Do IT conferences ever trigger Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) for you? The kind of FOMO that gets worse as you follow Tweet threads that make the conference seem inspiring, educational, fun, and pretty much the place to be.
Pure Accelerate has always been one of those FOMO-inspiring conferences for me. I’m thrilled for the opportunity to attend a Storage Field Day Exclusive at Pure Accelerate 2019.
While I initially hesitated to accept the invitation because of my relationship with another storage vendor, I’m grateful to attend Pure Accelerate and both see, hear, and experience their story without any tribalism.
In this post, I plan to cover my pre-attendance thoughts, hopes, and expectations of Pure Accelerate.
How Will Pure Tell Their Story?
Do you remember what IT looked like ten years ago? Before NVMe. Before Storage Class Memory. Before Pure Storage.
Founded in 2009, Pure came out of stealth in 2011 and burst onto the infrastructure scene with flash storage, easy upgrades, and a streamlined, simple UI. All of these were very disruptive things at the time. In addition, Pure benefited from being able to forget about hard disk drives (HDDs) and focus all of their effort on Solid State Disk (SSD) support. At the time, legacy storage vendors needed to refactor their code to add SSD support.
Will their messaging sound like every other storage/data-management company’s message? How will Pure tell the story of what differentiates them from the competition? Specifically, I’m interested in hearing the whyPure Storage message.
2019 is a much different world. Maintenance and upgrade cycles have slowed. Many organizations are switching from the majority of their budget being spent on capital expenditures (CAPEX) to operating expenditures (OPEX). Workloads are also moving to the Cloud. Will anything be said about the challenges that infrastructure-related companies face to remain profitable?
Standards Support and Community Support
One of my favorite things about Pure Storage is community support. You see evidence of this in the people that they hire from the Community, their presence at other community events and also in their sessions. While most tech conferences include certificate-themed tracks, it’s only for their solutions. Pure Accelerate includes certification sessions for Ecosystem Partners like AWS, NVIDIA, RedHat, Splunk, Veeam, and Veritas.
Community support is tied with standards support. While other vendors needed to play catch up to include support for Rest APIs and vVOLs, Pure Storage has benefited from its conception in a world in which Cloud was becoming a thing. It didn’t need to incorporate these features into legacy code.
Keynotes Expectations
Will Pure Accelerate’s keynotes and announcements heavily feature talk of operational efficiency, hybrid multi-cloud, or Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning? Those topics currently dominate IT discussion and usually end up in conference keynotes. I’m excited to hear the Pure Storage take on these topics.
With the mention of multi-cloud, I would be remiss if I didn’t include Kubernetes. Even before VMworld, this has pretty much been the Year of Kubernetes. Will Kubernetes or containers come up in the Keynotes? Will RedMonk Co-founder and Developer Advocate Guru, James Governor cover this in his Keynote speech?
Announcement Speculations
Last year, Pure released Cloud Block Storage, an offering that they dubbed “industrial, cloud-native block storage.” Cloud Block Storage brings bi-directional replication making DR and HA possible, thin provisioning, HA, space-savings like deduplication and thin-provisioning.
Earlier in the year, Pure acquired Compuverde, a Software-Defined Storage company specializing in advanced file services, to beef up its hybrid cloud and file services portfolio. What if any Pure Accelerate announcements will come from this acquisition?
For instance, could we see Pure add the ability for FlashArrays to tier to the Cloud? Maybe expand its Storage as a Service (STaaS) offerings and add NFS/SMB services offering fueled by some of intellectual property from its Compuverde acquisition?
Conclusion
I’m ecstatic for the opportunity to experience Pure Accelerate. I’m looking forward to hearing their announcements and hearing how they tell their story. Also, spending time with the Tech Field Day delegates and the Community never ceases to fill my heart with joy.
Stay tuned for my post-conference thoughts on Pure Accelerate.
