The acquisition of Portworx Inc. by Pure Storage Inc. for $370 million last year was viewed as opening a new buying opportunity for Pure with the DevOps community.

According to Portworx’s co-founder and former chief executive, the two firms have been working together in precisely that direction.

“Pure had this outstanding core infrastructure product, well known in the industry and very much flash oriented, and Portworx came in with the idea of driving Kubernetes and cloud native workloads, which are really the majority of modern workloads,” said Murli Thirumale (pictured), vice president and general manager of the Cloud Native Business Unit at Pure. “It’s the integration of a more complete stack which used to be centered around an IT infrastructure of purchase, and what is, for Kubernetes, a more DevOps oriented purchase. Being able to provide that combination in one package is something we’ve been working very hard on in the last six months.”

Thirumale spoke with Lisa Martin, host of SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming video studio theCUBE. They discussed the most recent announcements around the integration of container and storage volumes, supporting CIO initiatives for IT, and a focus on new products for the as-a-service revolution. (* Disclosure below.)

Deploying storage as code

The fruits of Pure and Portworx’s combined work toward an integrated DevOps solution could be seen in the latest announcements as part of the Pure Accelerate virtual event in May. Pure announced the release of Portworx Enterprise 2.8, which allowed users to scale Kubernetes usage with more functionality and simplicity.

“When users now provision a container volume through Portworx, the storage volumes are magically created on FlashArray and FlashBlade,” Thirumale explained. “A DevOps engineer can deploy storage as code by provisioning volumes using Kubernetes. On FlashArray, these volumes now receive the full suite of Portworx storage management features, including Kubernetes disaster recovery, backup, security, auto scaling and migration.”

Thirumale views the integration with Pure as an opportunity to open new buying centers for both companies, appealing to the DevOps, ITOps and DevSecOps sectors of the modern enterprise.

“Our top two Portworx budget sources are usually CIO initiatives; they’re not from the traditional storage budget,” Thirumale said. “It comes from things like move to cloud or business transformation. What we bring to Pure is the ability to take these CIO initiatives which were around cloudifying infrastructure and add layers on top of that.”

Focus on data services

What can users expect next from Pure and Portworx? A focus on providing additional support to CIOs who must service lines of business seeking to run applications faster across cloud platforms is a clear part of the strategy going forward, according to Thirumale.

“This is really the as-a-service revolution; our customers are taking Pure hardware, Portworx software and building them into a platform as-a-service,” Thirumale said. “You will see some announcements from us in the second half of this year where we’re going to be moving forward to allow our customers to more quickly get to data services at the push of a button. Database as-a-service, messaging as-a-service, search as-a-service, streaming as-a-service, some machine learning and AI as-a-service, these five categories of data services are what you should be expecting to see with Portworx and Pure going forward in the next half.”

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE