It’s conference season again! Cisco Live was a few weeks ago and VMworld is in 2 months among many other big tech conferences this summer. I was fortunate enough to be able to attend HPE Discover 2018 this year. Once again held at the Sands Convention Center which is attached to the beautiful Venetian Hotel & Casino. Unsurprisingly, Las Vegas was ridiculously hot last week, clocking in around 100 degrees every day.
I didn’t take as many pictures as I would have liked and some of the ones I did take turned out to be blurred or had bad lighting. Either way, this post will primarily be a quick visual representation of my week at HPE Discover 2018.
$27 Tacos!?!
I’ve been to HPE Discover several times before and I’ve stayed at the Venetian those times so I knew what to expect. Even so, it’s still hard to get over the magnitude and scope of things in Vegas. Everything is so opulent and over the top. Speaking of which I went to lunch the first day there and had 3 tacos that were $27! Granted they were Lobster and Shrimp tacos but they were snack size. Really tasty but OMG $27 for tacos! Anyway…
My company sent down a sizable contingent including many of our technical and sales teams and even some of our senior leadership. Many of the technical team were able to get some training and testing out of the way prior to the show as well. This time I didn’t have any pressing certs that needed done so it was a bit more low-key for me this year. I tend to be in the position to entertain customers as well at these types of events but this time I was off the hook which was a surprise. This allowed me to take in several sessions and roam the show floor a lot more than I expected.
On to the pictures!
This was my first session of the show on Monday.
This sign/screen lit up and looked cool.
The show floor with the HPE products and services booths.
The other side with lots of focus around IOT, PointNext and Greenlake.
Aruba sponsored Le Mans car.
I was super impressed by the Lego’s here, all custom builds.
The Lego’s were used to demonstrate the components of an infrastructure from Core to Cloud to Edge.
Another good session talking about Edge computing. They brought up a customer from a large college with over 600 buildings, 60,000 endpoints and 13,000 Aruba APs being managed by 2 guys. Pretty impressive.
They talked about Composable infrastructure and using AI in your datacenter.
The General Session was packed.
Antonio Neri was engaging.
HPE Spaceman! Behind him they demonstrated a capsule with compute technology designed to go to space. Very cool.
The canals at the Venetian.
One Republic played the celebration.
They were pretty good, I was actually surprised.
Conclusion
All in all it was a good week. I ate good food, attended pretty decent sessions and networked with peers. I also met Calvin Zito (@HPEStorageGuy) which was cool. Our technical team got to bond a bit at multiple lunches and dinners. I got to spend time with several of our partners including a dinner where I had one of the best steaks I’ve ever eaten. Stay tuned I got tons of content coming out soon and I’m going to VMworld in a few months. Thanks for reading!