1:02:48 Webinar
Beyond the Protocols: Pure’s File & Object Vision
Who knew that the best coffee break conversations would end up happening online? Each month, Pure’s Coffee Break series invites experts in technology and business to chat about the themes driving today’s IT agenda - much more ‘podcast’ than ‘webinar’.
This webinar first aired on November 9, 2022
The first 5 minute(s) of our recorded Webinars are open; however, if you are enjoying them, we’ll ask for a little information to finish watching.
Click to View Transcript
Hello and welcome everybody to the November 9th Coffee Break Beyond the Protocols, Pure File and object vision. My name is Andrew Miller. I'm joined today by my peer Sean Kennedy Sean. Thanks so much for being here as uh as you might have guessed, we try to keep this relaxed but it takes preparation time.
So you know, advance. Thanks there, Sean as always. Yeah, as always, this is a series. Now we've got a fancy logo and actually this month, what's really neat is that not only do we have this, that is in the follow up, you get each month that actually shows uh previous sessions and then they're even sorted by topics. If you actually go now to pure storage dot com,
uh slash events or slash webinars, take your pick and you scroll down a little bit. You'll see there's a new event center and it's actually got sections for the different series. Coffee Break is not the only series that pure has. Um It's the one that's nearest and dearest nearest, nearest to my heart for obvious reasons, but there's flash crew in there, you know, customer focused webinars,
tech talks that are kind of more specific, deep down technical webinars. This is for a technical audience, but let's be real. We only go so deep in the coffee break format and then if you click that little, see all area there, you can actually see a whole bunch of the previous ones there so you can browse through them because I, I think uh personally some of the content here lasts a
little better than sometimes other webinars that can get a little bit more stale over time as always. Um Thank you for the uh thank you for appreciating that. While there are incentives here, there are some folks that we can't send them to. If you don't see your card, I'll make sure to double check your spam folder and that actually comes out after attendance
now because we have so many people that join us that's actually based on attending a surprise next month, we'll be exploring the multiverse of modern data protection with pure storage. It will actually be the first month. Uh I will actually be out of the country visiting family, although hopefully tuning in remotely. But Jason Walker who's a two-time previous guest will actually be guest hosting along with
Chad Monteith Sean. If you had to describe Jason's energy, I'd like to think I do. All right, but it feels like he's on another level sometimes off the hook. Yeah, it's, it's a lot of fun to be with Jason. Absolutely. So I, I don't think if anything, I'm, I'm hoping when I come back in January, they won't be like,
yeah, it, it's, it's, it's the Jason show now because actually that's cool because this has been almost about two years. But what's neat there is that there's more that pure does from a data protection standpoint than you might expect. That's why we call it modern data protection. You know, therefore we're gonna cover that as a topic.
And this is definitely just like this month, this is kind of a portfolio discussion. It's not a product discussion, it's a capabilities outcomes and all that kind of stuff. I was always, I'm your host as it relates to this topic. Um I actually started with Novell stuff for file and some NFS and SM BS before it was SMB.
Um And I'm even thinking of RWCM FA and data and resource works on MAC stuff. There's just file throughout Sean though. Um Both maybe introduce yourself a little bit and you've got a really cool thing in your background there that is also in this uh slide here. So, yeah, yeah. So, uh yeah, also a principal technologist here up here.
And, uh, you know, I've, I've had this um career where, um, you know, I've been asked to summarize kind of, you know, well, what do you really do? And I think at the end of the day it's, I really like helping people, right? It, it's really all about, you know, you know,
what can I do from a technology perspective, uh to, to help people get through their day and make things easier for them. So I've had all sorts of different roles and kind of like you mentioned, you know, I've, I've wandered many a data center. Um I think my mild tinnitus is actually to that frequency of the crack units in data centers. So there's, there's that.
Um, but yeah, so, uh lots of stuff. Um you know, and one of my highlights was uh you know, we were talking about this in 2002. Um I had the honor of uh help to, of supporting the Olympics, uh the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City and it was a wonderful experience. Uh It was for the company I was working at, at the time Sun microsystems and,
you know, it was one of those things where, you know, it was exhausting, it was tiring, but it was also exciting and it was one of those things where, you know, I I knew people were paying thousands of dollars to be at the Olympics. And here I was, you know, on the, in the back ground in the back scenes, um you know, doing some really cool things and being paid for it,
right? So it was, it was quite an experience. Um The, the reason why I have the uh the medal in the background is it's not a real Olympic medal. Obviously, I'll say that, don't say that. But, but we did get it from uh some Microsystems in the Salt Lake Olympic Committee um for gratitude for uh the support that we did do.
And um I have my uh girls in this picture too because uh Audrey up front, um, actually got into an argument with her teacher about, uh they were talking about the Olympics and she said, well, my dad got an Olympic medal in computers and of course, the teacher said, well, you know, they don't have, uh, you know, events for computers in the Olympics.
And she's like, oh, no, he has a medal. So that, that turned into quite the thing where I had to, you know, gracefully explain to her what really happened and how it's not truly a medal. Um, and, and even actually had a conversation with her teacher and we all laughed about it. So, uh yeah, I'm just really excited to be here up here and I,
I really think that it's, um, you know, I really feel at home and that, uh, you know, simplification and, you know, engineering that's, that's complex to make things easier for people. Um, is, is really, you know, where it's at for, you know, as far as I'm concerned and I'm excited to be here. And the reason specifically not that just you
and I enjoy working together and talking, but actually around this topic, um Sean has done, you've done s work around helping with use cases and navigating as it relates to filing objects. That's part of why you're, you're the one in the boat with me today. So a little bit of a preview of the agenda as always.
So, like it says, agenda, not too much uh cheap jokes in the subtitle SMB versus NFS versus object. What do you think is best? You know, let's have a fight over that and not so much We've I fiber channel in the past or we could say stateless or state full applications with ah yeah, we're all human. So I think we love healthy debates but from a
topic standpoint agenda first, we're gonna do a little bit not exhaustive fun history of SMB NFS, an object because there's some interesting linkages there then thinking not just about the protocols because you know, if the goal here is to cover peer's violent object vision, it's not just the protocol layer and all the sub features there, but what's underneath the protocols, the hard problems you can solve with that layer.
Then if you're thinking about a protocol stack si B sport NFS, there's code there. Do you buy it? Do you build it? If you're pure? The answer is yes, embrace the healing power of and instead of or and then finally it is truly all about the use cases.
Hopefully that feels feels fair. Um Q and A throughout please. As always, I see the chat going nuts as it always does. There's been some couple of questions and comments in the Q and A bar. Thank you for using that before we dive in though. Uh What I find cool and I think this is even so it's, it's,
it's why you're here, Sean is we're not gonna cover this topic by the way from the standpoint of like, hey, we want to go through and like tell you all these interesting, architecturally technical sounding things that are actually a mask that pure doesn't do this very well. We do this really well. And my proof point for that is not, let's have a, have a long Gartner conversation,
but whether it's the primary storage, nine consecutive years of leadership furthest up into the right, if you look at it's a different quadrant for distributed file systems and object storage. Well, that relates to this category, right? Second consecutive year that we're a leader in the MQ. So I wanna just kind of put that out.
It's almost like table stakes. This is an area where we've done a lot. We've invested a lot, we're in a leadership position, but I actually wanted to kind of peel back, peel back the layers and help you understand where that innovation has come from. Not just placement on an MQ with that first poll if you don't mind launching that off Emily. Um We had a little bit of a, a little bit of fun with this one,
Sean. What, what would be your, your favorite, mostly pro file protocol of yesteryear or did we even leave it off? I don't remember. Oh, just, uh, I, I keep thinking about all the, all the pain points, right. Of all the things of yesteryear. So. Oh, good old FTP. Right. Mhm.
Or S FTP file transfer protocol. I, I still mostly know what these acronyms mean. So that's the mark of, uh, you know, if we're actually, you know, kind of b sing a little bit. So, no UUCP in there, we left out Net. I don't think I could remember how to spell that. That was the challenge on that one.
So I was like, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Actually let the pole keep going for a se we'll leave the pole open then and come back to it. But, but around that, for, for anyone uh in case we're not entertaining enough, hey, here's your joke. So uh actually I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll let you read the punch line. So here's your problem.
The connection to the network is broken. It's a token ring land. That means the token fell out. It's in this room someplace. These are 10, 15 year old jokes, maybe actually longer. And uh so would you like to sing? You are the wind beneath my wing Sean or is that putting you on the spot too much?
Now that puts me on the spot? Yeah. Yeah. It's like, I don't think anyone came to hear me or you or you think so? Uh And I, I'll, I'll, I'll just let you read the punch line there. So, over to you. Oh, you, you remind me the last slide. Yeah. Yeah, just the last line. Yeah.
So, you know, I'll, I'll wait a week and, and then tell him that the Token must be in the Ethernet. So, you know, it's just, it's, you know, when this comic first came out, I, I actually had it posted in my little cubicle that I had at IBM. Uh because back in the time we actually used Token Ring and we had these huge vampire clips right that we had to use to plug into the wall.
And then it had to go to a PC M PC M CIA card to get to your laptop to be able to do anything in the network. So it, it, um, it, it was near and dear to our hearts. Let's just say. So. I think Todd, I was trying to not say last names in case you don't want it on the recording. But Todd in the chat, I think for the,
uh for the opening win of the 1st 10 minutes or so, you know, it must have gotten stuck in the Vampire taps. So bam spot on. Ok. So, uh I'll, we'll just let the cool, keep going here for a little bit and some here we'll dive in. So, you know, a little bit of a fun history of SMB, you know,
NFS and object. But for me, you know, I think about actually I started even back help desk working MAC support and there was, you know, at MAC file system with resource forks and data forks and even supporting the very early days of net with, you know, RW ce M fa all the, all the permissions that you could have there. You're, if you're a,
um, if you have a, a Nobel certification that never expired, by the way, that's actually a fun fact. So you can still put on your resume. Maybe not, maybe not so much now. But I think for, for you Sean, it was even back in Windows for Ro ro isn't just kind of walk me through a little bit of your history there too.
Oh, yeah. You know, it was back in the days of, you know, going from DOS to Windows 31 and then Windows 31.1 0.11 right? It wasn't 313 11, was it? Yeah, that actually was Windows for our groups, right? That actually provided uh some protocol support for file sharing and that was,
you know, through net buoy support, right? So, you know, we weren't even talking TCP/IP back then. So, uh yeah, you know, things have progressed a lot over the years, right? And you know, the early years of, of using NFS and, you know, all my years at Sun, we had to deal with things of, you know,
like, you know, you'd have a server reboot and it would zombify all your clients. Right. And, and you have to, you know, troubleshoot locks and, and, uh, you know, port mapper and all sorts of things. There's just all sorts of crazy stuff that, that goes on out there. I mean, iii, I think about, I mean, we, we talk about the protocols but you've made an
interesting point when you're talking about this and the protocols, whether it's NFS or SMB, I mean, they came out of in a way the local file system, right? Yeah, really kind of an extension of the file system of the day, right? And then as the file systems were matured, right? The the protocols had to mature and, and,
you know, going back to, you know, 8.3 file name support, right? And then getting larger file name support and, and why was that? Right? Because people were putting more metadata right into the names that they're creating deeper directory structures and that sort of thing. And you know,
and, and I think that that brings up a conversation too, Andrew of, you know, there's this whole movement towards objects, right? And, and the object protocol space and you know what objects are. And really if you think about it, you know, there were all these limitations where, you know,
as you got more complex with directory structures and file names and, and you know, who hasn't put in a date and a version identifier in a file name because you don't think you can trust the actual modified date or the actual create date. Uh because you don't know where the the the file came from or you know, maybe you put it on a flash drive and a reset, the create date or something like that,
right? So, you know, there's all these things that happen with metadata uh in relations to just a file um that really kind of brought to light, hey, you know, if we actually abstracted the metadata from the object itself, we can do some really cool things, you know, and, and that, that to me is fascinating because this is even now there's these themes that we pull in
different ways. So we think about like databases and like you have a primary key and if you use the primary key in bad ways, you don't make it something actually friendly, kind of generic or, or random, you load stuff into it. We take a file name like you said 8.3. We load too much into that for me where that even clicked.
And I'm not trying to pull too much of the old school Mac stuff, but we think of hfs and you had, you had the data fork and the resource fork and then you, you lose the resource fork when you send it around or if you were an admin, you'd have these dot DS store files, littering your windows servers, you know, kind of thing like, oh, what's that? But it was actually to try and start to handle
the idea of having very rich metadata that goes just breaks down if all you have is a name, especially an 8.3 name, but, but even a longer name. So maybe if you don't kind of pull that metadata thread a little bit more on what it means as far as object well. And the thing is is, you know, as you, you know, these protocols have always support supported metadata of some
sort, right, you know, create date, modified access times, that's metadata, the file name, metadata, the directory location, metadata. But you know, we realized quickly and you know, I think for a while, you know, we started doing things in XML and we started doing things in databases and we had blob spaces, right, where we'd get,
you know, really large objects in the database. But then we'd have other columns to really kind of enrich the the data and the details around the object. And that's where it really started to make sense. Like, hey, if, if we actually have an object protocol where we separate the object from the metadata itself, you can do some really cool things.
You know, you can, you can do an analysis on a file for instance and only have to do it once put the results into the metadata right, and then you can search the metadata repeatedly um and not have to crack open the file every single time you wanna gain some insight. So, you know, there's a, there's a lot of a lot of progression. I think that that's occurred over the years just in the need of,
you know, being able to do better analytics and, and get, you know, quicker access to your files in a timely manner and all that sort of stuff. And especially the idea of that object potentially allows more decoupling from the application, right? One application might write it.
I, I think you've been, am I allowed to say DLL hell, maybe I don't know D BC. Hell, but uh yeah, just, just keep going there a little bit of that decoupling across the land and application impact. Oh yeah, I mean, I, I ran into issues long ago where, you know, you'd, you'd use a certain OD BC driver, right in windows to get access to your database,
right? And then, you know, if you didn't have the right OD BC drivers or if you didn't have the right application and the right application version, right? You'd get in trouble, you couldn't access the data anymore. So decoupling and, and, and getting the objects into a state where, you know, it really doesn't matter who wrote the information,
right? As long as it's written as an object, then it kind of opens up this whole world of, you're not constrained to the application that created the data, right? You might actually be able to transport that data, move that data around and use other applications uh towards it. I think with that, I'm gonna, I'm gonna close the poll and move on to section two.
Is there anything else you want to make sure to hit their song? Because this is a, it's a brief history but anything we left out there, I just that um the whole space of, you know, you know, taking MRI S for example, right? You know, if you had to crack open MRI S every single time you wanted to say, hey, I want to find all the broken legs in New York,
right? For that would be awfully intensive for any application to handle. But if you treat it from an objective perspective, using metadata, you know, that could be a very easy search to do. So um very excited in that space uh from an from an objective perspective. That's I think that's our dad joke of the way because we're both dad.
So just be um for the first poll for anyone wondering uh your favorite mostly protocol file of yes or your FTP wins out. I'm sure for its sterling security and plain text actor roots, but also probably it's universal. It just kind of works on the command line lois common nominator.
Um Thinking uh actually, I was, I was in a hospital at one point in a part of the country I won't say. And someone pronounced it and I was trying to, it took me a while to realize it wasn't something medically related. It was the, the, the protocol instead. And, uh, it looks like S3 and NFS are the pretty well S3 is the clear winner here,
but followed by NFS. So that, that's really cool. Ok. Quite a few votes for, uh, fiber channel over Tory too. Yes, that, that's, that's, it's actually clearly in third place. So that's awesome. OK. So I think uh Emily will do, go ahead and launch poll number two here and I'll,
I'll do the, the, the slide just to. So I remember that it was awesome. So what we're going to go into here a little bit and I'll kind of preview before reading it zoom underneath the protocols. I, I think it's fair to say Sean you and I have spent some of our life in block world or some, some, some of our life in file worlds.
There's more complexity often in a file world up the stack at the protocol level than there is in the block world. I don't think that's news to anybody. So that whole talk to me about file migrations, kind of kind of reflecting that a little bit. Um For me, the story is I used to get paid time and a half with free Mountain Dew. We didn't have to pay for those nights uh to do migrations.
Uh, I, I'm sure you've got some migration stories there too, Sean or maybe ones you don't even want to tell is like, oh, make this go away. Oh, yeah, they, they, they were always the, the, the highlights right of, of, of your week is, is spending late nights doing migrations,
lots of fun and as well, you know, a different version. We, we kind of hit on this last time but what, what protocol is most important today as we dial in on specifically the the file protocols. So um yes, and someone's asking about saying I scuzzy. But in this case, we were, you know, since we promised an advertised file and object protocol
vision, you know, that's where we're focusing in on this question so noted and, and understood David. So I wanted to go in here a little bit and this is where um we're, we're gonna kind of not reverse some of the roles, but sometimes. So it's always my job as um as host to make my guests look amazing, which doesn't take a lot of work with Sean and at the same time,
his job to be a great guest, but we're gonna tag team this these sections now a little more than sometimes makes the other times. So what I wanted to explore is the idea of it. We have to think about what's underneath the protocols. And this is even a theme that you even pulled out already a little bit, Sean, is that the, let's say SMB and NFS, they were an extension of the local file system of
NTFS of the XT three, you know, whatever other unique file systems that were in place kind of thing. So when we start to think about what's under the protocols, I'm gonna cheat a little bit because what's underneath the protocols is stuff that we've covered previously. You go back to Sam Marini. We actually, it was like a year ago this month. That's some serendipity right there.
You know, breaking free from, you know, the limits of legacy storage architecture around the idea of that, you know, when pure started come for the performance flash was an inflection point stay for the simplicity. And here I might even set an asterisk of the the relative simplicity if you will because there's still some complexity in file, file protocols.
You can't, you can't do anything with regardless. But underneath that is the core Evergreen message, which is what has gotten us here. But I think you could, you could make a case that this is uniquely impactful to file. Anything you want to emphasize from a file standpoint here about,
you know, evergreen. Yeah. You know, I mean, when it comes to pure, you know, we've talked about Evergreen for a long time and it's engineered into our product, right? Where you know, where forever currents, right? You can, you can upgrade over time without having to do replacements without having to do migrations.
We've talked about this a lot, especially in the block space. But if you think about it, um, when we bring file uh to our products, you get those same benefits, right. So, you know, you can continuously, you know, upgrade and improve, uh from an operating system perspective without outage, uh you know, you can upgrade the hardware over time without
outage. And, you know, if, if you really think about it, you know, that's really where you want to be right? You, you should be able to get back to what's important to your business and not have to care and feed so much, you know, your devices that just uh serve your data. And I, I think they even what you just called out is even more impactful from a file
standpoint because the higher messiness factor is that a technical word? I don't know the higher mess factor. Yeah. Yeah. Um II I, you were saying Robocop earlier was like, I'm gonna trump the all site rich copy, you know, for, for the win. I think someone's already tossed it in the chat but file migrations that, that even just that no data migration line,
that's so much more impactful in a file world than in a block world. It's great across the board, but even more impactful and, and full and just to be very clear, this is not just at a flash ray level. Um The bit one of the big announcements from pure accelerate was actually around flash blade s and fully embracing some of the evergreen concepts.
You may notice it's a little bit of a different slide visual style. It's actually the same kind of stuff listed here because that's the Evergreen approach. It's a portfolio discussion regardless of what protocols we have on the stack. One of the other things though that is underneath if you will under the protocols that matters from a peer standpoint is direct flash.
So I I think Sean Sean, what would you want to emphasize from even a file or a file and object standpoint about the impact of direct flash, some of the impacts the same, some unique over to you. Well, you know, we we often talk about the benefits of flash, right? And, and you know, we've come to expect,
hey, you need, you know, you should be able to get performance out of flash, but you know, the unique way that we implement and we've been built from the ground up to truly utilize flash um in its optimal way, you know, you get all these benefits right? You get benefits of data reduction at performance low latency. Um You, you get all these um um enhancements as far as uh performance when it comes to
low rate amplification and snapshot capabilities and all sorts of stuff. Uh all because of how we've implemented um our flash technology and and this actually goes across you know, the, the different arrays. So, you know, whether it's um a flash array C that uses QLC or X or XL that uses TLC a little bit faster, right? You know, it's still all the same technology,
it's still all the same operating system. Um It, it, it, it gives you that ability to, again, um simplifying, uh you know, that it's performant, reliable and resilient and you can get about your business, right? And concentrate, concentrate on the things that are really truly important to you, especially sometimes the only thing about file workload,
there are times where the the focus isn't latency or performance. That's what you think about the cost economics of flash ray C and the density and even bringing it into Highbridge array uh price profiles if you will. So this is a pervasive benefit under the coverage, but let's get into the file. So platform things that matter and we can afford to do that because we've pulled away
from just it's the underlying windows or Linux or uni you know, we're serving these protocols out of different platforms. But if we think about workload criteria even kind of before the protocol if you will. So it is about workloads and you saw we're gonna get to use cases here, there's a whole bunch of things out there and this is not exhaustive by the way,
a large versus small files, metadata, data reduction, random sequential. But what it often really boils down to is when we look at the core architecture pieces and, and now this is where uh what the reason I, I really, really appreciate what pure is doing. And I'm not just saying that because I'm here no, partly but, but also, I mean, it is that you think about what is the core piece of what
a platform is built around? You can only solve one or two hard problems. That was something I borrowed from Brian Co in a previous section. So when you look at workloads, the initial focus, not the only one like you've got to have the protocol support of the stack and other things, et cetera and and good financials from the company. So you trust them, but it it often becomes is
the most important thing around latency is the focus on latency is the focus maybe more around cost. Now let's be real here, we're all flash and even some of our products that are we think are relatively slower are still in the 2 to 5 millisecond range kind of thing or is the focus around bandwidth. And and interestingly when you actually look at it that way,
if you say these are the initial focuses the optimization points if you will, it leads into different things from a product and portfolio standpoint up the stack even before you get to the protocol. So we just had this slide up a second ago. So if we think about a cost focus that often kind of links into flash AC and QLC and data reduction. Uh We think about a latency focus.
I'm actually just trucking through here a little bit Sean. So apologies, uh latency focus, you know, sub millisecond latency for tier ones, your applications with crazy snapshot and metadata cables, that's flash array X and XL. You say I want 100 gig of through, but that's actually a crazy number unless you have
something that's built to be scaled out at that layer like for instance, flash blade. So this is now again, even before we get to the protocol is some of the initial focus for the workload, latency, first cost first bandwidth first. And that leads to different things. And that's actually really what has driven the
new our portfolio like, like it says kind of a new lens on the portfolio. What else do you want to add there? Sean. I know I kept going there because I'm watching time. And as always these expands of it, I know I left some things out, please. What do you wanna add? Uh just that, you know, I think it really does make a difference as to,
you know how we've approached things here as far as you know, massive parallelism, uh you know, high high throughput, right, uh flash played out is a fantastic machine for that. Uh and still uses QLC, right? And you know, how do we do that? Well, it's through tough engineering that we've
made that happen. Um, and then, of course, you know, with the, with the C and the X and the XL, right, you're looking at more of those workloads where, you know, it, it's, it's more suitable for conventional sort of NAS type of stuff. And, and, and also one of the things we sometimes don't talk about too often is that, you know,
we don't have to carve up, you know, little segments of space, you know, for file operations. So if you have block, you don't have to have a block space and a file space, it's just data when it comes to ras, right? So it's just, you know, if you want to write data from, from, from a file protocol, great, if you want to write it from a block protocol,
great. You know, it still lands on flash the same way. There's no pools, there's no segmentation and, and I think that's a really smart way of doing it. So we'll share the poll results here and not spend too long because I'm kind of trapped. I might go a little bit past the 45 minute mark. But yeah, that's into Q and A.
So talking about file migrations, it looks like the winner there is just by a little bit, don't trigger my PTSD, but they're all pretty balanced with 1000 and three responses, which is, which is actually pretty neat. Uh And then which protocol is most important to you today. SMB and NFS are just neck and neck there uh with S3 very clearly following and,
and, and actually, you know, very, very few that are uh are, are other in this space. So it's always good to see if what's coming out. OK. So next, so we think about there's underlying pieces there that are, that are common across the board, they're data pieces and what pure does, you know, I'm not building,
not buying S sds, but you know, buying raw in and all the benefits of direct flash. So then there's the idea sometimes of, and I've, I've seen this, you know, this is some time in Silicon Valley and chat with other folks. The idea that if you want to build a storage product and it's a block storage product that it can take maybe 3 to 5 years, you get really good engineers,
you build the underlying things, you, you solve a couple hard problems to give some distinctive competitive differentiation. Get it out in the market 3 to 5 years to have something that kind of hits some of the mark file file is harder. So, so as the classic number I've heard there is in the 5 to 7 year mark.
Um So in that case, you know, just like just like you, you think about, do I, you know, I, do I buy a product that automates stuff or do I write a bunch of scripts? It's the same thing if you're a vendor, you're a manufacturer, do I buy or I build the answer? Interestingly enough from pure was yes, because what we realized was if you want to have a true
scale out platform that can drive crazy high bandwidth and other pieces around that, what you have to do is you actually have to build the protocol stack. So the first step was that's what we did with flash blade. So again, harkening back a little bit but not entirely to a previous coffee break uh with Brian Gold, you know, you're not your grandfather's filer and ask the future of
unstructured data there. We're talking about how um you know, if you want to do multidimensional performance with crazy throughput and amazing metadata and concurrency and handle uh you know, small and large objects sides said all this stuff you, you actually have to build the protocol stack from scratch internally and that's what we've actually done with Flash Blade. Um So while there's a huge new hardware and
software launch earlier this year, it's been six years of innovation there. And, and sometimes I even get people who are like, like, I don't quite understand what flash blade is. Well, it is built for next generation file use cases. We'll get there in a second. So if you're kind of wondering a little bit
about like, oh what about the use cases we'll get there. It was like, couldn't quite decide to, to pull that apart or not. I, I think Sean though, there's, there's one piece here that you wanted to call out too. Right. And, you know, that's the thing is, especially with Evergreen over the years. You know,
if you think about it, you know, all this innovation without having to do a migration is, is just amazing. Right. And for any of us that have actually gone through migrations and had to, you know, migrate from one platform to another to another over the years, every 3 to 5 years or whatever that life cycle was, you know, it just seeing uh the ability of not having to do that.
Um II I think is a real plus spot on. So there's a sense here of OK, if you want to do something that is focused on bandwidth and concurrency and metadata, you know, OK, we're building a new platform for that now. But the flip side is, and now this is interesting. Um Actually I'm gonna pull ahead a little bit of the uh of the use case discussion.
So sometimes I think about there's almost, you know, kind of three use cases for file, file. Maybe one is my defined applications. I know what they are, they're very important, you know, kind of thing. Uh Other is my home shares and user directories. And my third is just all the random stuff in my data center.
I don't even know what it is anymore, but it's there somewhere, you know, kind of thing. So we kept having customers come to us and saying, ok, flash blade hits some use cases real. It's, it's a very innovative product like we we should some of the Gartner pieces that we talked about before. But what about general purpose user shares and
home directories and even a little bit more of a general purpose platform? So that is where then we also went and the answer to that buyer built a protocol stack was yes, this is a little bit of this is all origin stories now, right kind of thing. So the origin story for flash a ray file services is people coming to us and saying I want all the goodness of flash array but for
file. So we found a company uh in the Nordic Act so we could acquire software only company. And what we wanted was something to accelerate that protocol stack development. I say SMB or NFS, you should be like, well, what does that mean? Does it mean what version of SMB and NFS and then blocks and uh authentication methods? Like all these things that kind of make my head
hurt but they're all there and you gotta go look at the charts and the matrixes and like so to accelerate the protocol support, found a company acquired them, you know, several years back. But there was also then this really hard decision of how do we go and integrate this into flash, right? Which historically has been a block product.
And Sean, I, I know, I mean, your, your past was with, um, a company that bought a gateway product to go on top of block. I think we're trying to not be a jerk and call ones out. I see you nodding. So, is it a, do you put block on top of file? We've seen that in the industry. Do we put file on top of block?
We've seen that one too. I've worked with platforms that did both of those or do you do the right thing? But the the right thing, long term, but the harder thing and make file a first class citizen alongside a block. Now the slide, the slide tells you what we chose to do. It's taken some engineering work and you can
see that in the releases of capabilities around flash ray file and even you know, replications there but file first class citizen purity alongside block, you know, share pool. That was what you were calling out earlier. Like you don't have to carve carve things out in between, you know that you get the exact same data reduction benefits that you get on flash ara
directory snapshots, metrics as well as you know, multi protocol access. So the vision of this if you will is that it's all the goodness of flash array brought to file services. Now, like we talked about the design center of flash array in. Well flash A ray C, flash ray X XL, it's a different design center than the design center of flash blade,
right? And that's even where we get to a little bit of. Hm, what about overlap? Overlap's bad, right? Maybe so at a portfolio level and I was just pulling back the curtain a little bit from a kind of a product management development standpoint. You don't get to have perfectly aligned portfolios, you can have overlap,
you can have gaps. Those are your two choices just being very real. It's better to have not, not too much overlap, but some and especially if the products are flexible enough. Uh It's like what I did as a customer, I'll use it for whatever I jolly. Well, please, because I bought it if it works, you know, kind of thing,
I'll get, you get mad at you for that. So that's where because of those different design centers, we wanted to be very clear about some of the history, but I could see that some folks today would be like, come on. That's a lot of work. Just tell me about the use cases, map it to the applications.
That's where Sean. Um Yeah, we, we, we'll go and launch the third pole in a minute and you've spent a good bit of time even around uh what we call a use case Navigator internally. It's not about pure complexity about this space. You might even kind of talk some about about the work that you've done there. Yeah. You know,
there are just so many use cases out there, you know, that involve different scenarios and, and, um, you know, they have their own needs. Right. And, and it can be somewhat overwhelming as, as to all the different types of applications out there and all the different types of ways you use the data and all the sort of scenarios that you go through. And we do have two products that are very
complimentary uh to each other in a lot of areas. Uh But there are certain use cases too where, you know, one might shine over the other as well. And uh you know, uh for example, flash blade, right, massive parallelism, high, high throughput, um I it shines, it really truly shines.
So you, you see that in, you know, uh machine learning and analytics and all that sort of stuff. So, uh you know, bringing uh technology to the field as far as, you know, here are the use cases that we see out there in the field. Um And you know, uh which use case might be best for which platform and that sort of thing has, has been one of those things that uh I've uh I've personally taken interest in uh just to
ultimately help uh you know, not only our sales folks but our customers as well, right? And, and making sure that uh you know, they're getting the best Bang for their buck. This is, it's a reflection of once we get into the file world, it's a messier landscape kind of thing. So let me,
OK, I've got so many other thoughts, but we'll pause it and we'll toss out the third pole and then we'll bring it home with the final section. So I know if you don't mind launching poll number three. So we, we're gonna kind of, we're still gonna say, say what we're gonna say, you know, and, and then we'll come back and look at the policy and see what's most interesting. So what use cases for filing object matter the
most to you today? And what approach do you think is best being real? That's having a little bit of fun. Uh It's always a little bit of fun with it and it may even be just your origin of where you started as a customer and what products you started with, you know, kind of thing because that, that influences,
you know, our comfort levels like this, this feels normal. Like I can still, I won't say the product name, but I can still rail off ray ray groups, aggregates, flex falls, Q trees and put Luns inside, you know. So it's there. OK. So troll units, logical devices. Oh yeah,
there's all sorts of fun out there. Mhm So what, and now this is meant to be a very, a very real standpoint when we often target coffee break. It's not this isn't inherently meant to be an investor relations or analyst relations or pr but I think what, what you and I have both seen. So is that sometimes we have one platform to
rule them all that doesn't do anything super well or it doesn't actually do stuff really well. So it's like you, like, I want one single thing and sometimes it can hit the good enough mark and, and, and so that I've seen customers, that's the case and it's so good. That's awesome. We've also seen we're trying to hit good enough
means you don't do any of the things really, really well. So if we actually dial down now to specific use cases and we think about them. Um so this is where we are actually now getting a little bit product before we talk about the portfolio. So if we think about flash played, I remember if I talked about uh the kind of the three UC cases, I think in the data center for file,
one is like the very defined important business critical applications. And then two is user file shares and home directories and then three is all the random stuff that you know, some department someone put on department share 10 years ago, I didn't even know it was there. So being built for specific applications now, some of these may be like, OK, it's as far as like next generation or modern applications.
What does it say? Backup products? On there. Well, maybe backup has been around for a while but needing to restore at scale, you know, maybe maybe be a petabyte or day, you know, 270 gig of throughput. That's what flash can drive or more that's different or very data hungry, bandwidth hungry workloads and vidia for instance,
you know, their chips um love huge amounts of data and bandwidth or we get into ML we get into some level of packs and scale out stuff. So Flash Blade as this platform that focuses on concurrency scale out all the evergreen promises great things around metadata is uniquely well suited to some of the use cases that you see here, but it is really built and especially the protocol support.
I won't go back to the previous side of Flash Blade that as we've implemented protocol capabilities on flash blade, it's not been about let's just support everything in SMB or let's support everything in NFS. It's been about let's follow the applications and what they need and and sometimes a little bit more exoteric things from a protocol support standpoint that is in the context of gotta put it up again,
not just saying this, you know where this approach has landed us firmly in the Gartner magic quadrant of where flash play specifically plays around distributed file systems and object storage. Anything else you wanna add there, Sean from a a flash plate standpoint before we jump over to flash ray Well, I, I think just highlighting two of, you know, modern applications and,
and evolving applications over time, I think, uh you know, pointing out uh you know, backup applications is, is, is a good one, right? Because, you know, long gone are the days where, you know, you could, you know, you needed high parallelism to do the backup. But, you know, if you could have a slow recovery, you know,
one or two systems at a time that was acceptable. Well, that was then, you know, in today's environment with ransomware threats and everything else, you need rapid restores, right? You need to be able to have high parallelism in recovery now. Uh So, you know, there's been a lot of change in the industry over the years and uh you know, I think we're meeting those challenges next.
Oh MQ. Uh There we go again. What about flash array files? So flash array newer relatively kid on the block because flash play is 678 years ago, shame on me flash ray file go back about three or four years. So this was originally focused on customers, people, you asking and saying I really want user into department shares.
And then sometimes especially because with the flash array, we do have signs of unique cost, economics of flash array C that starts to hit hybrid price points. So sometimes that's why backup is listed here. Is it more about a balance of cost and restore speed? Or is it about the best restore speed possible between flash ray and flash blade content
repositories, archival and even in some cases, is moving toward even even just general use cases, we continue to build things out here as far as from a validation and testing and hardening standpoint. Uh But this is in the kind of the classic unified storage landscape, whereas flash ray, flash blade is built unabashedly around a different design center if
you will, right? So sometimes that focus is like, so, so what is pure vision for file? Oh, and I left this out, you know, we got, we got to call up the the MQ again, right? Because we're also playing very well in here on the flash ray side. So if you will the vision for file is we want to bring all the evergreen benefits.
We wanna follow the applications, not just say we're gonna do one size to fit all. And there was a great comment from Webb actually in the chat of we're not leaving behind, you know, legacy workloads if you have platforms that work well, great. But we we're driving getting innovation where customers are asking us to and not just saying trying to match what's been done for the last
20 or 30 years in some cases by some companies that I really respect, right? There's 2030 years of innovation, but they don't have the design center of Evergreen, the design center of, of direct flash and even building the protocols from scratch to follow what's needed. We're having very native fast file and S3 support Sean.
I got going a little too much. I wanted to toss a team more. You mind bringing us home and then we'll do the final poll. What did I leave out there? Anything you want to toss in? Well, just thanks again for just letting me participate. Andrew. I, you know, I always love hearing your take on things and uh you know,
I, I think we have a, a really uh intriguing story here and, and again, we're not talking about like, hey, this is how we bolted on an A gateway and this is how we had to kind of retrofit our software to try to make things as simple as possible. I think we made some really hard engineering decisions early on that are only going to reap massive reward going forward in the future and, and hopefully our customers can see that as
well in, in the maturity of our products as well as, you know, going forward and not having to do upgrades or, you know, migrations and that sort of thing and you can, you know, upgrade without downtime and all that sort of stuff. So, um I, I think we're in a great place right now.
I'm excited about the engineering efforts that are ongoing and uh I'm, I'm sure there's a lot more to continue. There is we're intentionally not doing road map things. That's not the, that's not, this isn't the right format for that. So, Sean, thank you so much for joining me. We've got a drawing uh and we,
and we're gonna hang around for Q and A as we always do. So we've got a drawing. We'll do the poll. We're just about the right time mark. And um yeah, OK. Let's keep going. So I think we'll end the poll here and I will share that back for anyone who was wondering
and I appreciate people because we were at uh over 900 responses on this. So what use cases for file and object matter the most to you today? I think we've got a clear winner there, Sean. Yeah. User, oh, go ahead, user and group shares. Absolutely. You know, there's still a large space for that, right?
And, you know, frankly that could be the most complicated of, you know, uh NAS sort of operations, right? When you're talking about protocols and file names and, you know, if somebody uses some crazy wing things format inside their file name and you know, how, how does your uh uh you know, a file system and, and protocols handle it and all that sort of stuff.
So, uh yeah, it's interesting to see that it's a different enough thing that we bought a company called Comp to help drive that. So actually, before we go to two, I want to be good for folks that they do need to drop for the drawing. If you stayed around for that, the raffle winner is Don P from Massachusetts. Hopefully that's enough. So, you know who you are?
Um Emily will be reaching out for uh to help you uh to help provide you with an ember mug, a retail value of around 100 and $30. I want to say the kind you can control with your phone. Yes, that's cool. But depending on how you like to drink your beverages, it's actually kind of neat to keep your tea long. You sip on it for an hour or two,
you know, kind of thing. So, um, kind of cool tech and it'd be actually useful too. So they're not sponsoring us. So I'd have to be totally positive. So, but being real question and so we are now at the end. Well, no, I think I'll, I'll hold the poll question. So for anyone who is, um, needs to drop,
please make sure to join us next month for exploring the multiverse of modern data protection with storage, pure storage, along with Jason Walker and Chad Monteith. And we are now into kind of the relaxed closing section. We got another poll here. I think if it's not too annoying for folks, if it's hard for anybody just say it in the chat, I'll pull the music up here a little bit
to kind of, you know, give the relaxed feel. Oh, that's about the right volume, Sean. And actually, uh for the poll, I'm, you know, I'm gonna actually leave that shared here for one more second. Do you wanna kinda let people, uh, give a little bit of commentary on question number two there,
Sean. Yeah. Uh What approach do you think is best as far as uh follow and block both as first class citizens? I, I think, I think, you know, we're engineering right to that. Right. So, you know, I think that's just a highlight of, you know, we're really listening to our, what our customers needs truly are and,
and engineering our efforts towards that. So um it's good to see that and I, I do like to just here for the coffee card too. Right. I, I've been in that category. I, I as, as a little secret. Yeah, it's stuff I, I'm, I'm hoping it hasn't been for like coffee breaks over the last year or two because we don't get the coffee cards as pure employees.
So if you're still waiting, sorry, you know. Um although every now and then I think Emily will include me on that, which I appreciate. So, you know, I think um I'll go ahead and stop sharing that. As always, we have a good number of our, our nearest and dearest friends, like 1500 of them still hanging out with.
So for the Q and A um there's actually one thing I'm just gonna toss in first here and I'll just kind of frame it up and then we'll see what comment Sean there. There's a great comment from Webb just around. Um making sure not to kind of leave behind legacy workloads. And I, my thought there is, I, I have huge respect for the companies that have been in
this space for 2030 years. Um If you're going to innovate and bring something new, you don't do that by saying, let me try and duplicate everything they've done for 20 or 30 years. That's the way that a product doesn't make it. So we try to focus on is where things are going and then making sure what are the baseline
capabilities we need, adding those in while providing things that we can uniquely do, especially based on the underlying foundation. So, so hopefully never, this is like a only workloads behind it, being honest about what we're built for. And frankly, we see things shifting toward pure sweet spot like there were even times
internally where um, full disclosure, there weren't plans on Flash Ray to do what we've done over the last couple of years. It wasn't the focus, but you customers kept asking for it and that happens enough and it's like we're, well, we ought to do that so on, please. Yeah, I, I think it's a great point, right. And I think,
um, you know, our efforts as far as let's, let's make sure, you know, we're hitting home uh, with, you know, solving the problems that our customers are asking for, um, instead of just checking off feature, uh, check boxes, I think is really important. And I think what we're seeing is a lot of legacy applications do have, you know, some of these core requirements and,
you know, that's, you know, some of the stuff that we've actually satisfied early on. Right. I think it's some of the more exotic stuff out there uh that we're still actively engineering towards. So um I, I think it's a great point, right? I, I think it's, it's one of those things where, you know, I think we can engineer in that space uh
appropriately and um you know, help people uh in, in those legacy type of systems um and carry them forward. So hope hopefully Web that kind of answers the questions more about and, and in this case, if there's big enough call it legacy workloads, we'll embrace that. I mean, user shares and home directories might
be as legacy as it comes. But we all thought, I think as an industry, that stuff was going to move to the cloud faster than it did and especially the data governance and sovereignty and all this stuff kind of thing. So OK. Um Hopefully Web that makes sense, but please put more stuff in the chat. Appreciate the question,
I'll mark that answered live. There's another one here um from Sarah. Um when the back end is stored in the storage pool as well. It's referring to kind of unified file and block. Um basically can you have load and performance impact or impact the block side.
So uh this would be kind of going into the flash ray side. We've done some very specific work around making sure that's not the case whether that is taking our always on Q OS approach and extending across both file and block, even some enhancements in the most recent major release of flash array there. And even in some cases saying, you know, if there are certain,
you know, like you can look at the website, you can see an X 10 flash ray model because of wanting to make sure that the block size not impact that's actually not rated for file, right? So we've actually had this focus on knowing where we came from on the flash ray side leading the block market. We shouldn't be doing things as people start to use it in a unified way that impacts.
Now, can you get any array busy from a total workload standpoint? Of course, right, but not outsized impact from the file versus block perspective. Well, and just to add to Andrew, I mean, not only, you know, do we have the always on Q OS which is global, right? It's, it's not shaped just for file or just for block, it's global.
Um And it's shaped for the IO of flash um the same thing occurs when, when you're doing, you know, reads rights, uh, from, you know, either block or file or just, you know, regardless of what you're doing. Right. It's still treating the data the same. Um, and I think we really gained some real efficiencies there because we're not just
masking off a portion of the array to do one thing. Right. And, you know, I, I think in years past there's been, you know, a lot of conversations about, well, you know, let's just do a NAS Gateway because that way the block device can do blocky things really well. And then the NAS device can do NASY things really well.
Um But, you know, we saw complexity in that type of solution and we decided not to go that way because we thought we could actually combine, you know, everything that you can do with file, um enhance it with what we do uh in the, in the data pipe, right? Um And, and come out with a very uh strong product and I,
and that's exactly what we've done. So great question. I, I think that's, that's a really important thing to know that, you know, it's, you still get full access to the array uh regardless of what you do, right, whether you're doing file or block or both, uh you know, uh load is load. So, and, and we do have those safeguards to
prevent noisy neighbors and that sort of thing. I'm gonna pull there's a bunch of questions which is great. Um I'm gonna pull up the uh there's 11 here. Where was that? Uh So do we need to request a file on existing flash A ray running purity six? It's actually kind of a fun question. Some that we don't talk about.
There's a specific detail that we don't talk about as much in poet. So there are some capabilities so on pure, all the capabilities on flash A ray you have and one flash plate. If you want to, for instance, activate synchronous replication, we call that active cluster, you actually have to call in to support to do that eventually that's gonna go away.
But we that was even because even if we dramatically simplify that layer, there are capabilities, there are things there about network trombone and other stuff you can get yourself into trouble with signature application and a network layer and stretch V les kind of stuff. And you even want to make sure there's sufficient bandwidth. Similarly on the file side features included,
you can even see it in the U I but there is actually a support activation process and it actually works is in conjunction with working with your local se so that you understand where flash A is a capability standpoint and you're not looking to go and try and do things we'll be like, oh this is there and it doesn't do the all the same stuff as my product that's had 30 years of smb development in it. So it's more about a transparency,
making sure to educate. So we have good customer experience. It is included, but that's actually some logic there and that's actually relaxed some over time, Sean and I are, uh we're in the middle of some of those processes and educational stuff, but it's really about um, driving customer satisfaction and level setting expectations. Um, I went too long there, Sean, please.
Oh, no, I right to your point. Right. It's, it's, it's all about making sure that the customer experience is, is what you would expect, right? And, and we wanna make sure that, you know, anything that you do from a file perspective, especially with flash array, um you, you know, is, is done in such a way where, you know,
uh you know, it, it makes for a smooth experience. So, and, and, and a lot of that too is just helping us understand what the trends are and what our customers really need and really want. Right? And that way we can focus our engineering efforts towards that. Great question. I'll put in a couple here quickly.
We've got four minutes left. So Chris, are you working with Epic for Web Lob certification? I'm just gonna be candid. I don't know, I do know we work really closely with Epic. We're on the high comfort level. Um A lot of work with Epic and also a lot of work with a ton of epic customers. We've even highlighted that in the coffee break
last month with Josh, I would presume that we are, but I don't want to say for sure. So if you don't mind even following up on that or I can follow, we can follow up with you around that question, but didn't want to ignore the question. There was another one here about, I saw a multi protocol SNB and NFS is S3 available or is only available for standalone use. So flash array file SMB and NFS S3.
Yes over on flash blade and it's unique in that it's fast object. They can even replicate into AWS three. I'll let you keep going with that with that Sean. Yeah, I know it just um you, you know, you get, you get all the the enhancements of the flash blade as far as its performance. Um you know,
in and resiliency too, right? Um uh And, and, and S3 uh type of protocol. So uh there's, there's a lot of use cases where um you know S3 is ideal but um you, it's very hard to get that from a performance perspective, right? And we can meet those needs. So, um yeah, great question.
So let me see here. Um We be able to do one or two more here. So Heidi, the MQ for distributed file and storage is only comparing flash blade s against the others. Yes. So for the MQ for distributed file, file and object. This is a file object. Um, that's where flash blade fits in that MQ. Uh flash array sits in the primary storage MQ.
So yes, that's why there's two MQS and there are different things in them. And it's even if you haven't dug into what Gartner does, it's, it's an exhaustive process where they evaluate, talking to the companies, they look at the products, they talk to a lot of customers to get that input too. Um So it's um this is why the MQ has outsized weight and impact on our industry,
I think last one here. Um And this isn't a file object. Well, this is kind of interesting will flash blade be more tightly integrated with the VM ware. So there is some work going on there, but in general flash ray is our primary VM Ware platform. There's so many integrations there with the A A I and all the now the VM Ware A products,
etcetera. It doesn't make sense. We do have some customers that do run VM Ware on flash blade with NFS. It's capable. But actually when, especially when you look at fail over behaviors between NFS and between MP IO. Um Flasher is clearly our flagship product with VM Ware.
There is some stuff coming specifically to flash blade. I shouldn't say what is in this form. So Doug if you want to reach out uh but please feel free to reach out and we can give you a little bit more individual visibility there as well. I leave out Sean. Uh, nothing. I, I think it's a great question.
Uh We do get that from time to time. Um, in regards to flashlight, I think with that there, there's a couple more questions here, but we are at the um, well, how many people? No. Um, I can go. Uh Let me make sure Sean, I didn't check your calendar. Do you have another?
Do you have another call in? Uh one minute here? I'm good. We can keep going. Keep, keep this party rolling though. People are. Uh and, and actually even uh from David in the chat, I love my flash blade. And so do my users that just makes me happy. Lots of,
you know, thanks for the um for the non discussion. We'll call it semi scripted. Thanks for the compliment. It was, it was planned out. So um and actually, so I'm, I'm gonna pull one in here from the chat from Dave. We're very focused on the file and the block discussion.
Yes, that was the context of this presentation, right? Very intentionally. Question for Dave continues on. Where are you going with API interfaces names today? Support for newer agile development. Yes. If you go back to the port works coffee break that we did. I want to say it was two months ago or so with
John Owings. Actually, the hardware free zone, a career art from network to vmware storage to Cobert. And you can actually find that here, that's where we fully explored and focused on port works, Cotis, Nextgen application development, et cetera. So this was kind of explicitly meant to limit down the focus to file an object from a topic
standpoint. We just wanted to highlight that in case anyone else was thinking like, well, what's pure doing it over in that other space? A lot of stuff is not today. Um Are there still from mic? Are there still limits on concurrent connections with flash blade? Yes. And there probably always will be,
there's always gotta be maximums. It doesn't matter what the platform is, the maximums keep moving up. If you're a pure customer, you can find those on our support site, we don't hide them, you know, kind of thing. Uh But I even think signs like snapshot maximums and volume maximums and concurrent connections. Absolutely.
Last one is that maybe I'll just try and frame this up and then let you run with it. Sean is a kind of a combo migration question. Uh Someone saying, you know, moving from a sand to pure. So that four is more like a block side migration question because even if you don't have to migrate after you go to pier, you gotta migrate to get on somehow,
then there's also the flip side of John asking, you know about migrating NAS file systems to flash blade and doing that. So do you mind kind of just talking through a little bit of uh what we, how we help people or, or help them think through uh migration questions, what we do to facilitate or not. So, yeah, sure. I mean, uh with most migrations, it really
comes down to, you know, what are you migrating? Uh the applications that you're using? Um are there tools with the application uh that uh can aid in that uh uh sort of operation? Right? So, you know, uh mentioned V motion, right? Storage V motion. Um So you can, you can easily do migrations using those sort of uh paradigms if you will.
Um there's a lot of stuff going on as far as LVM and that sort of thing. Um But I think from, from a general architectural perspective, you know, we really look at it from a best of breed, right? What makes sense uh from an application perspective that you're using and where you're coming from uh uh to come on board on the pier.
So we have uh you know, professional services that do that we have partners that specialize in that space. Uh So we, we can provide a lot of help with that. Actually, I was going to pull up. I wasn't quite fast enough if you Google pure storage Migration Center of Excellence. That's the nice tag, the tagline for our professional services group that actually helps
with migrations. And like you said, a lot with our partner too. I'll actually click send on that one and then from a file standpoint, let's be real. Um There are tools that we can use and help with that go far beyond Robocop and rich copy. Um But it does require some level of mapping stuff out. But sometimes we can do things with,
you know, multiple server names that help even there's things around share fencing. So even if you're migrating a lot of individual servers down on to say flash rate file, you only see the shares that you have permissions to. So it feels like separate servers. There's some some deeper details there. Uh This is John trying to um actually address your question because even um offer things like
multiple ad integrated service principal names, that's more of a user group and home share capability. So we actually do more of that over on the flash a a file side if you will. I think with that Sean, we're a couple of minutes past, but somehow there's still more than 1000 people hanging out here.
But uh music's looped enough times people are going off to another meeting again. I appreciate it. Then we'll go last ad for next month. I think I'm, I think I'm out of words as ours. Thank you, Sean. Well, thanks again for just letting me participate. Andrew. I had a lot of fun.
Lots of great questions. Uh Thank you so much for all the participation, everyone it's been uh really great to see everything and, and all the questions and the responses and all that sort of stuff. So, thank you for that. Thank you as always and join us next month. December 1st guest host, Jason Walker is amazing.
Chad's amazingly deep on this stuff exploring the multiverse of modern data protection with pure storage. Thank you all for joining us today. Have a great day.
Andrew Miller
Senior Principal Technologist, Americas
Sean Kennedy
Principal Technologist, Pure Storage
Who knew that the best coffee break conversations would end up happening online? Each month, Pure’s Coffee Break series invites experts in technology and business to chat about the themes driving today’s IT agenda - much more ‘podcast’ than ‘webinar’. This is no webinar or training session—it’s a freewheeling conversation that’s as fun as it is informative and the perfect way to break up your day. While we’ll wander into Pure technology, our goal is to educate and entertain rather than sell.
This month, host Andrew Miller welcomes his peer Principal Technologist Sean Kennedy to the Coffee Break. We’ll first explore Sean’s background as he’s been wandering around the datacenter for 25+ years - exploring a few career tips such as how you too can win an Olympic medal. After that, we’ll chat through Pure’s File & Object Vision including:
- A Brief Industry History of SMB, NFS, and how that lead into Object (S3 & others)
- Pure’s Innovation in this space with FlashBlade & FlashArray - building on Pure’s core architectural simplicity
- Do you Buy or Build a file protocol stack? The answer is yes!
- Why Pure Continues to Make Significant Investments in this space
Test Drive FlashArray
Experience how Pure Storage dramatically simplifies block and file in a self service environment.
Meet with an Expert
Let’s talk. Book a 1:1 meeting with one of our experts to discuss your specific needs.
Questions, Comments?
Have a question or comment about Pure products or certifications? We’re here to help.
Schedule a Demo
Schedule a live demo and see for yourself how Pure can help transform your data into powerful outcomes.
Call Sales: 800-976-6494
Media: pr@purestorage.com
Pure Storage, Inc.
2555 Augustine Dr.
Santa Clara, CA 95054
800-379-7873 (general info)