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After being at Pure Storage for the last 2+ years there are so many amazing moments that I have experienced but if I could distill it down into my Top 5 here they are:

  1. Customers & Partners — I focused a lot of time on customers & partners, doing demos, talking tech, working on DevOps automation and more.
  2. Release of FlashArray//m — When I decided to join Pure Storage it was for the technology and team. We continue to out-innovate others which makes everyday exciting.
  3. Release of Pure Storage PowerShell support — Near and dear to my heart. The delivery of PowerShell support for me shows that we do focus on innovation. I wrote the initial integration and as customers began to use it we made the investments to further the integration and now continue to introduce new features for DevOps and automation.
  4. Solutions Team — We are a growing team of highly motivated architects with many years of experience and it has been very rewarding to be part of the team growth. Shout out to all of my team members! Day 3 at Pure Storage I remember working 2 all nighters with Lou Lydiksen and devouring all Nutter Butters from the 3 floors of our building. Ah the memories.
  5. PSTG! — Last but certainly not the least going public!

Each one of the above really should be in the #1 spot but the overall theme of my time at Pure Storage has been about how we are as a company and Puritans making a difference to help our customers and partners accelerate their business and operations. In the early days of flash, a large percentage of businesses thought of flash as a point-solution to help simply fix performance issues. My #1 item being customers really reflects this point because as our customers have implemented our FlashArray they see the opportunity to use our platform as a multi-workload application hosting solution. Run multiple Microsoft SQL Server workloads, Microsoft Exchange Server and throw on some VDI as well. It has been very rewarding to see how our customers have helped evolve our platform and really begin to unleash its capabilities.

Part of the excitement of working with customers also includes how the Line-of-Business (LOB) application owners work with their storage, IT and developer teams to create simpler workflows and processes around provisioning, backup & recovery as well as DevOps for scenarios like Dev/Test. Our investments in the REST API, Windows PowerShell, Python Toolkit and starting to drive more open source work on github have really helped to show our customers the investment we are making in the platform. I rarely talk about our solution as a SAN, because it is so much more than just storage.

My recap of the last few years leads me to talk about our coming Pure//Accelerate conference being held on March 14th & 15th at Pier 48 & AT&T Park in San Francisco, CA. Looking at my Top 5 over the last few years there are a few themes that can be gleaned:

  • Innovation
  • Customers
  • Partners
  • Solutions
The focal points of Pure//Accelerate will be around Cloud, Applications and Flash Futures. One of the themes weaved throughout each of these areas is DevOps which is something I am very passionate about helping Pure Storage, Customers and Partners understand and progress. Details on the individuals focal points include the following:
Applications — Optimize applications and hypervisors, learn about DevOps and getting developers and administrators focused on productivity and not fire drills related to SAN issues.
 
Flash Futures — Learn about our platform, future vision, best practices and architecture.
Cloud  Discussing difference cloud models and have to take advantage of our platform on your journey to the cloud.
Exciting times are Pure Storage and be sure to register for the event and I hope to meet you there. I will most likely be walking around in my Pure rugby with BARKZ across the shoulders!
Thanks,
Barkz