The enterprise storage market arguably suffers from an oversupply of flash products, which threatens vendors’ profitability. To stand up to the competition, Pure Storage Inc. is betting on offering multiple classes of service for storage.

“This is not about the storage array anymore,” said Rob Walters (pictured, right), vice president and general manager of the Storage as a Service Business Unit at Pure Storage. “You look at the modern data experience message and this is about what do you need from your storage, from a storage attribute perspective rather than a physical hardware perspective.”

Walters and Rob Lee (pictured, left), vice president and chief architect at Pure Storage, spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Justin Warren (@jpwarren), chief analyst at PivotNine Pty Ltd., during the AWS re:Invent event in Las Vegas. They discussed Pure Storage’s enterprise market cloud strategy and the services it developed for Amazon Web Services Inc. customers. (* Disclosure below.)

To make on-prem and cloud compatible

As part of its storage-as-a-service strategy, Pure Storage developed the Cloud Block Store for AWS. It takes the company’s Purity software from on-premises to the public cloud. To ensure all existing automation is 100% transferable, companies can use the same application programming interfaces across their existing flash arrays and the public cloud.

“When we started out on this journey, we saw a tremendous promise for the technology to really improve the AWS ecosystem for people who wanted to consume block storage in the cloud,” Lee said. “It speaks to the durability, but also to the compatibility with which we’re able to deliver the same sets of features and have them operate in exactly the same way on-prem and in the cloud.”

Pure Storage has also provided solutions using artificial intelligence, associated with the large amount of data processed on multicloud. “As customers get further on AI deployment journeys, what they find is that the application space evolves very quickly there,” Walters stated. “And they really sort of internalize that they need infrastructure that can evolve and grow with them. That’s helping drive a lot of business back to us.”

Some key points of Pure Storage’s strategy are performance and cost, according to Walters, as customers are looking to make smart use of their finances.

“A lot of enterprises are seeing less and less value in the sort of nuts-and-bolts storage management of old,” he explained. “We are letting their sort of shrinking capex budget and perhaps their limited resources work on the more strategically important elements of their IT strategies, including hybrid cloud.”

As for the prospects for storage in general, Lee sees a clear shift to flash. “We have called the shots since day one, but that is accelerating with pricing dynamics,” he said. “It is just a matter of what is the sensible rate and what is the price kind of curve to get there.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS re:Invent 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