Machine learning opportunities are seeing massive upticks, according to a Pure Storage executive.

Health sciences, genome sequencing and medical imaging are joined by federal government and the automotive sectors in a thrust toward unstructured workloads taking over the storage space.

“We’re seeing tremendous growth in that unstructured space,” said Vaughn Stewart (pictured), vice president of global technology alliance partners at Pure Storage Inc. It’s one of the principal reasons newer Pure Storage products, such as FlashBlade, is superseding Network Attached Storage.

At last year’s VMware Explore event, Stewart spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed Pure Storage’s relationship with VMware Inc. (* Disclosure below.)

A changing storage market

“FlashBlade is really addressing a need of changing the market from NAS,” Stewart said.

Pure Storage has recently released a newer version, named FlashBlade S that is higher performing and a more scalable version of the object and file storage platform. Analytics applications, for example, benefit.

It’s these newer areas that are driving growth at the storage company. Portworx, is another example. That Pure Storage-owned entity claims to be the leading Kubernetes storage platform. The idea is to accelerate containerization for enterprises who want to run apps — container-granular storage, newly added cloud-like containerized databases on demand, along with disaster recovery are part of that package.

Significantly, Portworx, too, allows VMware users to deploy on any cloud. Stewart expanded on the topic: “VMware’s like a touchpoint for managing the infrastructure,” he said, defining where VMware fits into Pure Storage’s business. Indeed, VMware is the longest tenured technology partner that Pure Storage has had. And the FlashArray product, in fact, was conceived with VMware workloads in mind.

“VMware is our number one [independent Software Vendor] from a partner that we turn transactions with,” he added

VMware and Pure Storage are linking closer, as well, as VMware’s role changes from being described by the traditional adage of “here’s a software-defined data center, we’re going to standardize all your dissimilar hardware” to “software-defined management to standardize all your dissimilar clouds,” Stewart suggested.

“As customers are going on this journey, particularly the enterprise customers, and they’re not sure where they’re going, we’re giving them a platform that standardizes where they want to go, on-prem, in the cloud and anywhere in-between,” he stated.

Stewart also addressed Pure Storage’s sustainability posture, saying the company has integrated sustainability into its products since day one.

“Our portfolio reduces the power directly consumed by storage by up to 80%,” he claimed. Plus, he said that 97% of all of the products Pure Storage sold in the last six years are still in the market. “They’re not being put into recycle bins and whatnot,” he added.

While clearly corporately altruistic, the customer is also driving this element: “I’m talking to a lot of customers that are putting [in] that requirement when they’re doing RFPs on the vendors,” he concluded.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VMware Explore:

(* 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