>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube covering Dell EMC World 2017 brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Welcome back here on The Cube, the Flagship broadcast of SiliconANGLE TV. We rap up our coverage today, day two of Dell EMC World 2017. We're live in Las Vegas. I'm John Walls along with Rebecca Knight and joining us now all the way from Tobacco Road Patrick Williams, who is the IT Infrastructure Architect at North Carolina State University in beautiful Raleigh, North Carolina. Patrick, thank you for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Tell us first of all, you know, academically, you're the first, somebody from that community that we have a chance to speak with over the past two days. What are you seeing here that you are going to find of interest that you might want to take back with you to Raleigh, that maybe you're going to put into practice? >> Right, so we're really taking a look at the technologies that we have in play, and there's been a lot of new announcements at the conference this year, so we have Unity Storage, we have Data Domain and there's been announcements pretty much across that product spectrum, so we've been looking, going to breakout sessions talking to the experts and trying to take a look at the technology and see how we can take advantage of the new features that are offered in our environment. >> So before the cameras were rolling, you were setting the scene a little bit and describing the kinds of data needs, security needs that you have for a busy, thriving, and large college campus. Can you lay that out for our viewers? >> Right so for a college campus, one of the biggest concerns is around security, so there's a mandate or desire, probably as part of the academic culture to be as open as possible because the goal is to exchange ideas and to share resources between the university and across our set of institutions. So contrast that with the reality that we have to maintain a high level of security now, so there's obviously a lot of incidents. We are a Google Mail university and as you know, there was recently an attack on Gmail, right? So one of the things that we've had to do is to say, "We're going to implement Two Factor Authentication. "We're going to develop a classification system "around how we assess and manage data," so depending on the category, there's different levels of security that are in put in place in our (mumbles) environment, while also trying to remain as open as possible. >> So you have a lot of competing interests, it seems, in trying to balance those interests, is how much of your job? >> 100%. (laughing) Yeah, so what I would say is that in order to be able to get proposals forward, I have to be able to make the case on all sides of the equation, so I have to make the correct academic case. I have to make the correct business case. I have to make the correct cultural case and if I can make those cases coincide, then we can succeed and move things forward and get proposals. >> 'Cause you're saying that at NC State, it's not central IT. You're in IT, but there are some more schools that have options, they can make their own decisions, and so I would think coordination, integration, are not barriers, but certainly challenges. >> That's right, so we are, we call ourselves a central IT group; however, there is no mandate for each of the colleges to use central IT services, so our goal is to create kind of a foundational set of services that the consumers then in come and build on top of rather than building their own resources and we like to see that grow kind of organically rather than to mandate it, use of central services, and we've actually had great success. So we've had a lot of resources to come back from the edge into the central folds and be able to grow that centrally, put a higher level of resiliency on top of those services and satisfy our customers. >> In terms of one of the challenges, though, cost is a huge one, and then making sure that things do come within budget and not a penny over. Can you talk a little bit about some of those obstacles and how you've overcome them? >> Right, so cost is everything for us. Our budgets have been flat for the past three years, but the demand for growth in capacity and existing environments and the demand for new services is ongoing. What we've been able to do is to work really hard on assessing our resources. We've implemented Cloud IQ a year ago when it was first announced to get a kind of a long-term view of our environment and kind of track our growth, and that has enabled us to put the right data in the appropriate tier and be able to maximize our investment and that's really helped us be able to continue to grow our environments as we move forward. >> When you're talking about the different clients or constituencies you're trying to please: you've got the students, the faculty, the administration, and the staff, what do students want, what do faculty want, and how do you give them what they want? >> That's right. So students, is really interesting because the student perspective has really changed over the past couple of years and it caught us off-guard. We have a pervasive data network on our campus. We have all the dorms wired. We have about 21,000 students total. About 8000 stay on campus. All those dorms were hard-wired, but we did not have wifi enabled in all the dorms and we survey students every year. Last year we surveyed them and we got very bad marks because that, even a jack was not enough for them. If you look at what you typically show up with now, how many devices have a hard-wired jack, none, right? So they show up with four devices. They couldn't use any of them on our data network and their response on the survey was, the one that I remember the most was, "Our lives depend on wifi," that was the quote. >> Of course. >> We, of course, immediately went and looked at how we roll out 4000 access points right away. We did that over a summer. That was able to succeed. We also have a very unique set of challenges in that because I mentioned that, we only have 4000 students, slightly more than that, that stay on campus. The majority of them move back and forth between classes so 10 AM when 5000 people walk by one access point. >> When they've just woken up. >> That's right. >> 10 AM. >> Or log in to check their email, et cetera. So those are unique challenges so what we had to do is what are the tools to track the application resources? What's normal application performance? What's a normal peak and what's a breakout that's outside of the normal, and how do we profile that and we want to be well ahead of the demand so that we can put those resources in place ahead of the need. >> So what do you do about the challenge of future deployments? Your budget's going to be somewhat constrained. You know your needs are increasing. You know your constituents have new and growing demand. So, I mean, tough nut to crack, isn't it? You're trying to make your cloud strategy. What are you going to do with that? The 4GG server coming on board now, how do you find, or how do you balance that from the academic perspective? >> You mentioned that and also I didn't mention that one of our data centers is aging and so on top of all that, we're also starting to see, put a strain on our data center resources. What we really hope to be able to do is to leverage some type of a hybrid cloud strategy. The challenge for us has been, what is our application profile? If you look at applications that are a great fit in cloud and applications that are not a great fit in cloud, the traditional backend applications, the core infrastructure applications are not necessarily a great fit, and so what we're trying to figure out is what is the best hybrid solution that will help you move our environment forward and still leverage existing resources. >> So looking ahead, what does the college campus of the future, the technology-enabled college campus of the future look like? Give us a picture. >> I think one of the best examples i can give is our Hunt Library, so we opened a new library on what we call our Centennial Campus a few years ago. It was designed from the ground up as kind of a new model of what does the next generational library look like because it's not, if you think of a library now, you don't think of a traditional, okay, here's a building and stacks and stacks and stacks of books. So they put the books off in a corner and there is a large robotic library that's designed to handle the books and the bulk of it is about collaborative spaces, so there are high-end collaborative work stations, consolidated areas. There are students that are in the design school. If you want to go and practice your DJ skills, you can do that there as well, so that's where things are really headed. >> So Patrick, before we let you go, my final question is, when are you going to beat Carolina and Duke at basketball? >> We're waiting, so we have that US Championship banners from the '80s and I'm tired of looking at that, so we're really looking forward to-- >> Those days are long-gone. >> Right. >> Right, Patrick Williams, NC State, thank you for being with us here on The Cube. Safe travels back home and continued success at Raleigh. >> Thank you. >> Appreciate the time. >> Alright. >> Good. That raps it up here on The Cube, day two is in the books. We'll see you back here tomorrow morning at 11:30 central time, that's 2:30 on the East Coast, for more interviews live from Las Vegas, until then. For Rebecca Knight, I'm John Walls. Have a good night.