Virtualization Anonymous - Pittsburgh PUG
Welcome to Our 2nd Pure User Group (PUG) Discussion on Server Virtualization! We’re excited to bring our community together again for our second PUG session focused on server virtualization — a topic that's constantly evolving and critical to modern infrastructure. This is part of our ongoing effort to host these discussions every six months, continuing as long as there's interest from our user community. Whether you joined us for the first session or you're new to the group, we’re glad to have you here. Let’s learn, share, and grow together — and as always, your feedback helps shape future PUG topics! Event Details This will be a customer driven and customer focused discussion to hear from people like you related to the experiences and journey you have been on as we all seek the recovery we need to build a virtualization strategy for the future. Pure Storage and Expedient will provide experts and guidance to take that first step with you. After our presentation, we invite you to join us for happy hour and appetizers at the Federal Galley located here. Prizes will be provided to help encourage open collaboration. Space is extremely limited for this event. Sign up now to grab your spot to this exciting event. Parking Enter the Parking garage on level 2 off of S Commons, Take the east or west stairs to the Plaza Level, Exit the plaza level by the information desk to the outdoor plaza, walk towards the Federal Galley, The conference center entrance is located to the left of the Federal Galley. (follow Pure Storage Signage) Agenda 2:00PM Check In 2:30PM - 4:30PM Presentation 4:30PM - Giveaway Raffle (Pirate Tickets, Pure Swag, Autographed Pirate Baseballs) 5:00PM - 6:30PM Happy Hour with Pure aYou Could Have All This Observability! A Live Walkthrough of Pure1.
July 8th | Register Now! Imagine having full observability into your storage fleet with live insights, anomaly detection, and easy, fleet-wide management. But, there’s a plot twist! It’s all included with Pure Storage. Join us for a live walkthrough of Pure1®. You'll see firsthand how monitoring, intelligent planning, and proactive management can simplify your day-to-day operations and prepare you for what’s next. After some history of Pure 1 and unpacking the “nothing to install” approach, we’ll walk through common, customer day-to-day scenarios and how Pure1 helps with: Logs - Never upload them again. Planning performance and/or capacity growth yourself based on historical data at your finger tips. Modeling out new workloads in real time. VM-level visibility and container integration. Reporting on data protection, security, and sustainability/energy posture. This month host Andrew Miller welcomes back Matt Bradford—the driving force behind Pure360 for a LIVE DEMO you don’t want to miss. We’ll close with what’s new in Pure1 (hint: this may cover some upcoming announcements at Pure//Accelerate®). Register Now!Storage Jailbreak! The Transformative, Operational Hope of Storage as a Service
May 6, 2025 | 11:00AM PT • 2:00PM ET -> Register Now! Details: For May, Principal Technologist Matthew Bednar will join Coffee Break host Andrew Miller. First, we’ll explore Matt’s career as a customer–what drew him to choose Pure Storage as a customer even before he joined the company (yes, this is partly about how he got out of storage jail). From there, we’ll dive into storage as a service (STaaS) from a practitioner perspective and how STaaS done right (Evergreen® is part of it) enables you to focus on items that matter to your company—freeing you from storage jail. The discussion will include: How STaaS affects traditional customer organization roles and responsibilities - It’s more than just a shift from purchase to consumption. SLOs vs. SLAs - If you don’t know the difference, you might be getting taken advantage of. Initial sizing and expansion planning - The shift in approaches. Overview of Evergreen//One™ (Pure Storage STaaS offering) New Evergreen//One capabilities, such as “paid power and rack” and the “cyber resilience SLA” (unique value in the case of a ransomware attack). As always, we’ll keep it educational while exploring how Pure Storage offers capabilities and products that benefit you. The speakers will stay on after the webinar to answer questions for those who want to learn more. LIVE RAFFLE: One lucky attendee will win a YETI Coffee Lover Set (approx. value $132.16). See Terms and Conditions. Register Now!
Finding predictions in the unpredictable
At Pure we are looking to make meaningful changes and bring value to the markets we serve. While our technology is second-to-none, we know that business problems in healthcare aren't always solved by throwing technology at it alone. If you are able to join us at our customer event: Accelerate you will notice we have a dedicated Healthcare day. We will be delivering high-impact, reasonable length sessions, detailing out some exciting new solutions and announcements for our healthcare customers. One of our solutions is EvergreenOne// Medical imaging (PACS/VNA). This solution is truly unique in the market in the way it solves for data management while also delivering predictable pricing. Billed "Per Study" we lock in a price for you, for up to 10-years and take on the risk of variability in study size growth, performance, privacy, and reliability. Organizations seemingly fall into two camps. Either they have moved to a "cloud-like" billing model(monthly cost per TB consumed), or continue capital purchase where you guess your next 5 years capacity needs and performance needs for your PACS/VNA data. Historically there are 3 data needs to address for your organizations PACS/VNA deployment: Burning through OpEx budget since every month your PACS/VNA data grows larger Running out of storage sooner (under provisioning) or overpaying ( over provisioning) with CapEx purchase Performance requirements change ( e.g. running 10 AI algorithms while servicing the human clinicians off the same data platform, simultaneously) With our EvergreenOne//Medical Imaging solution, we believe we have to answer to solve for all 3 above. If youll be able to join us at Accelerate in June, you will be the first to hear, otherwise stay tuned for our public announcement happening just after Accelerate ends.
FlashCrew London & Glasgow May/June 2025 !!!! Register NOW...
I'd like to invite you to our upcoming FlashCrew Customer User Group in London on May 15th, from midday. Throughout May, we'll be taking our FlashCrew User Group on the road to share ideas, best practices and network on all things Pure over some drinks and food. Plus, as a thank you for your continued support and attendance we will of course have the latest FlashCrew branded gifts for you to take with you! If you can make it, please register at this link below. London 10-11 Carlton House Terrace Thursday 15th May: REGISTER HERE for FLASHCREW LONDON Glasgow Radisson Blu Hotel Thursday 5th June: REGISTER HERE for FLASHCREW GLASGOW These are user group meetings, targeted at a technical audience across Pure's existing customers. Not only will you hear the latest news on the Pure Enterprise Data Cloud, but will also get to network with other like-minded users and exchange ideas and experiences. Agenda: 12:00 - 12:50 Arrival, Lunch and Welcome 13:00 - 14:00 Pure Platform: Features and Roadmap: with demo 14:00 - 14:15 Break 14:15 - 14:45 SQL Databases and Pure 14:45 - 15:15 Voice of the Customer 15:15 - 15:30 Break 15:30 - 16:15 Portworx and the Enterprise Data Cloud 16:15 - 16:45 Modern Virtualisation 16:45 - 17:00 Open Floor Q&A, Raffle, Wrap Up 17:00 - 19:00 Drinks and NetworkingFlashCrew London & Glasgow May/June 2025 !!!! Register NOW...
I'd like to invite you to our upcoming FlashCrew Customer User Group in London on May 15th, from midday. Throughout May, we'll be taking our FlashCrew User Group on the road to share ideas, best practices and network on all things Pure over some drinks and food. Plus, as a thank you for your continued support and attendance we will of course have the latest FlashCrew branded gifts for you to take with you! If you can make it, please register at this link below. London 10-11 Carlton House Terrace Thursday 15th May: REGISTER HERE for FLASHCREW LONDON Glasgow Radisson Blu Hotel Thursday 5th June: REGISTER HERE for FLASHCREW GLASGOW These are user group meetings, targeted at a technical audience across Pure's existing customers. Not only will you hear the latest news on the Pure Enterprise Data Cloud, but will also get to network with other like-minded users and exchange ideas and experiences. Agenda: 12:00 - 12:50 Arrival, Lunch and Welcome 13:00 - 14:00 Pure Platform: Features and Roadmap: with demo 14:00 - 14:15 Break 14:15 - 14:45 SQL Databases and Pure 14:45 - 15:15 Voice of the Customer 15:15 - 15:30 Break 15:30 - 16:15 Portworx and the Enterprise Data Cloud 16:15 - 16:45 Modern Virtualisation 16:45 - 17:00 Open Floor Q&A, Raffle, Wrap Up 17:00 - 19:00 Drinks and NetworkingWhy Are We Still Designing IT Like It's 2012?
Let’s talk about complexity in IT. Not the fun kind—like building a Raspberry Pi-powered coffee machine or arguing over whether Terraform should be capitalized. I mean the kind of complexity that slows teams down, bloats your stack, and makes security people question their career choices. You know the type: five backup platforms, three monitoring tools, two storage vendors “for resilience,” and a bunch of scripts someone wrote in 2019 that nobody’s brave enough to touch. We tell ourselves it’s “best-of-breed,” “cloud-first,” or my personal favorite—“strategic.” But let’s call it what it is: chaos without any direction. Enter Conway’s Law (aka the Mirror You’ve Been Avoiding) Melvin Conway dropped this gem in 1967: “Organizations design systems that mirror their own communication structures.” Still true. Still brutal. If your company has six teams that don’t talk to each other except through passive-aggressive Jira tickets, your architecture is going to reflect that—fragmented, redundant, over-engineered, and impossible to secure. Conway’s Law isn’t just a quirky observation. It’s a diagnostic tool. If your architecture feels like a group project gone off the rails, chances are it’s because your org works that way too. Cloud Chaos: Now with More Vendors! And just when you thought it couldn’t get worse—we bring in the cloud. Or clouds. Somewhere between “cloud-first” and “cloud-only,” we lost the plot. We started treating hyperscalers like interchangeable gas stations: need compute? Just pull over at the nearest one. We’ve seen it: Migrations from AWS to Azure to GCP like it’s some weird tech pilgrimage Applications lifted and shifted with zero refactoring Hybrid architectures that “just sort of happened” Look, the cloud’s not the problem. I like cloud and I believe it is here to stay. But designing 100% for the cloud without actually understanding your why? That’s Conway’s Law, just with bigger invoices. Even worse? Bouncing between cloud providers because someone read a Forrester report and got nervous about lock-in. That’s not strategy—that’s cloud-induced panic. The Two-Vendor Lie We Keep Telling Ourselves Ah yes, the old two-vendor strategy. Meant to be safe. Designed to reduce dependency. What it really does? Doubles your complexity and halves your team’s sanity. Two vendors = two playbooks, two consoles, two support teams blaming each other It’s not more resilient—it’s just more confusing Gartner even calls it out: more vendors = more risk, not less If you think managing multiple tools with overlapping functions is safer than consolidation, congrats—you’ve just invented the world’s most expensive “Oops” button. Manual ≠ Secure. It Just Feels That Way Let’s talk about the weird rituals we still do in the name of security: Manually copying data to “safe zones” Turning off network access like it’s a security blanket Spinning up siloed sandboxes to avoid risk It’s not protection. It’s procrastination. Manual controls introduce human error, waste time, and don’t scale. If your “strategy” depends on someone remembering to toggle a firewall rule every Thursday, you're not secure—you’re just lucky. And outsourcing that chaos to a vendor doesn’t make it better. Handing over management to a provider that’s Frankensteined a bunch of loosely integrated tech with bailing wire and hope isn’t a strategy—it’s just renting someone else’s mess. If there’s no real roadmap, no cohesion, no architectural vision—it’s not a partnership. It’s a future support ticket waiting to happen. Hybrid Cloud Needs Purpose, Not Permission Hybrid isn’t a backup plan. It’s a design decision. Too many shops end up hybrid by accident—because apps don’t refactor, budgets don’t stretch, or politics get in the way. The result is an environment that’s technically working but operationally exhausting. A good hybrid strategy is opinionated. You should know: What runs where (and why) How data moves What your north star architecture looks like If you don’t have answers to that? You’re not doing hybrid—you’re doing hope. So What Do We Do About It? We simplify. On purpose. Relentlessly. Design like a startup, not a committee. Keep the stack lean. Less is more when you have tools that actually integrate. Use Conway’s Law in reverse. Want systems that work together? Build teams that do too. Break silos before they become dependencies. Treat cloud like architecture, not an escape route. Cloud is amazing if you design for it. Otherwise, it’s just someone else’s complexity in your billing statement. Stop solving people problems with platform purchases. Most complexity isn’t technical—it’s cultural. No vendor can fix your org chart. Final Thought: Complexity Is a Tax. Stop Paying It. Every extra platform, every vendor “just in case,” every manual handoff is a tax. And it’s compounding interest on your ability to execute. If you want to move fast, secure your data, and stay sane—you’ve got to design with purpose. That means fewer tools, better alignment, and architectures that reflect how you want to operate, not how your politics force you to. You want resilience? Start with intention. But what I’m really curious about is your perspective: How are you dealing with complexity? Is hybrid working for you—or just holding you hostage? Have you successfully simplified your architecture without sacrificing flexibility? Let's make this a real convo—not another “cloud is the answer” thread. —Zane AllynHave you moved to Evergreen Subscription?
Check out this webinar recap and discover how Pure Storage Evergreen can help your organization eliminate tech debt and unlock new levels of availability, innovation, efficiency, and more! Speakers: Thomas Duff, Principal Transformation Consultant, Evergreen//One, Pure Storage Brian Ferrar, FlashStack Marketing Director, Pure Storage Watch here. If you have additional questions, drop them below👇
