VMworld 2014 Pure Storage Recap

Phew another VMworld under my belt! Tons of fun and tons of work! Pure Storage had  its largest presence ever at VMworld–we certainly painted Moscone orange in addition to unleashing an arsenal of nerf guns (4,500) upon the city. This post is meant to be more of a photo album of the week and what Pure was involved in–technical posts of things that we did there will be forthcoming.booth

At the booth we demo’ed VVols, Site Recovery Manager integration, Log Insight Integration, our Web Client Plugin, VAAI, Single Pane of Glass Management for our FlashArrays, DBaaS and much more. Look for these demos to be posted soon.

The first event was the EMC and Pure Storage Sponsored event vOdgeball which is a great event to benefit the Wounded Warriors Project. $20,000+ was raised and much fun was had! Some intense rivalries certainly flared up too!

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We started off with the vExpert Game Show which was an absolutely blast! A little crazy and chaotic but a great way to start of the conference with some fun–I hope the 1,000 people in the audience agreed. I think we broke Twitter during it–my favorite comment was that is was a “hilariously fun train-wreck”–I think that is perfect and kind of what we were aiming for. Thanks to @vmtrooper for the photo:

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Next up was a post-presentation at VMware’s VVol deep dive session where I had a few minutes to talk about Pure Storage and our VVol implementation. On that note I will be posting a VVol demo here in the next week or so. So stay tuned for that! Same thing for Site Recovery Manager. Both were demo’ed in the booth.

My colleague Avi had a Virtualizing Business Critical Apps on Flash Storage session. Highlights included:

  • DBaaS demonstration. The reference architecture document will be posted soon.
  • Discussion on how the storage was configured for SQL to get 1.1 million transactions, and Exchange for 100,000 mailboxes
  • Data reduction rates  and performance were a big topic of interest. A talk track on the fact that data sets and data streams do indeed matter to educate attendees on how to intelligently analyze performance for their apps.

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The next session by @joelmckelvey with IT leaders from LinkedIn, UC Berkeley, and Skullcandy will discussed their own transition to flash, the successes and the pitfalls, and to help attendees understand the transition from disk to flash. The goal for this session was to provide a true view into the disk-to-flash transition and allow these distinguished experts speak in their own words without sales pitches and vendor propaganda. Straight from the customers–questions were taken live from Twitter as well. Of course, thanks to Brent Cochran (LinkedIn), Jonathon Taylor (UC Berkeley), and Brent Allen (Skullcandy) for agreeing to share their expertise.

My next session was a lot of fun–a panel discussion on using Log Insight. A product from VMware that I have found very useful. I am currently working on a Log Insight Content Pack for Pure Storage–that should be out soon. Bill Roth from VMware moderated the panel and besides myself I was accompanied by Dominic Rivera (US Bank), David Kelly (Beaumont Hospital), Dan Yanca (Walgreens). This session was recorded so do check it out when it is posted by VMware. Thanks to @lyanthony for the picture! And thanks Bill for inviting me to this session!

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Next up was my Flash Storage Best Practices session with Ravi Venkat. We went over why Flash for VMware, some best practices and new considerations as well as some futures and a bit of VDI.

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Vaughn Stewart had his awesome session with Chad Sakac from EMC. Going over the big picture of virtualization and storage. The agreement that every mention of a specific product that person had to donate $100 to charity–this was to keep it as vendor neutral as possible. Packed audience and some great information.

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Lastly, the Pure Storage Innovation Conference Evolve that took place right after VMworld officially ended. Hundreds of customers, partners and prospective customer showed up for the afternoon of great presentations and panel discussions and some after conference drinks and food to end the day right. BIG THANKS to those who after surviving the week of VMworld still having the stamina to show up for Evolve. Really impressive.

Mendel Rosenblum (Co-Founder and Former CTO of VMware) gave the keynote about flash disruption followed by the “Uncertainty Panel” discussing the future of the datacenter and IT. See here for summaries:  http://info.purestorage.com/EVOLVE-2014_Sessions.html

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All and all a great conference! I am sure I am missing tons of stuff we were involved in, just too much to include it all!

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