from Boston Massachusetts it's the cube covering wtg transform 2018 brought to you by Winslow technology group welcome back I'm Stu minimun and this is the cube coverage of wdg transform 2018 I'm happy to welcome back to the program probably an interesting who's come all the way from Boston University he said three blocks away about three blocks why yes all right Brian's the director of College of Arts and Sciences information technology great to see you again thank you all right back so good news is we spoke it was just about a year ago it was August last year it's June this year I'm sure nothing's changed in your environment you know students never change technology never changes there's a little bit of change on your end a little bit a little bit last year we'd spoke of quite a bit about hyperconvergence and what's that's gonna mean in terms of Education and how we deliver that and what the experience could be like for these students and I think at this point we're satisfied with everything that Nutanix has brought to us we've deployed VDI and a couple of large deployments for whole bunch of classes so we decided to reassess and reevaluate work what we're doing this year and now we move on to application development that's great so we get many ways they say you need to modernize your platform and then once you do that we can look at what the long haul 210 which is really at the application side right exactly once we knew what we had what we could possibly do with it we decided to move forward and figure out what else can we change and we had a lot of legacy applications for the business and so this past year we hired a developer who's focusing solely on docker izing our applications so we're deploying docker and a whole bunch of applications within the college and then we're going to be doing kubernetes deployment later this year ok and let's be clear where does this live you know is this on the Nutanix platform is it in you know service riders public clouds where does this span because kubernetes can live in all of those environments in the containerized stuff at Casa and currently it's all contained within a handful of VMs within our Nutanix server environment ok we're planning on looking at calm and use using natural blueprints to deploy kubernetes and docker down the road ok so I've got the Nutanix platform what hypervisor am i using HP ok so using the HP using which of courses Newt annexes comes on on the platform and then you know in the VMS you're using containers we are um have you looked at bare metal um you know because that's one of the discussions is like well if I'm doing containers you know do I just do that on Linux on bare metal or do I do it virtual is a virtualized and there's there's pluses and minuses for each of those we did a few of the pluses that my sis had means really enjoy is when our developer is going to go crazy and do new things we can make snapshot so if he happens to do something to the environment we can restore it in ten minutes and I think as far as my developer is concerned he doesn't want to have to rebuild the environment every time he makes a mistake he's had a few close calls so far and having HP and the ability to snapshot restore it's been awesome for him okay what insight can you give us about what you know what sort of applications are they building and you said Dockers in two minute Kruger burn Eddie's you know are they building their own stack are they leveraging you know how are they getting to that state well we're taking some business apps that were focusing on both student and faculty applications dealing with various components of each and he's pulling them apart to figure out what components go into the docker containers what do we have to still reside in VMs for security and long-term use and try to figure out how to reimagine the application stack to move forward we're starting to look at reusing components that he's developing and I'm hoping that we have a lot of pieces that we can do that with so we have a lot of applications to rewrite okay and just to drill in a little bit because I've got we've got a team of the cube that's gonna be at docker con next week I've been go to the kubernetes show for a while so when you say docker are you using just the free containers which is now called mobi or using the dr. CEO as part of that I actually can't tell you that because that's miss all my developers work I did so they're using docker as you said it's like the Kleenex and do you know from kubernetes standpoint have they just built their own do you have a distribution or a platform that you just do Tanic we just downloaded the distro from kubernetes instead of a small cluster himself we're going to be looking at using calm to do a deployment on their channels natively okay really interesting stuff what what is you know you talked a bit about you know you can give a little bit of stability and recovery and things like that for your developers to be able to play in that sandbox is what gives us a little bit of the roadmap as to you know how long do they play with this and then you know how does this roll out for the university so we're looking at probably a three to six month development cycle on a lot of new applications right now part of my developers job is to try to figure out how this environments going to work my sis admins are deeply engaged with him but since most of doctrine kubernetes is developed with faced he has to do most of the legwork and figure out how it's all gonna work and so we're hoping to leverage Nutanix to have multiple environments all with the same back-end so we have dev tests and production all in the same hardware but different pieces of actually physical clusters that'll be separated so he doesn't mess around the production all too much but set up a baseline that we can use to short that development cycle even further yeah one of the things we always look at is right you've got your developers doing their thing how does that fit with the operation side is it DevOps even I interviewed Solomon hikes last year that was the founder of docker and he said actually it was an operation mindset that I had when I created this container format how are you seeing it's actually great you're all working together you're you're in discussion there do you have a DevOps rollout and what you're doing or you do you keep it separate I still keep them somewhat separate but my administrators are writing a little bit more code and scripting than they used to and I think in general that's going to be the in the entire industry where you can't just look at and have your developer do everything in docker and not understand how it works Brian talk to us about your partners for doing this how involved are the likes of Nutanix and Winslet technology and you know in Dell in this discussion of the containers agent and your developers Nutanix we've been utilizing a lot of documentation and we're gonna be leveraging them a lot when we start to look at com Winslow's we haven't really talked to them about it to be honest we probably should because they might have some ideas and other partners we can talk to Dell in it there's really just a hardware to run everything on that's stable we don't have to worry about it I'm so happy with that yeah that's not in any you know oh I don't need to worry about them there's certain pieces we always look at and I'd love your feedback on this if you know when we virtualized first and now even when we containerize how much don't I need to worry about the infrastructure I mean remember back you know 15 years ago it's like oh I'll virtualized that well have you checked the BIOS because the BIOS might not work and the server could break things the OS could cause problem you know virtualization relatively stable these days how are you finding the container stuff it's really interesting and very very unique to virtualize a virtualized environment even further it's it's kind of mind-blowing just I've been doing this for twenty years and this is much further than I've ever expected the industry to go oh yeah just wait and it's you go even further than kubernetes it's like wait is it on top of underneath or side by side with the technologies you're doing from a Cooper nettie standpoint you said today it's all in the note annex what's the value of kubernetes for you is it just kind of the cluster orchestration of containers or you know are you is its portability a piece even part of the concern that you look at there oh it's it's mostly from portability part of the applications that we're looking at down the road are going to be vertical applications especially some student facing ones and certain times of the year we're gonna have to go from maybe a hundred people logged in to several thousand at the same time so we're hoping to stand up something that we can easily move to a cloud provider and still work the same way that we're expecting it to and so I think kubernetes along with the orchestration internally on-prem it's gonna be a huge benefit for us to know the environment it's gonna be exactly the same when we move it to Amazon or Google or adder all right so so Brian you're still kind of in the thick of it here but from what you've learned so far any any learnings or things that you'd recommend to your peers that oh wait if I could turn back the clock three months I might have adjusted or pointed things in a different direction yes yeah well when our developer started he focused more on getting an application up and running before starting to learn docker I would encourage anybody that's just starting down the road get your developer learning doctor and kubernetes first because they might want to rewrite what they're doing in the application okay well Brian this has been fascinating want to give you the final word is that you look out through the rest of the year so it's a lot you know so far since last time we talked but by the time we come around next year you'll be all serverless and you know deploying things off side the globe I'm assuming but I have no idea if you told me your ago that we're gonna be doing what we're doing now I wouldn't believe you it's it's a fantastic journey it's it's amazing what we learn every day all right well Brian appreciate you sharing some of the learnings as we go it's one of the reasons we come to events like this I know yourself to talk to your peers here what's going out thank you for moving forward with thank you all right plus more coverage here at wtg transform 2018 I'm Stu minimun and thanks for watching the Q

(shutter clicking) >> I'm Stu Miniman with theCUBE. We're here at the Winslow Technology Group Dell EMC User Group happy to have one of users here, Brian Anderson, who's the director for the College of Arts and Science Information Technology at Boston University, within a short stone's throw here. Brian, thanks so much for joining us. >> Oh, you're welcome. Thank you for being here and being here while Scott's doing this because it's kind of a fun event for us. >> Well, that's great. Tell us how many times have you been to this? >> It's my third event. I was actually a speaker last year. >> Excellent. >> This year, I'm just coming as a user, listening to the sessions, and being social with the rest of the people who do business with Winslow. >> Yeah, what do you get out of presenting and then attending an event like this? >> Feedback from my peers. I get to hear about what other people are doing, what their solutions are, how they solve some of the same problems we're trying to solve. And it's just a good networking event. >> That's awesome, Brian. And we love how peers can really share with other practitioners. So, the good news, Boston University, I think, we don't need to explain what the university is. But what are some of the drivers happening at the university level. Changes happening, changes happening in every industry. But what, specifically, is happening there that kind of impacts your world? >> Yeah, there's a huge push right now to look at cloud as a solution for a whole variety of areas, replacing infrastructure that's currently in place, trying to figure out how cloud solutions fit into the academics. We have a lot of faculty that want to use cloud solutions to teach. And we've been playing catch-up for the last few years. And we're really taking it seriously and trying to figure out how to provide those resources in both hybrid environments and cloud-only environments. >> Yeah, can you unpack that a little bit? >> Yeah. >> Where are you with cloud today? What are you looking at? What are the criteria? Obviously, cost is always a concern for everyone. But we know how fast in higher education the fees are going up. And therefore, you've got to be under a lot of pressure there. >> Oh we are, we are. We're already using a lot of cloud-based services for things like email, file storage. We now have a Dropbox implementation that we're pushing out to our faculty this year. So it's a combination of what services can we take from on campus and move them up to the cloud and is that feasible financially? It's a big transition to take the capital expenditure and transition over to OP-X. And it's really just the fine line of what services make sense to do so. >> I've talked to lots of, kind of, K through 12 environments. And the students there, obviously, have a lot of high demands there. I have to think it's even more when we get to higher education. You mentioned a little bit the faculty demands and what they're doing. Maybe expand a little bit, faculty and the students themselves, what are they looking for? What do they come into kind of expecting and how are you helping to deliver that? >> Well, I know a lot of students these days are coming from using services like Blackboard throughout most of their career until they get to university. We also have Blackboard, but it's not as widely distributed as students are expecting. We have about a 50% adoption rate of Blackboard in our courses. So it's an effort to try to get faculty to convert their curriculum for the last 20 years into something that's online and that students today can really relate to and want to learn from. There's a lot of integrations with really cool technologies that students like to use and have used in previous schools that we want to try to get up and running so faculty can take advantage of them. So we're fighting the tide between what faculty want to do and their inertia versus what students are expecting when they walk in the door. Knowing how much the university costs per year. And they get a great experience in the dorms and we want to make sure they get the same experience when they're in the classroom. >> Excellent. We heard in the opening remarks this morning really the kind of digital transformation that's going on. Scott Winslow talked about some of those emerging solutions that they're helping to drive. What solutions do you use from WTG? Where do you look to them as a solution partner? >> Well, they introduced us to the Nutanix platform, the Dell XD series, and we've been using that for the last three years to provide VDI solutions for our students. And that's enabling some of our faculty to be very creative in how they teach. We have one faculty who's trying to transform the chemistry lab experience to give the students hands-on experience without actually having to go to one of their prized rooms where all the research is actually done. So we're virtualizing instrumentation where they're able to play around with it and learn how to do it before they sit in front of it. And we're working with them to try to figure out how to expand that for training opportunities for their graduate students and Ph.D. Students. >> Brian, what's the impact of online education, MOOCs, and the like? Is that impacting your group yet? >> A little bit. BU has about ten MOOCs they host per year. They're widely attended at the beginning, and like every MOOC, it dwindles as the semester goes. But it's been a fine line. We haven't accredited them yet, so they're not really worth anything if students take them. But we want to get to that point where that is the case. We see the value. We see that's what the students want. We want to make sure we have the total MOOC experience available for our students and external students. But it's just a lot of distance between where we are now and getting to that point. >> Okay, I appreciate how you've been sharing how cloud is really developing in your environment. As you look into the partners that you work with, what's on your wish list? What would enable you to be able to move this transition even faster, you know, beyond, I'm sure cost is always a concern, but what would you be looking for? What would help you and your organization move even faster? >> Ease of manageability. Right now, a lot of our partners are all siloed applications. If we had a service that could put a bunch of things under the same umbrella and allow ease of management of a whole variety of services, that would be a huge, huge win for us. That would probably make adoption much easier and would accelerate things a lot quicker than we can now. >> All right, what excites you most in technology space these days, Brian? >> I'm going to say the hyperconvergence and what that means for standard technology and how things have been done for the last 25 years. I think that's the future. That's where we are now and that's kind of the nice bridge between what we used to do to the cloud. And I think it's going to be here for a lot longer than people think. >> And when you rolled out the hyperconvergence, is there any specific metrics? What was the impact on your operations and any specific learnings that you would share with your peers? >> Well for us, it was a new service. It was something brand new we were bringing in. And I was amazed at how quickly my system administrators picked up on it and how quickly the faculty started to understand what it was and adopt it to their classes. >> Brian Anderson, really appreciate you sharing with us >> Thank you. >> the journey that BU and your organization are going through. You're watching theCUBE here at the WTG Dell EMC User Group event. (shutter clicking)