Last month, VMware ran its third iteration of the Oracle Experts Event in Palo Alto, CA. This exclusive, invite-only event sponsored by VMware brings top Oracle experts in from around the world to learn about the latest and greatest around virtualization technologies. I was lucky enough to be invited as a participant to the first event and have attended the rest as an alumni (while being put to work to help with the hands-on labs).
For those of you that have never heard of the event, it's a three day intensive conference. We start around 7a in the morning and end at 6p with the day full of presentations from executives, product teams and partners. There are also a couple hours of hands-on labs during the day as well where everyone gets to play around, test out some new features and of course, try to break things.
This year's event was co-sponsored by Pure Storage, so the attendees were treated to a lot of inside information from both VMware and Pure Storage. A lot of the topics are still protected by NDA; however, with vSAN 6.6 being available now, I can at least mention the new encryption feature and cloud analytics capabilities. We also got an in-depth look at Pure Storage's new FlashBlade, which has some interesting applications for data warehouses and analytics using Oracle.
One of the big highlights was Wednesday night's outing to AT&T Park. We all got to watch the San Francisco Giants take on the rival Los Angeles Dodgers. The Giants won it in extra innings on a walk-off sac fly. I heard rumors that noted Yankee fan, Don Sullivan, was seen wearing a SF Giants hat. Personally, I don't believe it, but I see if I can find some photographic evidence.
There are a lot of new features on the roadmap for Pure Storage and the VMware on AWS offering that I really can't wait to talk about as well. Stay tuned for blog posts on those as soon as we're allowed.