No matter how much changes in life and in IT, two things stay the same: 1. Data continues to grow, and 2. Backup remains a problem. Last year when ESG polled storage decision makers on their data storage challenges, the rapid rate of data growth and backup/protection were two of the top three most commonly identified storage challenges.[1] They were also two of the top three storage challenges in ESG’s 2017 storage research, and in 2015, 2012, 2008, and… well, you get the idea.
Infrastructure, Cloud & DevOps
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COVID-19 introduced the business world to a new and previously unforeseen risk factor, in-person face-to-face interactions. For knowledge workers, the result was a mass exodus out of corporate offices and into their homes, now dependent on remote work. For the IT organizations tasked with supporting their businesses and those knowledge workers, COVID-19 reaffirmed the importance of digital transformation, now as a risk mitigation tool, emphasizing the continued importance of streamlining operations, while accelerating cloud usage to shift more of the risk burden to third-party providers.
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This year, Pure Storage’s Accelerate Event went digital and the experience was impressive. While as an industry the transition from in-person to virtual events has deliver mixed results (so much so, I wrote a blog about it), Pure Accelerate 2020 was brief, to the point, and managed to simultaneously inform and entertain. If you don’t believe me, you can still check out much of the content still on Pure’s site.
And in the spirit of digital events, I collaborated with my colleague, Christophe Bertrand, to pull together a brief video on our impressions of the event and the announcements. Prior to COVID-19, my colleagues at ESG and I would often create a “man on the street” video at the event. This year, it’s more of an “analyst from the home office” video. Hope you enjoy.
Some highlights from Pure Accelerate 2020:
Pure Storage CEO Charlie Giancarlo presented Pure’s vision to deliver a modern data experience focusing on three pillars:
- Secure the foundation and focus on flexibility – As businesses and IT organizations face uncertainty, leveraging technologies that offer security and flexibility can empower organizations to more quickly and easily adapt to change.
- Automate everything – Focus on technologies that maximize the value of human capital, a business’ most valuable asset.
- Status quo no more – COVID-19 can serve as a catalyst to create positive change within your organization.
As for the product announcements:
- Pure Storage announced it is offering its Pure-as-a-Service for free for 3 months when you sign up for a 1-year contract.
- Purity 6.0 for FlashArray, which introduces //FA Files which adds file storage, NFS, and SMB support to FlashArray to provide unified storage and increase the benefits to workload consolidation.
- Purity ActiveDR offers continuous replication capability, helping to minimize recovery times and simplify protection with single command failover and non-disruptive disaster recovery testing.
- With the Evergreen Storage subscription model, both //FA Files and ActiveDR are available via an upgrade and require no additional licenses and no added support costs.
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This week, Dell Technologies announced the release of its new PowerScale storage platform for unstructured (file and object) data. Despite the new name, PowerScale leverages the same OneFS technology that was the backbone of the Isilon brand for so many years.Why isn’t it just called Isilon? Multiple reasons, Dell looks to be consolidating the naming for its infrastructure portfolio all under “Power” brands, such as PowerMax, PowerStore, PowerOne, and now PowerScale. Also, there is a lot more in this launch than just a new appliance.
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Software-defined storage promised freedom from hardware lock-in. It has delivered, in part, on that promise. However, procuring enterprise storage technology as software separate from hardware creates new complexities. When IT organizations are aiming to add infrastructure agility and flexibility, the architecture becomes more important than the delivery model. Solutions featuring a software-defined architecture will provide the greatest value, whether they are deployed and delivered as software, as an array, as hyperconverged infrastructure, or as something else.
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The COVID-19 pandemic has severely hindered our ability, whether as analysts or as IT vendors, to engage with our peers, partners, and customers. And few places represent this shift in the rules of customer engagement more than the current hiatus of large, in-person customer and partner events.
The big events are gone–so too are the spectacle of the keynotes, the famous speakers, the meet and greets, the live demos, and the tchotchkes. Those poor, poor tchotchkes. Will no one think of the tchotchkes?
Business, though, like life, finds a way. And that way is in the form of online digital events, which have so far produced mixed results, though often better than expected given the circumstances. After attending a few of these events, I pulled together a few thoughts, critiques, and recommendations from my peers here at ESG, as well as a few of my own, on what works, as well as less-effective features for digital events thus far. It all comes down to two simple rules:
1. Entertain and Engage as well as Inform
The experience of a massive, in-person event produces a certain level of grandeur. The shift to a digital format loses much of that. When building content, assume that it must be significantly more exciting and engaging than it would have needed to be for in-person presentation. Some components of presentations that increase viewer engagement include:
- Fewer, more powerful messages. Every product person wants their chance to shine, but focus on the big-ticket items: the major, transformational advances. It’s better to save the incremental updates for another day.
- Zero buffering (or viewers will change tabs). If a technology firm’s keynote buffers, viewers will assume the firm doesn’t have the best or latest technology.
- Shorter more, engaging content. Attention is easier to hold in person. Digital content must be clear and concise—less is more. But make it easy for viewers who want to learn more to access additional short content.
- More conversations, fewer scripts. In a similar fashion, conversations draw greater interest. Viewers have short attention spans, which get shorter when the host is reading from a script.
- Exceptional quality for prerecorded events. Leverage graphics, dynamic content, and other elements that entertain while getting the point across.
2. Assume No One Is Entertained or Engaged
Building engaging content is important, but remember that the environment has changed. Audiences are likely trying to work from home while juggling their personal lives in the process. For example, you may be tuning out the noise of other people in your household while reading this blog. Chances are good that viewers are multitasking, too, so presenters must:
- Make content easy to identify and find. Assume that everyone will need to watch a presentation more than once to understand the topic and make it easy for them to come back and find what they want when interruptions occur.
- Include multi-type, snackable content. Don’t make the audience watch an hour-long keynote just to find the five-minute demo for the new technology they want to see. Divide content into specific topics with easily watchable and rewatchable pieces.
- Make materials sharable. Digital content can increase the size of the potential audience, so help attendees share content with their peers.
- Work toward persona-based content. CIOs, security professionals, IT admins, and developers all have different questions. Help them find specific answers.
- Create “rolling thunder.” Participants likely didn’t get the full message the first time, or the second; remind them, and follow up with added content, experiences, feedback, and commentary on an ongoing basis after the event.
Bottom line is that digital engagement is different, but that does not mean it has to be less effective. Remember you will not have your audience’s undivided attention, so you must do more to grab that attention, hold on to it, and then remind them when that attention becomes lost.
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Yesterday, NetApp announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Spot. While acquisitions are difficult to evaluate since the hard work really doesn’t begin until after the integration work is complete, I am finding it difficult to contain my excitement.
Spot is one of the more interesting young innovators in IT and its technology addresses a massive need in the industry. The firm has several different offerings but, in essence, Spot’s technology is about enabling its customers to achieve an application-driven infrastructure, where the technology provides tools that understand workload patterns, then provide visibility into those patterns, enabling more efficient use of infrastructure and automation. Spot understands how your applications leverage infrastructure including public cloud infrastructure, so you don’t have to.
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Pandemic? What pandemic? Last week, Pure Storage announced their first quarter fiscal 2020 financial results boasting a 12% revenue increase over last year. This revenue jump offered one of the few bright spots in a week that saw a flurry of less than positive financial news about multiple IT technology providers. Pure’s results also offer a reminder that business must go on even when a pandemic limits how and where businesses can operate. -
Last week, I was able to attend IBM’s virtual Think 2020 event. And though I still prefer the in-person versions of these events, I can say the announcements did not disappoint.
Whether it was by design or due to the pandemic, IBM focused its new technology introductions down to a few larger, broader-reaching technology solutions. A couple of which have the potential to be game-changing.
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In my recent article at SearchStorage, I took a look the hybrid cloud solutions offered by several of the major public cloud providers, Google Anthos, AWS Outposts, and Azure Stack, and their potential to help solve the modern challenges of hybrid cloud environments.
IT has a complexity problem, as nearly two thirds (64%) of IT decision makers recently surveyed by ESG indicated IT is more complex now compared with just two years ago. And for those that identify IT as more complex, more than a quarter (26%) of them identify the need to leverage both on-premises data centers and off-premises cloud providers as a driver of that increased complexity.
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The much-anticipated Dell EMC PowerStore was announced yesterday, the heir apparent to both the Dell EMC Unity and the SC technology portfolios.
At first glance, PowerStore delivers on all the expectations nearly anyone might have for a next generation mid-range storage array. You name it, it has it, including end-to-end NVMe, support for block and file storage, ability to scale up and/or out, a host of enterprise storage features, and a 4:1 data reduction ratio guarantee.
HPE’s Discover 2020 virtual event continued this week, with a day focused on storage. On the whole, HPE’s virtual Discover experience has been impressive, entertaining, and well managed. Check it out, the 
This week, Dell Technologies announced the release of its new 
Yesterday, NetApp 
Pandemic? What pandemic? Last week, Pure Storage 
Last week, I was able to attend IBM’s virtual Think 2020 event. And though I still prefer the in-person versions of these events, I can say the announcements did not disappoint.
In my recent article at 
The much-anticipated Dell EMC PowerStore was