Pure Accelerate conference - Worth going to?

StorageNinja

@NerdyDad My office is in Palo Alto (it's a long damn commute) and $400 a night is sometimes the rate for the Residence Inn. The trick in SFO proper is AirBnB, or use boutiques (us business travelers are after our points and will avoid both).

My hotel in Barcelona this year is ~$320 mostly for this reason.

StorageNinja

@scottalanmiller Spot on. The booth work is one of the most hated positions, and generally used by Product Marketing, or SE's who were trying to find an excuse to get a pass and pay for the trip.

The more serious SME's at conferences are often in the briefing center. Schedule with your vendor before hand with your sales rep who/what you need to meet with. Briefings are not just for the F500 (although those guys spend a LOT of their conference in there I'm pretty sure).

Now note, at a minor conference occasionally you get lucky. Some of my team did some booth duty for VeeamOn, and the Gartner conference.

StorageNinja

@scottalanmiller A lot of even small conferences have some good speakers buried in. A big thing is ignore the session topics and focus on the speakers. Look them up on linkedIn. Want technical information? Is it being given by a product marketing person with less than 6 months tenure, or is it being given by someone who's got 3 books you've read a blog you consult weekly.

At VMworld the following speakers could be have a topic called "things you didn't know about how to make a Cat5 cable" and it would be well worth going.

Frank Denneman, Duncan Epping, Mike Foley, Emad Younis, William Lam.

Frank would give you a performance deep dive on cables that would make your head explode, Duncan would somehow make it entertaining and practical even if it wasn't your core field, Mike would teach you why you don't need to be afraid of the cable but the person who plugs it in, Emad would teach you how to automate it, and William would teach you how to McGuyver your way into making the cable into a Indiana Jones Laso and fly across the ball room.

GREAT presenters can make even dry topics insanely entertaining.

For Pure storage I'd stalk Cody Hosterman. He's been doing some really cool stuff with vRA and automation recently. There's a big Russian Guy who talks about new x blade stuff who's pretty sharp and Scott the CEO has some interesting thoughts on the industry and data analytics and is worth talking to (I got locked in a room with Pure people for a few days recently). Vaughn Stewart is fun to argue with (Remember if he gets out of control threaten his hair).

The other person worth stalking while your there is Pete Flecha. He's a short guy who does the virtually speaking podcast and works for VMware. You should ask him about vVols and why you should be using it with Pure after you do your setup.

NerdyDad

100 Petabytes to teach a car to drive.

NerdyDad

New model for datacenters:

Multi-cloud
Core
Edge

NerdyDad

NerdyDad

Claiming investment protection through Evergreen policies.

NerdyDad

NerdyDad

Claims FlashStack will trump hyperconvergence.

NerdyDad

Cisco coming up.

scottalanmiller

@NerdyDad said in Pure Accelerate conference - Worth going to?:

Claims FlashStack will trump hyperconvergence.

Ha, it's on Cisco UCS. It's not even serious gear.

scottalanmiller

FlashStack is nothing but a throwback to the worst of the worst right? It's an IPOD with blades? Like... nothing even special about it, right? Just the absolute worst IPOD design ever?

NerdyDad

scottalanmiller

NTRODUCING FLASHSTACK MINI
FlashStack Mini is an integrated
infrastructure solution with market-
leading components from Cisco
and Pure Storage. FlashStack is
the empowering, efficient, and
evergreen platform that transforms
your data center and serves as a
foundation for your private cloud. It
consists of a pair of Cisco Unified
Computing System (Cisco UCS)
fabric interconnects that establish
a redundant, lossless, 10 Gigabit
Ethernet network that carries IP,
storage, and management traffic
over a single set of cables (Figure
2). These fabric interconnects
connect to a Cisco UCS blade
server chassis that hosts up to
eight high-performance blade
servers based on the latest Intel
Xeon processors. Also connected
to the high-performance fabric is
a Pure Storage FlashArray//M,
built to deliver always-on access
to high-performance flash-based
storage in a small form factor.
FlashStack Mini is managed by
Cisco UCS Director, which provides
workflow-based management that
can extend your administrators'
reach to nearly all the devices in
your data center and beyond to
remote offices, branch offices, retail
locations, and industrial sites