New Orleans Louisiana it that you covering dot next conference 2018 brought to you by Nutanix welcome back to the cubes coverage here of Nutanix next 2018 here in New Orleans Louisiana the brass bands are going talking to lots of customers been a great event so far and for Keith Townsend and I'm Stu minimun we always love to be able to talk to customers each one of them has a different story different analysis different challenges they're facing happened to welcome Alex Walker who's the senior vice president of IT at IBC Bank out of Texas thanks so much for joining us thank you alright so you've actually been going to all the shows just like I have at this Keys first one who's been getting getting the inaugural visit here but first of all tell us about yourself a little bit of background what you run at the bank and just give us quick sketch of the bank oh let's start with the bank you know we're in our 51st year we are based in Laredo Texas and it's a community bank mostly and commercial right you know where we are 19th according to Forbes magazine best banks in the country so we went up from 46 to 19 this year Congrats and so great accomplishments for the bank itself it's a great operation we're in 88 cities in the in Texas and Oklahoma and about 13 billion in assets great and what's under your purview as the SPID okay so you an all IT for the bank I'm not this not the development side of it you know without the operations infrastructure yes okay 51 year old company finance going through a lot of changes before we get in to the tech just give us one or two some of those the stresses and strains that you're feeling is business well regulation is one right over the last several years the increasing regulation has caused a tremendous growth in our auditing Keith Kountz rates at Department and a lot of cost to the bank I started about three and a half years ago and the bank was looking at how do we prepare for a change right potentially hoping for some change in them in the regulatory climate and so forth but we needed to prepare for that and prepare for growth so we we need to take a look at our infrastructure of everything across the board yeah maybe could organizationally where does that pension for change come from what kind of air cover do you get from from News exercise what's of the staff underneath you know how do they take change well initially there was a lot of reluctance right people were in the status quo they're comfortable with what they had not necessarily happy with it but taking on change is it's difficult right so we looked at operational costs some of the basic things we had two data centers at the time literally a hundred and fifty yards apart from each other so we said we can do we can do more right the bank's motto is we do more and so we said how do we do more for the bank for their customers improve the quality of the services the uptime and so and and reduce its cost so it's your bank so change in a bank a lot of times means going from one store to reef vendor to another storage or a vendor and that's a big deal big set of conversations you know your your your you know it we are sitting at the 19th best bank and then the fourteenth you don't get there by turning over the table part called the table you your get you get there by being steady what made you guys actually consider something as revolutionary as HCI when it came to change well when we looked at the infrastructure that we had and you know it goes back to simon Sinek start with quiet right why are we doing this I asked I asked the my department when I first started who are our competitors and they gave us the names of all the local banks and so forth and the usual suspects the large banks and I said no they're not that's the bank's customers our competitors are AWS Rackspace Microsoft is your Google Cloud it's the these are the hosting companies we host applications for our customers we're shared services for our bank once we understand who we are then we have to take a different approach because now if we're competing with them it's no wonder that the bank is starting to branch out and do their own thing right some unit I'm getting contracts with the cloud providers or with other service providers because we're too far behind we're not cost-effective we're not competitive so it doesn't mean that we want to build massive data centers everywhere but we need to have the same level of services that they provide so from a validation perspective it you start to look at the cost of hyper-converged in general I'm sorry how long you guys have been a new tennis customer three years okay so from a cost perspective as you start to look at hyper-converged how did you even begin to compare it to your existing environment well I looked I looked at the the studies that are out there particular there was an IDC study done member on 2015 that said that customers of like size all different types of customers we're getting these these benefits I said wow if I could get those that'd be really cool right so I went to the board I went to my boss the CIO and I said I think we could get this this would be a really good but then again people said we never heard of mechanics what is this our applications aren't certified with Nutanix you know so let's talk about procurements and I said well let's just do a PLC and that's bringing this in and and we'll run VMware on it which is what we were certified at the time our applications and I said let's let's look at this infrastructure this we brought in the PLC but what we did is we took Nutanix and had them talk directly to my accounting the bank's accounting department right we all know we all work for accountants eventually and so we said if we can get them to agree that if we can get these then they're gonna be behind us from the are white and TCO models right so we went through and said what are we paying for this what are we paying for that what's the hyung going rates for this let's get some samples of if we ordered this and replace it we had eleven storage frames from seven different vendors or we couldn't move data around from one storage frame to another because we had over time acquired a lot of different frames and like most places never retired them right and so all that layer of complexity what we did is we said this on this PLC let's test this out okay cut to the chase we we got the we got the numbers we were then three or two 5% of everything that came out in that study and so we bought that that that equipment immediately placed our first order which was 12 notes still want to keep it constrained so one of food in the water but I said this is a technology I'm betting on five years we'll write it off in five years we can get rid of it and move on to the next thing what happened was we were getting so such good wins we actually completed in our five-year model we completed that in roughly around two years because the acceleration based upon the benefits that we got some of the requirements that we had for change within the organization replace all equipment and so forth we were able to to accelerate that not only that we just finished upgrading our D our site which was not part of that five-year plan and just completed that and so within three years we've now are our 97% on Nutanix and we just took delivery of 24 of the Robo nodes which we're going to put out in our branch operations that'll leave us with five servers that are not Nutanix other than our for AIX system yeah Alex can you tell us what what were the key metrics that you were looking at to measure success and you did some TCO studies you actually presented here at the conference what do you recommend to your peers as to how they should be able to evaluate rolling out something like this well for one and a big one was licensing right it's far more efficient what we got for example we got we were able to take our Fibre Channel switches running about quarter of a million plus each and and get rid of those would we when we look at it the bandwidth that that's taken on the servers it's writing data to storage going through this storage controller going into this the sand and coming back that delay was substantial so much so that when we moved all of our databases into Nutanix and eliminated that infrastructure we're running 66% faster than we did on current technology on a conventional architecture did what was the business response on this did it change anything in the business what did the users say well when they'd users Jobs ran far faster than they did before when we went back and said I don't need as many Microsoft sequel licenses as they did before for consolidation fewer cores the tremendous benefits our sequel developed our sequel management team for example it takes far less time to stand up servers do migrations things like that so what's the Delta between the prediction debrief their predicted ROI and the realized our ROI you guys realize your savings much quicker wolves worldwide little surprises well the surprises were we were conservative we didn't include any soft costs those are difficult to we missed it me Steve Kaplan are all are all I got a TCO guy for Nutanix go back and forth on the soft cost don't show weak soft cost show me where I can give the money back to my accountants who we all have to report to correct right yeah so what we found is the fact that we were conservative we were getting much better benefits so again when we look at the servers we bought too many cores right so now I this good problem now I can migrate more systems I did anticipate based upon that spin so the time the technology to the financial benefits the reduction and latency allows you to stop spending money on more cores that you didn't need less latency equals better performance better performance tools more dense newness Lourdes units means less money spent so we we actually shut down one of the data centers and migrated into a single data center and it's we're running somewhere around up third a little bit more than a third of that data center so the electrical expend is down in aggregate roughly around 40% so that's real money okay you mentioned that you're also using Nutanix for disaster recovery tell us what led to that that's a newer solution from Nutanix how that experience go we're using the note annex replication for that and when we our legacy was that some of them were taped and some of it was you know migrating data you know a typical older dr type of situation we're in our testing now and that's a little bit complex because we have to protect that dr site from production but we're mirroring the the systems exactly as they are in production so when you spin it up its life right so we have to build a barrier between those systems so if we take that even then taking that into account we can get it up in hours rather than and when we say hours like a couple of hours rather than the 22 12 to 24 hours that we were before and it's 10 systems not 4 systems so roughly about a hundred servers or so minimally all right Alex look forward a little bit tell us what's on your roadmap what kind of things you're doing and if there's intersections with titanic's there we're looking at VDI for example something that we now that we've reengineering our network as well that we're looking at doing that for branch operations and security right but looking forward into AI and and blockchain and which is going to be very disruptive for financial institutions okay you mentioned blockchain so definitely need to get get your take as to what can you share either personally or from the Bakke standpoint cryptocurrency of course will I and I do pay taxes on it but realistically I'm mining with you know for video carts it's it's not it's really understand from as a chief technologist I'm I really need to understand these things you don't make appendix fluster off on the side I did ask her I could have the old data center and the when we're doing I'm doing that really effectively to better understand that but I think what we're looking at it blockchain is tremendous opportunities for many improvements in security and loss prevention and other types of things within the financial side I'm seeing a lot of big financial institutions that are getting filing for patents on block chains and they're they're bringing it up in their ten cases potentially very disruptive and very expensive and some of them are saying specifically cryptocurrency and blockchain and some of them are saying new you know new competition in the market right so we take that to kind of mean that they're they're thinking about the same things we are so keep a eye on to the future especially when it comes to something like blockchain this relatively inefficient at processing transactions how does that impact your data center strategy you guys just went down from you know huge space reduced electrical power by 40% any considerations around kind of the blood blockchain at a commercial level of use within the bank and how it might impact your strategy we're a conservative bank so would we we're having discussions about what what does that mean right what it were do we think that's might come in and it's very early for us right we've been busy you know the datacenter moves and other types of things too so we're starting to look at that and have some a few conversations about what do we think it it is we're talking to some of our our business partners and say how might we cooperate with you guys to do excuse me to use some of this blockchain technology it's a it's a different way of doing it you know when in the past we might use relational databases like sequel server or something to do something some of this work where distributed ledger might be a far easier better way to do that so it's another tool I like to say that you know video didn't kill the radiostar right yeah there's more type of radio out there than there ever was so this is another tool that we have to look and say well how does this how do we utilize this what with the right technology for the right job and we're being very cautious about that all right well Alex Walker really appreciate you sharing all the updates on IBC Bank pleasure to catch up with you and look forward to seeing you more than ten echoes in the future for Keith Townsend Thomas do minimun more coverage here at Nutanix duck necks New Orleans thanks for watching the queue [Music]