(techno music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its Ecosystem Partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, we are live on day one is Las Vegas, of Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. And we have a couple guests joining us now. We've got Ruya Barrett, the VP of Product Marketing for Data Protection at Dell EMC. Welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Lisa: And we've also got Kerry "KJ" Johnson from FieldCore, you are a senior systems engineer. Welcome, KJ. >> Thank you very much. >> So, KJ, we'll start with you. Tell us a little bit about FieldCore. I know you're a GE company but what is it about FieldCore that you guys do that makes you unique and how are you working with Dell EMC? >> Okay, so FieldCore is a global service provider in the power services sector. Our customers are governments and large countries. We service and build power plants all over the world. We're in the power generation business. So, anything that generates power. That could be wind, it could be water, it could be traditional oil and gas, it could be nuclear, anything that generates power. Basically, what FieldCore does is we service it, and we keep the lights on around the world, especially in, we're in 92 countries. So, other countries don't have the infrastructure that the United States has and experience outages a little more frequently than us. So our job is to get the power back on as quickly and as efficiently as possible. >> So last fall in the U.S. we were slammed with a lot of natural disasters, including Hurricane Irma. You guys at FieldCore had a critical situation last fall when that hurricane struck. Tell us about that, and how working with Dell EMC Technologies you were able to recover. >> Okay, so last year, they changed the forecast on Hurricane Irma from coming up the east coast of the state to coming up the west coast. And they were projecting it to hit the Tampa Bay area, which put all of our production systems directly in its path. So with them projecting the storm to hit us within about three to four days, we weren't prepared for it. I was on a call with all of the directors, and they asked me, what was our level of preparedness for this storm. So I told them that as far as data protection, we had replication, that was fine. We were replicating all of our SAP, Oracle, databases, all of our email via Exchange and file systems, to our data recovery center that was in Atlanta, via Dell EMC RecoverPoint appliances, so that was fine. We had a recovery point objective of less than two minutes. We could go back two minutes and be up and running. The problem was, had the storm hit us, and we had to then throw over and go live at our DR facility in Atlanta because Tampa was down, we wouldn't have any way to have backups during that time that we were live. So that was a gap that I identified. They subsequently asked me, is there something that could be done in three days- >> Dave: Got any magic beans? >> Yeah, exactly, so I'm going, I'll do everything in my power to make something happen. So basically I got on the phone and called my Dell EMC Data Protection rep, Matthew Sattler. And he was actually at a Dell management boot camp in Boston I believe, at the headquarters. And he actually took my call. He snuck out of the meeting and answered the call, which was an all-day meeting, which was, that enabled us to do what we did. He offered a solution that we could actually use virtual appliances, because we had not rolled out our DR equipment yet, it was wasn't even scheduled to be delivered for two weeks. So he shored up the licensing, he called a sales engineer, who got in touch with me, his name was Dominic Greco, he's based out of Pittsburgh, great guy. He lined up all of the resources. I got my resources together, and we put a plan together, and we actually had the project started by the end of that first day. >> Just another day at the factory. >> Hey, you know, our customers call us and we answer. That's how it works. >> So, it's common scenario for you guys? >> I think we had an exceptional team on the account, so exceptional teams always make a huge difference, and I think in this case, we definitely had a great team. And I think one of the things that KJ talked about, is how flexible the software-defined data protection approach can be. I think sometimes people think of us as an infrastructure company, infrastructure meaning hardware predominantly, but our data protection capabilities are just as robust on the software-defined data center front. So I think the flexibility of being able to do DR, and put in place a DR environment, that gave KJ all that flexibility, is really a testament to the software capabilities. >> So could we just kind of review exactly what happened? So, if I understand it correctly, you were concerned about the exposure on your remote site, right? You're going to fail over, RPO of only two minutes, so you're going to lose, maybe exposed to two minutes of data loss, you can live with that in business, right, understood that, you communicate it. But then you have no way to back up that failover site. >> KJ: Yeah. >> And so, the team came in and what, you you accelerated a DR project that was sort of in the pipeline? >> Exactly, we had hardware that was scheduled to be delivered to Atlanta, and be deployed within two weeks, but we didn't have the two weeks. >> Ruya: Three days. >> So our DR facility was still running on a legacy product, and that wouldn't work for us, because all of our production data was backed up to data domain and it's not interoperable. So, we went with the virtual appliances, and we deployed a virtual data domain, a virtual Avamar appliance, running Dell EMC Data Protection Software Suite, and an NDMP Accelerator, I always have trouble with that one, for our file systems, and by the end of the day, they were deployed and we were already starting the replication. >> So in this situation did you do you failover proactively, or you just wait for the disaster to hit? What's the- >> Well, the thing was just to be prepared. So, the storm was projected to hit Saturday. Day two, was Thursday, and we convened the conference call, an indefinite conference call, that means I was going to be on it, all of Dell EMC's people were going to be on it, until either we finished, or the storm blew us away. So we monitored the replication all Thursday and by like 6:45 that evening, all of the data had replicated over to the DR, and the next day, the office had closed early so people could go home and hunker down for the storm, look after their families and their property, and we kept the call going from home, but the data had finished by that evening. And the storm hit, started coming around midnight that evening on Saturday. So, fortunately, the storm only hit us as a weak Category 1, so we never even had to throw over to it, but had it hit us as a Category 3, we would have been very much in trouble, had we, weren't able to accomplish that. >> So I wanted to get, kind of an idea KJ, in terms of what is the business impact that you've been able to achieve? You've obviously had to accelerate this part of your security transformation, which you were able to do, what's the business impact that your bosses, and their bosses in the C-suite, at FieldCore, have seen as a result of being able to have the agility, with Dell EMC to implement this so quickly? >> Well, some of the things that came into play with the setup that we had with Dell EMC, one was the Data Protection Suite encompasses everything, hardware, software, licensing, replication, it's all one suite of things. It's not nickel and dime add-ons or bolt-ons, it's one full protection suite. So the package that we had, Matt said, "You already have this package", you know, there's nothing to buy, there was no charge for any of the resources rolling it out because we were on a, what's called a utility mode of billing, and it's basically, it's like instead of a CapEx expenditure, where we buy hardware, we don't buy anything, they bring it out for free, they install it for free, as soon as we start backing up, okay, how much deduplicated data do you have on a data domain? We'll bill you for it. And they send us a bill every month. So that helped us out. >> And you know the data domain efficiency quotient is just through the roof, it's one of the best platforms for dedupe, so it really helps our customers, especially when you're talking about a utility-base model as well, that efficiency, that architecture, that really brings that to bear. >> Dave: What do you call this utility model? >> This utility, it's the utility model, it's just one of our consumption models. It's the flexible consumption models that we offer across data protection software, as well as our platforms. >> So it's a pay by the drink? >> Ruya: Yeah absolutely. >> Now, I'm interested in the ripple effects, and I don't know your business well enough, but it sounds like, not only were you covered, but had a Category 3 hit, your customers, there would've been a ripple effect here to your customers, around the world, 92 countries I think you said. Is that right or is it, is this not a real-time business? >> Well, our users, the vast majority of them, are field technicians, they're field service guys. >> Dave: Oh. They work on turbines, they work on boilers, they work on nuclear plants, they're out in the field. They work on windmills. So they're not very technical people, but all of the laptops that they carry and hook up to this equipment, feeds equipment into our systems, and our systems can't go down. So, the impact would've been pretty great had our systems been offline for any amount of time, because when your global you know, there's really no good time to be down. When I'm sleeping, there's people busting their butts in other countries and you know, middle production hours. >> So last question here Ruya, to you, on this theme of Dell Technologies World, of make it real, KJ you've done a great job articulating how you've been leveraging your partnership as well as the technology, to make your security transformation a reality. Ruya, last question to you is, there was a recent ESG study on IT maturity, can you share with us some of the impacts there that you've seen, and how it kind of relates to FieldCore? >> Yeah, absolutely, be happy to. So we just recently unveiled a study we did with ESG, where we surveyed 4,000 customers, IT professionals, over 16 countries. And it really had to do with the IT transformation maturity curve, and their adoption. And one of the things that was really interesting is customer feedback, was that transformed companies, that have gone through this massive IT transformation, are perceived to be 16 times more innovative, be 2 1/2 times more competitive, perceived as being 2 1/2 times more competitive, and six times more apt to have IT as part of the business decision-making process. And data protection was one of the top areas of this transformation as well, because it's so critical. As data's moving out of the data center and becoming more distributed, we talked about the distributed core today, going to the edge with IOT, and all of those types of applications, there is this massive amount of data moving out, outside of the data center. So data's growing, it's moving out, and it's also becoming more and more critical for customers. So data protection, that recoverability, operational recoverability, disaster recoverability, cyber recovery, are becoming more and more critical. And there was three things in the maturity curve on data protection. Transformed companies are basically protecting data in five types of different applications. So they're not really looking at just physical protection, which a lot of legacy companies are still kind of stuck at physical, and maybe virtual, and starting to really do a lot more on virtual. These guys are looking at data protection across distributed environments, they're looking at public cloud, they're looking at hybrid cloud, they're looking at physical, virtual, so very comprehensive. So that was number one. Two, is really self-service models. Transformed companies, that have gone through IT transformation for their data protection have enabled application owners to be able to do self-service. So that has become a part of how they offer data protection. And the last one was really about automation and automated policies. So when you add a virtual machine, when you bring in a new system, how do you automatically apply policies, so protection isn't something that needs to happen as a backend consideration? And I think KJ talked about some of those things as well. And they're doing a self-service model as part of what they're rolling out, as well as the automated protection policies. So I think they're well on their way to transformation, and this is what makes it great, in terms of the partnership we have with our customers. >> Well thank you both so much for stopping by, sharing, KJ the great successes that you've had with that one very, very potent example, Ruya thanks for stopping by and sharing with us that data protection continues to be hot, hot, hot. >> And thanks for having us again. Thank you, nice seeing you guys. >> Our pleasure. We want to thank you, you're watching theCUBE live, day one, Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas, stick around. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. We'll be back after a short break. (techno music)