VMworld 2021 digital.  Will you be in attendance?  Make sure you check out Pure Storage!

VMworld, the world's largest virtualization and cloud computing event hosted every year by VMware, is back again for 2021 in a digital setting.  And one of the show sponsors this year is a company called Pure Storage.

Pure Storage delivers a modern data experience that empowers organizations to run their operations as a true, automated, storage as-a-service model seamlessly across multiple clouds. One of the fastest-growing enterprise IT companies in history, Pure helps customers put data to use while reducing the complexity and expense of managing the infrastructure behind it.

Are you gearing up for VMworld 2021?  Get started now by reading this exclusive interview with Donald Schubot, Director, Strategic Alliances, at Pure Storage, to learn more, and start getting excited for what's to come!

VMblog: Your company is sponsoring this year's VMworld 2021 digital event.  Can you talk about what that sponsorship looks like?

Donald Schubot:  Of course! Pure Storage is a Platinum sponsor at this year's virtual VMworld. Any registered attendees can visit our Demo Zone (our virtual booth) to download the latest and greatest in all things Pure for VMware, chat with our experts via the Chat Feature, and view the links to our sponsor speaking sessions. Check out our presence and request a meeting here. Additionally, attendees can complete our booth survey for a chance to win an Apple Airpods Pro!

VMblog: And do you have any speaking sessions during the event?  If so, can you give us the details?

Schubot:  We have several speaking sessions at this year's VMworld event. As a part of our sponsorship, we're excited to invite attendees to attend numerous speaking sessions, including:

• Want to Run Production Apps in Tanzu? Learn How with Portworx [APP2889S]: The rapid transition to modernize applications is accelerated by using cloud native technologies such as containers and Kubernetes. In this session, Pure's Cody Hosterman, Jon Owings, and Kyle Grossmiller will discuss and demo the benefits of using cloud native data services from Portworx, showcasing how to deploy your critical applications on VMware Tanzu.

• Can 1+1=3? It Can When Using Joint Solutions from Pure Storage and VMware [MCL2980S]: In this session, Pure's Vaughn Stewart, Vijay Ramachandran, and myself will discuss how you can take advantage of the unique capabilities available in Pure and VMware solutions. We will discuss key solutions customers are adopting today, including VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes, VMware Cloud Foundation, and Portworx for VMware Tanzu, as well as give you a peek into the future of the Pure and VMware portfolio to ensure we continue to deliver the outcomes our customers need.

• vSphere Locked Up by Ransomware - How to Make Bail? (asking for a friend) [SEC2892S]: Ransomware is scary - but what does an actual attack look like and is it possible to recover quickly? Pure's Andrew Miller - Principal Technology Strategist - will discuss the anatomy of an attack, how to apply a defense in depth strategy, and go into a number of architectural design decisions to help mitigate attacks.

• Core Storage Best Practices Deep Dive [MCL2071]: There have been new core storage features released with VMware vSphere 7, and setting them up correctly is critical to optimum performance and resilience. We will review the new and some common features, as well as the best configuration practices. We will have a major focus on new NVMe over Fabrics (NVMeoF) protocols and best practices for configuration.

• Build and Publish a PowerShell Module to the PowerShell Gallery [CODE2756]: Script. Make it a module, Pure's David Stamen will show attendees the process to turn PowerShell scripts into a cloud-ready module accessible on any computer at any time with the PowerShell Gallery.

Add our sessions to your agenda here.

VMblog: What are you personally most interested in seeing or learning at VMworld 2021 digital?

Schubot:  VMware has gone through a lot of changes since VMworld 2020. With all of the changes and the impending divestiture from Dell, I am really excited to get a solid direction on where they are doubling down on their strategy. I think continuing to automate the datacenter will be a big topic of discussion this year and I am looking forward to seeing how Project Monterey has matured over the last 12 months. Through my previous roles, I've been lucky enough to work with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) since it started out as EvoRack, through the development of VCF as a service, to now helping support VCF on FlashStack here at Pure Storage. I believe this is the next iteration that can help bring the bare metal automation into the solution.

VMblog: Can you give us the high-level rundown of your company's technology offering? What kind of message would a virtual attendee hear from you?

Schubot:  At a high level, Pure Storage delivers modern data services in a multi-cloud world. Committed to giving technologists their time back, Pure enables a modern data experience that empowers organizations to run their operations as a true, automated, storage as-a-service model seamlessly across multiple clouds. Pure helps customers put data to use while reducing the complexity and expense of managing the infrastructure behind it. With a certified customer satisfaction score in the top one percent of B2B companies, Pure's ever-expanding list of customers are among the happiest in the world.

VMblog: Where can organizations learn more about your products and services?

Schubot:  Pure has a strong portfolio of offerings that cater to customers' unique storage needs in today's dynamic business environment. To learn more about our systems, software and stack solutions, you can visit: https://www.purestorage.com/products.html

VMblog:  Normally, VMworld is the time of year that people in this industry announce a new product or product update. Do you have anything new that you've recently announced or plan to announce? Can you give us the details?

Schubot:  Look out for an announcement from us on October 5 at VMworld!

Most recently, back in May 2021, we announced the release of Portworx Enterprise 2.8. The latest release extended Portworx support for leading Kubernetes platforms with addition of VMware Tanzu (TKG) support via the native Tanzu CSI driver. This means that customers can benefit from container-granular data management such as backup & recovery, encryption, DR, and migration regardless of the storage backing their VMware environment including with vSAN, VVols, and VMFS datastores, or cloud block storage providers.

VMblog:  What specifically does your company offer a VMware shop or VMware implementation?

Schubot:  Pure offers a portfolio of data services for your VMware environment giving our customers a Fast, Simple, and Secure storage platform that can evolve with the customer. We partner with VMware to design next generation technologies like vVols and NVMe-oF, as well as offering jointly architecture solutions such as Portworx for Tanzu. We extend this with features to help protect and mitigate against ransomware attacks, and joint solutions like FlashRecover from industry leaders Cohesity for your data protection needs. In short, we really provide industry leading data solutions for any part of your VMware environment.

VMblog:  How does your company work with VMware?  Where do you fit within the VMware ecosystem?

Schubot:  While Pure works with many partners, VMware has always been and will continue to be a critical and strategic technology partner.

Pure Storage delivers the modern data experience to customers leveraging VMware solutions. Pure's all-flash performance, industry leading reliability, and integrations across the VMware software-defined data center enables organizations to virtualize even the most critical applications with confidence while supporting innovation and increasing IT productivity.

For more than a decade, Pure has been a VMware Technology Alliance Partner, collaborating with VMware to help customers realize the greatest value from their virtual infrastructure and underlying hardware. As one of the few Advanced Technology Partners with executive sponsorship at VMware, Pure continues to jointly innovate with VMware through native feature integrations, our design partnership initiatives, and VMware Validated Design certifications.

Just in the last few years Pure has been a design partner for vVols, Site Recovery Manager for vVols, and NVMe-oF support. We deliver jointly architected solutions through the Pure Validate Design process, The VMware Validated Designs certification, and other industry partners such as Cisco Validated designs. We have a number other joint initiatives in process so stay tuned for those announcements to come soon.

VMblog:  VMware may be covering things in their keynote, but what big changes or trends do you see taking shape in the industry for 2021 and heading into 2022?

Schubot:  While we've seen incredible business resilience across all industries amid the pandemic, I'm excited for the next phase of business innovation and growth. We are already beginning to see customers refocus on significant digital initiatives and expect that to continue over the next year.

Many of the initiatives we see are related to Kuberenetes and application modernization. VMware Tanzu continues to be a growing topic of conversation as well as other solutions like Openshift on VMware. I don't think we will see a clear winner in the Kubernetes orchestration space but the segment as a whole should see significant growth.

Additionally, ransomware will continue to be a challenge for customers as we see an increasing number of attacks, which present an incredibly frequent (and expensive) risk to modern businesses. While having the proper precautions in place to prevent an attack is absolutely essential, it's equally as critical that organizations plan for recovery. This means implementing a ransomware strategy that also takes into account the necessary recovery through which data can be rapidly restored, at scale, in order to avoid business continuity disruptions and negative financial impact.

Finally, we'll continue to see organizations make the move to flexible consumption models. Pure as-a-Service, for example, has been a meaningful offering to our customers since its initial launch, and now having FlashStack delivered as a service, customers are able to keep the control they need while paying how they want. I expect to see more and more of the industry move to this model to truly provide customers with flexibility.

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