>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering Microsoft Ignite brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's Ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We are joined by Chris Menard, he is the lead storage administrator at Brown University. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, Chris. >> Thanks for having me. >> So in your role, you would do storage, backup recovery, and disaster recovery. I mean, I think our viewers, we have a sense of what you would do at a large Fortune 500, But what do you at an Ivy League University? What kinds of things are you working on? >> So from disaster recovery we're doing things to protect all of the data that the university has. So research data, academic data, business data. So we're making sure that if something were to happen in Providence itself, we would be covered and have access to our data, our applications. If our data center were to go away. >> So in a way your constituents are a lot larger because you're also thinking, is it student data as well? So student data, research data? >> Yes, so student data, research data, administrative data, faculty data. Any kind of data that gets generated by pretty much anybody that either works or attends the university. >> Chris, wonder if we step back for a second. We're here at Microsoft Ignite, I know that Microsoft has a strong connection with higher education. But have you been to this show before? What's the relationship between the university and Microsoft that you have interactions with? >> So this is my first time coming to Ignite with Brown. I've been to Ignite when it used to be called TechEd, so a long time ago. But we do have a pretty good relationship with Microsoft. Obviously, we have everything from Windows Operating Systems all the way up to cloud services with Azure. Something that we just kind of started delving into this year. So we're looking at running things like Remote app in the cloud. We have some of our disaster recovery data in the Azure cloud as well. And I'm sure they'll be more to come as we learn more about what we can put there and how that can help us. >> Yeah, Microsoft really sits at the center of this multi-cloud discussion. As you've said, they've got SaaS offerings. They've got public cloud. >> Yep. >> They're in your data center. How does Brown look at, kind of, cloud overall? And you said starting to look at some of the public cloud offerings. So maybe give us a little bit of what you can about this strategy today. >> Right, so, we are doing a lot with secondary backups, secondary data for our backups going to the cloud. So for disaster recovery, hopefully in the future we'll be able to use that data for test and dev or maybe moving workloads from one place to another place. We're looking at putting some actual workloads in Azure, in the cloud for bursting capabilities, things like that. >> Yeah, you look at data in a multi-cloud world, tell us, what are you looking for when you talk about how you manage your data in a multi-cloud world? Even we talk about, some people when they went to SaaS they were like, "Oh, I don't need to worry about things like "security and data protection." Well, those people might have had to learn faster or they'd be out of a job. So what do you look and how do you use? >> Right, so security is definitely one of the main concerns. So, I mean, we have a whole security team that that's all they do is look at these projects and look at what we're trying to do and say, "Wait a second, what's the security around it?" As far as the tools that we're using for security. >> Data protection. >> Data protection we're using Cohesity. We just started using them at the beginning of this year. We switched off, we were a long time Legacy backup infrastructure. So a lot of moving parts. We decided that we wanted to find something that was more streamlined and was looking to the future with the way that they did data protection and disaster recovery. >> And where do you use the Cohesity solutions? Is it in your data center, public cloud, which offerings? >> So we have a Cohesity Appliances in our data center. We protect all of our virtual machines and physical machines using Cohesity. We tier that off into Azure cloud as a secondary copy, so then we have flexibility on what we can do with that data now that it's been virtualized and sent off to the cloud. >> Great, and are you realizing any cost savings? I mean, I know it's still early yet, you've only recently gone to Cohesity. But what's the... >> We have realized a lot of cost savings. Probably about 50% reduction in costs, CapEx style costs. And we also have reduced some of our year-to-year maintenance with licensing. >> All right, maybe talk about the operational side of things too. How many people did you have managing these kind of environment before? What's it look like after? What's that change mean? >> We have the same amount of people still managing the same environment. The only difference is now we're not spending as much time. So we kind of manage it across different teams within our environment. So our systems teams will do recoveries of virtual machines or data, whereas my team will actually manage the backups and adding clients and troubleshooting and things like that. Our team probably saves 10 or 15 hours a week. And the other teams about the same, with not having to troubleshoot things that just weren't working in the old platform compared to the new platform. >> Yeah, it was actually one of the things in the keynote this morning Satya Nadella was talking about business productivity. You always say it's nice if I could shave off an hour here, five hours there. There's always fear in IT, it's like, "Oh, wait, "they're going to put me out of a job." But the reality is you've always got more projects to work on and more things to do. >> There's always something else for us to do, which we're finding there's plenty of work for everyone to do. So we don't have to spend that time doing things that we shouldn't have been doing. >> I'm curious about how you stay on the cutting edge. I mean, typically you think about academia in general as being a little slow to adopt the latest and greatest technologies. And yet, this is where the research gets done, so much of it at these top universities. So what's the balance in your experience, and how do you stay abreast of all the new gizmos? >> We're pretty lucky because we're more of the central IT for the university even though we do work with researchers in different departments. So we are always constantly out there looking for, how can we do what we're doing now better, more efficiently, maybe cheaper, maybe not? But we're constantly looking for, what's the best way we can deliver the service that all of our users need. And it's a pretty broad base of users. Like you said, from students to researchers to just regular admins. They're all very different workloads and different users. >> All right, so, Chris, as you've rolled out Cohesity and you're starting to adopt Azure, what learnings have you had? If you're sitting down with one of your peers, and you hear them said, "I'm looking at this." What was the experience? What can I do to make it a little faster, save the team some heartburn maybe? >> I would say the biggest thing is just to do your homework. Go out and look and see what are your pain points today. And talk to people like Cohesity and say, "Honestly, here's my pain points, what can "you do to help me?" Cohesity's sat with us from the very beginning and they were very open to, "We can help "you with this, this, and this. We can't do that, "but we can get it into the product down the road." And they've done with with a lot of things that we've asked for to help us with whatever our needs might have been. >> Yeah, anything particular that you're asking of Microsoft, Cohesity, or others in the ecosystem that would help you do your job better? >> Not at this exact moment. Since we started with Cohesity, we have put in some requests with them over the first couple of months. And the product has evolved, maybe not because of stuff that we only asked for. I mean, it could have been a whole hundred other customers that asked for the same thing. I'm not sure. But they're very quick to put those things into the system, and they roll out updates very, very quickly and keep it going. >> Yeah, so we talk about education might be slow to adopt things. You've got a storage group, storage is not known as the latest and greatest. How do you manage things like upgrades? I was standing in line waiting and joking, it's like, "We're in a Microsoft event, remember Patch Tuesdays?" Yeah, how do you look at the, kind of, cloud on-demand, always on the latest generation versus balancing to make sure that things are trusted, secured, and tested? >> You're exactly right. In the storage world you might only do an upgrade once or twice a year at most. With Microsoft you're doing them once a month, maybe. With Cohesity, if they tell me there's a new upgrade or a patch, I'm ready to install it on a moment's notice. It's non-disruptive and the support team they have is so very good and quick that even if something were to go wrong, I am very confident they would have it fixed in very short order. So the confidence level with doing upgrades is very high. >> In terms of one of the big buzz words we hear, at this conference as well as at other technology conferences is "digital transformation." What does that mean to Brown University? Or does it mean anything? >> Well, it does. Our CIO had put out in his last year that we were going to start working on digital transformation as one of our big projects. What that exactly means for like my group is just what we have to do to support whatever the other groups are going to do to support moving toward a digital transformation. So if that means buying some new storage, or adding more storage to what we have, or talking to them about what apps are being added and how can we back that up and how can we perform disaster recovery services for those? That's the kind of things that our group would be worried about. More so than, what's the actual digital transformation itself. So it is something that is on our plate, but it's not the actual transformation itself. >> Well, Chris, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a lot of fun talking to you. >> Thank you for having me. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, we will have more from theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite in just a little bit. (upbeat techno music)

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE! Covering DockerCon 18, brought to you by Docker and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with John Troyer we are live from DockerCon 2018 on a sunny day here in San Francisco at Moscone Center. Excited to welcome to theCUBE Chris Brown the Technical Marketing Manager at Nutanix, Chris welcome to theCUBE! >> Thank you so much for having me. >> So you've been with Nutanix for a couple years, so we'll talk about Nutanix and containers, you have a session control and automate your container journey with Nutanix. Talk to us about what you're gonna be talking about in the session, what's Nutanix's role in helping the customers get over this trepidation of containers? >> Yeah, definitely, and it's, it's a 20 minute session, so we've got a lot of information to cover there 'cause wanna go over a little bit about, you know, who Nutanix is from the beginning to end but, the main part I'm gonna be focusing on in that session is talking about how we, with our com product, can automate VMs and containers together and how we're moving towards being able to, you know, define you application in a blueprint and understand what you're trying to do with your application. You know, one of the things I always say is that nobody runs Sequel because they love running Sequel, they run Sequel to do something, and our goal with the com is to capture that something, what it depends on, what it relies on. Once we understand what this particular component is supposed to do in your application, we can change that, we can move that to another cloud, or we can move it to containers without losing that definition, and without losing its dependence on the other pieces of the infrastructure and exchange information back and forth. So we're talking a little bit about what we're doing today with com and where we're going with it to add Kubernetes support. >> Chris, we're sitting here in the ecosystem expo at DockerCon and your booth is busy, there's a lot of good activity. Are people coming up to you and asking, do they know Nutanix, do they understand who you are, do they just say oh you guys sell boxes? You know you're both a, you're a systems provider, you're a private cloud provider, and a hybrid-cloud provider, do people understand that, the crowd here, and what kinda conversations are you having? >> It's actually really interesting 'cause we're seeing a broad range of people, some customers are comin' up, or some people are coming up that they don't reali--they don't know that other pieces, places their company use Nutanix, but they wanted to learn more about us, so they've got some sort of initiative that you know, a lot of times it is around containers, around understanding, you know, they're starting to figure out, you know, how do we deploy this, how do we connect? You know, we've got something we wanna deploy here and there how do we do that in a scalable way? But we also have some that have no idea who we are and just comin' up like so you've got a booth and some awesome giveaways, (laughing) what do I have to do to get that, and what do you do? And you know, I really kinda summarize it as two main main groups of people that I've seen is, one of 'em is, the people who've been doing containers for forever, they know it, they've been doing it, they're very familiar with the command line, they're ret-- any gooey is too much gooey for them. And then we've got the people who are just getting started, they've kinda been told hey, containers are coming, we need to figure out how to do this, or we've got, we need to start figuring out our containers strategy. And so they're here to learn and figure out how to begin that. And so it's really interesting because those, the ones that are just getting started or just learning, we obviously help out a ton because the people who came before had to go through all the fire, all the configuration, all of the challenges, and figure out there own solutions where as we can, now we kinda come in, there's a little bit more opinionated example of how to do these things. >> So DockerCon, this year is the fifth DockerCon, they've got between five thousand and six thousand people, I was talking with John earlier and Steve Singh as well, that how I really impressed when I was leaving the general session, it was standing room only a sea of heads so they've got, obviously developers here right, sweet spot, IT folks, enterprise architects, and execs, you talked about Nutanix getting those the two polar opposite ends of the spectrum, the container lovers, the ones who are the experts, and the ones going I know I have to do this. I'm curious, what target audience are you talking to that goes hey I'm tasked with doing this, are those developers, are those IT folks, are you talking with execs as well, give us that mix. >> For the most part they are IT folks, you're artusional operators who are trying to figure out this new shift in technology and we have to talk to some developers, and it's actually been interesting to have speak with developers because you know, in general that's not, that hasn't been Nutanix's traditional audience, we've sold this product called infrastructure to develop. But developers, the few developers I've talked to have gotten really receptive and really excited about what we can do and how we can help them do their job faster by getting their IT people on board but for the most part it'd be traditional IT operators who're looking at this new technology and you know, givin' it kind of a little squinty eye, trying to figure out where it's going, because at the end of the day, with any shift in IT, there's never a time where something is completely sunset, I mean people are still using mainframes today, people will be using mainframes forever, people are just starting their virtualization journey today they're just going from bare metal to VMs, so, and then even with that shift, there's always something that gets left behind, so, they're trying to figure out how can we get used to this new container shift because at the end of the day not everything is gonna be containerized because there's just simply some things that won't be able to or they'll scope out the project and then it'll end up falling by the wayside or budget will go somewhere else. So they're trying to figure out how they can understand the container world from the world that they come from, the VM-centric world, and then, you know, it's really interesting to talk to them and show them how we're able to bring those two together and give you, not only bring the container journey up another step, but also carry your VMs along the way as well. >> Chris, Nutanix is at a, the center of several different transitions, right, both old school hardware to kind of hyper converge, but not now also kind of private hybrid-cloud to more kind of multi-cloud, hybrid-cloud. When we're not at DockerCon, so when you're out in the field, how real is multi-cloud, how real is containers in a normal enterprise? >> Definitely, so, multi-cloud is a very hot topic for sure, everyone, there's no company, no IT department that doesn't have some sort of cloud strategy or analyzing it or looking at it. The main way that we get there, or one of the core tools we have is com once again, so, and I'm obviously biased because that's my wheelhouse, right, in marketing, so I talk about that day in day out, but, with com you can add, we support today AHV and EXSi both on and off Nutanix, as well as AWS, AWS gov cloud and GCP, and Azure's coming in down the line that's where Kubernetes will come in as well, so we see a lot of people looking a this and saying hey you know, we do wanna be able to move into AWS, we do wanna be able to move into GCP and use those clouds or unify them together, and some com lets us do that. There's a couple other of prongs to that as well, one of them is Beam, Nutanix Beam, which is a product we announced at DotNext last month, which is around multi-cloud cost optimization, Beam came from an acquisition that of bought metric--the company was called milinjar, I'm probably saying that horribly wrong, but made a product called bought metric which we've rebranded and are integrating into the platform as Nutanix Beam. So what that allows you to do is, you can, it's provided as a SaaS service, so you can go use it today, there's a trial available, all that, you give it AWS credentials and it reaches out and takes a look at your billing account and says hey, we noticed that these VMs are running 50% of the time at no capacity, or they're not being used at all, you can probably cut that down shrink these and save it or hey we noticed that in general you're using this level, this baseline level, you should buy these in reserved instances to save this much per month. And it presents all that up in a really easy to use interface, and then, depending on how you wanna use it, you can even have it automatically go and resize your VMs for you, so it can say, hey you've got a T2 medium or an M2 medium running, it really would make a lot more sense as a you know M2 small. You can, it'll give you the API call, you can go make it on your own, or you can have, if you give crede-- authorization of course, it can go ahead and run that for you and just downsize those and start saving you that money, so that's another fork of that, the multi-cloud strategy. And the last one is one of the other announcements we made around last month which was around--excuse me extract for VMs, so extract is a portfolio of products, we've got extract for DBs where we can scan your sequel databases and move into ESXi or AHV, both from bare metal, or wherever the sequel databases running, extract for VMs allows us to scan the ESXi VMs, and move them over to AHV. And then, we're taking extract for VMs to the next step and being able to scan your AWS VMs and pull them on, back on-prem, if that's what you're looking for as well, so that's right now in beta and they're working on fine tuning that. Because at the end of the day, it's not just enough to view and manage, we really need to get to someplace where we can move workloads between, and put the workload in the right place. Because really with IT, it's always a balance of tools, there's never one golden bullet that solves every problem, every time a new project comes out you're trying to choose the right tool based on the expertise of the team, based on what tools are already in use, based on policy. So, we wanna be able to make sure that we have the tool sets across, that you can choose and change those choices later on, and always use the right thing for the particular application you're running. >> Choice was a big theme this morning during the general session where Docker was talking about choice agility and security. I'm curious with some of the things that were announced, you know they're talking about the only multi-cloud, multi-OS, multi-Linux, they also were talking about, they announced this federated, containerized application management saying hey, containers have always been portable but management hasn't been. I'm curious what your perspectives are on some of the of the evolution that Docker is announcing today, and how will that help Nutanix customers be able to successfully navigate this container journey? >> Definitely. And--(clears throat) you know federation's critical, being able to, container management in general is always a challenge, one of the things that I've heard time and time again is that getting are back to work for Kubernetes has always been very difficult. (laughs) And so, getting that in there, getting, that is such a basic feature that people expect, you're getting the ability to properly federate roles or federate out authentication is huge. There's a reason that SAML took the world by storm, it's that nobody wants to manage passwords, you wanna rely on some external source of truth, being able to pull that in, being able to use some cloud service and have it federated against having Docker federated against other pieces is very important there. I might've gone way off there, but whatever. (laughing) >> No, no, absolutely. >> And then, the other piece of it is that we, with a multi-cloud, with the idea of it doesn't matter whether you're running on-prem or in the cloud or, that is what people need, that's one of the true promises of containers has always been is the portability, so seeing the delivery of that is huge, and being able to provision it on-prem, on Nutanix obviously because that's who I'm here from. (laughing) but, and being able to provision to the cloud and bring those together, that's huge. >> Chris you talked about Kubernetes couple times now, obviously a big topic here, seems to be kind of emerging de facto application deployment configuration for multi-cloud. What's Nutanix doing with Kubernetes? >> Yeah, so I've definitely, Kubernetes is, it's really in many ways winning that particular battle, I mean don't get me wrong Swarm is great, and the other pieces are great, but, Kubernetes is becoming the de facto standard. One of the things we're working on is bringing containers as a service through Kubernetes, natively on Nutanix, to give you an easy way to manage, through Prism manage containers just the way you manage VMs, manage Kubernetes clusters, and you know it's, it's really important that that's, that is just one solution, because we, there's as many different Kubernetes orchestration engines as you can name, every, any name you bring in, so that's my-- >> It's like Linux, back in the day, they're a lot of different distributions or there're a lot of different ways to consume Kubernetes. >> Exactly. And so, we wanna be able to bring a opinionated way of consuming Kubernetes to the platform natively, just as a, so it's a couple of clicks away, it's very easy to do. But that's not the only way that we're doing it, we're also we do have a partnership with Docker where we're doing things like deploying Docker EE through com, or Docker, it's of course all sorts of legalese but, they're working on that so it's natively in everyone's Prism central you can just one click deploy Docker EE, we have a demo running at our booth deploying rancher using com as well, because we wanna be able to provide whatever set of infrastructure makes the most sense for the customer based on, this is what they've used in the past, this is what they're familiar with, or this is what they want. But we also want to offer an opinionated way to deliver containers as a service so that those of you that don't know, or just trying to get started, or that that's what they're looking for, this, when you've got a thousand choices to make everyone's gonna make slightly different ones. So we can't ever offer one, no one can offer the true, this is the only way to do Kubernetes, we need to offer flexibility across as well. >> One of the words we here all the time at trade shows is flexibility. So, love customer stories, as a customer marketing person, I think there's no greater brand validation you can get than the voice of the customer, and I was looking on the Docker website recently and they were saying: customers that migrate to Docker Enterprise Edition, are actually reducing costs by 50%, so, you're a marketing guy, what're some of your favorite examples of customers where Nutanix is really helping them to just kill it on their container journey? >> Yeah, so, there's a, wish I'd thought of this sooner, I shoulda. (laughing) No, but we have a, one of our customers actually, I, this always brings a smile to my face 'cause they they came and saw us last year at the booth, they're one of our existing long time customers, and they're looking to adopt Docker. They came up and we gave 'em a demo, showed them how all the pieces were doing all of the, and he's just looking at it and he's like man, I need this in my life right now, and it was mostly a demo around Docker EE, using the unified control plane, and showing off, using Nutanix drivers showing how we can back up the data and protect individual components of the containers in a very granular fashion. He's like man I need this in my life, this is incredible, and he went and grabbed his friend ran him over, and was like dude we're already using Nutanix look what they can do! And the perfect example of the two kinds of customers, this guy goes like hold on a second, jumps on the command line, like oh yeah I do this all the time from there. (laughing) >> But, that was the, that light up, the light in the eyes of the customer where they were like, this, I need to be able to see this, to be able to use this, and be able to integrate this, that's, I will not forget that anytime soon. That's really why I think we're going down a very good path there, because the ability to, when you have these tinkerers, the people who are really good at code, I mean I spend a lot of time on the command line myself even though I'm in marketing, so, I don't know what I'm doing there, Powerpoints maybe? (laughing) Just because I can understand it from the command line or an expert can understand it, doesn't mean you can share that. I've been tryin' to hand off some of the gear that I manage off to another person, and was like oh you just type out all these commands, and they're like I have no idea what's going on here. (laughing) And so, seeing the customers be able to, to understand what they're more in depth coworkers have done in a gooey fashion, that's just really, that makes a lot of sense to me and it's, I like that a lot. >> It's great. >> Are you seeing any, and the last question is, as we wrap up, some of the, one of the stats actually that was mentioned in the Docker press release this morning about the new announcements was, 85% of enterprise organizations have multi-cloud, and then we were talking with Scott Johnston, their Chief Product Officer, that said, upwards of 90% of IT budgets are spent on keeping the lights on for existing applications, so, there's a lot of need there for enterprises to go this road. I'm wondering, are you seeing at Nutanix, any particular industries that are really leading edge here saying hey we have a lot of money that we're not able to use for innovation, are you seeing that in any specific industries, or is it kinda horizontal? >> I, to be honest, I've seen it kind of horizontally, I mean I've had, I've spoken to many different customers, mostly around com because, but, and they come from all different walks of life. I've seen, I've talked to customers from sled, who've been really excited about their ability to start better doing hadoop, because they do thousands of hadoop clusters a year for their researchers. I've talked to, you know in the cloud or on-prem, or across. I've talked to people in governments, I've talked to people in hospitals and, you know, all sorts of-- >> I can imagine oil and gas, some of those industries that have a ton of data. >> Yeah and it's actually, the oil and gas is really fascinating because a lot of times they, for in a rig, they wanna be able to use compute, but they can't exactly get to a cloud, so how do you, how do you innovate there and on the edge, without, how do you make a change in the core without making it on the edge, and how do you bring those together? So it's, there's really a lot of really fascinating things happening around that, but, I haven't noticed any one industry in particular it's, it's across, it's that everyone is, but then again, by the time they get to me, it's probably self selected. (laughing) But it's across horizontally, is that everyone is looking at how can we use this vast storage, I just found out this is already being used in my environment because it's super easy, how do I, how do I keep a job? (chuckles) Or how do I adopt this and free up my investments in keeping the lights on into innovation, how do I save time, how do I-- Because one of the things that I've noticed with all of this cloud adoption or container adoption all of that is that many times a customer will start making this push, not always from a low level, maybe from a high level, but, they start making this push because they hear it's faster and better and that it'll just solve all their problems if they just start using this. And, because they rush into they don't often they don't solve the fundamental problems that gave 'em the issue to begin with, and so they're just hoping that this new technology fixes it. So, now there's, I am seeing some customers shift back and say hey, I do wanna adopt that, but I need to do it in a smart way, 'cause we just ran to it and that caused us problems. >> Well it sounds like with all the momentum, John, that we've heard in the keynote, the general session this morning, and with some of the guests, you know, I think even Steve Singh was saying only about half of the audience is actually using containers so it's sounds like, with what you're talking about, with what we've heard consistently today, it's sort of the tip of the iceberg, so lots of opportunity. Chris thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE and sharing with us all the exciting things that are going on at Nutanix with containers and more. >> Thank you so much for having me, it was a lot of fun. >> And we wanna thank you for watching theCUBE, Lisa Martin with John Troyer, from DockerCon 2018 stick around we will be right back with our next guest. (bubbly music)