Charlie Giancarlo, Pure Storage | Pure Accelerate 2019
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 17/09/2019

Charlie Giancarlo, Chairman & CEO, Pure Storage, sits with Lisa Martin & Dave Vellante at Pure Accelerate 2019 in Austin, TX.

#PureAccelerate #theCUBE @siliconangle 
https://siliconangle.com/2019/09/24/more-than-flash-charlie-giancarlo-explains-how-pure-will-move-storage-from-spinning-rust-to-spinning-cash-pureaccelerate-guestoftheweek/


More than flash: CEO Charlie Giancarlo explains how Pure will move storage from spinning rust to spinning cash


The story of Pure Storage Inc. is not merely one of flash memory, but also a story of significant progress in the storage industry.

The company celebrated its first decade of existence this month and has already broken new ground by being the first all-flash array business to achieve escape velocity. Pure orchestrated its success through a combination of savvy partnerships, a significant investment in research and development, and a realization that its customers would embrace an innovative storage model that could support the software application world.

Yet, what is also driving Pure’s rise is basic economics. The storage industry has moved from spinning disks in mechanical metal enclosures to a more software-oriented model fueled by the speed, efficiency and lower prices of all-flash arrays.

Pure’s value proposition was validated recently from survey data released by Enterprise Technology Research. The results showed that Pure was leading the pack in enterprise spending momentum at the expense of Dell EMC and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.

“We had mechanical disks in our computers literally spinning rust,” said Charlie Giancarlo (pictured), chairman and chief executive officer of Pure Storage. “It’s only been in the last decade where solid state has taken the place of that, called flash. As that continues to get less expensive, we now can bring not only flash performance into disk economics, but more importantly, we can finally have modern software that is driving the need for greater flexibility with our data.”

Giancarlo spoke with Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Pure//Accelerate event in Austin, Texas. They discussed the influence of solid-state technology on Pure’s success, an evolving hybrid cloud strategy and “application-first” focus, falling prices for flash and the firm’s continued commitment to growth (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

This week, theCUBE features Charlie Giancarlo as its Guest of the Week.

Freeing storage and applications
Pure is riding the wave of enterprise interest in applications as storage technology has evolved to a place where it can more effectively service this need. As the company fine-tuned its strategy over the past decade, application technology shifted from being tied to custom hardware stacks and operating systems.

With the maturation of the internet and the evolution of server virtualization, applications could now move from on-premises to cloud and back again. Yet, storage remained stuck, tied to the rack and constrained by slow disks that could support only one application at a time.

The game changer was solid-state, according to Giancarlo, non-volatile storage that retained persistent data in NAND-driven flash memory devices with higher capacity. Applications were freed and so was storage.

“We can make it a horizontal layer rather than tightly tied to any individual application, and that’s what the next decade is going to be about,” Giancarlo said.

Mirroring cloud for on-premises
The result has been the unveiling of Pure’s comprehensive cloud strategy. When the company announced its Cloud Data Services offering in November, it also heralded a “new chapter” where it would deliver the same Pure experience in the public cloud.

“Our cloud strategy is really quite simple,” Giancarlo explained. “We want to make the cloud and every cloud appear to an application developer to be the same as it is on-prem.”

To achieve this, Pure followed up on its November releases with announcements this month designed to provide customers with new cloud services, enhanced flash arrays, and an artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Cloud Block Store for Amazon Web Services Inc. will allow users to move applications to the cloud using Pure’s own software. The release of FlashArray//C offers reliability and affordability for two-tier data. And the AI Data Hub lets enterprises unify information for more rapid deployments of AI-generated workloads.

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Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Pure//Accelerate. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Pure//Accelerate event. Neither Pure Storage Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)