>> Narrator: Live from Copenhagen, Denmark, it's theCUBE. Covering Nutanix dot next 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix dot next. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight co-hosting along with Stu Miniman. We're joined by Christo du Raan, he is the COO IT Hardware and Infrastructure at Trustco Holdings. Thanks so much for coming on theCube. >> All right, thanks. And thanks for having me. >> Direct from Namibia. So we keep hearing there are customers from 50 countries. And you represent Namibia here. >> Yeah I come from far down in Africa. (laughs) >> So tell our viewers a little bit about Trustco, what you do down there? >> Trustco's a financial services company firstly, we look after all our Namibian customers in the insurance industry, as well as in the banking industry. We've been busy building our banking industry now for the last five years. And we're almost to that point where we can start serving people. Then we've got also educational services that we give to our customers and we've got roughly about 15,000 students, all doing distance learning, and of that 15,000 we've got about 80 to 90 percent of them that we also do finance, not just for the course material but also the technology, that we finance for them, so to give them the capabilities to do their studies through us. Then we've got also natural resources, it's quite a new business unit for us, where we dabble a little in diamond mining, we've got two mines currently, one in Namibia itself, where we produce probably one of the best diamonds in the world, clear cut diamonds, and then also in Sierra Leone we've recently acquired a mining license there as well. Then in Namibia, the other stuff that we do is in Shared Services, where we have our own radio station that we broadcast in Namibia, and then we do a little bit of in-house marketing and media and those type of things. >> Just a few things! >> Well luckily Christo, your IT staff, they have it easy, they don't have, you know, I walk through the Expo floor, it's like oh well how many verticals do you need to go to all of them, to be able to learn what you're doing. So give us if you can just, a little bit of a snapshot of your IT environment, what your team's responsible for, and if you can, kind of bring us even back before you began the journey onto Nutanix. >> So we're very centralized in Namibia, all our stuff gets run out of one data center, or one common area in our area offices, and then we expand to the six branches out in Namibia and in South Africa and now of late we'll be in Sierra Leone. IT team pretty much look after everything, we've got a saying at the office, "If it's got a plug on, it's IT's problem". (laughing) So yeah, so we do everything from the infrastructure, the networking, the servers, the storage, well, now it's Nutanix, everything is already built into one solution, so that the spurred systems have now fallen away, and we only look after it. >> Bring us back to that move to Nutanix, was there an upgrade that you were looking to do? Was there a pain point? What was the impetus to look at Nutanix? >> So our business has expanded quite quickly and the old way of doing things, with the separate SANs, separate switches, separate servers, those type of things became a little bit slumbersome, and difficult to manage because you had to have all these different kind of vendors that's got specific software solutions and specific training that you have to do and it just became a little bit too much for us and we decided that, let's step back a little bit, and see if there's any solutions out there that makes it firstly easier, that we can manage with less people and do more and at that stage hyperconvergence was just on the peak of becoming a thing, if you want to call it that, and we had done our research and found that Nutanix at that stage was the best fit for us and also the most mature in the hyperconverged space. So, that's basically where we got to the Nutanix solution, obviously like everyone else, we started with a Community Edition, dabbled our hand a little bit in there, and saw that's actually doable, it's easy and something that we can build on. >> So, you've been with them for about two years now, so still a relatively new relationship but talk about the beginning in particular and relationships are hard. Every relationship is hard. There are inevitable stumbling blocks. What were some of the challenges you faced and how did you work with Nutanix to overcome them? >> Challenges, I can say, luckily we haven't had a lot of them. Our business is not nearly as big as the Europeans and the Americans, so it is not that complex a system. We had our challenges in the beginning, hypervisor specifically, 'cause we made a huge move, we went totally 180 degrees from our Hyper-V environment, we said we going to go right over to AHV, don't want to do deal licensing, let's just jump in on AHV and go Nutanix fully. So, obviously we had a few challenges with a couple of our services and servers. But other than that, I must say, it was actually a pretty easy move for us. >> It's interesting that you say going from Hyper-V 'cause I've talked to the customers, oh there's a saving from moving from VMware, oh Microsoft, Hyper-V's all included, if you're doing Windows and you've got Hyper-V, I'm sure you've got a Windows application, so was there an application change or what was the driver to move? >> There were some of our applications that were very specific, especially on the network drivers side of things, moving from the normal Windows drivers, to the IO drivers in Linux. We had a couple of challenges with our in-house apps as well, but again, it was a reasonably painless move over to Nutanix. >> One of things we keep hearing about at this conference is how Nutanix is evolving as customer needs and demands are changing. You gave us the overview of your company, you are getting into new businesses and still continuing in established businesses, what are some of the needs that your IT is experiencing and how is Nutanix meeting those needs? >> Like I say, in the old infrastructure days, provisioning was probably the biggest hurdle, if the Dev guys wanted stuff, you first had to go and buy some more hardware, because you need to adapt to them. When we reversed over to Hyper-V eventually, it became easier, but it was still not the right fit. You still had to tweak it and play with it etc etc. So, the biggest challenge was to get our DevOp guys quicker access to what they need. And then also our customers as well. We've moved from where there's a person that needed to provision storage, needed to provision networking, needed to provision server and VMs, that's now all basically done by one person and most of those things we've already automized, so it is five, ten minutes, and then they've got what they need. I think it made us a little bit more agile because we pride ourselves on being quick thinkers, deploying stuff fast and that was always Trustco's main advantage in the Namibian market, we didn't go through all the other rigamarole that other companies have of tendering and doing things in a certain way and by the time that you get there it's not relevant anymore, now we need to do something else again. That brought us quick to market and made it so that we can deliver quicker solutions to our customers. >> So, Christo, was there any impact organizationally for rolling out Nutanix, you mentioned DevOps there, the goal of course is that they shouldn't have to worry about the infrastructure and hopefully Nutanix is delivering that, but there's some retraining or moving inside the organization, what's the impact been on your organization? >> On the customer side, none. They don't even know we've moved over. >> But from the IT side? >> From our customer side, they've not seen anything. From the IT side of things, we had a phased approach, so we started off with the Community Edition, where we basically just dabbled in it, saw what we could do on it and then also, let's call it training for the IT guys, so that they're comfortable in how the product works. So by the time that we got to deploying it in production, it was actually a very smooth transaction. We had all the kinks sorted out beforehand and made sure that everything will work, again, being in the finance industry, in the banking industry, downtime is an absolute no no, and we wanted to get to a point where we say we're not going to move over production sites, production environments, in the evenings from twelve to four in the morning because we've all got families so we'll either plan it properly ahead of time and yes we did it and actually, dare I say, in production time, we moved across almost seamlessly. We've got a lot of redundancies built in obviously so it gave us the opportunity to actually move in place if you want to call it that. >> So what does the future hold for this relationship? Where do you see your partnership with Nutanix evolving and where do you think you'll be, say, five years from now? >> So, we've got a roadmap set out with Nutanix and where we're now only in the baby phase, where we've done the infrastructure, we're happy everything is working, so now we're in the POC stage of exploring the software suite in its entirety. We've started now with Leap and Bolt ADR scenario and tested it extensively and we're now in that process, probably when I get back in Namibia, we'll have the licenses hopefully to start deploying it in our production environment. More closer to the future, in the next I would say, six to nine months, we're going to take on Frame, 'cause part of our business scenario, because we were Microsoft, was the Remote Desktop Service, and that was what kept us so lean. There are some challenges now with Remote Desktop Services where our Dev guys are moving into some Linux and there's different things coming up now where we move away from the traditional monolithic applications to more agile applications and then we'll start dabbling our hands in Frame. For us the holdback was when Frame came out, that it was only in the cloud and for us in Namibia, Africa, the internet is not as stable as we would like, so that was totally off the cards for us. Now that it moved back into on-prem and we can run Frame on-prem, that will probably be our biggest project going forward for the next year and year and a half. >> Excellent. Well thank you so much for coming on theCube Christo. It was a pleasure talking to you. >> Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, stay tuned for more of theCube's live coverage of dot next. [Urgent Music]

Cisco extracting the signal from the noise it's the cube covering vmworld 2015 brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors now your host still minimun welcome back to vmworld 2015 here in San Francisco this is SiliconANGLE tv's live broadcast of V emerald 2015 I'm stupid a man with Wikibon calm happy to have on this segment talking about the future of software-defined storage hyper converged everything there is Christo's Carol Manolos who's the CTO and principal engineer in the vmware storage group because those first time in the cube thank you for joining us thank you for having me here all right so you know the buzz over the last year when one of the hottest topics inside the vmware ecosystem has been this whole you know virtual sand v vols of course has had you know quite a bit of activity can he first set for us you know what what's your role inside vmware how long you been there sure i've been a long time ER at vmware I've been with VMware for 10 years almost now and for most of this time I've been working on storage and availability products the last few years I've been working on virtual son specifically I was one of very original architects of the product and the people that had the original idea and most recently the last few months have have had a wider olam now the the city of the business unit with a responsibility for technical insight and robot for a range of products not only this on but also our availability products course Torres features and included in this yeah sir Sir sir Sir Christos Charles said I think their stuff ever member 8 500 engineer's inside that the storage unit 10 years ago yeah I'm curious how many were in that group oh we were a handful we could you know you could always walk down the hallway to the engineer you need to deal with so yes it has been a no a very big change in that respect even though invent a new york teams we still maintain a a mentality of a small company startup of you is where everybody works closely with everybody else and even though now we're distributed we organize our projects such a way that teams are very agile they work very closely together yes so I mean I think everybody that watches this space knows that you know VMware's always had a lot of storage pieces and interaction you know back to you know what happens with SRM wood storage vmotion when that came out but the role has become a lot more front and center when you talk about what's happening with v Vols and virtual sand can you just give us kind of your personal journey and insight as that dress actually this goes back many years I would say probably sometime around two thousand nine where we started thinking a little bit more fundamentally about what is the stores how is the industry what in this industry evolving and what do we see VMR all banking this a new world and we made an explicit decision that we need to drive the narration that we need to drive the industry in a direction would be we believe this the best direction for our customers current and future so our vision around stores from back then in 2009 when actually we we shared a white paper with a many partners back then was twofold on one hand we're going to introduce a management model from from storage that is much more application centric a model where the owner the application that administrator can require in at a high level in the form of policies as we call them what they want from the storage without necessarily having to know all the gory details of the hardware or implementation details of every individual vendors products so you say what you want know how to do it and then the storage platform should be able to automatically configure provision your stores and so that you get a quality of service the properties you want for your application that is one side and that led us to a number of projects and features now that range from storage policy based management to virtual volumes and a number of data protection as solutions around that on the other hand we also decided that we should really give to our customers a storage platform that implements that vision in the best possible way so that was that you know the genesis of a virtual son essentially virtual son is vmware's own storage platform that follows a certain architecture we decided that a hyper converts architecture is the best way to go because meth emits the best possible way the requirements of our customers requirements for streamlined simple procurement deployment configuration and operational management of of their stores infrastructure and do that in a way that does not require specialization that doesn't require to be expert in any specific vendors products or you know don't need to even know the gold details of their storage hardware instead of that we want to offer to the customers a way to manage stores in the same way they manage today their computing infrastructure the computer resources and now with NSX also the network resources a unified model we can manage their clusters that provide all the fundamental services they need for their applications yeah I think Charles Phan had a good way of looking at it he said we don't think of a visa and cluster it's just a vsphere cluster that uses V Sam so it's very different operational model you know we know that the growth of the virtualization admin you know highlighted always this year and we see you know record numbers of attendees so talk a little bit about you know is this you know a major shift or you know it just kind of a continuation an expansion of what you know we've been seeing from vSphere so last decade I would like to differentiate here since you know I'm an engineer that's how the technology and the product the the visa on storage space room has been designed as its genetic storage platform and here at vmware will have a number of sessions where we actually talked about that and we stress some of the advantage of that approach now for the specific product we have we're releasing we have released and we are supporting now we decide to take a certain packaging approach if you wish which is make this product very easy to manage by essentially taking making the storage cluster to be the same as your computer pastor that has sounds like a very simple idea but has tremendous benefits starting from the fact that we'd only need to introduce new management obstructions you don't have to configure and provision your store ads and then decide which host has visibility which data store all those no fencing and zoning techniques that you probably are very familiar yourself with which actually the kind of complex management operations we try to eliminate moreover by making this simple constraint very simple constraint on the product we allowed management to be done with simple extensions to existing management abstractions and workflows and even api's that are extremely common among our customers that they're used to write scripts or code that automate the management of every infrastructure so with virtual Sun now we have added a few new API s and extend a few existing API so for the vSphere at mean this is a natural extension of managing their computer clusters yeah I I thought just came to me because you know you think back as to what happened in storage kind of last 15 years you know there was a many attempts to do what we called storage virtualization and what a layer of abstraction in there and try to help clean it up well storage is pretty complex and while virtualization from a compute standpoint we've seen huge benefit from a storage pan standpoint there were usually real limits as to I couldn't leverage the functionality underneath it true head of genera tejan 80 underneath was difficult um you're not trying to virtualize storage here at all i don't think what you really help to simplify what's happening and you're leveraging the platform that you have is that a fair statement it is from from a customer's perspective yes it is but from a technology guess there is there are some complexity there obviously but that is the whole point we're trying to hide the complexities and deal with some of those I've worked on some of those early virtualization products myself what we're trying to do is hide all that complexity that we were exposing to the administrators before and help them in a way which is automated where the options are the obvious ones and because we we have certain constraints we have the class as we have the certain types of hardware we can afford to do some of those things automatically now and so that in addition to an extensive card compatibility list certification process who have allows to deal with a broad range of hardware without having to expose some of the gory details of the decisions of how you configure that hardware up to the administrator so but as you pointed out very well from the administrator this is not really about stores this is about the data consumption needs of their applications and that is exactly that the abstractions were exposing upstream to the application of the administrator yeah thnkx it could practically break down some of the technology versus the packaging one of the frustrations I've had when people look at this market is they tend to say okay when the first version comes out there and we shrink wrapped it and you know and shipped it out as here's the skew and here's the sheet metal and they're like oh okay hyper convergence it's a box and it's like hyper convergence as a trend the box is the least interesting piece of this it's super important to have the stack the hard worked out a bit early list who have tested that out I mean that if we simplify that that that's such a huge savings because operationally we know how things break but I want to give you know you're CTO hat you know what do you see as the vision you know this dissolution is good today but it's not the end where does this journey take us and what what's the vision going for this is the few billion dollars question I guess so I see two two directions there on one hand we today we have a platform that as we discuss already the management which is centered around the management of your corner of your computer clusters and those compute classes those management obstructs exists in vsphere today because they they're the core around which we do distributes resource scheduling around which we deploy features such as AIT's a DRS vMotion and why do you have those because applications today are the so-called monolithic applications they do not have natively the ability to be fault tolerant to be highly available to be able to tolerate and co Tori's resource changes themselves so this is why vSphere has been so successful because we add all these business continuity features to applications that had no idea about such concepts when they were in similar design now we're moving gradually towards a wall of cloud native applications their platform applications whatever you want to to call them where we see that the application by definition is more aware of the infrastructure scalability distribution and even fault tolerance features are natively integrating the application so Rick needs for things like DRS or HEA are very different or may not even exist in some of the new applications however now we see these applications having scalability requires which exceed the current limits of vSphere clusters computer classes which are up to 64 node as you understand so one set of challenges and opportunities I see ahead of us is how to deal with storage infrastructures that can meet the demands of those applications how can we use a plot from like a virtual Sun to extend it and deal with the management of infrastructures that span thousands perhaps tens of thousands of physical cause with applications that even our distribute across geographical location so one set of challenges is management of storage infrastructure at very large scale and we have a few interesting ideas and I had the opportunity to talk to customers today in a couple of events about those on one hand what we are exploring as we speak with a few prototypes in the lab is new management models where we collect and process a lot of data that have to do with the physical infrastructure with the application workers that ran on that virtual infrastructure we store them we process them and through that processing and analytics we run on them we provide the users we fed a holistic view of their infrastructure allowing them to zoom in and air in the areas of interest where that those areas have to do with problems and help them do troubleshooting and help them decide what is what are the right remediation actions or there is just a awareness of how the application is doing how it is evolving and what are the chances that should be aware of so they're prepared in terms of investment in hardware infrastructure and so on so that is one one dimension that's I'm very excited that we have some really cool ideas there are other dimension has to do with this consumption of storage I said all these nice things about fine grain policy based management where an application gets the quality of service requires without the administrator need to having to do any fine grain configuration of physical hardware well we want to take this model to go beyond traditional virtual machines with the ritual skazhi disk to a model where applications that use other obstructions perhaps file systems or native blog protocols like nvme or perhaps even object stores like ancestry and similar types of stores that they can really take advantage of a single platform with a unified management model along the lines of what I described a few seconds ago but still be able to consume different types of storage and manage them with the same approaches so that is the other thing offered to the applications for example containerized cloud native applications file systems distribute file systems that solve some of the critical problems that we know the address image management sir data volumes and so on well Christmas I feel like I'm looking back to my year to summary that I did on servers and and one of the critiques I gave is current solutions today they're using the same applications typically that sat in your traditional standard ass environments and they hadn't been it's not the modern applications it's not that you know the cloud native hugely scalable architectures you laid out a bunch of the challenges there do you think we're going to hit from a technology standpoint that the growth of those applications and the maturity of this solution set do you think they match pretty well you know yes that's a good question which is you know what we all are not debating here but I believe at a high level we have the building blocks for the technologies that are required I believe we have the ability to scale to infrastructures of thousands of physical we have the ability to provide the storage even a third model of storage with high availability and served by the platform for cloud native applications where I think the bigger the biggest challenges are and where things really you know make a difference is the model of managing those infrastructures and this is something which is a little subjective that is something you have to develop in an iterative fashion jointly with customers and see you know what is the right motor because nobody quite know these things today with this a few of software development teams that have currently built such applications they are very sophisticated or they build applications for very specific environments I think the talents and the opportunity for companies like VMware is to develop a model a management model that allows and facilitates many different software organizations from different companies to take advantage of these new ideas without having to reinvent the wheel from Scrubs all right well Chris does really appreciate you taking time I know you've been talking a lot this week as with all of us trying to keep our voices through the final sprint here lots of stuff to look forward as to the maturation growth of you know this really important trend so then you offend you forget I'm here it was an opportunity to talk with you and appreciate it awesome thank you for watching we'll be right back wrapping up day three here over the next couple hours here were SiliconANGLE tv's coverage of v emerald 2015 thanks for watching you