Note: The following article represents my views alone, and does not represent any statement on behalf of Pure Storage whatsoever. All opinions are entirely my own.
For the first time ever, Pure Storage asked Puritans (Pure-speak for ’employees’) from around the globe to apply to be Ambassadors at the 2019 //Accelerate conference.
One representative from each of the three global regions would be selected to attend //Accelerate, meet with colleagues, executives, customers and partners alike, share the experience on social media and report back to the Puritans watching at home. I applied and was accepted to represent the Americas!
It was awesome.
Not only was it a lot of fun to visit Austin for the first time, but I also had a great time throughout the conference, attending keynotes, breakout sessions and exploring the expo floor. Pure Storage brings a lot of excitement to the table, and Pure’s customers bring the energy to match.
It was a pleasure to meet colleagues who I have worked with but never had the opportunity to meet in person. Pure is full of extremely talented, friendly and thoughtful people, and I’m happy to be here.
What Pure Storage is bringing to customers is working, and they are excited about the future.
In addition to meeting my fellow Puritans, one of the best parts of this experience was the opportunity to meet Pure’s customers. As a support representative, most of my customer interactions start with negative feelings — “something is broken!” I always try to end all of my interactions with a happy customer, but at //Accelerate every customer I met was so enthused about what Pure Storage is doing.
The energy is palpable – what Pure Storage is bringing to customers is working, and they are excited about the future.
There are so many things to talk about when it comes the Pure//Accelerate experience, but I think the most important thing to focus on are the announcements that were made during the event:
1. Flash for Cold Storage
As Pure Storage writes on their blog, tier-two applications have long been held back by disk technologies. Today’s customers need immediate data availabilty across all their applications, and now Pure has a solution to help. With FlashArray//C, Pure is bringing cost-effective flash storage to cold data workflows.
2. Pure-as-a-Service
During the day 1 keynotes, Pure Storage announced that it would expand its extremely popular Evergreen Subscription to cover all Pure products. I can see how this would be of huge value to customers – it’s flexible, it turns cap-ex into op-ex, and it helps companies renew their storage on a regular basis so as to keep up with the ever evolving demands of the modern IT world. Pure’s Modern Data Experience – that Simple, Seamless, and Sustainable approach – is the way to go.
3. DirectMemory Cache
Designed to plug directly into FlashArray//X70 and //X90 systems, Pure’s DirectMemory Modules are set to bring the future to today. We’re talking about enabling sub-millisecond latency in real-world environments. This was one of the most exciting public announcements of the entire keynote (I am a nerd, okay) – Pure claims that these Intel Optane-powered cache modules can speed up critical applications by 2x!
4. Cloud Block Store for AWS and CloudSnap for Azure
Speaking of the future, what’s a modern tech conference without some mention of the cloud? Pure Storage took this opportunity to position itself as customers’ best option to help bridge the divide between the public and private clouds, announcing two new exciting products – Cloud Block Store for Amazon Web Services, and CloudSnap for Azure. CBS delivers enterprise-class block storage directly in the public cloud, providing a unified management platform for both local (private) and public storage. On the flip side, CloudSnap enables customers to rapidly restore from either the private or public cloud, which is also incredibly useful.
This mostly reads as a press release, which it is not, but the point is I had a lot of fun at //Accelerate, and there were a lot of cool announcements. Pure Storage is a remarkable company with remarkable customers, and I’m beyond excited to have had this opportunity to attend our annual conference and get a glimpse into the customer side of things.
