What breed of computing storage do modern companies require? Most are moving targets darting between cloud and on-premises data centers, so it’s a complicated question. Which company is best positioned to answer it? Is it on-premises legacy, a public-cloud hyperscaler, or a hyperconverged infrastructure provider?

Or maybe it’s a company with strong on-prem roots but steadily growing as-a-service branches. Such is the current state of 10-year-old Pure Storage Inc. It is trying to differentiate from competitors by being the storage company for today’s IT environments. That means a heavy emphasis on hybrid mobility and as-a-service consumption.

“The Amazon gorilla wants everybody to go to the cloud,” said Dave Vellante, co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Pure//Accelerate event in Austin, Texas. “Pure — they make much more money on-prem, but they realize customers are pulling them in. So they have to move to that as-a-service model.”

To meet customers where they are, AWS and Pure have partnered on a new, deeply integrated, hybrid storage offering. 

Vellante and co-host Lisa Martin discussed Pure’s market position and its bid for dominance in hybrid cloud (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

To cloud and back in a flash

Pure said the vast majority of its portfolio will be available through an as-a-service cloud consumption model. “This is important, because Pure has about $600 million in deferred revenue largely coming from their evergreen service, but they’re slowly shifting … to a subscription model. It’s going to be very interesting to see how that plays out,” Vellante said.

Pure just announced Cloud Block Store for Amazon Web Services Inc., which combines Pure software, AWS S3 storage, and EC2 compute instances. The product is basically a block storage array in the cloud, Vellante explained. Customers can replicate their on-prem flash environments in the AWS Cloud with little re-architecting and a single interface.

That represents the kind of hybridized product customers with mixed environments are demanding, according to Martin.

“The forcing function is the customers — from the enterprises to the small businesses — who need to have data available immediately wherever it is to be able to extract those insights from it quickly so they … can act on it quickly to drive competitive advantage,” Martin concluded.

Here’s the complete analysis, 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.)

Photo: Pure Storage