Red Hat Summit + AnsibleFest 2025 | Ajay Singh, Pure Storage & John Durko, Fiserv

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Ajay Singh

Chief Product Officer

Pure Storage

John Durko

Director IT, Product Architect, Container Services

Fiserv

Joselito Angeles

Principal Containers Platform Architect

Fiserv

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play_circle_outline Impact and benefits of containerization and microservices in software delivery process

play_circle_outline Importance of efficient storage infrastructure in modernization projects

play_circle_outline Enhancing AI, Security, and Virtualization for Future-Proofed Storage and Operations

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Ajay Singh, Pure Storage & John Durko, Fiserv

Ajay Singh

Chief Product Officer Pure Storage

John Durko

Director IT, Product Architect, Container Services Fiserv

Joselito Angeles

Principal Containers Platform Architect Fiserv

Ajay Singh of Pure Storage, John Durko of Fiserv, and Joselito Angeles, a Unix administrator, join host Paul Nashawaty at the Red Hat Summit AnsibleFest 2025. The session examines the transformative impacts of containerization on modernization efforts, specifically focusing on application delivery and infrastructure transformation.

Singh, Durko, and Angeles contribute their extensive expertise in information technology and product architecture. During the discussion, they explore the complexities of transitioning from traditional monolithic application... Read more

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What was the initial promise of containerization? add

What was the initial promise of containerization in terms of software delivery across different environments? add

What are the outcomes achieved with Portworx and Pure Storage while working with Fiserv? add

What are some considerations or challenges for using AI in a highly regulated industry such as fintech, specifically in relation to data privacy and data center storage? add

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Ajay Singh, Pure Storage & John Durko, Fiserv

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Paul Nashawaty

>> Hello, and welcome to this episode of the AnalystANGLE, coming to you live from the Red Hat Summit AnsibleFest 2025 show floor. My name is Paul Nashawaty and I'm here today with Ajay Singh, chief product officer of Pure Storage. I'm here with John Durko, director of IT, product architect and container services, and Joselito Angeles, a Unix admin. Thanks for coming here, guys.

John Durko

>> Thank you. - Great to have you here.

Paul Nashawaty

>> This is really a topic that's top of mind. We'll jump right into this. There's a lot happening when we look at modernization, and we look at what's happening with regards to containerization and all the activity on the show floor. How's it going for you here?

John Durko

>> Great. It's been a great show remeeting people and meeting new people.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Great, yeah. We establish a lot of networks and then we're learning new technologies.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, absolutely. That's great.

>> Great show. Red Hat is a great partner for us and we're doing a lot of things together. It's a great place to be.

>> Absolutely, absolutely.

Paul Nashawaty

>> To be here talking about modernization, talking about containerization and what's happening in this space, it's really it's top of mind, and the keynotes really showed it. When we look at Fiserv and how you are transforming your business and your infrastructure, you're looking at different areas around containerization, around the application delivery service. My area of coverage, I cover AppDev and I cover everything that touches the SDLC and the CI/CD pipeline. So I'm really curious if you could get into a little bit of the details around why you took the plunge to transform your infrastructure?

John Durko

>> Sure. So in my mind, the initial promise of containerization was to provide a consistent software delivery mechanism across very disparate SDLC environments. What works on a dev's laptop wouldn't necessarily work in the dev environment, CAD environment, prod environment. And the container allows the devs to provide everything they need in that one package.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Now that's not always easy. Joselito, what do you think?

>> Well, yes, aside from what John said, before with the monolithic applications of the time to deliver changes takes a long time. Now with the adoption of containers, microservices, the delivery, there's a lot possible, more efficient.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, absolutely. And there's this concept of people thinking, "Well, modernization is just like you flip a switch and it just goes. " But Ajay, I'd like to talk a little bit from your perspective, there's this bridge in the gap between old and new. When you look at containerization, that's like where people want to go, but what about the heritage environments?

>> Absolutely. So while containerization, I think as both John and Jose are pointing out, is really around driving agility and speed for the developers and all of that. But at the same time, there's another layer of modernization happening, which you can see a lot of discussion at the Red Hat Summit as well. And this is around your storage infrastructure and how that integrates with the VM environment, the container environment, and how that can really become the backbone of something that drives agility up and down the stack. So it's the base of the stack, as well as the upper part of the stack. And a lot of that comes around not only agility, but reliability, sustainability, all the -ility between the availability. Drive all of that, that's the transformation that's going on.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, absolutely. And transformation, I talked to a number of CIOs who are in C-suites that are trying to do this modernization approach. And they often run into challenges such as complexity and skill gap issues. Those typically are areas that organizations run into. But having a platform that allows for that growth and seamless integration to move along, that's really a focus point. What are your thoughts on that?

John Durko

>> Yeah. You're absolutely right that both complexity and the skill gap is a challenge. Kubernetes is still relatively new when we think about IT products and offerings, so that is a challenge. But partnering with the good vendors, making use of what's out there in the open-source community. And just taking care of the talent that you do have so that hopefully they stay with you, those are some of the keys. And then complexity, just keep it as simple as you can. And when it's not, make sure that you're writing very thorough documentation to help, should somebody later have to go through and figure out, "How does this work?"

Paul Nashawaty

>> Of course. And the promise of AI is going to take over all of that, is that what we're seeing? What do you think?

>> Well, also there's a lot

>> of challenges when you introduce something new. But once you start working on it, then you set template standards, then it becomes easier down the road. In the long run, setting standards, working with vendors, and even within internal organizations, if you set the standards, then people have something to follow, then it makes it easier. It takes up a little bit of the complexity.

Paul Nashawaty

>> And certainly, we see a lot of our customers that are obviously grappling with complexity, a skill gap, but at the same time, they're also trying to drive some outcomes. Their transaction volumes are going up, they want to reduce their footprint in the data centers. They want to reduce the power consumed because power is more difficult to get by, so it's an and scenario. You have to deal with the complexity and at the same time, improve the outcomes, and that's what we find our customers try to do.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Well, speaking of the outcomes though, when we look at what Fiserv is trying to do here, what were your desired outcomes for this transformation project?

John Durko

>> So initially, again, that consistent SDLC software delivery process was initially the goal. But what comes along with containers, is the ability to make much more efficient use of Fiserv resources where they're talking about servers, CPUs. From an old day where people might allocate a VM just to run an app. Now, as CPUs get more powerful, Kubernetes and containers allows us to package many more applications particularly, and run them with those same hardware resources.

Paul Nashawaty

>> So the density comes into play?

>> The density comes into play,

John Durko

>> and obviously that has follow- on effects on your environmental footprint, your power requirements. Yeah, so just everybody's trying to find ways to do things more efficient.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. The efficiency piece and the sustainability piece. Ajay, you were talking about what I see in my notes here, I see 25,000 transactions per second. Reducing your on-prem block storage rack space by 75%, lowering power, cooling and associated costs by 73%, that's impressive. What are your thoughts on that?

>> Yeah. No, absolutely. So I think and John was mentioning, we're trying to drive this more efficient backup, faster backup, but in addition for the storage environment, I talked about earlier on the challenges and the outcomes folks want to drive. Those are the outcomes, 75% reduction in block storage, rack space. 73% reduction in power consumed, while getting 25,000-plus per second or more transactions through the system, that's the end. How do you do both of them? And those are the outcomes with Portworx and Pure Storage working with Fiserv, that the teams have managed to accomplish.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, very, very impressive. So Joselito, I have this question about you. So why don't you walk us through the architecture for Fiserv, how you deployed? How is OpenShift powering it? What are you looking at from the architecture deployed, whether on-prem or in the cloud? What are your thoughts around that?

>> Yeah. Well, our initial implementation with OpenShift whenever giving our prep-up concept, is we put it on the cloud, AWS. But then later on, we started deploying OpenShift on-prem, and that's what we've then adopted this OpenShift on-prem.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Okay, very good. Anything to add to that?

John Durko

>> Yeah, so that's been it on-prem. We do also consume OpenShift in Azure in the form of ARO.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Okay. - Yeah. And then we do have other Kubernetes

John Durko

>> offerings from other vendors as well, so it's a bit of a heterogeneous environment.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Are you looking to standardize?

John Durko

>> I don't think we'd get down to one vendor. It might be a smaller number than we have now, again, large organizations. And there was a merger originally within Fiserv and First Data, so we've got a lot of disparate infrastructure. But over time, we will probably reduce the number of vendor platforms.

>> Actually, we do find our customers very much in a similar scenario where they're multivendor, they're doing cloud and maybe multiple cloud.

>> Of course, yeah. - On-prem.

>> And one of the things we have worked with on Portworx,

Paul Nashawaty

>> is truly to make it that heterogeneous, that works with ARO, works in the on-prem OpenShift. Works with AKS, EKS, certainly our own storage, EMC storage. So be that truly multivendor, heterogeneous software- defined storage layer in something.

Paul Nashawaty

>> No, absolutely. In our research, in theCUBE Research, we find that 94% of organizations are using two or more clouds, 65% are using four or more clouds. So there's going to be the usage of different clouds, and you have to have that commonality to make it work together. You have to have the right mix within your organization in order for it to work, so that makes a lot of sense, Ajay. I guess, Ajay, while we're talking about this, what role does storage play in all of this and how does Portworx fit into it?

>> Yeah. So as you think about, it's been a super exciting journey for Pure working with Fiserv on the storage site. As I mentioned earlier on, it gives you a platform that's reliable, highly available performance, and at the same time very sustainable, low in power, low in space, rack space. But as we've built this journey, we've also worked very closely with John and team on the Kubernetes side. And recognizing that they are also on a journey, which is starting with ARO, they're going to take it on-prem. They're looking at other Kubernetes offers. And we are looking to work closely with them, to give them the outcomes and the flexibility to be able to make that shift and movement, without having to do a lot of reengineering work. You give that one common, software-defined storage layer, and that's really what we are excited about, and now what our engineering team is really excited about working with the Fiserv team on.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Definitely. John, what are the impacts of the business?

John Durko

>> The impacts of the business are clearly reliable software deployments, where we're deploying more features. So this allows developers to get towards multiple deployments perhaps per month, per week. I think we're doing a lot yet of multiple pushes per day, but it is enabling that sort of thing in a consistent fashion. So in the fintech business, everyone is demanding new products and they want them yesterday, and containerized application delivery is one of the key ways to deliver that.

>> That sounds really great, so that's today.

Paul Nashawaty

>> And so I'll ask you, Joselito, when we look at what comes next, when you look at the rest of 2025 and beyond, what do you think? We talked about AI just early on briefly. I have to ask it because it's part of, if I didn't know we'd be missing it, but also what about modernized virtualization?

Paul Nashawaty

>> Before I answer that question, John was saying earlier about the impact on the business.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. - The architecture that we've adopted,

>> also gives us the flexibility to scale in and scale out our resources. That gives the business users the confidence that, "Okay, if they need more resources, they'll get it. " If they don't use it, it's there for them to use it, but then if they don't need it, they can take it out. That's one of the thing that gives us that advantage using the containerization architecture that we adopted. Okay. Going forward, I think John will be in a better position to do that, but in terms of AI, so from what we've learned from all the sessions here. We have a lot to learn with AI, and I think it gives us more let's call it incentive to learn it and adapt it.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Very good. All right, so I have a final question to ask each of you. Okay. So when we're sitting here next year having this conversation about where this is going. What do you want to see and what do you want to say from your own organization's perspective? And where do you think, where we would be next year at this time?

John Durko

>> I'd like to feel that we have a very good story for AI, even in cases where that needs to be on- prem perhaps because of data privacy issues. Again, as a fintech, we're highly regulated. There's certain things where we're just going to need to keep that data in our data centers. So to be well on the way to enabling AI, and to do it as efficiently as possible, given the costs of GPUs and that sort of thing.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Okay, yeah.

>> Well, sir, in terms of AI, I think one of the areas we also want to achieve is use AI to make sure that our environments are secure.

Paul Nashawaty

>> That's good. - So using AI not only for

>> efficient operation, but also for secure operations.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Ajay? - I will say, I think a lot of enterprises,

>> AI is a big initiative. And one of the challenges with storage and AI, is traditionally storage has tended to be very bespoke to the application. It's very siloed and locked off, but AI is hungry for data. But if the data is siloed off and locked off, it creates a bunch of challenges. So one of the things we are doing is we are virtualizing this data through our platform, our Pure Storage platform, which effectively you can get access to all of this data on- prem or in the cloud. That you can supply an AI model against it, without having to make a huge data lake copy that get obsolete by the time you finish copying it, et cetera, et cetera. So there's a lot of excitement around AI and how it's going to transform the storage architecture into more a virtualized data architecture. If you think about it for a minute, the public cloud have already virtualized storage and data. On-prem world has not done it yet.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Right. - And we are leading the charge

>> with the Pure Storage platform to really do that virtualization. That should really help AI. So we hope to see some of that adoption happening in Fiserv and in the industry over the course over the next year. And then certainly on modern virtualization, in the industry, you see the big momentum here at the conference. We definitely see a lot of momentum in that space as well, and this whole data platform also lends itself very well. If you're going to do a modern virtualization, you may as well also make it AI ready. The maze will unlock those silos at the same time through something like a Pure Storage platform.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Well, one thing sounds very consistent, operational efficiencies, AI is definitely not going away. We think that's going to just keep growing. Yeah, I think there's exciting times ahead for all of us. I want to thank you all for being here today. This has really been great. It's really been an exciting time, and it really is going to be an exciting future and I want to thank you for joining us today. My name is Paul Nashawaty. I'm with theCUBE Research, the leading source in tech news. Thank you.