As the enterprise storage market continues to evolve, all-flash data storage company Pure Storage Inc. aims to leverage its partnerships to boost its growth. The company just announced its Q2 financial results, which saw a 28% year on year growth, according to Vaughn Stewart (pictured), vice president of technology alliances at Pure Storage.

One of Pure Storage’s key integrated partnerships is with VMware Inc. Stewart spoke with Dave Vellante and John Furrier, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the VMworld event in San Francisco. They discussed the company’s partnership with VMware and how containers are impacting the storage world (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

Furrier: Talk about your relationship with VMware and why that’s been so important for Pure?

Stewart: As VMware evolves their product platforms, whether it’s the Pivotal Software’s multi-billion-dollar acquisition, the VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware Cloud on AWS, and as that’ll expand, you have to, as a partner, continue to jointly innovate. And, our investments engineering-wise are significant. We’ve had a large number of new capabilities that we’ve rolled out through the years that are specific to VMware that are either integrations or enhancements to our platform. 

And we’re a key design partner right now with the cloud platforms, the VMware Cloud Foundation, as well as VMware cloud-native on AWS. 

Vellante: I’m interested in how you’re achieving number one in VVols in a world where it seems the ecosystem is getting a little tighter between Dell and VMware. How do you thrive in that dynamic?  

Stewart: We’ve been fortunate enough that through … our system’s integrated partners, [we have] actually been able to demonstrate the technology, to gain their enthusiasm, to drive it into the market, and then to actually demonstrate that to the customers. Let me give you one example. We have a lot of customers … who are deploying HCI along with all-flash arrays. And what we’re finding from customers is they’re looking to say … “If my applications need to be more cost-effective and easier to manage at scale, we actually want to put it on an all-flash array.”

I think it’s fair to say that our platforms are more intelligent, more automated, and they operate at a greater scale than the competitors. So it’s simple things like … rapid provisioning, not having silos that are optimized for performance, or availability, or cost. 

Vellante: So you said HCI, complement or a competitor? And then the same question for vSAN [working with flash arrays]? 

Stewart: So an area that we’ve put a lot of investment in and started with VMware, around the middle of last year, was putting vSAN with Pure Storage flash arrays together. And so [now] when you look at VMware Cloud Foundation or VMware Cloud on AWS, their management domains must be vSAN. And that’s so that you can have an instant, out-of-the box controlled management plane that VMware executes on. 

Furrier: So the question is, how do containers impact the storage world? There’s the talk of putting Kubernetes on bare metal, so you’re starting to see HCI come back, so you’re starting to see hardware become important again.

Stewart: We do a lot of object storage within the container ecosystems today. A lot of high-performance objects, because the file sizes of instances or applications are much larger than a document file that you or I might create online. So there’s a big need around performance in that space along with, again, management at scale. 

Vellante: Do you feel as though the integration with VMware will supercharge Pivotal? 

Stewart: I absolutely agree with that. I’ve had this view that the container ecosystem was really segmented. As the enterprise apps start to roll over, the enterprise will start to evolve from virtual machines to containers. And so I think the timing’s right. That’s not to dismiss any of where Pivotal has built a brand right now, which is helping companies build next-gen platforms. 

Vellante: How do you capitalize on this container trend in the next three to five years? 

Stewart: So you’ve got storage needs for containers that either tend to be ephemeral or persistent. And I think when containers were originally created it was always this notion that it’d would be ephemeral … but where does the data reside ultimately? 

There’s been significant growth around data persistence, and we’ve driven that in terms of leveraging the FlexVolume drivers that have been put into the community, driving that into our Pure Service Orchestrator, our PSO tool, which supports Pivotal and Kubernetes derivatives today. 

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the VMworld event. (* Disclosure: Pure Storage Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Pure Storage nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE