Pure Accelerate conference - Worth going to?

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

I forgot my tin foil hat.

What? You can never forget one of those! How else do you keep the marketing drivel away?

I use a fish bat.
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NerdyDad

Talking about HCI and saying that the more nodes you add, the cost benefit decreases.

Namely Nutanix, which he named directly.

scottalanmiller

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

Talking about HCI and saying that the more nodes you add, the cost benefit decreases.

That's true. The higher the nodes, the lower the cost benefit of HC. What he's not telling you is that it's an inverse cost to risk ratio. Cost benefit goes down as HC gets bigger. But for an IPOD (you are at an IPOD conference) it's the risk that gets higher as the ratio increases. The ONLY thing that makes IPODs cheap at large scale is that they trade protection to save money. You voluntarily take on more risk and less performance in order to cheap out.

IPODs' singular purpose is to "cut corners" at large scale by trading in your protection on cost savings.

momurda

@NerdyDad tinfoil isnt enough these days. You need carbon fiber hat painted with IR/microwave reflective paint, or nothing.

NerdyDad

I am finally back in Texas and have had a full day to retrospect and review on my journey to Pure//Accelerate.

Location: Pier 70 in San Francisco, California
Transportation: Mass-Transit, Uber/Lyft/Taxi, or Shuttle
Company: Pure
Date: June 13th & 14th
Target Audience: IT Buyers
Actual Attendees: 60% IT Buyers & Prospect Buyers / 40% Investors & Partners
Swag Meter: Minimal
Party Meter: Moderate
Total Cost to Attend: $2,300+ / person (does not include hours lost out of the office)

Location
San Francisco, California is one of the worst places to hold a convention. It is difficult to get around San Francisco as a visitor.

Transportation
Uber/Lyft/Taxi is going to be expensive ($10-15+ for a 1-way trip over 3 miles). If you attend every event and go back to your hotel, you're looking at least $60 in taxi transportation, but will get you there in about 20-30 minutes.

Shuttle to and from the hotel is another choice, but it doesn't allow you to get around and check out San Francisco. These shuttles were also the reason for why the convention was delayed for an hour on Day 1. Day 2 the issue was corrected. I am not sure how long it took for these shuttles to get to and from the hotels, but I would imagine it would be about 30 minutes for a 1 way trip.

Mass-transit doesn't make much sense as there are multiple systems servicing San Francisco and each has their own way of taking payments. You could get a 3-day pass on the Muni for a little more than $30, but mass transit would take you at least an hour and still includes a little bit of walking, possibly across highways and questionable neighborhoods.

Walking is about out of the question as you would have to walk into some questionable neighborhoods and possibly across unsafe highways.

Lodging
On top of that, they hold it at an abandoned warehouse that is at least 3 miles away from the closest hotels (3 of them), which is where the sponsoring company, Pure, partnered with for discounted rates. A normal nightly rate in San Francisco is about $400+/night in one of these hotels. The discount brought it down to about $320/night. For 3 nights, you're pushing close to $1k, just for lodging with their recommended hotels.

Main Sponsoring Company
The main company holding this event is a company called Pure. They first started by creating all-flash SANs. Later on, they began to make all-flash blade chassis and servers. They have started to go into cloud management of SANs and blade servers and have made more announcements that pushes this cloud initiative. Ticket cost was approximately $600.

However, I believe that these are not really originally designed by Pure, but by Cisco as UCS blade servers and rebranded for Pure. Plus, the SSD drives that are shipped with the equipment are more than likely Toshiba drives, again, rebranded for Pure. Both Cisco and Toshiba were big sponsors of this event with executives from both company making a speaking appearance at the conference.

Date & Weather
The only thing that might keep people away from this conference is Father's day, and that was only a negligible consideration. Other than that, the timing of the conference was good. The agenda of the conference was thrown off a little bit because of San Francisco Traffic and sponsored hotel shuttles arriving late with a majority of conference goers. This setback delayed the conference for about an hour on Day 1 which pushed back the breakout sessions for about an hour with festivities being delayed an hour into the night.. Luckily, Pure management reacted appropriately for the shuttles to arrive on time on Day 2. However, speaking engagements ran long and started to run into breakout sessions again.

Weather at the event was beautiful with lows in the low to mid 50's and highs pushing upper 60's and into 70's. I wore shirt and jeans and never needed a jacket.

Target Audience
The target audience here is mainly IT buyers. If you know the basics about IT and just need resources to purchase equipment and keep your company moving, then this conference is more for you. If you are more into the nuts and bolts of how things work and using open source systems, you're going to get bored quick.

Pure was more about how they keep developing their technologies to help IT shops use Pure's technologies more and to keep people in the Pure storehouse. Again, they brought in other vendors as well to also pitch to these IT buyers for other areas adjacent to Pure's products. This was a majority of my day in Day 1. Day 2 was more targeted to IT Pros, but more directly to early IT pros that are starting to explore IT and in how things work in predominantly Windows shops.

Actual Attendees
I did not get any information from a Pure rep, but as an attendee, so take it for what you will. I would think that the demographics of attendees is going to be 60% of IT to 40% of Investors and Partners. The amount of Investors and Partners present was somewhat daunting as this was supposed to be aimed at IT people. Therefore, I would think that this has something more to do on the business side of Pure, rather than the technology and engineering side of the house.

The presence of investors/partners is concerning to me as I wonder about the longevity of Pure in 3-5 years. One of their selling points is their "Evergreen" policy, in that you're not going to lose money in your equipment as long as you keep up with their support agreements. If you purchase their "Gold" level, then you can refresh your controllers in 3 years free of charge. If a drive dies, then you get a comparable or better drive, free of charge. But, what happens if Pure goes out of business? What about their Evergreen policy after that? Who would you call if there is no more Pure to call?

Conference Keynotes
Pure did 2 days of Keynotes. Day 1 was taken up about how Pure was continuing to develop its technologies and products. They have a number of fronts, such as FlashBlade arrays, Pure1, drive storage technologies, and how they are working on making it all faster. They also included some of their big sponsors, such as Cisco and Domino's in how they are leveraging Pure's products for their companies.

Day 2 was a little bit more on the keynotes, with their own awards ceremony, which basically amounts to who can buy the most Pure equipment, along with a special speaker, Jeff Ma, who was the guy from MIT
and figured out how to count cards at blackjack using math, statistics, and strategy, which inspired the movie "21". Jeff continued about how he was able to apply these same principles to other areas of life, such as business and health (especially with an episode dealing with his mother).

I had to leave early both days in order to make it to the breakout sessions on time, which continued to stream the keynotes, so that you wouldn't miss anything.

Breakout Sessions
Day 1 sessions mainly consisted of sponsored sales pitches from other vendors on how their products can help save your company (as if your company needs saving). I did not get much out of Day 1.

Day 2 were more of, what I have been calling, "Meat & Potatoes". This was a majority of the reason why I came here. Mainly to learn more about the product, how it worked, how can I use it more for the company and get the information that I need out of it. Sessions here mainly consisted of how to test the storage to make sure it is ready for your SQL vm, how to get started with NVMe and where it is going into the future, and how to apply scripts, whether they are PowerShell or Python, to manage FlashArrays.

Food
During registration, you are given 2 meal tickets. About lunch time, a caravan of food trucks are pulled in and waiting for you to give them a meal ticket in exchange of a selection ranging between 1 and 3 choices per truck. The trucks ranged anywhere from Philly cheesesteaks to Thai to Vietnamese and any where in between, except for some normal American food.

Non-alcoholic drinks ranged from sodas to water to juices and were readily available all during the conference.

Swag Meter
Pure's conference website made it sound like conference goers were going to need to check a bag into the airlines because of all of the swag that they were going to bring home. There was not much swag to have been had.

My swag meter barely responded at this conference. When you register at the beginning of the conference, you are given a backpack with a small pamphlet book on NVMe over Fiber Channel, which was sponsored by Brocade for their Fiber Channel products. As I went to the keynote, there was fidget spinners in everybody's seats, sponsored by Toshiba. If you walk around other booths, you might get an extra pen or notebook or another book to read, such a VM Data Protection for Dummies that was sponsored by Veeam and Quantum. I only got one shirt out of the entire conference and that was from Zerto. There was another booth giving away shirts, but you had to win a small game against other customers in order to get the shirt. Another company was giving away more fidget spinners and another company was somehow giving away RC cars, but I wasn't going to get too involved to figure out how to win one.

Party Meter
I did not go to the parties, but their main highlight was the party after Day 2, which featured Snoop Dog. Not really the talent that I would look for at a conference, but there is one thing that both of these had in common, and it was "Clouds". I did not hear a lot of buzz about the vendor parties after Day 1. Everybody was dressed appropriately so the parties must not have been too exciting, but the alcohol did start to flow at a respectable 4 to 5 o'clock in the afternoon.

Cost
Registration cost is about $600. Airfare was approximately $500 roundtrip. Lodging is about $1,000. Ground transportation (if you do not use the shuttle, just go by Uber/Lyft/Taxi) is approximately $70 (taxes and fees included). Meals would be about $100 (does not include lunch at the conference). So total conference cost is looking at $2,300 per person to attend.

Overall
If I was still looking at purchasing this product compared to NetApp or other competitors, then it would be worth while going to. If I am already a customer, then I might have skipped Day 1 and went right into Day 2, if it was worth going for me at all, which really wasn't. If I base my decision on whether or not I go next year based on this year, I am 60% positive that I would not waste my company's money going next year. But I also consider myself more of an IT pro than an IT buyer, so take it for what you will.

NerdyDad

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

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

Going to turn your storage into a file server.

Why wouldn't you just bring up a Linux SMB or Windows server? I can't imagine why you would want user access directly to the hardware?

Thank you. That doesn't make sense to me at all either.