This week we welcome Paul Joyce, who leads one of Pure Storage's largest Field Solution Architect (FSA) teams. Our discussion begins by exploring the philosophy behind building a team of super technical specialists and key capabilities for this specialized role. Paul highlights that in addition to deep technical expertise in areas like databases and virtualization, he seeks candidates who demonstrate passion, a willingness to be vulnerable to build their personal brand, and, most critically, empathy for customers. This empathy should be rooted in a foundation of hands-on experience, where the architects have "lived the pain" of IT operations and can truly understand the challenges faced by customers, allowing them to focus on delivering time and value back to the business.

We then move to what's top of mind for Paul, focusing on two major industry dilemmas. First is the ongoing virtualization dilemma, the continuing need for customers to re-evaluate their virtualization strategy following changes to VMware licensing. Paul emphasizes that the key challenge is not just the technology conversion (like moving to another hypervisor) but the business risks involved—including the cost of retraining entire staff on a new enterprise-ready platform and the complications of creating complex, high-risk migration pipelines between different environments. The second dilemma, around Big Iron, covers the massive shift in mission-critical storage. Paul contrasts the legacy multi-controller, spinning-disk systems of the past, built primarily for high availability, with Pure Storage’s all-flash, two-controller architecture, which he attests delivers equal or greater availability with a simpler architecture and superior performance. This simplified approach enables massive consolidation for complex database environments.

Finally, Paul shares his hot takes on database trends. He points to the growing importance of vector embedding, noting that major enterprise databases like Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server 2025 are building native vector capabilities into their platforms to bring AI/data lake functionality directly to the data. He also discusses the implications of Oracle's 23ai release, which has focused on cloud and engineered systems, prompting on-premises customers to consult with their FSA teams on their future database strategy. The episode concludes with a classic IT mess up story from Paul’s early career as a jack-of-all-trades network administrator, recounting a failed, all-weekend core switch replacement in a freezing data center.

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00:00 Intro and Welcome

01:44 Building a Specialist Team

05:53 Prior Experience in IT

09:45 Working with Rockets

15:15 Virtualization Dilemma

24:09 Enterprise Storage for Databases

37:01 Hot Takes Segment