KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2025 | Victor Williams, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama & Venkat Ramakrishnan, Portworx by Pure Storage

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More from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2025

Venkat Ramakrishnan

President and COO

NeuBird AI

Victor Williams

Infrastructure Engineering Consultant

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama

play_circle_outline Blue Cross Blue Shield's Journey: Embracing Container Technology and Transitioning from VMware to Kubernetes for Modernization

play_circle_outline Streamlining Kubernetes Storage Management: Kube Data Stores Enhances Data Management and Interoperability with Third-Party Hardware

play_circle_outline Portworx Enterprise enhances time to market and facilitates container management.

play_circle_outline Benefits of Portworx seen in customer experiences across various industries.

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Victor Williams, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama & Venkat Ramakrishnan, Portworx by Pure Storage

Venkat Ramakrishnan

President and COO NeuBird AI

Victor Williams

Infrastructure Engineering Consultant Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama

In this KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025 kickoff segment from Atlanta, theCUBE’s Rob Strechay talks with Victor Williams of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama and Venkat Ramakrishnan of Portworx by Pure Storage about moving from traditional virtualization to Kubernetes-based infrastructure. Williams shares how Blue Cross Blue Shield migrated from Red Hat Virtualization to OpenShift Virtualization, replacing a lagging CSI stack with Portworx Enterprise to speed container startups and make VM migrations up to 10x faster, all while reusing existing Hit... Read more

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What is the experience of Blue Cross and Blue Shield regarding their transition to Kubernetes and their partnerships in the process? add

What are the capabilities of Portworx related to Kubernetes that simplify data workflows for customers familiar with VMware? add

What were the benefits of using Portworx Enterprise for managing container pod workloads and data migration in the new OpenShift environment? add

What environments and technologies are customers using with Portworx and Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization? add

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Victor Williams, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama & Venkat Ramakrishnan, Portworx by Pure Storage

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>> Hello and welcome to wonderful Georgia. We're in Atlanta where it is cold-lanta, and we're at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025. Trying to stay warm and we're about to warm up the set here with our first interview of the day and the first interview of this week. We're so honored to have some great guests on with us again today. So, first off, Victor Williams, welcome on board. You're the infrastructure engineering consultant for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama. Welcome on board.

Victor Williams

>> Thank you so much for having me.

>> At least coming over from Alabama, maybe it was about the same temperature down there today.

Victor Williams

>> It is. I got reported that it is 21.

>> Yep. Oh, wow. And then, of course, welcome back, Venkat, I'm going to get this right, Ramakrishnan.

Victor Williams

>> Awesome.

>> Thank you. I got it right this time. Who's the VP and GM of Portworx by Pure Storage. That's a tongue twister again. I'll get there.

>> We try to make it difficult for you.

>> Yeah, absolutely. It's a lot of fun though. So, hey, again, I think this is a lot of fun, but you got these plushies here. What's up with the plushies?

>> All right. This is our new mascot. Her name is Pixie. Pixie, yeah. So, we're launching a remote client for communities today. It's called Pixie Client, Pixie, that lets you orchestrate data across all clouds, but more importantly as Victor and I was joking about that, this is your VMware recovery therapy type. You're getting high VMware prices. You can leave that, come to Kubernetes virtualization and Portworx, and also hug our Pixie and feel a little better.

>> I love it.

>> You want one?

>> Very cute. Yes.

>> You want one?

>> We'll keep it. I'm sure my daughter would love that. She's big into the plushy things. But Victor, help us understand how this is helping you because I think when you look at data management for Kubernetes and you look at all of what's going on with VMware and the Broadcom acquisition, people are making some serious choices. But I mean, VMware had some great stuff inside their data stores and stuff like that. What has brought you across to ?

Victor Williams

>> First of all, thank you, Venkat, thank you for having me on here. So, Blue Cross and Blue Shield, we're a healthcare company. We are biggest dog in a small pond in Alabama. So, we have taken this container journey very slowly. We are not like our bigger competitors and everything like that. We do everything with purpose and we do everything with conviction. So, our partner Pure... First of all, our first partner was Red Hat. So, we were a RHV customer. We didn't have a whole lot in the VMware space, but we did have some. Red Hat decided to Sunset RHV. We moved into the Kubernetes space. At first I thought it was a bad thing because I loved RHV, but it was needed to move us forward into the Kubernetes container orchestration. So, we migrated a lot of VMs with Red Hat's help, and we ran into some bumps with our... We are a Hitachi storage... That's our back-end storage. Great partner, we love them. But as you know, this Kubernetes stuff moves fast and not every vendor is up to the task to keep in cadence with Red Hat, Pure is. And they provided us with the Portworx CSI, and it has basically revolutionized and made our time to market, our container journey that much better.

>> So, Portworx Enterprise.

Victor Williams

>> Portworx Enterprise, yes.

>> So, what are some of the efficiencies that customers are seeing out of this? Because I mean, again, to me I get the simplification part. That totally makes sense. What are some of the other efficiencies they may see?

>> Yeah, I mean, first of all, when customers, like Victor and BCBS, try to modernize from VMware to Kube work, VMware is a legacy hypervisor and there's a lot of invested hardware. They've already made investments in other hardware in the past, but when you go from VMware to Kube work, you need a data storage and management layer that's natively integrated in Kubernetes, right? Because most of the CSI drivers aren't mature, they haven't kept up with the innovations in the Kubernetes space and they're definitely pinning the customers to the hardware implementations. So, what Portworx does, and which Pure has been a phenomenal acquirer of us, and that's our parent company, it's a infrastructure-neutral data management layer integrated into Kubernetes. That means you could run Portworx on any third-party hardware and you can make your data operations and storage management and Kubernetes smooth. But not just that, you could replicate that stack anywhere. You could go to cloud and run the same stack with no modifications. And more importantly, what we have done in the past is that we have mapped the Kubernetes storage management to what VMware was doing or VM storage management. So, like Storage vMotions, Storage DRS. Portworx has capabilities that maps into that list, where a customer who's used to the VMware data workflows can easily do that without having to relearn a whole bunch of things for Kubernetes. Portworx simplifies that as well. And more importantly, Rob, we are actually announcing our newest innovation, it's called Kube data stores.

>> So, tell us more about that, Venkat.

>> So, VM data stores. We are all familiar with VM data stores, right? VM data stores give you ability to have different kinds of data stores into ESX and vCenter, right? But there is no equivalent for Kubernetes and Kubernetes virtualization. So, what we looked at it and when we looked at it and saw, okay, this is something that's going to radically simplify customer's lives about how they bring in different kinds of storage into Kubernetes virtualization and get capabilities like storage, DRS storage, vMotion, failover of an entire data store from one server to another server without any application outage. Portworx helps deliver that without Cube Data store innovation. And this is the first of many generations of Cube data stores that we're going to release. The roadmap is going to continue to evolve. We are going to say, I would like to say we're going to completely recreate what VMware did with vSAN and VMFS and VM data stores, in Kubernetes with Kube Data stores and the customers are going to get a like-for-like functionality. We are starting off with Arcadia's Kube data store release 1.0 at this KubeCon.

>> Nice. And just coming back to you, Victor, because you mentioned all the CSI and compatibility issues and other stuff. What were you seeing as you went through this journey with CSI? Because we were talking about Hitachi and you were going to OpenShift Virt from RHV and things of that nature. How did this help you in that journey?

Victor Williams

>> Well, we were primarily a VM shop and when we decided to go along this journey, we knew we needed a place for our VMs, and OpenShift Virtualization provided that. And we used the native Hitachi CSI driver. Like I said, unfortunately, it didn't keep up. The biggest part of it was with VMs, storage is key. Storage, network and OS, you don't have one of those three, you're done. So, they could not unfortunately, keep up with the pace and the innovation that Red Hat introduced in OpenShift Virtualization. So, upgrading the operators, upgrading the environment, we need to stay ahead. We need to stay in cadence with Red Hat. Hitachi couldn't give that, Portworx Enterprise did. They solved several problems for us with container pod workloads starting up faster, migration of VMs way faster. Portworx enterprise second to none.

>> So, you were able to help bring over the data into the new OpenShift environment to be able to bring up those utilizing this?

Victor Williams

>> Yes.

>> And so, that had to have saved time and toil for your team and yourself?

Victor Williams

>> It does. It does. I'm in the healthcare industry. We all know healthcare prices are going up. Our charge at Blue Cross is to try to keep those prices low. So, how do we do that? Number one, Portworx Enterprise are hardware-agnostic, so we don't have to buy new storage. We have Pure Storage, we love Pure Storage, but if we had to make that spend, then we would have to pass that on to our members and we didn't want to do that. That's where that Portworx Enterprise product shines. We could use what we already had and still keep our cost low, keep our time to market low.

>> And are you seeing a lot of this across customers?

Victor Williams

>> Absolutely. We have customers running Portworx on top of, in this case, Hitachi arrays. We are one of the largest automakers in the world. We're not allowed to say their name yet, have migrated most of their factories off of VMware to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization and Portworx. And it's a complete multi-vendor environment. They run on top of pure arrays. They have third-party SAN vendors, like HP, NetApp, and Hitachi, and we run on top of them. And we're also running on top of Dell PowerFlex in the data centers. And more importantly, customers are trying to replicate the same stack. In the cloud as well, there's managed OpenShift Virtualization, managed OpenShift in the cloud. People who want build a hybrid cloud pathway, they want build their applications in the data center, but want to deploy it closer to their customers, have a hybrid cloud model. And building on Portworx not only gives them that abstraction in the data center, it also helps them abstract that in cloud, so they can go to any cloud of their choice where the customers are at. So, yes, we see this a lot and this is what we built Portworx for and it's a sweet spot use case. I'm glad to see the world is arriving where our earlier vision was vendor-agnostic, infrastructure-agnostic, data management layer with no lock-in, right? We are anti-lock-in. That means you're not even locked into Portworx. You can rip Portworx out. You still have access to all of your data. And we have still held true to our mission and what we are now solving is what the world needs.

>> Yeah, that makes total sense. I think when you start to look at it, again, everybody's in a different place on their journey. You mentioned the fact that you were early on in the Kubernetes side, but you were very much in the VM side and think... How has that really evolved and how has this helped from a learning curve perspective with that?

Victor Williams

>> Well, you got to look at the things in a much different scope with VMs. I remember when before we had VMs, we were all rack and stacks and those monolithic really hot data centers, right? Then we made the switch to VM infrastructure. Now, we're containers. The biggest thing about a container that I love, when you have an issue with a container, you put a bullet in it, spin it back up from the Dockerfile. Moving from that infrastructure to OpenShift Virtualization, it is a lift. I want to say that to all my brothers and sisters in the VMware world, it is not without challenges, but it's worth it. It's worth it. Like I said, I felt some way about OpenShift virtualization when it came to fruition and we moved from RHV, but a year into it, it's been about a year, we're better for it. We provide better service for our customers. We're better time to market, more resiliency, more security. We are all about security. One of my closest co-workers said, "It doesn't have to work, but it has to be secure."

>> That's good.

Victor Williams

>> And that's paramount in healthcare. And again, we could not have done that without Red Hat's partnership and Portworx Enterprise.

>> Yeah, I mean I look at it and it makes total sense to me. I mean, again, long time storage guy. I've seen it throughout the decades and I think like you were saying, it's, hey, we get to a point. But one thing, Venkat, we were talking a little bit before and we're starting to see things at scale that is just massive. How is this helping customers from a scalability perspective and to get a handle on all of that as well?

Victor Williams

>> Yeah, we are seeing while our little Broadcom recovery tie here, therapy tie, Portworx is like that, right? We are helping with Kubert and Portworx. We're essentially helping them leave and migrate off of their VMware estate and then go to Kubernetes-based estate at scale. Right now, there are different sets of scale challenges at Kubernetes. Look, scale is always a challenge, but it all depends on how do you architect it? Who are the partners you pick? And what are some of the technical considerations you need to have in place upfront? And then, automatically, scale works, right? Portworx runs today one of the largest global payments platform in the world, which is another CUBE interview back in EMEA. So, large telcos are running Portworx at scale. So, at scale, what Portworx does is that it absorbs all the operations at the Kubernetes control plane level. So, the underlying arrays aren't that busy with all the credit operations that generally happens at scale, right? Where a VM is migrating off from one set of VMs are failing over to another, to another, to another. Kubernetes reschedules a whole bunch of pods. There are more GitHub's pipelines getting deployed every minute. So, Portworx absorbs all of that load in the Kubernetes control plane layer and then leaves the underlying storage layer less utilized in the sense that it optimizes utilization, so you get more efficiencies out of it. And that essentially is how we have solved the scale problem. And this is unique. You don't get it with CSI drivers because CSI drivers will hit the arrays really hard and will drive the utilization up. What Portworx does is it absorbs all of that, delivers better efficiencies on top of these arrays.

>> It's a nice plushy for all the operations. So, Victor, last question. What's next? Where do you go from here with Portworx and Kubernetes and your environment as you for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama?

Victor Williams

>> So, right now we're a year in, so most of our environment is in OpenShift Virtualization. We just installed Portworx Enterprise in that environment. We're seeing great gains. For instance, VM migrations, which I say we're primarily VM shop right now, VM migrations under the old Hitachi CSI driver, took a while. 10 times faster with Portworx Enterprise and that number-

>> That's a thing.

Victor Williams

>> That's a thing, that's a real thing. We have 600 VMs. Imagine if you had some of the Metas, the Amazons, that have thousands and it's 10 times faster. So, where I see us in a year, I see us more getting... Not everything can be containerized, but I would say 90% of our stuff can. And I see us in a year, 50%. In another year, up to 80%, and the sky's the limit.

>> Awesome. Well, hey Venkat, Victor, this has been fantastic. Thank you for coming on board and thank you for helping us kick off KubeCon here today.

Victor Williams

>> Thank you.

>> Thanks for having us, Rob.

Victor Williams

>> Thank you.

Victor Williams

>> And thank you for watching this episode. We'll be back with more from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025 Live from cold-lanta. See you soon.