Re-setting your body clock to a new timezone is always a challenge, having arrived in San Francisco at 09:30am on Monday to be involved in the conference; I found myself awake after a good night’s sleep ready for the next day, this year I’m staying at an Airbnb apartment about 10-15 minutes walk from Pier 48, so it was a nice change to walk to the venue!

I was greeted by the best coffee I’ve had in San Francisco, this was instrumental in my acclimatisation to this timezone and (I know I’m biased), but it makes a big difference to any conference! Thank you and well done 🙂

On to the event… So Day 2 was slightly more subdued than day 1 (I have to say, I’ve been to a number of conferences and I really found this event to be quite relaxed compared to others).  I think the environment created along with the quality of engagement between attendees has been quite unique.

It was great to meet up with @datacenterdude and hear about @cohesity together with @PureStorage, it almost felt like a mini @TechFieldDay rehearsal, live at Pure//Accelerate but with less hecaling 😉

I then met up with my good friend @kylegrossmiller who’s one of our Solution Architects specialising in Horizon View and XenDesktop, he showed me this beautiful looking NVIDIA Tesla M6 which is a GPU offload mezzanine card that fits nicely into a Cisco UCS model B blade.

My presentation was up next, DEVOPS a day in the life of Pure Storage you can catch it here recorded live on periscope: –

Then it was back to the main auditorium with that beautiful screen again…

First off we had the //Accelerate Awards 2016 for customers who got behind Pure from the very beginning, these included Symantec, Paylocity, Red Hawk Casino and SouthEast Technical Institute.

Next up there was a great discussion with Biri Singh (@zbirisingh) CTO, Cisco and Scott Dietzen (@scott_dietzen) CEO of Pure Storage talking about future trends including the reality of public cloud and the shift from virtualisation to containerisation.

After a short break Scott returned, this time with Raghu Raghuram (@raghuraghuram) EVP, GM of SDDC at VMware where the conversation jumped straight onto Dell before mentioning VSAN and the origins of the Software Defined Data Centre (SDDC), kudos to Raghu for mentioning Stephen Herrod (@herrod) who originally coined the phrase!

Robert Herjavec (@robertherjavec) provided a very interesting perspective on the technology industry as a security business owner and entrepreneur with a fascinating insight into being in the public media (AKA Shark Tank) and left us with some interesting observations on the growth of data and the problem of more, being more.

Jonathan Martin (@_iamJM) then gave away three (3) FlashArray //m10 arrays to 3 lucky people who found Willie Wonka’s golden ticket stuck under their seat!

The main Keynote ended and I attended several breakout sessions including The Pure Flash Futures session with the FlashBlade team.

And an interesting Pure Founders Vision & Q&A session, I have to comment that it’s not often you go to these kind of events and get intimate access to the company founders!

The breakout sessions came to an end and it was time to indulge in some arcade action, I couldn’t believe that I found Robotron:2004, I used to love this game as a kid…

Another classic was Space Wars…

Then it was time to start packing up the Pure//Pavilions hardware before the live music started.

With the hardware teardown coming to a close, drinks began to flow with the signature cocktails reminding me of New Hire Training!

The Sun went down on the end of a fantastic day 2 at Pure//Accelerate, I really enjoyed this event and I’m proud to be part of this journey with Pure Storage!

…and the evening came to a close with live music from Panic at the Disco.

Thanks Pure//Accelerate for providing a relaxed environment for customers, partners and employees to join together, learn and help initiate the next phase in our partnership!  I feel honoured to have shared this experience and I look forward to the opportunity of returning 21/22 March 2017 for the next thrilling installment…!