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SSUG at CIUK, Manchester 2021

December 2021 saw the return of an in person user group event as part of the annual CIUK conference in Manchester. Whilst it wasn’t the busiest SSUG we’ve run, it was great to see colleagues back and talking about Scale. The event was of course held in-line with government guidelines and all attendees were asked to wear masks throughout CIUK – and for the most part, people did do this!

The sessions kicked off with Indulis Bernsteins (IBM), an SSUG regular speaker, presenting on what’s new in 5.1.3. Whilst we’ve run a few “What’s new” sessions digitally, actually being in the room and having people be able to ask questions directly was a great return. (Personally, I’ve talked and presented at a few digital/online events over the past year or two, and the lack of any kind of response from the audience is what I’ve found most difficult, so it was great to actually see people respond in person!)

Steve Hindmarsh, Francis Crick Institute then presented an update on Scale at the Crick, as well as talking about the older systems, Steve also gave us a little sneak peak at the new storage going in in 2022.

Daniel Kidger followed on, Daniel is also a familiar speaker at SSUG, but now is at HPE. Since moving there, he’s been pulled in to working with the ECE storage systems now shipped by HPE and gave an update on the licensing model, servers as well as some detail on scaling and performance of the systems. … I think this is the first production system ECE talk we’ve had so far at SSUG!

Finally, Indulis returned to the stage giving an update on Spectrum Discover and use cases with Spectrum Scale.

I’d like to extend a personal thanks to all the speakers at CIUK for agreeing to even speak in person, as well as to all the attendees who made it and joined us for the event. Actually, not just for the CIUK21 event, but over the past few years – due to a change in role, I’m standing back from running the user group. We even got a volunteer at CIUK to agree taking on running events in the UK! A big shout out of thanks should go to Ulf Troppens, from IBM who has worked with the user group over the past few years, finding speakers and topics that fit the user group agenda! The past two years has been difficult with no in-person events, so actually getting to do one as my last running the group was a great opportunity… I’m sure I’ll still see many of the SSUG colleagues in the future, I’ve met some great people in my time running the group and that has supported some interesting projects as well as giving some fantastic conversations. I’m sure the user group will continue to thrive, and with restrictions on events changing, maybe we’ll see some more in-person opportunities and get to meet in person again!

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Introducing SSUG::Digital

We’ve gone digital for a series of Spectrum Scale user group talks! As we’ve had to cancel our in-person events, we’ve been working out how we can do digital content in a way that works for the user group. We’ll be running a series of digital webinars along the lines of the talks we’d normally have at SSUG events hosted by the Spectrum Scale user group people.

During the series we’ll be pulling in the types of talks we’d have at our events and we’re sure you’ll see a number of familiar names and faces in our speaker line-up – as well as some new faces too! We’ve been working hard with IBM to work out the format and content of the events and whilst it might take a few goes to get the format right, we’re hopeful it will work out well.

Each of the events will be hosted by a member of the SSUG committee and we’ll have digital Q&A live during the event. We plan to post the videos on our Youtube channel and post the questions and answers on the user group website along with the slide decks. Anything we can’t answer during the talk, we’ll take away and try and get a response from afterwards!

Anyone can join the SSUG::Digital series using the links on each event page. We know it won’t be the same as the in-person events, but we hope you’ll join in and participate in the on-line series. We hope to run a talk every couple of weeks, but the schedule will be driven a little by how well people engage and speaker availability.

You can find details of all our Expert Talks on the SSUG website.

Due to the tooling we’re using, only the presenter and Q&A panel hosts will be able to speak, but we you can ask questions in the live Q&A chat.

We appreciate as a global group this timing doesn’t work for everyone, but as a lot of the speakers are based in the US and Europe…! And we will be posting the videos of the talks shortly after each session.