(upbeat music) >> Welcome back. We're here at Supercomputing 22 in Dallas. My name's Paul Gill, I'm your host. With me, Dave Nicholson, my co-host. And one thing that struck me about this conference arriving here, was the number of universities that are exhibiting here. I mean, big, big exhibits from universities. Never seen that at a conference before. And one of those universities is Indiana University. Our two guests, Dave Jent, who's the AVP of Networks at Indiana University, Aaron Neal, Deputy CIO at Indiana University. Welcome, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you. >> I've always thought that the CIO job at a university has got to be the toughest CIO job there is, because you're managing this sprawling network, people are doing all kinds of different things on it. You've got to secure it. You've got to make it performant. And it just seems to be a big challenge. Talk about the network at Indiana University and what you have done particularly since the pandemic, how that has affected the architecture of your network. And what you do to maintain the levels of performance and security that you need. >> On the network side one of the things we've done is, kept in close contact with what the incoming students are looking for. It's a different environment than it was then 10 years ago when a student would come, maybe they had a phone, maybe they had one laptop. Today they're coming with multiple phones, multiple laptops, gaming devices. And the expectation that they have to come on a campus and plug all that stuff in causes lots of problems for us, in managing just the security aspect of it, the capacity, the IP space required to manage six, seven devices per student when you have 35,000 students on campus, has always been a challenge. And keeping ahead of that knowing what students are going to come in with, has been interesting. During the pandemic the campus was closed for a bit of time. What we found was our biggest challenge was keeping up with the number of people who wanted to VPN to campus. We had to buy additional VPN licenses so they could do their work, authenticate to the network. We doubled, maybe even tripled our our VPN license count. And that has settled down now that we're back on campus. But again, they came back with a vengeance. More gaming devices, more things to be connected, and into an environment that was a couple years old, that we hadn't done much with. We had gone through a pretty good size network deployment of new hardware to try to get ready for them. And it's worked well, but it's always challenging to keep up with students. >> Aaron, I want to ask you about security because that really is one of your key areas of focus. And you're collaborating with counties, local municipalities, as well as other educational institutions. How's your security strategy evolving in light of some of the vulnerabilities of VPNs that became obvious during the pandemic, and this kind of perfusion of new devices that that Dave was talking about? >> Yeah, so one of the things that we we did several years ago was establish what we call OmniSOC, which is a shared security operations center in collaboration with other institutions as well as research centers across the United States and in Indiana. And really what that is, is we took the lessons that we've learned and the capabilities that we've had within the institution and looked to partner with those key institutions to bring that data in-house, utilize our staff such that we can look for security threats and share that information across the the other institutions so that we can give each of those areas a heads up and work with those institutions to address any kind of vulnerabilities that might be out there. One of the other things that you mentioned is, we're partnering with Purdue in the Indiana Office of Technology on a grant to actually work with municipalities, county governments, to really assess their posture as it relates to security in those areas. It's a great opportunity for us to work together as institutions as well as work with the state in general to increase our posture as it relates to security. >> Dave, what brings IU to Supercomputing 2022? >> We've been here for a long time. And I think one of the things that we're always interested in is, what's next? What's new? There's so many, there's network vendors, software vendors, hardware vendors, high performance computing suppliers. What is out there that we're interested in? IU runs a large Cray system in Indiana called Big Red 200. And with any system you procure it, you get it running, you operate it, and your next goal is to upgrade it. And what's out there that we might be interested? That I think why we come to IU. We also like to showcase what we do at IU. If you come by the booth you'll see the OmniSOC, there's some video on that. The GlobalNOC, which I manage, which supports a lot of the RNE institutions in the country. We talk about that. Being able to have a place for people to come and see us. If you stand by the booth long enough people come and find you, and want to talk about a project they have, or a collaboration they'd like to partner with. We had a guy come by a while ago wanting a job. Those are all good things having a big booth can do for you. >> Well, so on that subject, in each of your areas of expertise and your purview are you kind of interleaved with the academic side of things on campus? Do you include students? I mean, I would think it would be a great source of cheap labor for you at least. Or is there kind of a wall between what you guys are responsible for and what students? >> Absolutely we try to support faculty and students as much as we can. And just to go back a little bit on the OmniSOC discussion. One of the things that we provide is internships for each of the universities that we work with. They have to sponsor at least three students every year and make that financial commitment. We bring them on site for three weeks. They learn us alongside the other analysts, information security analysts and work in a real world environment and gain those skills to be able to go back to their institutions and do an additional work there. So it's a great program for us to work with students. I think the other thing that we do is we provide obviously the infrastructure that enable our faculty members to do the research that they need to do. Whether that's through Big Red 200, our Supercomputer or just kind of the everyday infrastructure that allows them to do what they need to do. We have an environment on premise called our Intelligent Infrastructure, that we provide managed access to hardware and storage resources in a way that we know it's secure and they can utilize that environment to do virtually anything that they need in a server environment. >> Dave, I want to get back to the GigaPOP, which you mentioned earlier you're the managing director of the Indiana GigaPOP. What exactly is it? >> Well, the GigaPOP and there are a number of GigaPOP around the country. It was really the aggregation facility for Indiana and all of the universities in Indiana to connect to outside resources. GigaPOP has connections to internet too, the commodity internet, Esnet, the Big Ten or the BTAA a network in Chicago. It's a way for all universities in Indiana to connect to a single source to allow them to connect nationally to research organizations. >> And what are the benefits of having this collaboration of university. >> If you could think of a researcher at Indiana wants to do something with a researcher in Wisconsin, they both connect to their research networks in Wisconsin and Indiana, and they have essentially direct connection. There's no commodity internet, there's no throttling of of capacity. Both networks and the interconnects because we use internet too, are essentially UNT throttled access for the researchers to do anything they need to do. It's secure, it's fast, easy to use, in fact, so easy they don't even know that they're using it. It just we manage the networks and organize the networks in a way configure them that's the path of least resistance and that's the path traffic will take. And that's nationally. There are lots of these that are interconnected in various ways. I do want to get back to the labor point, just for a moment. (laughs) Because... >> You're here to claim you're not violating any labor laws. Is that what you're going to be? >> I'm here to hopefully hire, get more people to be interested to coming to IU. >> Stop by the booth. >> It's a great place to work. >> Exactly. >> We hire lots of interns and in the network space hiring really experienced network engineers, really hard to do, hard to attract people. And these days when you can work from anywhere, you don't have to be any place to work for anybody. We try to attract as many students as we can. And really we're exposing 'em to an environment that exists in very few places. Tens of thousands of wireless access points, big fast networks, interconnections and national international networks. We support the Noah network which supports satellite systems and secure traffic. It really is a very unique experience and you can come to IU, spend lots of years there and never see the same thing twice. We think we have an environment that's really a good way for people to come out of college, graduate school, work for some number of years and hopefully stay at IU, but if not, leave and get a good job and talk well about IU. In fact, the wireless network today here at SC was installed and is managed by a person who manages our campus network wireless, James Dickerson. That's the kind of opportunity we can provide people at IU. >> Aaron, I'd like to ask, you hear a lot about everything moving to the cloud these days, but in the HPC world I don't think that move is happening as quickly as it is in some areas. In fact, there's a good argument some workloads should never move to the cloud. You're having to balance these decisions. Where are you on the thinking of what belongs in the data center and what belongs in the cloud? >> I think our approach has really been specific to what the needs are. As an institution, we've not pushed all our chips in on the cloud, whether it be for high performance computing or otherwise. It's really looking at what the specific need is and addressing it with the proper solution. We made an investment several years ago in a data center internally, and we're leveraging that through the intelligent infrastructure that I spoke about. But really it's addressing what the specific need is and finding the specific solution, rather than going all in in one direction or another. I dunno if Jet Stream is something that you would like to bring up as well. >> By having our own data center and having our own facilities we're able to compete for NSF grants and work on projects that provide shared resources for the research community. Just dream is a project that does that. Without a data center and without the ability to work on large projects, we don't have any of that. If you don't have that then you're dependent on someone else. We like to say that, what we are proud of is the people come to IU and ask us if they can partner on our projects. Without a data center and those resources we are the ones who have to go out and say can we partner on your project? We'd like to be the leaders of that in that space. >> I wanted to kind of double click on something you mentioned. Couple of things. Historically IU has been I'm sure closely associated with Chicago. You think of what are students thinking of doing when they graduate? Maybe they're going to go home, but the sort of center of gravity it's like Chicago. You mentioned talking about, especially post pandemic, the idea that you can live anywhere. Not everybody wants to live in Manhattan or Santa Clara. And of course, technology over decades has given us the ability to do things remotely and IU is plugged into the globe, doesn't matter where you are. But have you seen either during or post pandemic 'cause we're really in the early stages of this. Are you seeing that? Are you seeing people say, Hey, thinking about their family, where do I want to live? Where do I want to raise my family? I'm in academia and no, I don't want to live in Manhattan. Hey, we can go to IU and we're plugged into the globe. And then students in California we see this, there's some schools on the central coast where people loved living there when they were in college but there was no economic opportunity there. Are you seeing a shift, are basically houses in Bloomington becoming unaffordable because people are saying, you know what, I'm going to stay here. What does that look like? >> I mean, for our group there are a lot of people who do work from home, have chosen to stay in Bloomington. We have had some people who for various reasons want to leave. We want to retain them, so we allow them to work remotely. And that has turned into a tool for recruiting. The kid that graduates from Caltech. Doesn't want to stay in Caltech in California, we have an opportunity now he can move to wherever between here and there and we can hire him do work. We love to have people come to Indiana. We think it is a unique experience, Bloomington, Indianapolis are great places. But I think the reality is, we're not going to get everybody to come live, be a Hoosier, how do we get them to come and work at IU? In some ways disappointing when we don't have buildings full of people, but 40 paying Zoom or teams window, not kind the same thing. But I think this is what we're going to have to figure out, how do we make this kind of environment work. >> Last question here, give you a chance to put in a plug for Indiana University. For those those data scientists those researchers who may be open to working somewhere else, why would they come to Indiana University? What's different about what you do from what every other academic institution does, Aaron? >> Yeah, I think a lot of what we just talked about today in terms of from a network's perspective, that were plugged in globally. I think if you look beyond the networks I think there are tremendous opportunities for folks to come to Bloomington and experience some bleeding edge technology and to work with some very talented people. I've been amazed, I've been at IU for 20 years and as I look at our peers across higher ed, well, I don't want to say they're not doing as well I do want brag at how well we're doing in terms of organizationally addressing things like security in a centralized way that really puts us in a better position. We're just doing a lot of things that I think some of our peers are catching up to and have been catching up to over the last 10, 12 years. >> And I think to sure scale of IU goes unnoticed at times. IU has the largest medical school in the country. One of the largest nursing schools in the country. And people just kind of overlook some of that. Maybe we need to do a better job of talking about it. But for those who are aware there are a lot of opportunities in life sciences, healthcare, the social sciences. IU has the largest logistics program in the world. We teach more languages than anybody else in the world. The varying kinds of things you can get involved with at IU including networks, I think pretty unparalleled. >> Well, making the case for high performance computing in the Hoosier State. Aaron, Dave, thanks very much for joining you making a great case. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> We'll be back right after this short message. This is theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> live from Atlanta, Georgia. It's the two you covering. Citric Synergy. Atlanta 2019. Brought to You by Citrix >> Welcome back to the Cubes. Continuing coverage of Citrix Energy, 2019 from Atlanta, Georgia. I'm Lisa Martin. My co host for the event is Keith Townsend and Keith and I are excited to talk. Teo, one of the Citrix Innovation Award nominees, Indiana University, with a couple of folks from Indiana University joining us. Stephanie Cox, manager, a Virtual Platform Services and Mat Link, associate vice president of research Technologies Guys, thanks so much for joining Keith and me, Thank you. And congratulations on Indiana University being nominated for an innovation award. I was talking with Tim in hand there CMO yesterday, saying there was over a thousands nomination. So to even get down to being in the top three is pretty exciting stuff. Talk to us a little bit about Indiana University. Us. This is a a big, big organization. Lots of folks accessing the network through lots of devices. Matt, let's start with you. Give us that picture of what's going on there. Yes, so I >> u is about 130,000 students across seven campuses. We've got about 20,000 faculty and staff across those seven campuses. One of the things that makes us a little unique is were consolidated shop. So there are 1,200 of us and I you that support the entire university and all the campuses and anyone point in time, there could be 200,000 devices touching the network and using those services. >> That's a Big 70 talk. Talk to us about your virtual a footprint. How How big is the location? Data centers? What's the footprint? >> Well, we have two data centers. One of them is in Indianapolis, which is my home. It's one of our larger campus is calling Indiana University Purdue University affectionately, I U P y. There is a data center there, but our large danna center is at the flagship campus, which is in Bloomington, Indiana, >> and to support 100,000 plus people and to hundreds of any given the 2nd 200,000 devices. How have you designed that virtual infrastructure to enable access to students, faculty, etcetera and employees. >> So from the network perspective, we have several network master plans that have rolled, and we're in our 2nd 10 year next network master plan, and the network master plan is designed to continually upgrade the network. Both the physical network, the infrastructure and the wireless network in our last 10 year budget, for that was around $170,000,000 of investment just to support the network infrastructure. And then Stephanie rides on top of that as the virtual platform with Citrix to deliver the images anywhere on campus. Whether it's wirelessly or whether it's connected via network connection >> kill seven campuses is already a bit. If you ever look at a map, Indiana sits Christ map damp in the middle of the country. It's a big space. Right before we hit record, we were just talking about that. Drive off I 65 from Indianapolis to Chicago is just a lot of rules area, and I'm sure part of your mission is to make sure technology and education is the sensible thing. Everyone in Indiana talk to us about the challenges of getting connective ity and getting material virtual classrooms to those remote areas. >> Yeah, it's really one of the major strengths of our partnership with Citrix. They are really at the premiere Remote solution connectivity offering at Indiana University. So we built our citrix environment. Teo encompass everyone. We wanted to make sure we could have enough licenses and capacity for all of our 130,000 faculty, staff and students to use the service. Do they all show up at the same time? No, thank goodness. But we do offer it to everyone, which is I found in the education. You're in a very unique tin Indiana University. Another another thing to have consolidated I t. And then to be able to offer a service like ours to everyone and not just restricted to specific pockets of the university. With that, we've been able to them extend offering of any application or something that you might need for a class to any of our other remote location. So if you're a student who is working in or go, you know, lives in rule Indiana and you want Teo get in Indiana University degree, you can do that without having to travel to one of our campus sites or locations. We I have a very nice of online program, just a lot of other options that that we've really tried Teo offer for remote access. >> So Citrix has really enabled this. I think you call it the eye. You anywhere. Indiana University anywhere Program. Tell us about opening up this access to everyone over the time that you've been ascetics Customer, how many more people can you estimate have access now, that didn't hurt not too long ago. >> Yeah, I think initially, and Matt was probably no more before me before I Even before I even came on the scene, I believe that the original youth case was really just trying. Teo, extend what we were already doing on premise in what we call just our Indiana University lab supported areas. Right? So just your small, like the old days you would goto your college campus and you go into your computer lab with it. We just really wanted Teo the virtual Isar expand the access to just those specific types of APS and computers. And that was an early design. Since then, over the years, we've really kind of, you know, just really expanded. Really. We used the Citrix platform to redesign and distribute how we deliver the applications and the virtual desktops. So now not only do we service those students who would who would normally come onto the campus just to use your traditional computer lab. Wait do a lot, especially programs for other schools. Like we, we deliver a virtual desktop for our dentistry. Students may actually use that whole platform in the dental clinic to see real patients are third tier. Third year doctors do that way. Also replicated that same thing and do it in our speech and hearing sciences for our future audiologist. We have certain professors that have wanted to take a particular course that they're teaching and extended to different pockets all over the world. So we might host a class from Budapest or Africa somewhere else. You know, wherever that faculty and staff has three sources that they know they need to get to in their content already virtualized. We worked to make that happen all the time. >> That's a lot of what you just said is first of all, initially, maybe before Citrix being able to provide support in the computer labs for your maybe seven core campuses. Now you get your giving 130,000 plus individuals anywhere, anytime. Access that is the ex multiplier on that is massive, but you're also gone global It's not just online, it's you're able to enable professors to teach in other parts of the world where it was before. It was just people that were in Indiana, but master and and >> you're just limited by the network. So that's the only draw back. When you go to the rule areas way out, you're just limited by the network. You know, the initial program was really you really thought of as a cost saving measure way we're goingto put thin clients out. We wouldn't have to do life cycle replacements for desktop machines that were getting more expensive and more expensive, you know, 10 years ago, and now the way that we look at it is I you wants to provide services across the breath of the organization and make those services at no additional cost and open to everybody open access to everybody. The desktop, for example, is one of you know Stephanie is, is the brainchild behind the desktop, took three years of dedicated hard work to create an environment to support the visually impaired. >> Talk to us more about that because that was part of the video and that captured my intention immediately. What is 80 accessibility, technology, accessibility technology is inaccessible to get that. So I'm just, you know, hundreds thousands, and not just those that are sight and hearing. >> So one of the things then I think it's just a wonderful thing about working at a university. We're able to buy software licenses in a big quantity, large quantity, right? Because we have that kind of buying power software that I normally never would see or get access to, even in my private sector. Administer tricks engineer for a long time. But when you come to a university and then you're selling or you're getting licenses for 50 60 70 80,000 you get to see some of these products that you don't normally as a regular consumer. You'd like it, but you know you can't really afford it. So with that, when we started looking at all of the different applications that they could buy in a large quantity site licence, you know, the way we thought, Oh my goodness, let's virtualized these and make sure everybody gets access to them and the ones that were really attractive to us, where the ones for the visually impaired, sure they're in niche and They're very, very expensive, but we but let's just try it. We'll see how well they perform in a virtual environment. And with that, our Citrix infrastructure underneath they performed quite well. Plus, the apse have evolved a great deal over just the last four years. So we're really proud to offer our virtual desktop to our blind students. We had to work really hard to make sure that the speech recognition software was fast enough for them. It turns out that blind people listen to speech really, really, really, really, really fast, and so we had to make sure that we kept our platform while we're working on it to keep it sped an updated so that it's usable to them right since functional to me. But they really need it to be like, 10 times faster. I found that out after even shooting the award video and spending even more time with them, I thought, Why don't you guys tell me it was slow to you? But yeah, it's, uh, it's been an honor, really, Teo to be up for that award. But tow work with those students to learn more about their needs to learn more about the city different applications that people write for people with old disabilities. I hope we can do more in that space. >> So the young man in it and why I don't remember his name. >> Priscilla, Bela, Chris. So >> share just quickly about Chris's story. >> Yeah, and he watches the Cube. I hope he's listening because I >> think I think this whole >> kind of >> really put a little bit icing on the cake because you're taking an environment and urine empowering a student to do what they want to do versus what they are able or not able to do. So Christmas story is pretty cool of where he wants to go with his college career. >> Yeah, I won't say he's a big, you know, proponent, user of the virtual desktop, because he's just so advanced. He's like, way beyond everything We're learning from him. But he is Indiana University's believe. I'm saying this right, very first biomedical chemical engineer who is blind and fourth completely blind, Yes, wow and is quite a brilliant young man, and we were lucky to have him be r. He will test anything for me and and Mary Stores, who was featured in the video Chris Meyer. And he's also featured in the video. Gonna remember their names? I mean, it's a hole. I'm lucky to have a whole community of people that will Yeah, they know where we want to be there for them. We don't always get it right. What? We're gonna listen and keep trying to move forward. So >> But if you kind of think of even what a year or two ago not being able to give any of this virtualized desktop access to this visually impaired and how many people are now using it? >> Um, well, we open it up to everyone. We have hundreds and hundreds of users, but we know not everyone who uses it is blind. People like you can use it if you want it or not way. Don't really understand why some people prefer to use that one over there. The other But it does have some advantages. I mean, there there are different levels of sight impairment, too, as I've just been educated right. There are some people who are just at the very beginning of that journey of just losing their site. So we if if that happens to be, you know, someone that we can extend our environment to. It's probably better t use it now and get really familiar with that issue. Transition to losing your sight later in life. I've been told so >> So you ask a little bit about the scope of of the desktop, so I'll layer on a little bit of the scope of eye you anywhere. Last year, around 65,000 individual unique users over well over 1,000,000 Loggins and 8,000,000 and the average session time was around 41 minutes. That's so our instructors teach with it. Are clinicians treat people with it? We've built it in two. How's Elektronik protected health data? Er hit. The client's gonna be critical, writes the hip a standard because you can't say compliance anymore because you can't be compliant with a standard change. That wording several times way are very familiar with meeting hip. A standard we've been doing that for about 12 years now with where I came from was the high performance computing area of the university. So that's my background, and I >> so one thing we didn't get a chance to talk, uh, touch 12 100,000 devices were a citrus citrus is a Microsoft partner. Typically, when those companies think of 200,000 users, they think for profit. There's, you know, this is a niche use case for 200,000 users. Obviously, you guys have gotten some great pricing as part of being a educational environment. What I love to hear is kind of the research stories, because the ability to shrink the world, so to speak, you know, hi HPC you're giving access to specialized equipment to people who can't get their normally. You know, you don't have to be physically in front of GPU CPUC century. What other cool things have been coming out of the research side of the house because of the situation able? >> So this is cool. I mean, >> I get it. So >> So one of our group's research software solutions stole the idea from Stephanie to provide a research desktop. Barr >> imitation. Highest form of flattery, Stephanie. Absolutely. So what we've >> done is is is we always continually to try to reduce the barriers of entry and access? Uh, you know, supercomputing. Before you had to be this tall to ride this ride. Well, now we're down to here and with the hopes that will get down even farther. So what we've done is we've taken virtualized desktop, put it in front of the supercomputers, and now you can be wherever you want to be and have access to HPC. Untie you and that's all the systems. So we have four super computers and we have 40 petabytes of spinning disc ah, 160 petabytes of archival tape library. So we're we're a large shop and, you know, we couldn't have done it without looking at what Stephanie has done and and really looking in that model differently. Right? Because to use HPC before, you'd have to use a terminal and shell in and now, looking at you anywhere that gives you just the different opportunity to catch a different and more broad customer base. And I call on customers because we try to treat him as customers and and helps the diversity of what you're doing. So last year alone, our group research technologies supported a 151 different departments way were on 937 different grants, and we support over 330 different disciplines. Uh, it I you and so it's It's deep, but it's also very broad. First, larger campus we are. And as a large organization as we are, you know, we're fairly nimble. Even a 1,200 people. >> Wow! From what I've heard, it's no wonder that what you've done at Indiana University has garnered you the Innovation Award nominee. I can't imagine what is next. All that you have accomplished. Stephanie. Matt, thank you so much for joining Key to me. We wish you the best of luck and good a citric scott dot com Search Innovation Awards where you can vote for the three finalists. We wish you the very best of luck will be waiting with bated breath tomorrow to see who wins. >> So thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Keep >> our pleasure for Keith Townsend. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube live from Citrix. Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching

>> Live from Atlanta, Georgia. It's theCUBE covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019 from Atlanta, Georgia. I'm Lisa Martin, my co-host for the event is Keith Townsend and Keith and I are excited to talk to one of the Citrix Innovation Award nominees, Indiana University. We have a couple of folks from Indiana University joining us, Stephanie Cox, Manager of Virtual Platform Services and Matt Link, Associate Vice President of Research Technologies. Guys, thanks so much for joining Keith and me. >> Thank you Lisa. >> Thank you. >> And thank you Keith. >> It's an honor to be here, yeah. >> And congratulations on Indiana University being nominated for an innovation award. I was talking with Tim Minahan, their CMO yesterday saying there was over a thousand nominations, so to even get down to being in the top three is pretty exciting stuff. >> Yeah. >> Awesome. >> So talk to us a little bit about Indiana University. You guys, this is a big, big big organization lots of folks accessing the network through lots of devices. Matt, let's start with you, give us that picture of what's going on there. >> Yeah, so IU is about 130,000 students across seven campuses. We got about 20,000 faculty and staff across those seven campuses. One of the things that makes us a little unique is, we're a consolidated IT shop. So, there are 1200 of us at IU that support the entire university and all the campuses. And at any one point in time, there could be 200,000 devices touching the network and using those services. >> Big, that's big. >> Big. >> Wow, that is big. Stephanie talk, talk to us about your virtual imp, footprint and how big is the location. How many data centers? What's the footprint? >> Well we have two data centers, one of them is in Indianapolis which is my home. It's one of our larger campuses, we call it Indiana University Purdue University, affectionately IUPUI. There is a data center there but our larger data center is at the flagship campus which is in, Bloomington, Indiana. >> And, to support 100,000 plus people and, you said at any given second, 200,000 devices. How have you designed that Virtual Integral Structure to enable access to students, faculty, et cetera and employees? >> So from the network perspective we have several network master plans that have rolled and we're in our second 10 year network master plan. And, the network master plan is designed to continually upgrade the network, both the physical network, the infrastructure, and the wireless network. In our last 10 year budget for that was around $170 million of investment just to support the network infrastructure. And then, Stephanie rides on top of that as the Virtual Platform with Citrix to deliver the images anywhere on campus, whether it's wirelessly or whether it's connected via network connection. >> Yep. >> So seven campuses is already a bit. If you ever look at a map, Indiana sits right smack dab in the middle of the country. It's a big space, right before we hit record, we were just talking about that drive up I-65 from Indianapolis to Chicago is just, a lot of rural area and, I'm sure part of your mission is to make sure technology and education is accessible to everyone in Indiana. Talk to us about the challenges of getting connectivity and getting material, virtual classrooms to those remote areas. >> Yeah, that's really one of the major strengths of our partnership with Citrix. They are really the premier remote solution connectivity offering at Indiana University. So, we built our Citrix environment to encompass everyone. We wanted to make sure we could have enough licenses and capacity for all of our 130,000 faculty, staff, and students to use the service. Now do they all show up at the same time? No, thank goodness. >> Thankfully. >> But we do offer it to everyone which is, I found, in the education arena, very unique to Indiana University. Another thing to have the consolidated IT and then to be able to offer a service like ours to everyone and not just restrict it to separate pockets of the university. With that, we've been able to then extend, offering of any application or something that you might need for a class to any of our other remote locations. So, if you're a student who is working in or lives in rural Indiana and you want to get an Indiana University degree, you can do that without having to travel to one of our campus sites or locations. We have a very nice online program and just a lot of other options that we've really tried to offer for remote access. >> So Citrix has really enabled this, I think you call it the IUanyWare, Indiana University Anywhere Program. >> Yeah. >> Tell us about opening up this access to everyone over the time that you've been a Citrix customer how many more people can you guesstimate have access now that didn't not too long ago? >> Yeah, I think initially, and Matt would probably know more before me, before I even came on the scene, I believe that the original use case was really just trying to extend what we were already doing on premise in what we call just our Indiana University lab supported areas. Right, so just your small, like the old days when you would go to your college campus and you go into your computer lab, we just really wanted to virtualize, or expand, the access to just those specific types of apps and computers. And that was an early design, since then over the years we've really kind of, just really expanded. Really use the Citrix platform to redesign and distribute how we deliver the applications and the virtual desktops. So, now not only do we service those students who would normally come onto the campus just to use your traditional computer lab, we do a lot of specialty programs for other schools. Like we deliver a virtual desktop for our dentistry students, they actually use that whole platform in the dental clinic to see real patients our, third tier, third year doctors do that. We also replicated that same thing and do it in our speech and hearing sciences for our future audiologists. We have certain professors that have wanted to take the particular course that they're teaching and extend it to different pockets all over the world so we might host a class from Budapest or Africa somewhere else, wherever that faculty and staff has resources that they know they need to get to and their content already virtualized. We work to make that happen all the time. >> That's, a lot of what you just said is first of all, initially, maybe before Citrix being able to provide support in the computer labs for your maybe seven core campuses, now you're giving 130,000 plus individuals anywhere, anytime access. That is, the X multiplier on that is massive. But you're also gone global, it's not just online, you're able to enable professors to teach in other parts of the world, where it was before it was just people that were in Indiana. >> Right. >> That's massive. >> And you're just limited by the network. So that's the only drawback when you go to the rural areas way out, you're just limited by the network. The initial program was really, really thought of as a cost saving measure. We were going to put thin clients out, we wouldn't have to do life cycle replacements for desktop machines that were getting more expensive and more expensive 10 years ago, and now the way that we look at it is IU wants to provide services across the breadth of the organization, and make those services at no additional cost. And open to everybody. Open access to everybody, the AT desktop, for example is one of, Stephanie is, the brainchild behind the AT desktop. Took three years of dedicated hard work to create an environment to support the visually impaired. >> Talk to us more about that, because that was part of the video and that captured my attention immediately. What is AT? >> Accessibility. >> Technology. >> Technology. >> Accessibility Technology. >> Accessible, is it Accessible Technology? >> Accessible Technology. >> Yeah, I always get that wrong. (laughs) >> So, hundreds, thousands, and not just those that are sight and hearing. >> Right. >> Yeah, so one of the things that I think was, it's just a wonderful thing about working at a university, we're able to buy software licenses in a big quantity, large quantity right, because we have that kind of buying power. Software that I normally never would see or get access to even in my private sector, I've been a Citrix engineer for a long time, but when you come to a university and then you're selling or you're getting licenses for 50, 60, 70, 80,000, you get to see some of these products that you don't normally, as a regular consumer, (laughs) you like it but you know you can't really afford it. So, with that when we started looking at all of the different applications that they could buy in a large quantity site license way we thought oh my goodness, let's virtualize these and make sure everybody gets access to them. And the ones that were really attractive to us were the ones for the visually impaired. Sure they're a niche and they're very, very expensive but we thought let's just try it. We'll see how well they perform in a virtual environment and with our Citrix infrastructure underneath they performed quite well, plus the apps have evolved a great deal over just the last four years. So, we were really proud to offer our virtual desktop to our blind students. We had to work really hard to make sure that the speech recognition software was fast enough for them. It turns out that blind people listen to speech really, really, really, really, really, fast and so we had to make sure that we kept our platformer working on it, to keep it sped and updated so that it's usable to them, right. Seems functional to me, but they, it really needed to be like, 10 times faster. After I found that out, after even shooting the award video and spending even more time with them I thought, why did you guys tell me it was slow to you? But yeah it's been an honor, really, to be up for that award but to work with those students, to learn more about their needs, to learn more about the different applications that people write for people with all disabilities. I hope we can do more in that space. >> So the young man, in, at IUPUI. >> Yes. >> I don't remember his name. >> Chris Lavilla. >> Chris. >> Yes. >> So share, just quickly about Chris' story. >> If, he watches theCUBE I hope he's listening 'cause I think he's kind of remarkable. >> I think this'll really put some, a little bit of icing on that cake because you're taking an environment and you're empowering a student to do what they want to do, versus what they are able or not able to do, so Chris' story is pretty cool of where he wants to go with his college career. >> Yeah, now I won't say he a big proponent user of the virtual desktop because he's just so advanced, he's like way beyond everything. We're learning from him, but he is Indiana University's I believe I'm saying this right, very first biomedical chemical engineer who is blind since birth, completely blind, yes. >> Wow. >> He is, and he's quite a brilliant young man and we're lucky to have him be our, he will test anything for me, and Mary Stores, who's featured in the video Chris Mire, he's also featured in the video I got to remember their names, I mean, it's a whole, I'm lucky to have a whole community of people that will. Yeah, they know, we want to be there for them, we don't always get it right, but we're going to listen and keep trying to move forward, so. >> But, if you kind of think of, even a what, a year or two ago, not being able to give any of this virtualized desktop access to the visually impaired and how many people are now using it? >> Well we open it up to everyone. We have hundreds and hundreds of users but we know not everyone who uses it is blind. People can, you can use it if you want it or not. We don't really understand why some people prefer to use that one over any other but it does have some advantages, there are different levels of sight impairment too, as I've just been educated right. There are some people who are just at the very beginning of that journey of just losing their sight so, if that happens to be someone that we can extend our environment to it's probably better to use it now and get really familiar with that as you transition to losing your sight later in life, I've been told so. >> So you asked a little bit about the scope of the AT desktop, so I'll layer on a little bit of the scope of IUanyWare. Last year around 65,000 individual unique users over, well over a million logins and-- >> 1.4 million. >> 1.4 million. And the average session time was around 41 minutes. >> That's long. >> So. >> Yeah. >> Our instructors teach with it, our clinicians treat people with it, we've built it to house electronic protected health data. >> So HIPA compliance, got to be critical, right? >> It meets the HIPA standard. >> Right. >> Because you can't say compliance anymore because you can't be compliant with a standard. (Stephanie laughing) They've changed that wording several times in the course of the year. >> We know this. >> So, and we are very familiar with meeting the HIPA standard, we've been doing that for about 12 years now, with, where I came from was the high performance computing area of the university so that's my background that I. >> So, one thing we didn't get a chance touch on, 200,000 devices. We're at Citrix, Citrix is a Microsoft partner. Typically when those companies think of 200,000 users they think for profit, this is a niche use case for 200,000 users. Obviously you guys have gotten some great pricing as part of being an education environment. What I would love to hear is, kind of the research stories because the ability to shrink the world, so to speak high HPC, you're giving access to specialized equipment to people who can't get there normally, you have to be physically in front of GPUs, CPUs, et cetera. What other cool things have been coming out of the research side of the house because of the Citrix enablement? >> So, this is cool I mean. >> You got to, got to. (laughs) >> Right, so one of our groups, Researched Software and Solutions stole the idea from Stephanie to provide a research desktop. >> Borrowed. >> Borrowed. >> Imitation, highest form of flattery, Stephanie. >> That's right, absolutely. So what we've done is we always continually to try to reduce the barriers of entry and access. Supercomputing before, you had to be this tall to ride this ride, well now we're down to here. And, with the hopes that we'll go down even farther. So what we've done is we've taken a virtualized desktop, put it in front of the supercomputers, and now you can be wherever you want to be, and have access to HPC at IU. And that's all the systems, so we have four supercomputers And we have 40 petabytes of spinning disc, 160 petabytes of archival tape library so, we're a large shop. And, we couldn't have done it without looking at what Stephanie has done and really looking at that model differently, right? Because to use HPC before you'd have to use a terminal and shell in. And now, looking at IUanyWare, that gives you just the different opportunity to catch a different and more broad customer base. And I call them customers because we try treat them as customers >> Right. >> And it helps the diversity of what you're doing so last year alone our group, Research Technologies supported 151 different departments. We were on 937 different grants. And we support over 330 different disciplines at IU and so it's deep, but it's also very broad, for as large a campus we are and as large an organization as we are, we're fairly nimble even at 1200 people. >> Wow, from what I've heard it's no wonder that what you've done at Indiana University has garnered you the Innovation Award nominee. I can't imagine what is next with all that you have accomplished. Stephanie, Matt, thank you so much for joining Keith and me, we wish you the best of luck. You can go to Citrix.com, search Innovation Awards where you can vote for the three finalists. We wish you the very best of luck. We'll be waiting with bated breath tomorrow to see who wins. >> So will we, thank you very much. >> Thank you. >> Thank you Lisa. Thank you Keith. >> Our pleasure. For Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Citrix Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)