In February, Pure Storage Inc. and Amazon Web Services Inc. announced a three-year strategic investment to help customers manage their cloud-based software container environments.

The partnership underscored the central role that software and cloud services will play in a future growth scenario for Pure Storage and its Cloud Block Store offering, which brings primary storage and enterprise data services to the cloud.

“Cloud Block Store is where things started, and we’re seeing that move and evolve from predominantly being a disaster recovery site and now having production applications lifted and shifted and running natively on AWS on our storage software,” said Dan Kogan (pictured, right), vice president for product management and product marketing for FlashArray at Pure Storage. “It takes you from moving and managing individual arrays, obfuscates at fleet level, and allows you to build a very cloudlike backend and consume storage as code — turn your traditional Pure Storage into an AWS-like experience.”

Kogan spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin at AWS re:Invent, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. He was joined by Venkat Ramakrishnan (pictured, left), vice president of products of the Cloud Native Business Unit at Pure Storage, and they discussed the key factors driving enterprise interest in storage services for the cloud. (* Disclosure below.)

Run applications anywhere

One factor that is leading to partnerships such as the one between Pure Storage and AWS is enterprise interest in application portability, according to Ramakrishnan.

“As people run more and more workloads in the cloud, there’s a huge movement towards the ability to bring these applications to run anywhere,” he said. “People are building on Kubernetes and containers because they want multicloud portability for their applications.”

That desire for portability has also created a major business opportunity for Pure Storage. The company has been able to leverage growth of the cloud with its offerings to provide a more attractive economic scenario for enterprises.

“Cost is probably our biggest tailwind from a cloud adoption standpoint,” Kogan said. “Customers see that on our side with Kubernetes, with data reduction, thin provisioning, low-cost snaps, those kinds of things. It’s brought a lot of customers who thought they weren’t going to be using our storage moving forward, back into the fold.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent:

(* 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