem in the cloud there are two completely different environments with different levels of reliability, different levels of features, different interfaces. But with this Evergreen one experience, it's the exact same purity operating system on prem
15:16
and cloud. It's the exact same pier one. And so as you're using all these monitoring and management tools and automation tools, it's going to be able to deliver yourself and your customers. Um this consistent experience and not have to worry about retraining and re upping just to be able to understand how when you move that data, you have to manage it completely different
15:33
because truly you're gonna manage it the exact same way in a very real sense. David, I, you know I talked about delivering the best of the public cloud on prem but it also through cloud block store. It delivers the best of enterprise storage array technology out to the public cloud where it's sorely lacking. Right. So you mentioned earlier compression data at
15:52
rest encryption, all of these things that the public cloud doesn't offer natively are delivered seamlessly through through cloud block store in a in a in an evergreen one subscription. Yeah, definitely. Absolutely. Absolutely. And and the one thing we can't forget is especially for for our customers is there are always customers that need in their entire data
16:10
center. Right. And and with pure you also have that option with flashback as a service. Being able to have your computer as well as your networking components and and your and your storage as a service and then leveraging that hybrid model of of storage on the storage side to be able to address those hybrid cloud needs. So never forget about flashback as a service as
16:28
well and you know it's it's popping up in more and more more and more models and we now have uh bare metal powered by pure through economics. Uh so uh clinics and and and pure have have kind of taking it a full stack and and and around the globe you can get pure as a service as part of that bare metal solution provided by economics. Yeah, we won't forget about that works either.
16:54
So I think evergreen one really encompasses every product that Pierre has can be consumed within that. It's just not the flash. Right. But it's our entire suite of products. Absolutely. And flashbacks of the service includes all that. You can get any of those options with flashback of the service.
17:10
So really it's really designed to address whatever needs you have and wherever you are, wherever our customers businesses go. And that's part of that be risking the entire investment for for our customers, which is so important. So moving on to the cloud block store. So how are you seeing customers use cloud block store today? David um for storage in the cloud.
17:29
Um, but no, so it's a, it's a really great use case. So um, I'm based here in florida and so I tend to see that the use cases come and go with the season. So in florida it feels like it's always hurricane season. And so I'm normally always talking to customers about disaster recovery. And so there's a lot of things that I think are
17:46
driving that this year, especially with a lot of the supply chain issues that are hitting us because of covid. And so a lot of customers are either having to shut down data centers because someone needs them for something or they can't get equipment for them. They can't get switches. The servers are way too old. They can't use them anymore.
18:03
And so they're kind of looking at a way to get a reliable disaster recovery target in the cloud with low R P O S, low R T O S and a flexible model. And so that is really what is driving a whole lot of use cases, especially around sequel file services and a lot of workloads. If we kind of think about that, customers are then also using it to migrate their
18:22
applications through a lift and shift methodology to the cloud from their own premises experience. So they can either do that with purity replication or a sink or they can do it with our cloud snap, which allows them to take those snapshots, move them to S3 or blob storage and then utilize that for their cloud storage.
18:38
But what I kind of feel is like a very efficient approach of this is kind of combining two. And so if we combine the two middle ones, disaster recovery and depth test is customers are already replicating their data up. And one thing that we do very well here is our snapshot technology and so we can take snapshots and clones of environments and develop and compress them.
18:57
And so that storage at that point is essentially free. And so if you have a disaster recovery data set, that's your production, you're replicating it up, you're cloning that for test view 80 staging and at that point you have essentially free storage, you're only paying for compute and you're really getting a whole lot of flexibility.
19:14
But for cloud block store, we definitely want to make sure people understand is you don't need a flash storage on premises, you don't need your on premises. And so we have the ability to do intra cloud disaster recovery. So replicate from US east to US west, do you? High availability in the cloud. And so they do active cluster synchronous replication between zones within a region,
19:32
have that high availability. And so there really is a whole slew of use cases. And I think as more customers are getting their hands on this, they're kind of creating their own custom ones. Um and a lot of what's definitely coming up a lot more is around containers and not to say that we don't love containers.
19:50
Right. Court works was an acquisition we made a little bit over a year ago. It's part of that evergreen um one model, but court works as our kubernetes data services. So when you're having data, whether it's on prem, whether it's in the cloud, whether it's anywhere any kubernetes any environment, it gives you the single pane of glass to be able to manage your kubernetes and
20:09
container environment, whether it's from a storage perspective, a migration, A D R a security, um backing it up and kind of autopilot, which when we think about some of these cost economics, it's probably a really best tool for that when you think about container persistent storage. So I think a lot of the stuff we've done has kind of built onto this journey about how we
20:28
can really provide a lot of cost optimizations for our customers. Absolutely everything we're talking about today is about de risking our customers environments, whether it's in the cloud, whether it's on prem or both. I have conversations with customers all the time who are saying that it's hard enough to get, you know, hardware for on prem that they want to look at something like cloud cloud
20:47
block store for VR because then it's less hardware they have to try to acquire right now. So as the service is very, very relevant. Yeah, I just I I did one other thing that we probably haven't given enough attention to here is that everybody has got a plan for adopting the public cloud. Uh It's it's not so much a matter of if it's it's a matter of when for for a lot of their workload.
21:07
Um but there's significant timing risk associated with that that adoption of the public cloud and and using cloud block store in a in an evergreen one subscription kind of removes that timing risk right? They can move during the term of the of the subscription when they're ready. So you don't have to make any guesses. Um and and be hurt if those guesses are off about how quickly they will adopt the public
21:29
cloud as long as they're in a subscription and, and uh, and using cloud block store to move to the, to adopt a public cloud. They can't be hurt by, by timing slips. Absolutely. So it sounds like the, the answer here is the risk, your, your installed, the risk, your hybrid cloud strategy with,
21:45
with evergreen one and, and, and, and cloud block store. So thank you gentlemen for joining us today. Any final comments? I'll start with you, john yeah, just uh, you know, I, I go back to the, the, uh, the reasons for the heavy interest, you know, maybe maybe you know, one of the primary reasons for the growth in in interest
22:05
in, in the public cloud has been being able to adopt those consumption models and evergreen one and, and pure in general is making that possible for on prem and kolo consumption as well. So I'm very excited that we've taken those paradigms and, and, and put them where customers need them today. Absolutely. Thank you so much john for your,
22:23
your great business insight and uh, and and talking to us about evergreen one. And so I'll turn over to you David any any final comments. Any closing remarks? Um, no, nothing specific. So thank you everyone for joining us today and hopefully this was helpful and if you have any questions about cloud block store about evergreen one,
22:39
about flashback as a service, please reach out and we'll be glad to answer to you have a wonderful session.
  • Evergreen//One
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  • FlashStack
  • Pure//Accelerate
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