Container Data Management with Rajiv Thakkar – KubeCon Europe 2025

This is Textron tv. Hey, everyone. We're back here at, uh, at, where are we at?

We're at Q Con. That's where we're at. I'm just looking at the amount of people around us.

Yeah. I don't know. It's like we're surrounded by thousands of people.

Yeah. We're in line for something. Well, This is, they, people watching this can't see it, but behind the camera is the lunch line and there's That's right.

Hundreds of people just cycling through. Yeah. But anyway, let me introduce you to Rajiv Thakkar.

All right. Yeah. Rajiv is with Pure Storage Close.

The people recently bought, or not recent. It's been a while now. Port Works.

Um, Rajiv, thanks for coming on Tech Drug tv, man. How are you? I'm great, Alan.

I'm so excited to be here. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.

Um, let's start about you. Tell us about kinda your journey. How'd you wind up here today?

Thank you. So I run product marketing for Port Works. Okay.

Which Is part of the cloud native business unit of Pure Storage. Right. And I joined them a year after the acquisition.

So they wanted to build the product marketing function, really grow the business to, you know, acquire hundreds of customers and help them through the cloud native journey. Um, in the past I've had several product management roles and product marketing roles at companies such as VMware and hp. Uh, I've been part of the cloud native ecosystem for quite some time now.

Yep. Uh, I helped Pat Gelsinger tell the, you know, VPE on containers and containers on VPE story, uh, starting from Project Pacific, Really Landing VPE with Zu and you know, really helping thousands of VPE customers run containers on VMs. They could use you right now.

Anyway, we're not gonna go there. Okay. Let's talk, let's talk Port Works.

Yeah. Some of our audience knows Port Works. We cover Port Works all the time.

I was talking, as I told you, the, a couple of the Port Works people at Scon a couple weeks ago. Yeah. But for those folks who are not mm-hmm.

Familiar with, with Port Works Yeah. And Pure Storage for that matter. Yeah.

Give them, give them kind of the pitch. Absolutely. So, you know, port Works is the leader in container data management.

It's, uh, you know, a newer category compared to virtualization. But essentially we help bring stateful applications that run on containers to production. And what I mean by that is our value is threefold.

Right. We bring storage as a service to hundreds of thousands of developers in the enterprise and also help with the automation of the operations related to storage, such as ha, backup, disaster recovery. These are the things that mission critical applications need.

And when you're serving thousands of applications in an enterprise, you need automation. Sure. The third benefit that we give to customers, Alan, is Diagnosticity.

Right? So if you change a cloud provider or a Kubernetes distribution, you can still continue to use Port Works as your container data management layer because of our architecture. Sure.

So that's what Footwork is. And you know, pure Storage obviously has been around longer and it's much bigger organization, but we are the leaders in Flash. Right.

2 billion in revenue Wow. Helping around 12,000 customers and counting. Uh, and obviously, you know, we have almost 6,000 employees, you know, a massively happy I install base of customers who use the Pure Platform.

Uh, we're also helping them now with the AI use cases. Uh, but obviously 80 to 90% of the workloads that run on, uh, flash Array and Flash Blade, they're highly virtualized. Right.

And the, uh, enterprises and commercial customers trust across storage with all the enterprise applications that require the flash and the performance of the underlying flash and the networking, you know, connects we have and things like that. Love it. Excellent.

Before we just move to the next part, I want pure, uh, port Works website. Uhhuh, what's the URL? com Ww So it's No Port Works do com and you can probably get there from Pure Storage.

Absolutely. Absolutely. There's a product solution section where you could Navigate, click through.

Yeah. Alright, let's focus in on, we're here. Yeah.

I don't know, 12, 14,000 people. Yeah. What, what's Port Works doing here?

Thank you for asking. So we're doing a ton of things. We had a Day Zero event.

Uh, obviously we partner very closely with Red Hat, so you know how they, uh, have the OpenShift Commons. Yes. So thousands of users coming over there.

So we brought a workshop to help the community understand how to run VMs on containers. So we had a massively oversubscribed attendance there. Fantastic.

Your for a hundred. We got like one 70, uh, folks. That's great.

Doing the workshop, hands on, listening to talks and hands-on practice. That's what people like hands on. Exactly.

Yeah, exactly. So good for you guys. Thank You.

So that was day zero. 0 announcement where we are bringing a three four news again. So we're helping customers, some leading automatic in the US and a leading healthcare provider who are using our solution for running VMs on containers along with Red Hat.

Okay. So that's the first part of the news. The second part of the news is we're bringing enterprise grade data protection, enterprise grade performance, and giving customers the choice to run keyboard VMs with not only Red Hat, but Spectra Cloud, suse and Matic.

Really? So they have a choice of Kubernetes. Oh, right.

No, that's, So we're really focused on that ecosystem. And that's important though, Tina, I was talking the last interview we did, I don't know if people are watching this chronologically, but Uhhuh, the last interview we did, we were talking to the folks at TIS and their CEO was saying, it's so important. Like, why do you have these foundations, CNCF, Linux Foundation, the Infra Foundation, which is now gonna be part of lf because having standards based interaction Yeah.

That allows you to not get locked in to any one platform per se. Yeah. That's what people want.

That's why all these people are here. That's part of what makes it go round and round. Yeah.

Um, so that, that, that is an important piece of it. What are you hearing from people here? You hit it on the nail.

I'm telling you. We also hosted a customer advisory board with our loyal customers, and there were a couple of prospects in there too. Yeah.

We want to enable that community and collaboration. Uh, but the big thing they were saying was not technology speeds and feeds. Right.

The big takeaway on everybody's organizations and leadership teams is we don't want to be locked in again. No one would, they don't want to be in a situation that VMware has put them into right now. And the clouds have put them into where they have to renew.

Their workloads are running there with mission critical business AppSec. They cannot Guts in their head. I know.

Well not leave fast enough, but they're forced to stay in while they look for alternatives. So I'm a I'm a glass half full kind of guy. Yeah.

And here's what I think with that. I think that's one factor, I think, but that factor then drives another one, which is a lot of these people have been talking about moving the public cloud or a cloud anyway. Absolutely.

Right. And a lot of them have also been talking about app modernization, which is code for Yep. Moving to a microservices architecture.

Absolutely. Moving to a cloud native architecture. Yep.

So instead of talking and thinking about it forever, this is sort of a, a gun to the head moment. Yeah. Where people can say, if I'm gonna do it, now's the time to do it.

Absolutely. Right. Again, you, you're painting a very good picture for what is working for our go-to market efforts.

Absolutely. I think that's what it is. I think that's what timing this modern Virtualization, Alan is actually becoming a back door opener for app modernization.

For app. Yep. So We are the leaders in container data management, but the same kind of mission critical capabilities are what VMware customers want and they want the optionality.

Right. Which is working out very well for Port Works. Absolutely.

Now we see that, you know, we've had massive growth over the last four years, but we actually see that we've caught a 10 x wave. It's gonna get us, I think all you, all you gotta do is kind of draw bread Crumps. Exactly.

Right. And, and draw the life of. 'cause they're looking to go.

Exactly. Rajiv, that's great, man. I'd love to talk to you all day, but we are busy, busy, busy with more people waiting.

Thank you so much, Alan. It's been a pleasure. Matt, thank you So much.

Rajiv Kar, uh, port Works a pure storage company. Check it out. Especially if you are one of the thousands and thousands of folks that are looking.

What do you do here? Do you move things to the cloud? Do you re-architect, transform?

Mm-hmm. Modernize your applications? Fort Works can help check 'em out.

We're gonna take a break. We are at CubeCon. Stay tuned.