>> From Gillette Stadium, in Foxborough, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2019, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Hi I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE at VTUG Winter Warmer 2019 at Gillette Stadium, home of the New England Patriots, AFC Champions week out from going to Super Bowl 53. Joining me is a user from the great state of Maine, Dawnna Pease, who is the Director of Computing Infrastructure and Services for the state of Maine, thank you for joining us. >> Yes, thank you. >> Alright so Dawnna, you've been to a few VTUGs, of course the Summer Fest, which is, you know it might not be quite as big, as the winter one, but it is known even broader, I've known people come from out of the country because there's a giant lobster bake at the end of the day. I've been a few times, but you know tell us, you've been to VTUG before, yes? >> We have, so I have been to many, especially in Maine. And this is probably our fourth or fifth one that I've broughten the team from the state of Maine here and I feel it's really crucial and important because it allows them to network, to talk with their peers and to look at the technologies of how we can provide services for the constituents of the state of Maine and for our services that we offer within our office. >> Yeah so we always love talking to the users, we love to be able to help you share with your peers what you've been learning and actually I've had lots of great government discussions over the last few years, even attended, I attended a public sector show in the cloud space last year, and it's always fascinating because people have a misconception when it comes to what it's like to be IT in government, so let's dig into that a little bit. Tell us a little bit about your role, your group, what's kind of under your purview. >> Sure, I've been in state government going on 33 years as a public servant, very proud of that. I have a great group and I am the Director of Computing Infrastructure Services and it's really directory services, Microsoft stack. We have VMWare environment that we been probably nine years now and we're just implementing SimpliVity our hyperconverged, and after extensive research on that, we really solidified and selected HPE SimpliVity because in state government we had a lot of aging servers that needed to be replaced as well as our VM environment which was 44 nodes and it was a huge investment so not only on the licensing, hardware, storage, the compute part as well. So lookin' at the hyperconverged that was just one of many of our technologies that we looked at. >> So Dawnna take us back, how long ago did you start looking at that initiative? >> Oh 18 months. >> Okay, and was it a single location, multiple locations, can you give us any, how many you know servers or VMs or locations that this solution was going to span? >> For me it was actually spannin' and takin' on many of our on-prem solutions that we have. Like our SQL environment, our application hostin', the one offs, we're bringin' into that. As well as upgrading our existing VM cluster. So it's really taken on and morphed even more. We have a lot of net new as that want to participate in this environment so for us it is literally like a cloud solution, but it's for within our own private cloud solution on that. >> And these were critical business productivity applications that you're talking about? >> Absolutely >> This wasn't a new project to do, you know, early days of hyper converged, it was like oh I'm doing desktop virtualization, let me roll this out. I mean you're talking about databases and applications. >> Absolutely so we run close to, little over 600 servers for virtual and physical, so when all said and done within our hyperconverged our goal is to really be under 60 physicals left within state government. And currently today we have probably over 400 in our virtual environment today. So we're really expanding that more and bringing the services all into one knowing that we're going to have compute network and everything in our storage will all be in this environment. Plus we have a legacy storage environment, so when you're thinking of your legacy storage environment and you're looking at your refreshment of hardware and all the licenses around that our return on investment was huge for the state of Maine. So it was literally the wise choice for us to do within state government for tax payers, saving money. Also for the state as a whole. >> I have to imagine in addition to kind of the Capex piece if you're saying going from 900 to 400 and looking to get down to 60, operationally hopefully it makes the jobs of you know you and your team, a little bit easier once things are up and running. And that's one of the promises of hyperconverged, is it should be that cloud layer, it should be almost invisible when you talk about, it's just a pool that my virtualization lives on but I don't need to touch and rack and stack stuff the way that I might have in the past. >> Exactly, exactly, good point on that. Also on that we've really taken a broad look at how we can leverage the cloud so from a disaster recovery aspect and not only havin' the site resilience between two data centers, but how we can leverage the cloud for that continuity aspect. So we're really broadening that and the team's doing a fabulous, excellent job at that. >> Are you doing the Cloud DR today or is that a future plan? >> That is future. >> Okay, going to leverage a public cloud as that Are you far enough down? >> Government. So we have Azure today and we have a government tenant on that so we will use that aspect within the government tenant as well. >> Great so primarily Microsoft applications, you've moved into hyperconverged and you leveraged the Azure government certified cloud pieces. >> Correct >> Okay, awesome, when you started going down this path did you have in your mind hyperconverged or is that, how did you end up on that type of solution? >> So no, we didn't. Doin' the research on that and lookin' at all options, and really doin' the research with that, hyperconverged was more of makin' sense from the return on investment and also from a ... I want to say the simplified fashion, like you said it's simple you want to make it not so complex, it provided everything within that environment, and it was really based on how we were structured today, the investment that we would need to do if didn't go down this path. And taking in, so we did go with the hyperconverged. >> In your previous environment were you using HPE for the servers or the storage? >> So we were HPE, we are an HPE shop. And we have VMC, we have Pure Storage, we have different aspects of our storage today that exist so lookin' at that as well, we had an investment that we either needed to upgrade, replace, and, or invest. >> What I was poking at a little bit is were you HPE before, was that part of the decision to buy SimpliVity which is part of the HPE family or was that not a major factor? >> It was not a major factor, I mean we were ... We have always been a HPE shop, however we had criteria we were lookin' at, so you know after doing the research and we had 15, we were lookin' at 15 vendors at the time. We narrowed it down to like eight, and out of that we really narrowed it down to two that were in the quadrant, in the Gartner quadrant. And in doing our own research and study and bringin' all the vendors in and everything and what we had already invested what we currently had, it really came out to SimpliVity as the choice. >> And your 18 months into this, you've got some Cloud DR in the future, how are things going? What have you learned so far, is there anything you would have done differently or any advice you'd give to your peers if they're starting to go down this path? >> Do the research, do the research, be very thorough in what you're lookin' at for your requirements. And you know not only the research but look at what you've already invested in and take that into consideration and what your return on investment, what you're looking for your return on investment because you need to look just past not only your hosting environment but it really goes into can your network support that environment? Do you need to upgrade your network, your storage aspects, licensing aspects of that as well? So it's a huge investment, however look at the money they already pay in. >> Yeah licensing, one of those things when you talk about that great reduction of servers, are you today or do you expect in the future some of those licensing costs from the database, the virtualization, will those actually be able to be scaled down? >> Absolutely, and that was part of our ROI as well. By a lot, you know and that is one of the benefits of the hyperconverged as well. Once you set that up and purchase the proper licenses, I mean like data center licenses, you can put in as many VMs as you need within that environment and that's important. So you're really just looking at your compute at that, what you need for storage and compute. >> Yeah, I'm curious just spoke, cause we have, we've worked with clients for years on that and often times I've got a ELA or I've got a multi-year contract there and I have to renegotiate it, has that gone smoothly? Have there been any bumps along the road or is it pretty straightforward that licensing can be a huge chunk of your budget and like oh great, I'm two years later and I'm going to save myself a lot of money. >> So I actually am the administrator of our enterprise agreement with Microsoft, had been for many years, so I know what we have. And so I work very closely with that and I as far as the licensing and what we have, so for the renewals, I will say it gets easier. I found that being consolidated because when the agencies own their IT, at the time, we had many enterprise agreements and that was more complex so if you can actually consolidate and go into one, we have one enterprise agreement, or under the three I would say, it's much more manageable on that. So I don't find that that's a show stopper on that, it's gotten easier over the years. Simplified, it's more simplified. >> It's great to hear that and actually Microsoft has made great strides, Microsoft today is not the Microsoft of fives years ago or 10 years ago. >> Correct, I would agree. >> So, Dawnna Pease, pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much for sharing your experiences and be sure to check out thecube.net for all the recordings from the VTUG Winter Warmer 2019 as well as all of the other shows. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.

>> From Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts It's theCUBE, covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2019. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE media. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of the VTUG Winter Warmer 2019. We talk about virtualization, we talk about cloud computing. In this segment, we're going to talk about cyber security. Absolutely a hugely important to every user out there and if it's not hugely important to them today, I don't know I want to do business with 'em. Helping me to dig into this conversation-- >> (laughs) >> Is Matt Kozloski who's the Vice President of Professional Services at Winslow Technology Group. Matt, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> Alright, so I set it up. >> You did. >> Cyber security. >> Yeah. >> You know, what I said, Matt, in my career, I remember back, you know, 15, 20 years ago, security would be top of mind, kind of bottom of budget. >> Yep. >> It got great lip service, but when you looked at the project, if you look what's going off, it was like, I didn't do it. Now, that security project that I've been putting off for years, it's a board level discussion, you know, everybody needs to be paying attention to it, so, there's got to be no better time to be in the cyber security business than today, right? >> Well, you would think. So I would say a lot of organizations are taking the right steps that they need to in their budgeting and preparing for, you know, incidents or protecting themselves, but a lot of organizations, still, are just not taking the right steps to protect themselves and their, you know, patients or just their organization's information. >> Yeah, it's challenging, 'cause they say while it gets more attention, there's huge-- >> Mhmm. >> Emphasis on it, many companies are doing it, boards do care about it. Dave Vellante, one of our hosts of theCUBE, something he said many times, he said, okay, do I feel more secure now than I did last year and, you know, we've been doing this program for nine years and every year it's like, oh my god, it seems scarier now than ever. >> Yeah, that's a great, yeah. I mean-- >> So, you know, how are we doing as an industry? >> Yeah, I think technology continues to get more complicated, which is part of it. Another part is just the way that technology's integrated into everyone's lives, whether it's their smartphone, their smartwatch, their, you know, smart everything now. And the software behind the scenes is just incredibly complicated, too. So, things are getting more complicated. We rely on it a lot more and it just gives more opportunity for, you know, hackers to do bad things. >> Yeah, so my background is in network-- >> Mhmm. >> And virtualization technology and it used to be, you know, you talk about security products. >> Yeah. >> It was like, oh well, I've got the firewall-- >> Yeah, the thing. >> Or I've got something in, you know, the virtualization layer-- >> Yeah. >> That does things. I heard, the line that I hear that resonates with me is security is everyone's responsibility. >> Sure. >> And where does it go? The answer is yes, everywhere. >> Yeah. >> And everything from, it can go down to the chip level to absolutely at the application level and everywhere in between, but boy, that sounds complicated. >> It is. >> So, is it, you know, I need to have a security practice more than buying security products and security mindset. Is that what you hear and what you recommend to clients? >> Yeah, it's a practice or program. So you have to think of cyber security as that, like a program. It's about people, policies, the technology in place. I mean, one of the, you know, most common ways that malware gets into organizations is through a phishing attack. That's all social engineering. That's not exactly the most high tech thing around, right? So, there's an example of it on the people angle. >> Okay, so Matt, tell us a little bit about your background, you know, what you've been doing and maybe explain, so Winslow Technology Group, we're familiar, hopefully people have watched some of the videos we've done because they, you know, offer products that are made by other people-- >> Yes, yes, yeah. >> So you know, Dell, VMware and the like, Nutanix-- >> Yep. >> And things like that. So tell us your background and what, say how security fits into that. >> Sure, so my background is in supporting enterprise, you know, environments in the past and then I became, you know, a consultant and now at Winslow. Winslow, yes, is a reseller of products, but we also do services, which is kind of my role there too. So, in a way, the services is Winslow's product. >> Right. Yeah, absolutely. So, is it consulting, is it, you know, helping to bring in various products? >> Yeah. >> Is it doing, you know, a comprehensive analysis? >> It's all of those things. >> Yeah. >> So it's the comprehensive analyis, that's usually where things start, where we do a gap assessment and we figure out, like, hey, even if you're not HIPAA regulated or fall under PCI complaince, maybe you just want to look at NIST as a framework to start with. That's a government standard for cyber security, right? So we can do a gap assessment against that and then figure out, well you're deficit in awareness training or, you know, that firewall is not effective for what you need it to do, things along those lines. >> Okay, so you know, I mentioned earlier, security can be lots of places. Is this a holistic approach do you have? Are you, you know, data center, SAS, public cloud, all of the above, everything in between? >> I think all of the above. >> Yeah. >> It really starts with security as a philosophy and a way of doing things and then figuring out how that pipes down to the individual app components and infrastructure component. >> So, you know, I hear statements sometimes that it's, you know, it's not a question of if you will be hacked, but it's usually how soon you'll find out that you have been hacked. >> (laughs) Yeah. >> Is it that dire, I mean, I feel like the weather is, you know, appropriate for what we have today. There's fog rolling in, the rain is pouring, there's no sunshine here, you know, give us some sunlight in-- >> Yeah. >> How we can disinfect, you know, some of these challenges. You know, what are we doing well-- >> Yeah, people are doing well in that they're actually talking about it now. I do see a lot of people doing things like awareness training and it's actually really become part of what people consider, even in, like, mergers and acquisitions, right up front, people are asking, like, are they secure? How about we don't just connect their networks together and hope for the best, right? There's firewalls put in and even here today at VTUG, you see a lot about microsegmentation and what we're doing to containerize apps and secure, you know, software and applications from each other and, you know, have like, almost a zero trust policy on the inside of the network too, not just on the perimeter. >> Well, that's great, 'cause yeah. You know, I think back, you know, five years ago it was, the general conversation was, oh wait, I shouldn't do public cloud because it's not secure and now it's like, look, we understand. In many cases, public cloud is more secure-- >> Way more secure, sure. >> And many times just 'cause they update things. >> Yeah. >> You know, much more often. They have thousands of people focused and working on it as opposed to, how many people do you have-- >> Exactly. >> Maintaining and watching your environment. >> Yep, mhmm. >> So yeah, maybe, what are some of the hot segments? You brought up, you know, containerization-- >> Yeah. >> You know I remember, you know, can containers be secure? I have gone to, you know, the Docker Kan show, the group entities show and it seems like it's still a major issue, just shove it all into the-- >> Yes, yeah. In some ways too, I wonder if we're creating a problem in certain circumstances that way too because now we're giving more power and more scale in different ways that, and it just could be used in different ways that we didn't intend, I guess, right? I think in terms of segments, though, where we see, like, the cloud adoption. One example is in medical space, right? So medical records are incredibly important. When you think back to, you know, there's a server in the closet that the private practice I go to, my PCP's office, you're like, how are you securing that? Like, you're doctors, you know, you're good at keeping me alive, but what's going on there? A lot of private practices, just an an example, have actually migrated to cloud-based systems for patient management and I personally feel like that's more secure because doctors, in that case, can focus on what they're good at and they've offloaded, not necessarily all the risk, but a lot of the care and feeding and like, all of the security to people who know what they're doing and they're good at it, so that's like, an example. >> Matt, Matt, have you talked to doctors? They know how to do this. >> (laughs) >> Absolutely. They totally understand and have taken every, you know, thing to make sure that that absolutely is true-- >> (laughs) >> But, yeah maybe sometimes they understand that bringing in an expert that focuses on that more than the, you know, one hour every couple of months. >> (laughs) >> Would be there. >> Yeah. >> So, good to hear. What then, what would you like to see from the vendor ecosystem out there to, you know, is there more training, is it, you know, improvement of the products? >> I'd like to see some standardizations around the way products work with each other a little bit more. I mean, I think like, you know, you have vendor A, vendor B, vendor C, creating all these really great products and there's a lot going on from, you know, network monitoring and like, deep analysis to different technologies on the endpoints themselves, so like, traditional malware isn't, I mean it's a thing, but we're talking about more advanced protection, but really, like a framework for all of these products to talk to each other, 'cause that would, you know, allow, you know, cyber security consultants and engineers to really see all of this without being locked in to some proprietary system as well. >> Yeah, ransomware's been, you know, a hot topic the last couple of years. Are we getting a good handle on that? >> The studies that I've read recently say that it's relatively leveling off. So it's not necessarily getting any worse, but it's not getting an better either, so yeah. >> Excellent, so what you're saying is, you will not be put out of a job anytime soon, right? >> No. (laughs) >> Alright, want to give you the final word, Matt, you know, 2019, you know, what's interesting you, what are some of the, you know, top initiatives that your customers are going to have going forward? >> Yeah, so just in cyber security in general, just putting these programs together, doing the assessments they need. Enterprise customers are really interested in containers, we talked about that a little bit. So, me this year, I want to do a little more, you know, investigation and figuring out, like, cyber security as it relates to containers and how enterprise environments can secure the containerized apps. >> Alright well, Matt, really appreciate you-- >> Thank you. >> Helping bring us up to speed on some of the state of cyber security here at 2019 and you're watching theCUBE's coverage of VTUG Winter Warmer 2019 here from Gillette Stadium, home of the AFC Championship New England Pariots, going off to Super Bowl LIII in just a week. Thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

from Gillette Stadium in Foxborough Massachusetts it's the cube covering Vita winter warmer 2019 brought to you by silicon angle media hi I'm Stu minimun and this is the cube at V tug winter warmer 2019 at Gillette Stadium home of the New England Patriots the AFC Championship team going to the Super Bowl third year in a row yet again Randall right yeah paying it's my Los Angeles Rams oh so happy to welcome to the program Randall hunt who's a software engineer with AWS did a keynote this morning I believe it was a hundred AWS features in 50 minutes and felt like you we added a couple more than 100 and went a little over 50 minutes but I think we probably hit 57 minutes that was what the slide counter said but yeah I added a couple of the updates since reinvent you know reinvent is not the end of our innovation we continued releasing new stuff after that all right so our program we're not going to be showing JavaScript we're gonna take a deep breath and slow down a little bit because you know our audience absolutely knows Amazon I tell you this show remember like four years ago first time AWS presented me at Microsoft and AWS here and people heard cloud 101 and I was like come on I could have given this presentation and they were walking around like oh my god I just you know found out that you know who you know horseless carriages and I can do that do them and things like this so you know cloud we've been there for a decade but we're still I believe you know day zero day one is what Amazon always likes this is day one it's always day one so there's no way we can shove the entire reinventing keynote into this discussion so you know want to start first Tulsa rent a little bit about yourself your role what you work on and what customers you talk to sure so I studied physics and then I found out physicists don't really make any money so I became a software engineer and I worked at NASA I worked at SpaceX and worked with this company called MongoDB back then it was called Tianjin and then I am an Amazon I was my second time around in Amazon I'm a software engineer there but I'm also a Technical Evangelist and what that means is I get to travel around the world and make make all of the demos and chat with all of our customers and kind of solicit feedback from them and then kind of try to act as the voice of the customer for the service teams whenever I can get them to listen yeah so probably not going to go into open source versus software licensing of things with you because we want to make sure that we can publish I tell you space is one of those things I love it when I've interviewed people that have been in space I've talked to lots of companies that have our code in space Amazon you have I loved you know robotics and space are hard and we make it easy and I kind of laugh cuz I was an engineer as an undergrad I mean I studied a little bit of you know what it takes to break gravity and understand I always love watching you know all the shows about space and track SpaceX would you work for and things like that give me a break you haven't made space easy well I think space as a whole is getting easier this industry is becoming more approachable one of the things that we launched to reinvent this year was a ground station and this is something where if you have an S band or UHF you know satellite and leo which is low Earth orbit or mio which is medium Earth orbit you can basically down stream that data to one of these ground stations which is you know essentially attach to a region you know in this case us East 2 which is in a like Ohio area and you can go and say hey just stream this data into s3 for me or you know let me access this from my V PC which is pretty gnarly if you think about it you know you have a you have an IP address which is a satellite in space yeah I love I worked on replication technology 15 years ago and it was like okay can the application take the ping off the satellite or you know how do we do this so look we're leveraging satellites a little bit more I understand it's a great tagline to make those useful and more readily just you know it's amazing you think about when you think about my availability zones and regions it's now you know that things aren't just on the Terra Firma well I'm looking forward to the first availability zone on the on the moon or on Mars that that'll be you know when we have utopia planitia 1a that'll be the really cool AZ alright we heard the first blue origins working to Mars no well the latency you know if you have 300,000 and fit three hundred fifty thousand kilometers on average between the Earth and the moon so you know you can go around the earth it would speed of light 7.5 times every second to go to the moon is a fool I hang it's like six seven seconds or so so the latency requirements become a little bit harder there I roll more my wrong pin I have I have the Grace Hopper nanosecond which is the wit which is you know curled up and if you follow the white thing it's how long light would take to travel that and it does it in two nanoseconds so you got me I'm a physics lover and love space as does a lot of our audience so bring it down to the thing one of the things that amazon has done really well is I don't need to be a physics geek to be able to use this technology we're having arguments as to you know if I'm starting out or if I want to restart my career today do I go code or heck you know let me just use lambda and all these wonderful things that Amazon have and I might not even need to know traditional coding I mean when I learned programming you know it was you learned logic and wrote lines of code and then when you went to coding it's pulling pieces and modifying things and in the future it's it seems like serverless goes even further along that spectrum I definitely think there's opportunities for folks who have just you know I don't want to say modest coding abilities but people who were kind of you know industry adjacent scientists you know data scientists folks like that who may not necessarily be software engineers or have the they couldn't recite in Big O notation for mergesort and things like that from scratch you know but they know how to write basic code there's a lot of opportunity now for those developers and I'll call them developers to go and write a lambda function and just have it accomplishing a large portion of their business logic for their whole company I think the you know you have a spectrum of compute options you have you know ec2 on the one side and then you have containers and then as you move towards service you get this this you know spectrum between Fargate and lambda and lambda being the the chief level of abstraction but I I think in a couple cases you can you know even go further than that with things like amplify which is a service that well it's an open source project that we launched and it's also a service that we launched and it takes together a bunch of different AWS services things like app sank and kognito and lambda and it merges them all together with one CLI call you can go and say hey spin up a static site for me like a Hugo static site or something and it'll build the code pipeline build all that stuff for you without you having to you know worry about all the stuff and if developers are starting new today you know I remember when I started I really had to go deep on some of the networking stuff you know I had to learn all these different routers and like how to program them and these like the industry router so you know the million dollar ones and having to rack and stack this stuff and the knowledge is not really needed to operate of large-scale enterprise you know if you if you know a Ralph's table and you you you know V pcs you know you can run you know a multi-billion dollar company if you want yeah it's been interesting to watch too and you know I think the last five years the proliferation of services in AWS got to a point where is like oh my gosh if I wanted to kind of configure a server for my datacenter or configure an equivalent something that I wanted at AWS there was more choices in the public cloud than there was there and people like oh my gosh how do I learn it how do I do this but what we start to see is it's more don't need to do that because what do I want to do if there's an application that I can run where services that will help make it easier for me to do that because the whole it's not let me replicate what I was doing here and do it there but I have to kind of start with a clean sheet of paper and say okay well what what's the goal what data do I need what applications do I need to build and start there I'm curious what you see and how do you help companies through that so that this is a really common scenario so I this is a kind of key point here is enterprises and companies have existed since before the cloud was really around so why do we keep seeing so much uptick why do we keep seeing so many customers moving into the cloud and how do we make it easier for customers to get into the cloud with their existing workloads so along that same spectrum if you have greenfield projects if I were running my own company and I were doing everything I would absolutely start in the cloud and I would build everything as kind of cloud native and if you want to migrate these existing workloads that's part of the one of the things that we launched this year in partnership with VMware is VMware kind of interface for AWS so you can use your native vCenter and vSphere kind of control plane to access EBS to access route 53 and ec2 and all the other kind of underlying stuff that you are interested in run it you can even do RDS on VMware in my environment so that line is definitely blurring between my stuff and my stuff somewhere else and when people are talking about migrating workloads right you know you can take the lowest hanging fruit the most orthogonal piece of your infrastructure and you can say hey let me take this piece as an experimental proof of concept workload and what kind of lift and shift it into the cloud and then let me build the accoutrement the glue and all the other stuff that kind of is associated with that workload cloud native and you'll get additional agility your you know 1:1 ops person can manage this whole suite of things across 19 20 regions of AWS and you know there's kind of global availability and all this kind of good stuff that typically comes with the cloud and in addition to that as you keep moving more and more workloads over it's not like it's a static thing you know you can evolve you can adjust the application you can add new features and you can build new stuff as your move these applications over to the cloud yeah and it's interesting because just the dynamics are changing so much so there's been there's still so much movement to the cloud and then oh well some people I'm pulling stuff back and then you see you have a WS outposts so later 2019 we expect to Amazon to have you know footprint in people's environments and then you know Jeff just to make things even more complicated well the whole edge computing IOT and the like which you know everything from snowball and these pieces so the answer is it gets even more complicated but you know your your AWS I know is trying to help simplify this for use right the board I think I can say anything at all about AWS it's that if a customer is asking us to build something we are gonna do our best to make that customer happy we take customer feedback so incredibly seriously in all of our meetings all of our service team meetings you know we that voice of the customer is very strong and so if people are saying hey I want a AWS in my own datacenter you know that's kind of the genesis of outpost and it's this idea that well we have this control plane we have this hardware let's figure out how we can get it to more customers and customers are saying hey I want into my data center I want to just be able to plug in some fiber and plug in some power and I want it to work and that's the idea right we're gonna when I think of every company that I've watched there's usually something that people will gripe about and what I've been very impressed with Amazon Amazon absolutely listens and moves pretty fast to be able to address things and if you see you know if I'm a competitor of Amazon I'm like oh well you know this is the way that we get in there you know where we think we have an advantage chances are that Amazon is addressing it looking to you know move past it and you know absolutely the Amazon of 2019 is sure not the Amazon of 2018 or you know when you thought about it you know 2015 and it's big challenge for people as to because usually I think of something and you never get a second chance to make a first impression but it changes so much right everything changes that you know I need to revisit it it's like oh well this is the way I do things well Amazon has five different ways you can do that now um you know which one fits you best and I think that's important is different applications gonna have different characteristics that you want to be able to pull in and run in different ways yeah you know honestly I'm a huge fan of service I I think service is where a ton of different workloads are going to move into the future and I just see more and more companies migrating their existing you know everything from elastic Beanstalk applications so like vdq you know VMware images into the service environment and I like seeing that kind of uptick and someone recently I I can't remember who it was someone sent me a screenshot of their console with their ec2 instances in 2010 and maybe it was part of this 10-year challenge thing on Twitter where it's 2009 versus 2019 but they sent me you know they're in one large and the screenshot of the console from back then and they sent me a screenshot of 2019 and Wow things really have changed and you don't really notice it as much when you're using it every day but I can imagine you know their their Ops teams where they haven't logged into the console in three years because you know everything is done kind of in an automated fashion they set up their auto scaling group you know three years ago and then the only time they ever log in is to update to new instance types or something for the cost savings and I get messages on Twitter sometimes from people who are like whoa console got an update this is so cool and then sometimes we we get messages from people where you know we changed the EBS volume snapshotting things we had somebody who had it was like 130,000 EBS snapshots or something and they were like hey you removed my ability for me to select multiple snapshots it what it's like well you have a hundred and thirty thousand so we went in into the UI and we added a little icon that works better for large groups of snapshots you know if there's a customer pain point we will do everything we can to address it all right Randall Hunt really appreciate you sharing with us your experience what's going on with customers and absolutely that 10-year challenge we know things change fast we used to measure in decades I say now it's usually more like you know 18 to 24 months before between everything AWS in 2029 it's gonna be crazy and I can't I can't imagine what its gonna look like then all right well the cube we started broadcasting from in 2010 we appreciate you staying with us through 2019 check out the cube net for all of our programming I'm Stu minimun and thanks so much for watching the key

>> Announcer: From Gillette Stadium, in Foxborough, Massachusets, it's theCUBE. Covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2018 presented by siliconANGLE. >> I'm Stu Miniman, and this is siliconANGLE Media's production of theCUBE at the VTUG Winter Warmer 2018. It's the 12th year of the event, the fifth year we've actually had theCUBE here. Dave Vellante, my boss, was here the first year. Every other year, I've been kind of manning it solo. Great community here, I talked to a lot of users and really looking at, you know, some of the transitions that are happening in the industry. This event is all about virtualization and Cloud, and to help me put an exclamation point on everything we've been looking at here, and what's happening in the industry, happen to welcome back to the program Rob Strechay who is the SVP of product at Zerto, someone I've known for longer than I even realize, and you know, been on the program many times, But first time since you've been at Zerto. >> Yeah, first time since I was at Hewlett-Packer Enterprise. So, I'm glad to join you guys here, and great event, glad to be able to get down here today. >> You know, Zerto, company we've known for many years. I happen to know one of the earliest investors in the company, and you know, when I look at two of the biggest industry shows, when you talk about Virtualization and Cloud, it's VMworld and it's Amazon's Reinvent show. >> Right. And, I remember like the first or second year we did Amazon Reinvent, the Zerto booth was like right behind us, and so your company that really spans that gammon, helping customers with that, so I want to get your viewpoint, you talked about why people come here, but what are you hearing from the users? What are some of the big challenges they're facing, and how are they looking to manage some of those transitions? >> Yeah, I think it's really critical to have events like this that are, you know, a lot of different vendors that are here because I think when we see a number of companies going out and looking, and I was with a customer down in New York City yesterday, the software for FinTac. And what they were looking at is, how do we leverage multi-cloud? It becomes very important. They're looking at, it's not going to just be Amazon, it's not just going to be Azure, it's not going to be VMC on AWUS, they're looking at how they're going to have a multi-cloud strategy. And I think that when, what we're hearing from customers is there's a lot of confusion in the market, and I think that's why this program and others are really great at cutting through what is real, what's not real, how do you look for the ability to have that data mobility between clouds but with security. Especially today's like Privacy Day, you know, on the 25th, so, you know, you start to look at it and go, hey, security's a big thing, and a big theme from what people were saying here today too. >> Yeah, and one of the user interviews I really loved today talked about one of the biggest challenges he saw, he said, gosh, security, think about the Intel discussion there, what's that going to mean? And he actually said, performance issue actually doesn't fit, isn't a big deal for him from an architectural standpoint. Security? Oh my gosh, he's in healthcare. (laughs) If he's in violation, or if patient information gets out there, you know, this is the kind of things that put companies out of business. >> Absolutely, yeah, and I think that's what we're hearing. I mean, especially yesterday, it was okay, how do you layer encryption on top of your solution? How do you utilize the different types of secure transfers? How do you make sure the data is secure? There's a lot about that resiliency of the data, and making sure you can get it back, and it's immutable for that matter. >> Yeah, one of the things when we talk to customers, it's funny, in the industry we're always arguing as to what's the right terminology? It's like, I still get to have a company that said they had a convergence problem that they were trying to fix, and also it's like, hyper-cloud, multi-cloud, no, they have a Cloud strategy. And yes, they're using sass, yes, they're using public Cloud, and yes, almost everybody's got something in their data center. How do we get our arms around it? How do I have the services that work with me wherever I am, whether that's data protection, security, replications. So where's Zetro fit in that discussion, and how are customers doing at getting their arms around these challenges? >> So I think a lot of when I'm out talking to the CIO's and the VP's of infrastructure and having those conversations, a lot of what we help them understand is here's where you need to go, and here's the choices you need to make. Are you going to use Azure? Do you have an EA with Microsoft? Because you've probably been paying for Azure credits that you're not using, so start there. It's simple, it cost you nothing extra. Get your feet wet, dip your feet in there. We see a lot of customers of ours that use DR's as a service as the first stepping stone to getting into the Cloud. It's a nice, easy way in, they can get their feet wet, they can test out the performance, the security, they can do user acceptance testing without actually having to go there. They can also get a realistic view of the cost. I think that was talked about earlier today too. With some of the Amazon stuff is that really, you have to understand the cost. It's not the same as owning it on Prime. But then again you're not having the on Prime anymore, so if you can get away with that, when we see people taking strategies, a lot of it is data center consolidation, but maybe now I'm down from six data centers to two. And I still need to have that third copy. Where do I put that third copy? Do I put it at another data center? Do I go to a manage service provider, cloud service provider, or do I go to the public cloud? So, what we try to do is offer them a platform, the Zerto platform, that can actually take them to all those different places. We can take them there and bring them back. Yes, people use use for DR, but really that data mobility and the data flexibility really helps them stay away from the vendor lock-in as well. >> What are you hearing from customers when they talk about vendor lock in? There's very few companies out there that do a good job at being, it's like, oh, the VM ware, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, we can actually help you across the board there. >> Rob: Yeah. >> How much is lock-in a concern, and how do you as a software company stay agnostic and still fit into all of those environments? >> Yeah, the staying agnostic is really tough because some people are nicer than others, you know, to work with, and you know you try to not pick your favorites, but a the same time, we let our customers drive us to where they are going. I think that when we started to look at the bigger picture, people start out, you know, Amazon's the 800 pound gorilla in the space, everyone tries Amazon first. Maybe they didn't like or have the experience they thought they would, it was a lot more work than they thought it was going to be, so they start to look at other options. So when we started out, in 2014 we've been shipping our to Amazon, DR to Amazon part of our platform. Now, over the last year, we've added in the go-to and go-back from Azure, and we'll soon release the next iteration of that next month that will take even further among and across those different platforms. And I think to your point, it's a how can we give our customers choice? If you want to use a manage service provider, such as an IBM where they're based on Cloud foundation from VMWare, you can use that. If you want to then go from there to Amazon, our product will actually enable you to do that. And I think that's what we can do is look at our customers, and they've, luckily enough, driven us to this heterogeneous cloud environment. >> I want to get your comment on something. When people talk about compute moving to a more utility model, but it's not the way utility was where if I'm getting energy, as a consumer, from one place or another, I don't care whether it's wind, solar, or coal, nuclear, because I'm just getting it. When I look at Cloud computing, even infrastructure's a service. There's things that need to happen. When I talk to most software companies, it's yes, I'm going to support across the board, but there's special integration. There's things that I can do to make Amazon better, Azure better, Google better, and it's all a little bit different, and even with things like cooper netties, it's not homonogizing IT. The big problem we see out there is IT is a heterogeneous mess. There's never killing anything, it's all add this and add this, and now we've got a bad episode of Hoarders. >> Yes. (laughing) >> Is what we got, so I'm curious from a customer standpoint and from a product standpoint, maybe you know you could talk a little bit about that. >> I think our customers have been very clear to us that's simplicity, and I think that's what you're getting at is that simplicity is job one for us. If we're not being simple about what we do, and we're not really trying to make it all that one platform, we're not doing our job. We're doing a disservice our customers. So our Azure product looks identical to our AWS looks identical to our IBM looks identical to one of my other cloud service provider's products. Looks the same as your on Prime VMWare to VMWare or VMWare to HyperV for that matter. I think that part of it is that we've taken an approach that, exactly that. We got to be heterogeneous, but we've got to make it all look the same and be the same user experience. So, I think what we as an industry can do better is really focusing on user experience and single platform to help across these because like you said, we have a customer, he uses both AWS and Azure. And he was on of our first customers on AWS and one of our first customers using our Azure product. He said that certain Linux systems actually run better on Azure than they did on Amazon, and that surprised him. But he was able to go up and test them out, put them up there, felt them over, and do them in a test bubble, and see how well they ran, and I think to your exact point it's that was a surprise to him, and I think it's that your mileage will vary with the different clouds, and being able to go there and test on them is very important 'cause you're going to find that, like he did, he's a smaller company, it's a refabrics manufacturer, TenCate, they really focused on having that multicloud strategy because for them, they didn't want to have all their eggs in one basket either, but they found that certain applications ran better on Azure, certain ran better on AWS, so they're going to have that multicloud strategy. >> Alright, Rob, help bring us home. What brings Zerto to an event like this, kind of user groups in general, to VTUG specifically? >> Yeah, so the VTUG, we've been a long term supporter of this, I think since pretty much the founding of the founding of the company, so one of the reasons is a lot of out customers come to... So, we want to support them getting more knowledge out there, obviously we get to reach more customers and more potential customers, but at the same time, it's about the community and building that community. We look for more, in fact, we're starting to do even local user groups of our own. We've seen that the user groups have fallen off, and in particular around disaster recovery, in the IT resiliency, there's really no place to go. You had ISACA, you had different organizations for certifications, but really, that community where I can go and understand what are my peers doing, and get that group learning is so important, and that's why we've been a long term supporter of this. >> Alright, well Rob Strechay, really appreciate you helping me wrap up, put an exclamation point on what's going on here at the show as well as in the industry are all the major changes happening, virtualization and Cloud. Make sure to check out TheCUBE.net for all of our coverage. We have a huge line up of 2018 events. Feel free to reach out to the team. As always, I'm really to get on Twitter, I'm just @stu, @-S-T-U, and thank you so much of watching, I'm Stu Miniman, and you've been watching theCUBE. (techno music)

(electronic music) >> Narrator: From Gillette stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2018 presented by SiliconANGLE. >> I'm Stu Miniman, and we're at the VTUG Winter Warmer 2018. Always love at these user conferences, and we get to talk to a lot of the users, and we've had a bunch. Next user we have on the program is Erik Kurlanska, who's a systems engineer at MMC. Thanks so much for joining us, Erik. >> Thanks. >> Alright, tell us a little bit about your background. You're coming down here from Maine. The people that run this event are also from Maine. >> Yeah, I mean, it's a nice event. I've been for the past four years, and I learn something new every year. It's a good time. It's a good networking moment for a bunch of people, and there's always something new on the horizon. That's what I like. >> So you're a systems engineer. >> Tell us a little bit about what you do in your role, the industry you're in, things like that. >> Yeah, I'm in the healthcare industry in Maine and like you said, what I do is basically one of the lead virtualization people in my group and we're just basically every day working on VMware and new products coming in, new applications, building them up and testing and that kind of great stuff. >> Can you give us just thumbnail sketches to kind of location, number of servers, number of people on your team? >> Erik: Sure, yeah. >> How do you manage it as to number of VMs or however? >> On our team right now there's three of us and that's just the virtualization team. We have a couple thousand VMs, probably 110 servers, Blades, all Cisco Blades nowadays. And that's the extent of what we have, and for storage we have many, many petabytes of storage. >> Okay, tell me. You're in healthcare. You've got virtualization. The good thing is, there's nothing changing in your environment, right? >> (laughs) Right. >> There's not new requirements from the business. I'm sure they're throwing tons of money at you, and the government stays completely out of your way. So what are some of the challenges you're facing? >> Exactly. The challenges there are, again, it's money. What can you do for such a small amount of money? Again, we're trying to find very good tools to monitor our everything, networking, servers, virtualization. That's one piece that we've had trouble in the past with a good tool to monitor everything across the board. We're just having a hard time trying to find that, to be honest, so it's a struggle. >> Yeah, tell me what tools have you worked through and what's the gap? I always love to hear, it's like, "Okay, hey vendors. "You're listening. Here's a user that saying you are failing "To meet the requirements that they have." So come on, give them product requirements. >> We've tried a few big ones, and we want a monitor. So for instance, from VMware, we've just stood up vRealize, We have vRealize Business, vRealize Operations, Log Insight, bringing all that in now and personally I think some of that should have been just part of the product to start. So it is what it is. But that's a whole subset of tools that we need just to manage our virtualization environment. We also have another tool called Turbonomic. We've used that for years, and it's done pretty well for us. But again on the networking side, that's a whole different department. So those guys have their own separate tools. They use WhatsUp Gold. They've had challenges with that, and all along the way, every different vendor, like we have Epic for one of our major EMRs, and they have their own sets of monitoring tools for just Epic, so it's tough to get one straight answer from one company. We also have another product called ControlUp. I don't know if you're familiar with that one. For all of them to give us one concise answer, it's nearly impossible. >> Yeah, unfortunately we have this joke that single pane of glass is spelled P-A-I-N. >> Exactly. >> Because that is what IT feels when they're trying to do this these days. If you were to have the magic wand out there, what are you looking for? Obviously it needs to be free and support everything, but what are some of the big gaps that you see? >> Part of it is, integration with the management interface tools. We have Cisco's UCS Manager. That's one interface. You have to go to manage this. You can't get there from here kind of thing. I'm from Maine, so. (Stu chuckles) You can't manage your Cisco stuff right from VMware, and then you have ControlUp that you need to go to another pane. There's just 10 panes of glass. You can spend all day looking at 10 different things and get eight to ten different answers. >> I thought vCenter should be at the center of a lot of things there. Don't most of the vendors kind of integrate well? I would think especially all the VMware products would have a similar look and feel now. >> They should. They should. >> They're just not meeting up to what they need to. >> I think they're trying with like Lifecycle Manager for instance from VMware. They're trying to get there, but it's not there yet. It really isn't. If you start greenfield, I would say, and you start with Lifecycle Manager, and you bring in all those products in one fell swoop, it'll probably work great, but for us, that hasn't been the case. >> Okay. Talk about what brings you to an event here. What have you seen so far? What interests you in the keynotes? When are you going to go to the breakouts? I'm sure the hallway conversations are of use. >> Sure. The hallway conversations are one of the big things for us because you meet people in the industry, a lot of them are doing the same thing, using the same tools, having the same problems, and it's great to talk about them and come up with solutions between ourselves and converse in that fashion. It's a great experience to come to these. You learn a lot from a lot of people. >> Any specific technologies or areas that you're specifically interested in digging into? >> So Hyper-Converged, we're trying to get into that a little bit more, and there's three or four major players, and we're evaluating all of them now. I've spoken to other people at other hospitals locally that have some Hyper-Converged, and they're happy with one product versus another, so I'm just trying to, pros and cons of that, see what we can. >> Let me ask, is there a certain business challenge just to simplify overall going into Hyper-Converged? Is the economics of it, the management of it, what's kind of the business objective to look at that space? >> We have a couple smaller hospitals, and they have a lot of legacy storage, a lot of legacy servers and Blades, and again, Hyper-Converged is a good fit for them because they can just plop everything in one unit and call it good, and so we're trying to do that for a couple smaller hospitals and kind of bring them into the fold that way. >> How does cloud fit in your overall picture, or does it fit into your discussion today? Cloud, the SaaS application, everybody's using some, public cloud regulations might be hurting you. But what is the cloud scenario for you? >> Right now we have just a few apps that are cloud-based. And that's it. Not a lot in the cloud because we're healthcare so far. >> Alright, Erik, anything else from kind of the hallway conversation that you're hearing, some of the big challenges you're seeing, or what people are excited about these days? >> I think right now the big thing is the Spectre/Meltdown thing. Nobody really knows what it's going to do. UCS, we're still waiting for Cisco to come out with firmware for the Blades and kind of to go through that testing. VMware came out with some patches, they pulled them back. So it's kind of a big mess, and it worries us a bit. However, all of our Blades, everything is RAM-bound basically for us. We even have most of our Blades have 768 gigs of RAM, but CPUs at 20%. The memory's 90% used, so that's what it is. >> So just if I hear you right, if all of a sudden they said, "Hey, you're going to get 30% less "performance there," you'd be like, "Yawn. That really didn't impact us." >> Exactly. >> It's more the security gaps that you need fixed now. >> And we can't fix them because the solution isn't there. So, yeah. >> Stu: Hoo, boy. >> It's tough. It's a new challenge every day. >> (laughs) Yeah, just last thing. How do you keep up with everything that's going on? >> Well that's, again, a great question. I think it's hard. It gets harder and harder, and they want you to do more with less every day. I'm not sure how we keep up, really. Get a tool that can do everything. That just doesn't exist yet. >> Erik Kurlanska, really appreciate you sharing with your peers, which is really a main function of a user group like this. We're thrilled to be able to share this with our community. I'm Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE. (electronic music)

(lively techno music) >> Announcer: From Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2018, presented by SiliconANGLE. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of the VTUG Winter Warmer here in 2018. Happy to welcome to the program, first time guest and first time company on the program, Dilip Advani, who's the vice president of marketing at Uila. Great to see you. >> Thank you Stu. Great to be here. >> All right, so Dilip, first, tell us a little bit about your background and what brought you to Uila. >> Yeah. So again, my background has been on the analysis side and the protocol analysis side. I have been, in the past, focused on the wireless aspects of the business. I have led teams on product strategies and product marketing in my past history. What I have done is, the reason I came to Uila, is because of the rich history, from the founders who have great experience on the deep packet inspection and the protocol analysis side. And they decided to bring this to the virtualization world and that's what got me very interested in Uila. >> Okay. So Uila itself, we've worked with a number of the team. Fluke Networks? Was that where... >> This was, yeah this was from the original AirMagnet Fluke Networks team as well. So this is the team that actually built the world's first analyzer product, which was Net XRay from Cinco Networks. >> Okay, great, tell us the why of Uila, why today, what's different, what's the big problem it's helping us solve. >> Yeah, so before I talk about what Uila does, and then, what role it plays in the industry, I wanted to address one question that people frequently ask us, "What does Uila actually mean?" The joke around the office is that, because the founders like to go to Hawaii, a lot, >> Stu: (laughs) >> That's why they came up with the Hawaiian name. It actually means "lightning in the cloud" in Hawaiian. But there's a deeper meaning to that. We, actually, we are the power and the guiding light behind some of the challenges that people have with their cloud environment. So what Uila, If you step back and talk about what Uila as a company does, we are a young and dynamic company based out of the Silicon Valley, and what we do is, we do application-centric infrastructure monitoring. We pinpoint the bottlenecks that may exist on your infrastructure, and we also help users on the hybrid cloud workload migration strategy. >> Yeah, I hear "application-centric," and there's been hardware companies that sometimes use that term, and it really more infrastructure-centric, that applications sit on. So, maybe tell us a little bit about where you sit and what you look at and how much is kind of tied to the application versus the infrastructure. >> Absolutely, right. At the end of the day, everything goes back to the application, all the business service. And obviously, the business service is running on the infrastructure. So we target the IT operations team. We want to make sure that they don't end up being the fall guy, or the team to be blamed for anything and everything that goes wrong with the network. Sometimes it is the infrastructure, but at times it could be the application itself, as well. So, that is where Uila plays a role, to help in that full stack monitoring, to avoid the finger-pointing discussion that takes place between the operations team as well as the application teams, or any other teams within the organization. >> I think that's a great point. It's interesting, when the dev ops wave, some people throw out that term "no ops," it's like, operations is real important. I interviewed Solomon Hykes from Docker, and he said, "The reason we did container wasn't to get away from the operator, it was actually to create tools to help the operator, and it enables the developer and the application side, but ops is still pretty critical." >> Absolutely, absolutely. That's where, I think, everything ends. So that's been our focus, to make sure that we provide a solution for that particular team, so that they can help solve any challenges that you may have in your data center. >> Okay, need to understand where this lives, because, today, customers, especially at an event like this, there's virtualization and there's cloud, and there's a huge spectrum of what cloud means to customer. Some of them, cloud is, I'm a small company, maybe it is mostly public cloud. Everybody's doing SaaS. Most companies have some in their on-premises, whatever you want to call that, and heck, there's even the edge stuff, is becoming majorly important, but it's the, everything, whether you call it multi-cloud or hybrid cloud, how do you put that all together? There's lots of challenges there, where do you fit in this overall puzzle? >> Absolutely. In terms of the private cloud, like I mentioned, our main goal is to help you solve the performance bottleneck, whether it's on the application side or the infrastructure side, and help you solve that problem. But what trends we are seeing, is, a majority of the customers, just like the industry in general, is looking towards the hybrid cloud, or multi-cloud, or whatever you want to call that. We are seeing a lot of customers move towards that strategy, but again, they are struggling with defining that strategy. They're struggling with how you get going on this particular path of taking their applications or their business services, which, traditionally I've stated in the private data center and moving it to the public cloud as such. So that's where we've seen organizations struggle with understanding what their current scenario looks like, what their current applications look like, how they're dependent on each other. Again, documentation, obviously, as you know, is that last thing on IT people's minds. Or, if they have a document ready, it's outdated as soon as it's created. So that's where we've seen a lot of organizations struggle, with getting that visibility into what exists within their environment, as they plan about taking their applications to the hybrid cloud. >> Okay, so Dilip, I just want to make sure I understand. Things like performance management, do you look at both sides of a hybrid, both the public and the private, or is it primarily in the private? >> We look at both sides, on the private side as well as the public side. And on the private side, like I mentioned, not only do we help on the performance monitoring there, but we also help you define your migration strategy. >> Okay, when I think about all those things you were talking about, I'm surprised I haven't heard some mention of machine learning, artificial intelligence, 'cause things are growing, things are changing so fast, there's no way the administrator can do it themselves, what's the secret sauce, where's the software, where do you fit in, or do you just stay away from those buzzwords? >> No, no, no, again, I think everybody likes to use those buzzwords. >> Stu: (Laughs) >> We do the same as well. I think, when you think about artificial intelligence, or machine learning, at the end of the day, it goes back to the predictive analysis capabilities that organizations must have for their data centers, because at the end of the day, it's about being proactive, not just being reactive, to issues that could be occurring on your network. So, mining the data that's being collected on your current environment and using that, by artificial intelligence, or machine learning, to figure out what are the resources that will be needed as they expand their own capacities within their own environment and such. Or, being able to predict that they need to assign certain resources, or they're going to run into a certain issue, if they don't assign certain resources, or they don't do something, which could impact their business performance. >> Okay, Dilip, want to just step back for a second, give us a snapshot of the company. How many people, what can you share about funding, the state of the product, is it, actually GA? >> Yeah, absolutely. Like I mentioned, we are a young and dynamic company located in Silicon Valley. We are founded three or four years ago, we have a product that's shipping, we have lots of customers. In terms of funding, we have gone through Series A round of funding and such. And we have customers across different verticals. Whether it's healthcare, whether it's retail, and whether it's MSB type of customers as well. >> And you're 100 percent a software company, how do people engage? Is there like a free trial demo type thing, or how do people get started? >> Yeah. Again, we're a pure software company, so if you look at how Uila gets installed, we get installed as a guest VM, on top of the hypervisor. So this could be a Hyper-V environment, or it could be a VMware type of an environment. And then what we do is we do deep packet inspection to get the application and the network information. >> You mentioned VMware and Hyper-V, public clouds, which ones? >> Public clouds, AWS, Google cloud, so we are more agnostic on that side. >> Stu: Great. >> So we do deep packet inspection, to get those details, on the application and network side, and then we also talk to vCenter, to get all of the compute and storage statistics. So again, a pure software solution, we do have trials available, we have a 30-day trial available for our software, so in case anybody is interested, they can obviously go to our website, at Uila.com, and then request a trial. We work with the customer to install it, we train the person who's doing the trial, and then, after the trial, we even do data reviews, and show you what issues that may be existing in your network. So like a true performance assessment of your data center. >> Okay, and who's the typical administrator of this? Is this same person using vCenter admin, or doing their public cloud management? And I'm curious what dynamics you're seeing in the company, when they've got both sides of that, and how that plays? >> Yeah. So typically, we're seeing virtualization engineers, or IT architects, who are using the Uila solution. And the trend we are seeing between the private and the public cloud is that many of the people who had the responsibility on the private side, it's the same group of people who are still responsible for managing the environment on the public cloud side. So it's not only important to make sure the availability of the infrastructure continues, as you go from your private to your public cloud, but also the application and user experience continues, so that's why having the same group of people managing and monitoring is the trend that we are seeing with our customers. >> Okay. Dilip, want to give you the final word. What brings Uila to an event like this? >> Again, this is the first time we've come to VTUG, we have been doing many other community events, in other locations. Uila believes in working with the community, so that's why we've been engaged with the vExperts, as well as the community in general. And we think this is one of the premier events where the right people in the community, in terms of the technical professionals, hang out. So that's why we decided to come to the VTUG event. And I'm pretty sure I will be back for the Summer Slam as well. >> Well, Dilip Advani, really appreciate the updates, and telling our audience a little bit about Uila, it's lightning in the cloud. For some reason we haven't had the CUBE yet in Hawaii, maybe we need to re-change >> Instead of water, we'll have mai tais there. (laughing) >> Absolutely. Lots more coverage here, at the VTUG Winter Warmer 2018, I'm Stu Miniman, you're watching theCUBE. (energetic techno music)

>> Announcer: From Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, it's theCube! Covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2018, presented by Silicon Angle. >> Hi I'm Stu Miniman and this is the VTUG Winter Warmer 2018. Happy to welcome to the program a regular here at the VTUG, but no longer a local, so Chris Colotti who's currently the Field CTO at Tintri, great to see you Chris. >> You too Stu, it's been a while. >> And love the attire. >> I know, I think every time I come and do a presentation, I have a Patriots jersey on of some kind. >> Absolutely, I mean there's a few things we know you for, so you love your virtualization, you love your Patriots, and there's usually some workout thing, so are we going to get some fitness tips (mumbles)? >> Not today, actually you don't want to know what I did the other day with a buddy of mine, so you'll see me hobbling around because it was not a good leg day (laughs). >> Okay, so we'll be getting, I always like to hear, I just had a user on of what they weren't like in the industry, so you'll give us the what not to do to make sure that you can keep your fitness goals. >> Yeah, don't hook up with a buddy who has a lot of sandbags in his truck that likes to work out with them. >> So Chris, for those of our audience that haven't been to the event, and give us just a little bit about your background, what you're doing these days. >> Yeah, so I mean VTUG's, man this has been around forever, I think. >> 12 years now. >> 12 years the Harneys have been doing this, and I've been, I think I've been a part of it for a better part of the last decade or so. One being a Patriot's fan, two being a virtualization person, and where I kind of grew my career from sort of being a Sys Admin to where I am now, I just think this is one of the better events because it's all technology, right? I mean we run into people that it's not just virtualization, you got AWS now, you got people of all walks of life that comes to this and honestly, I think you can't beat the venue, right? I mean especially, how many times have we been here where they cover the windows? If the windows are covered, it's a good year. That's what we say. >> As a matter fact, this is the fifth year we've had theCube, and every year the Patriots are still in the playoffs, working towards the Super Bowl, and they're one step away again. >> I think the worst year for me, was I actually had the center stage keynote one year, and they told me while I was presenting they were actually on the field practicing, and it was all I could to not just stop talking and say I'll be right back (laughs). >> As you said, better part of a decade you've been here, you were working for VMWare, when this was a VMUG, but you've been involved, tell us just what you're doing these days for work. >> Yeah, so I left VMWare and moved over to Tintri, which is I'll flash the word partner, I came over there, actually I came over as a cloud evangelist kind of person, and that shifted a little bit, and while that was around how to use our APIs and things like that for automation and private cloud, now there's actually three Field CTOs, I'm one of 'em, and I spend most of my time really talking to customers, doing events, doing roadmap presentations, where were going, what we're doing, I still spend my fair share on the road doing the shows and stuff, VMworld. >> You just threw in a bunch of things there, talk cloud, API, storage, what are you hearing from customers these days? What are they getting right? What are they struggling with, and what are they looking for? >> Yeah it's funny, so for a long time I was a cloud guy, right? I mean I did VCloud Air, I launched VCloud Air DR, and I think what I heard coming over to Tintri is good, folks are still struggling with that whole, "What do I put in the cloud? "What don't I put in the cloud? "Do I bring everything back?" We've got a lot of customers that have brought stuff back on premises, I think a lot of customers are just still struggling with that concept, I mean one of the first presentations I did, probably I think, here it was back in 2010, right around that timeframe, when VCloud Air, or VCloud Director was launched, Chris had me, Harney had me come down and do VCloud Director, and it was deer in the headlights, you know? It was so bleeding edge for VMWare at that point to have this cloud product and this automation stuff, and then fast forward to today, you know eight years later, I still think people are struggling with that. They're just not sure how to deal with it, right? And operationally, I think people come and really figure out it's not about cloud so much as automation, we've got to simplify the way we do things, we got to automate more. We've got to take day to day operations and do something different with 'em. >> Yeah, I mean a line we've used often is cloud is not a destination, it's an operations model. >> Yeah, for sure. Unfortunately I think there's a lot of people that still think it's a destination, the old To the Cloud ads, remember those? >> Microsoft, absolutely, there's lots of jokes on that. Yeah, you gave an interesting keynote this morning, I actually had one of the users that came on our program earlier, and she was like, "I really enjoyed that." So Luigi Danakos, a friend of ours and you, tell me a little more about IT in careers, because we know the only thing that is consistent is that things are going to change, so give our audience a little bit of taste of what you talked about. >> So yeah, it was actually interesting, so we came up with the idea because I've come to these and done technical presentations all the time, but inevitably I always get somebody, or a couple people come up to you and say, "How did you get where you are? "How did you evolve?" And people who know my story, what's interesting about mine is I went to school for architectural engineering, I actually have a degree in architectural engineering, drawing blueprints and designing houses, and they always look at me and say, "How did you "get to here? "You were a System Admin, and I'm a Sys Admin, "and how do I grow my career?" So Luigi and figured why don't we sort of take a little bit of that history 'cause now we're kind of, I hate to say we're the old guys on the porch these days, but back in the day, we were younger, we were faster, as you go forward, how do you stay relevant? And that's what we wanted to kind of talk about, so we talk a concept from an author by the name of John C Maxwell and we kind of took one of his books and we kind of cobbled it down to five different aspects and we just talked about what to think about, how to move, not just always knowing the technology, where do you want to go? What do you want to do? And how to get there, not just to sit and say, "Well it's never going to happen for me." You have to make something out of it yourself, and I think the response was pretty good, it was different, it was the first one in the morning, but it wasn't getting hit at 9:00 a.m. with technicals, it was really just us telling our stories around how we got to where we were going, and one of the big parts about Luigi was having just been let go from HP and now he's done some interviews and I thought it was really great 'cause he came right out and said, "Y'know what? "I'm going to just do my own thing. "I've just decided there's never a good time "to start your own company, so why not do it now?" And that was after he went through four or five interviews, so hopefully it resonated with some people. For me, it's always gotten harder to learn. I think as we get older, I made the joke in the session, I lost my phone first thing this morning. Literally, couldn't remember where I put it, dropped it, I called my best friend, Chris Boyd, who's one of the other CTOs and I said have you seen it? Because I'm going to send the, I was going to have him run around the west side with the buzzer going off, the Find my iPhone to go find this, I can't remember what I did yesterday, so learning gets harder. >> Yeah, well learning's harder, the bar's not that high to kind of get into new stuff. When I walk around the show, two things struck me. Number one is the vendors, every single one of them are hiring SEs, and they can't find enough good quality people, and it's more about the people, then it is, you can train them up. And secondly, some of these new spaces, talk about like the cloud space, if you get your Associate's on like AWS? Like people will call you immediately, and there's so much opportunity out there, we both had lots of friends. There's changes in consolidations in the industry, and therefore there's people that hey, it's time for a change, so-- >> Well I never thought I would work for a storage company. Well I worked for VMWare which was acquired EMC years ago, but we still never, as VMWare employees, we didn't work for a storage company. >> VMWare's a software company. >> We were a software company, and I still actually look at Tintri as a software company, yes we sell an appliance, but the crux of what Tintri does really is the software of the OS itself and that's what makes it different. So yeah, and I mean I've had to learn more about storage then I knew before, and I was telling a guy at the show, one of the things that Luigi and I talk to people, always said just learn something new every day, just as small and as silly as it was, and we've told different stories, and a guy asked me, "So what's the last thing "you learned, technology-wise, outside of storage?" I said I actually learned containers because of my home media server environment. I had to go out and learn Docker because I wanted to run some stuff and I didn't want to stand it up, I just wanted to figure out how containers work, so now Tim Gabett and I, we're on the phone back and forth, alright how'd you get that container run? And what'd you do for the storage, and how'd you deal with this? But that to me is what keeps your brain a little bit sharp, I mean I don't do puzzles and things like that, but those stupid side projects we all do because we're technologists I think help. >> Yeah, and you never know when those side projects and passions could turn into an opportunity from careers standpoint? >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Alright Chris, you've been coming to this event quite a long time, as we said, give us the what's changed and what's stayed the same from your standpoint? >> Aw man, that's a tough one because I think a lot of stuff has essentially stayed the same in the realm of networking and storage, I think there's always a new player, but I look back at the last, I'll probably get myself in trouble here, but what was the last big innovative thing in the IT space when I was a System Admin, and I go back to those easy things, like I remember when I did my first VMotion, and it was like how does that work? And I used to have conversations, and I do that today with engineers, and I say what are we innovating? What are we doing to change the game? And to me, and again this is all my personal opinion, I suppose I'll preface it with that because for most people that know me know I have a pretty strong opinion on stuff, but I think that's the tough part is how do we move forward? How do we evolve to the next, really big, innovative thing that just blows people's minds? And I think AWS definitely did that a little bit when it really started to go mainstream and people realized it was a real thing, it wasn't a book store anymore, they had this other stuff, and we go through these cycles, right? But I think in the standard IT space, I'm still trying to figure out outside of those, what's the next really cool thing that we're going to see from the different vendors? And who's innovating and who's just sort of maintaining? >> Yeah, absolutely, well I can tell you that people here are excited, there's a lot to learn about keynotes this morning, I mean everything from what's happening in the automation space, developers, not a ton of developers at a show like this, but definitely lots of opportunity there, you talked the AWS presentation, he's like, "I'm live-coding and showing you Lambda stuff." Most of the people here aren't quite ready for some serverless world-- >> That was like me doing VCloud Director presentations (laughs). >> And things like that, I remember three years ago, it was like the AWS 101, everybody was like, "Oh my gosh, "this cloud thing sounds really amazing." So it takes some time, we've heard about it. I remember back when I heard about VMotion when it was in development, and still one of those things where you look back at your career and like wow, that was an amazing, it was that magic technology. >> It was almost those conversation, where were you when you did your first VMotion, right (laughs)? >> As a matter of fact, Duncan actually did a blog post about that, "Where you heard about it?" And I pulled in (mumbles) into the thread because I was lucky enough to go to a conference and moderate a session where he explained down to Kernel Zero how it worked, and it was interesting-- >> How he actually did what he did. >> You know what they say, "Any technology that is significantly difficult "to explain might as well be magic." So you're right, interesting stuff to see where innovation's going in the industry, I think most people I know are pretty excited, there's so much going on there, there's no shortage of new things to learn, we just need to reach out and take those opportunities, and I love your advice to keep learning something every day. >> As small as it is, I told these guys this morning that one of my biggest learning experiences was when we moved, I had to learn how to drive a motor home, a house, and deal with stuff that I've never done, right? But it's all learning. I challenged them today to just whether you're going to the sessions or you're just walking around where the vendors are, just understand what those people do and take that away and internalize it and see how you can use it. >> Well Chris, I'm glad to see you're still a true blue Patriots fan there-- >> The tattoo is still real (laughs). >> You haven't picked up the Southern drawl just yet. >> No it's funny, my wife said I pick it up a little bit when I'm around our neighbors, and then when I come back up here, I can really turn on the Boston accent if I tried but (laughs). >> Well, you all come back for lots more coverage here from VTUG Winter Warmer 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, this is theCube. (exciting electronic music)

>> Announcer: From Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE, covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2018, presented by SiliconANGLE. >> I'm Stu Miniman, and this theCUBE's coverage of VTUG Winter Warmer 2018, in addition to being an Analyst, and the host of this program, I've also been a long-time Patriot's season ticket holder. Real excited to welcome to our program, Logan Mankins, number 70. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> Yeah so it's interesting. At this show we're talking tech, and a bunch of the IT Admins, they're people that you'd consider in the trenches. You, you know spend a lot of time in there. I wonder, a couple of your guys like Tedy Bruschi, Ty Law, Lawyer Milloy's here today, making interceptions and things like that, sometimes get a little bit more coverage out there, and they're a little bit more well known. Do you ever feel that you were faceless, you know, paying for the Pats? >> No, those guys, they made all the plays, they got all the recognition but, the linemen, we always knew that without us the offense couldn't go, the team couldn't go so... And most linemen, they don't want to be the face out there anyway. Me personally, I'd rather not be known, but it comes with the job. >> Yeah well, seven-time Pro Bowler. As a matter of fact, I was looking back, and there was this great video from Bill Belichick, and he's like, "There's tough players in the NFL, "but when I think of Logan Mankins, "he's super tough out there." When you look at the game now, Rob Gronkowski took a massive hit in the AFC Championship game. How does toughness and injuries, how did you think about that? Did you think about that when you were playing, versus now being out of the game? >> When I was playing no, you don't really think about it, but fortunately for me, I didn't have hits like that to the head, those big concussion-type hits. The stuff I always played with was just body stuff, and there's always a difference between being hurt and injured. If you're hurt you can still play, and if the injury's not too bad you can still play so, it was just a fine line of figuring out what you could do and what you couldn't. >> Patriots have had a phenomenal run. I mean you played for a great team. Bill Belichick, Tom Brady throughout them all, give us a little perspective of somebody that played for the team for awhile. How did you work through the changes, but yet there were some consistency around the core? >> Yeah, that's the main thing, the core, and they've had an unbelievable run. I don't know what's Bill been there, 18 years or something? And it's been unbelievable to see what those guys have accomplished and, it all starts at the top. You have a good owner and the best coach ever, and the best quarterback ever so, as long as you get the right guys that buy into that system, and follow those two guys, you're going to have a good team. >> Last year Deion Branch shared with us some great stories about Tom Brady, his, hyper-competitive type of guy. Give us a little color. What's it like playing in front of TB 12? >> Aw, it's great you know, you know he's always prepared. You never have to worry about him, he's going to play great the majority of the time and, just the way he competes and works. It rubs off on other guys and, he's just so dependable and can make all the right reads, throws, and he's a great guy to be around on top of that so, he's the ultimate teammate, and ultimate competitor, and that's why he's had so much success. >> You said that you didn't take, you played through some injuries, you had some, you played when you were hurt and, we know you had some rough injuries during your career, but concussions weren't a concern. Is it something that you look back now, or look at the game today, and all those things about CTE and concussions, is that, you know...? >> Oh yeah, the more you learn about it, the more you worry about it, because you're aware of it now. I think when I started playing football no one talked about it. There was no worries about it, and towards the end of my career it really started coming out, and more comes out about it every year so... Of course you worry about it. You hope you're one of the guys it's not going to affect, but there are guys that it's really affecting in bad ways, so at this stage of my life, it's too late to go back so it's, we'll see what happens I guess. >> Yeah, would you recommend young people going into football, knowing what you know now? >> I think so there's... It's a lot safer now. You're not taking those big... Well, every once in awhile a guy's just going to take one, you just saw Rob the other day. But for the most part they're trying to prevent that, and via techniques that they're teaching now with the blocking and the tackling, to not use your head as much, so it's a lot safer and look, at the end of the day, it's up to whoever's making that decision to play, and if they want to play, then they have the right to play. >> So we're obviously, everybody locally is super excited, getting ready for another Super Bowl. How does the team stay focused? You know, two weeks leading up to it, there's a lot going on. It's not New Orleans that they're going to, but how does the team stay focused on their job? >> Well, this team with the Patriots, they've been through it so many times, and they know what, they have a big job ahead of them. But they do a good job with what I was hearing when we went to Super Bowls. Like all the tickets and the hotel rooms for family and all that, they do a great job by getting that out of the way the first two days, and get that taken care of so you don't have to worry about that. And then it's on to the opponent that you're playing, and you just focus in on that, and Bill has, he's great at just, he draws a line, and follows that line so he'll have everyone in that line, and everyone will be ready, there won't be any distractions, and they'll be ready to go. >> Speaking of distractions, there's been a lot of noise in the press lately, as the relationships, everything like that. When you were in the locker room, does that hit your radar? Do you just focus and do your job? How does that impact what's going on? >> Yeah most stories, they don't bother you. They got to find stuff to write about but, the last one I guess with those guys, the story coming out that they're feuding, and this and that. I don't know if they are or they're not but, if they're not, I think that would upset me if they said I was feuding with someone that I wasn't, that has been a colleague, and most likely a friend of yours for that long. >> Well, Logan Makin, really appreciate you joining. Patriots has some phenomenal guards. You know, Hannah, in the Hall of Fame. You're definitely up there as one of the greatest guards in Patriot's history. >> I appreciate that. >> I really appreciate you joining me. >> Alright, thank you. >> Alright, so thanks again to the VTUG for bringing Logan Mankins. Love being here at the Intersection Virtualization Technology, and the Patriots. I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (tech music)

(up-tempo electronic music) >> Announcer: From Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2018, presented by siliconANGLE. (electronic music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of VTUG Winter Warmer 2018. Happy to welcome to the program first-time guest Kevin Kotecki, who's the Vice President of Sales at Igneous Systems, Kevin, thanks for joining us. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> Alright, so we've been talking to Igneous since really the early days, we've known some of the founders of the team. Before we get into it, tell us a little bit about your background, how long you've been with Igneous, and kind of your day-to-day activities there. >> Yeah, so I've been with Igneous for three years now, so very early stage. Came in pre-product, pre-revenue, been working with our earliest stage prospective customers and our earliest customers from day one. So, I've had the pleasure over the last few months of building out the Sales Organization more broadly, the Marketing Organization growing as well, as we have achieved that product/market fit that every start-up's looking for, and going out and solving those problems at scale across the country and having the feet on the street to help with that. >> Yeah, you know, it's interesting, we talk a lot on this program about these user groups. They're great for the users to get education; it's also a great place for hiring. I've helped lots of friends at this specific event, talked to a number of companies that are like, Oh yeah, we're hiring SEs. Everybody is hiring SEs. >> Yes, indeed. >> And I'm sure you're probably doing some interviews >> We are, yeah. While you're here. But, I love to watch the maturing of start-ups. A number of companies I met here at the first time, Igneous has been supportive of this event for a number of years. What brings Igneous, what are some of the key objectives coming to an event like this? >> Yeah, so with VTUG's Winter Warmer, it's an opportunity to see customers first and foremost, and interact with the local Boston companies that are here, that fit the profile and have the problems that we solve. But it's also an opportunity to see our partners and to have visibility in the community and show that support of the local business community as well. >> Alright, so let's talk about Igneous. At the show, it's the changing dynamics of what's happening in the world of virtualization, what's happening in cloud. Igneous sits in those spaces, and how does it differentiate itself from this massive market of cloud and storage and everything that's going out there? >> Yeah, good question. At a high level, what we do is we help organizations manage their unstructured data wherever it may be, when that unstructured data is at scale and begins to break traditional paradigms for doing so. And, the specific problems that we solve start with data protection, day one. It's a great way to help customers get insight into their full suite of unstructured file data and build an index around that that's extensible and powers their other services like archive, like end-user search and restore, and also feeds into our policy engine that helps customers tier data to the public cloud, and specifically to cost-appropriate cloud products, like Amazon Glacier, like Azure Archive. So that intersection that we sit in between cloud and storage and all of that is really around delivering the entire experience as a service and solving, day one, very difficult data protection problems. >> When talking about things like scale, can you quantify for us what's kind of the low bar for your customers? Where does it start and how big is big? >> For us, a minimum starting point would be a few hundred terabytes of file data. >> Okay, which is not that big, right? >> Yeah, in today's world, not so much, but it certainly does bring clarity to the type of customers that we can help. And really, we're not focused on on structured data, right? We believe that there are a lot of great solutions out there for protecting databases and a virtualized infrastructure, and that's not what we do. We partner with those folks. As far as how big is big, our largest customers have approximately 100 petabytes of file data, and so approaching kind of the top end of what customers have still on-premise today. >> Great. Sounds like you can start with, I mean, most customers are going to have that kind of data. Do you find maybe it's because it's unstructured, there's plenty of companies that might not fit in your bucket? And then, you've got plenty of headroom for scale, is what I'm hearing. >> Correct, and architecturally that headroom is built in day one. I think the focus from a customer standpoint around unstructured data is, if we quantify and qualify what that data is and where it comes from, it's really machine-generated data at scale, it's application-generated data at scale, and so the types of industries where we're really doing well are, call it, electronic design and automation, whether that's in the semiconductor space or in engineering use cases, it's in media and entertainment, a traditional place that has large-scale file data. It's in legal services, it's in proprietary trading, it's in all the places where that data exits. But then, it's also in bioinformatics, where genome sequencers and next-generation 3D microscopes are producing those kinds of data sets. And so, not every organization is in that boat today, right, and so we're really working at machine scales as opposed to human scale data creation. >> Yeah, and it really goes back. I think of when object storage was first discussed, you described it really well, people data versus machine data. All the industries that you went through, there's just the growth portfolio that I have to do things, and how do I take that from being, Oh my gosh, this is a challenge, to How do I make an opportunity, how do I leverage that data, how do I use it? >> It's about monetizing the data, right, and if it's just simply data that you're storing, then there's less incentive to invest in platforms that allow the extensibility of that data, to comb through it and be integrated into other applications, other use cases that can be monetized, right. And if we come back to some of the core problems that we really solve and get us to demonstrate the value of the product and of the approach to customers, it does indeed start with data protection, day one. And so, many of our customers today are protecting their data in a traditional paradigm, whether that be NDMP to tape or just working within backup windows where the goal as an IT Organization is to not impact your end users, and their ability to create the type of data that they can then monetize. So whether that's an engineering organization that's writing code or creating designs, whatever it may be, the goal is to be behind the scenes. And so when the scale of data creation, when the density of the file data that is being created creates challenges for those traditional architectures, whether that be around metadata management or some other challenge of scale, that's where we come in and we shine. And so we start day one focusing on customers' hardest problems as it relates to file data at scale and protecting it. And then, once that data's on our system, the power of that platform, the power of the microservices-driven architecture that we've spoken about here on past interviews, the power of the extensible, you know, compute context, if you will, that can then integrate into other applications and be leveraged for also very tangible things, like archive and reducing your spend on primary storage, and also integrating with the cloud. >> Kevin, one of the things that we've looked at is inside an organization, a lot of times, this paradigm shift also goes with, Organizationally, who owns this? When I think about a lot of the applications, it would be application owner that has the problem, but isn't connected necessarily with the storage admin or virtualization admin or cloud architect. How does Igneous, how do you get involved there and how do you help companies work through some of those organizational dynamics? So that's been one of the most satisfying elements over the last year or so of successfully solving customer problems, has been actually seeing the closer marriage of those three entities within organizations. So again, the application owner, the backup or disaster recovery owner, and the storage owner. And so, the most tangible example I can give is, in a world where backups were impacting end users, in this case an engineering organization that would experience latency in their application and then the work they were trying to do, traditionally their first order, or I guess their first solution was to contact the backup team and say, Hey, are you running a backup, and if so, kill it because you're impacting my ability to do my job. And then the storage folks of course were experiencing pain around trying to manage the scale of the infrastructure to support that engineering organization. And so in our approach, we don't impact the end users in any way, and we provide continuous and automated protection, which allows those data protection team members to focus on other things that are higher-order priorities than sitting there managing, actively managing, a backup window or a backup itself. That's something software does for them now, and the end users no longer complain, and therefore their daily interaction with IT as it relates to data protection is less colored by the IT impacting their ability to do their job through the data protection approaches that they're using today. >> When it comes to some high-level data protection secondary storage, there's a lot of players out there, and many of them, it's like, Data Domain? Very different from a rubric or cohesity. Where does Igneous fit in kind of the spectrum of what's going on? What are some of the companies that you're running up against that make sense for you, as opposed to which ones that we're just in the wrong conversation here? >> So the clear line of delineation between us and most of the other new entrants and traditional entrants in the field is that we're only focused on file data. We believe that the growth of unstructured data is unbounded and will continue to be unbounded and will break traditional architectural paradigms. And so that's the problem that we're specifically focused on, is how to help customers manage and protect that. Therefore, we're not focused on protecting structured data, databases, and VMs; that's not our point of entry. What that does do within that space is create a lot of opportunities for partnership, where our architectural approach is unique and is something that is very difficult to pull off if your day-one focus is on protecting virtual machines. It's not easy for you step up to the plate and protect two, three petabytes of file data, right? And so that's an opportunity for best-to-breed solutions where the customer can have the best data protection and two vendors in place for those kinds of use cases. >> Okay, Kevin I want to give you the final word. Maybe do you have a customer story? You talked a little bit about the organizational piece, but what's a customer story that you could relate that people might find interesting? >> Being in Boston, and having Boston be such a hotbed of bioinformatics, one of our recent customers is leveraging new 3D microscope technology to do very important research on the human body and disease and things of that nature, and that produces petabyte-scale data, even once it's been processed. And so what we're helping them do is both protect that and minimize their cost of implementing primary storage, minimize their cost around data protection, and not have to implement, or put IT folks in play, to manage that whole process. It's all very automated in this deployment. But then also, even more importantly, is from a collaborative standpoint they leverage us to tier to the cloud to then move that data and then share that data with their other collaborating investigators, and then also meet grant requirements of publishing their findings in a publicly available, downloadable format. And so, that end-to-end ability to provide a solution for customers that have unique challenges in creating large-scale file data has been really satisfying. >> Well Kevin Kotecki, appreciate all the updates. As we've been saying for the last couple years, data is at the center of it, and needs change from that kind of challenges around data to huge opportunities out there. Congrats on all the success. >> Thanks you, thank you very much, appreciate it. >> Lots more coverage here at the VTUG 2018. I'm Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE. (up-tempo electronic music)

>> Announcer: From Gillette Stadium, in Foxborough, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering VTUG Winter Warmer, 2018. Presented by Silicon Angle. (upbeat music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is the VTUG Winter Warmer 2018. Happy to welcome to the program Tom Rasmussen, who's an IT director, and an instructor at JATC of Greater Boston. Tom, thanks for joining me. >> Thank you. >> OK, so you wear a couple of hats, like many people in IT. Tell us a little bit about your background and your organization. >> So my background, I come from the electrical engineering, that's my degree, so I used to like the chip-level stuff. And then as time went, I got into computers, networking, and so I kind of, my background is in the server side of it, you know, the Novell, the Microsoft days. And as I became an instructor, because I actually had a service call to the school, and they said, "Oh, you know something "about computers and networking, "would you like to teach here?" And of course, 20-something years later, I'm now the IT director, and part-time instructor. >> Yeah, so I want to dig into both of those. Why don't we start with your IT hat, there? Tell us a little bit about the organization, what kinds of things you deal with, some of kind of the biggest challenges on your plate. >> Yeah, so we're the trade school for the local IBEW in Boston, we've got about 12 to 1,500 apprentices in the school, both electrician and telecommunication. And it's a five-year program, and one of the biggest challenges that kind of brought me on board was just the management of the computer systems. They need someone, you know, they had these computer labs that, as the students did things to them, they no longer worked, and so that machine went off, and that machine, and, you know, they didn't have a full-time IT person, so it was like, OK, this weekend, we're going to re-do everything and so on and so on. Part of me coming on was we implemented a VDI environment, where you might think of it as a cost-type thing, but it was really just a management, where we could manage the desktop, manage the experience. And we're about two years into it, and it's been successful, but it's challenging. >> Yeah, you bring up a real good point, though. When people tend to go in from a cost-savings, a lot of times, they'll be disappointed. There really needs to be some kind of transformational, solving some real business problems, and it sounds like you had that well identified, and while there's always, oh, I've got to fine-tune the performance, oh, the network's got issues, you know, so many devices, and what do I deal with, and churn of what's going on there, it's, you know, changing the paradigm of management, you no longer have, probably, you, running around from all of these places, constantly fiddling with all of these boxes too, I think it would centralize your job a little bit more. >> It did, and one of the kind of benefits was, well, we can't use this lab, because the machines aren't working, or it's not up to date, or we don't have this software, or we don't have the ability to get it up and running, to fighting for the labs now. You know, if a contractor wants to come in, and display, you know, demo a new piece of software, we can put that software on that for the period of time they're there, and then take it away. So we're getting much more utilization out of our systems, which benefits us in production, and it kind of, you know, the students as a whole. >> Yeah, another challenge I hear a lot from education people is, you know, just the wireless infrastructure, how you deal with all the devices, what people get access. Is that running well? You know, challenges, what are you seeing with the abundance of technology that everybody walks in with? >> One of the the things that, we do have a challenge with wireless, we don't have enough, we're not quite sure where we're going with it yet, right now we have a policy that our students aren't allowed to bring wireless devices in, but as we're rolling out new types of products or applications, we're seeing, like, oh, we actually need that tablet, we need you to bring your work, we need that, and so I see this changing very quickly, which is really going to affect us from the wireless management. We had a code update just the past weekend, and they're, again, implementing some type of, you know, OK guys, let's take a quiz. And everyone brings out the phone. Well, they gave out the wireless, and they saturated it, so, we're like, OK, we're going to fix that one too, now. >> Alright, let's flip over and talk about the training that you're working on. What kind of classes are you doing, you know, what skill set, what's kind of the... I know there's never a typical, the typical student look like? >> So, a typical apprentice would be anywhere from someone coming right out of high school, coming out of the military, just deciding to retool. So we could have a 20-something, up to a 40-something. So from an educational standpoint, it is challenging. Some people know things about computers, you know, they know a little bit about network, and it's a range. They know a lot more now than they say, did, five or six years ago, so it's a little easier. From the telcom side, traditional telephone and networking, those apprentices get a full-blown of, you know, this is computers, this is basic networking, this is advanced networking. We're finding that even in the electrical industry, that we need to train our electricians to know about networking, because the lighting system is now in Endpoint, the HVEA system is in Endpoint, the management of the security system, everything is going to be on the internet. So as I say, there's not going to be a lighting switch. You're going to walk in the door, and say, "computer, turn on the lights, mood level five." >> Or even, you have things like Nest, that I don't even have to, a lot of my settings, it's going to learn what's going on. All those IOT devices, does that come into the training today, or is that still kind of a future? >> It's starting to come in, because it has to. Those devices are there. Our heating system in our building went down the other day, and it turned out it was an IP address information, so the joke was, don't let electricians near IP addresses. >> When you said you'd been there 20 years now? >> Tom: Part-time. >> Part-time, but we talk about the rate of change, and there's always change going on, but it definitely feels that things are changing faster. How do you, as a trainer, keep up with it? You want to make sure that when they finish their apprenticeship, they're ready for the new job, how do you manage that? >> The curriculum is constantly changing, it's evolving. We're trying to fit more in, in a shorter period of time. I came out of, I came full time just two years ago, so I was in the thick of things. I'm now focused on VDI and educational resources, which, again, is kind of new to me. What tools, what are all these tools, what are the applications that work in the educational environment, which is kind of above and beyond the traditional IT piece. It is challenging, I read as much as I can, and get involved with places like VTUG, and the other groups, and you can only know so much. I can't be an expert in hardware, or software, or services, or applications, I kind of have to get in the middle, and then hopefully get someone to come and give me a hand. >> Tom, very good point, I think all of us know that there's nobody that can be an expert at everything. You set me up for the last question I have for you. What brings you to an event like the VTUG, what do you get out of it, what would you share to people that didn't come this week? >> I like coming and talking to the vendors, and seeing what's available, but the biggest thing I get is just seeing the other mes out there. Just at lunch today, I met a person that comes from a K to 12 school, and it turns out that we have very similar systems. So, to me, that was probably the best part of the event, there. Because now I have a relationship, because I am the IT guy, I am the IT director, and an instructor, and to have those types of resources is really useful and important to me. Absolutely, which is why, Tom, we appreciate you coming, and sharing with your peers that couldn't come here, what's happening in your environment. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from the VTUG Winter Warmer, 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, you're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, it's theCube! Covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2018. Presented by SiliconeANGLE. (energetic music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCube's coverage of the VTUG Winter Warmer 2018, the 12th year of this user group, fifth year we've had theCube here. I happen to have on the program a first-time guest, Kyle Ruddy, who's a Senior Technical Marketing Engineer with VMware, knows a thing or two about virtualization. >> Maybe a couple of things. >> Stu: Thanks for joining us, Kyle. >> Oh, thank you for having me. I'm happy to be here. >> All right, so Kyle, I know you were sitting at home in Florida and saying, "What I'd like to do is come up in the 20s. "It kind of feels like single digits." Why did you leave the warmth of the south to come up here to the frigid New England? >> (chuckles) Yeah, well, it was a great opportunity. I've never been to one of the VTUGs before, so they gave me a chance to talk about something that I'm extremely passionate about which is API usage. Once I got the invite, no-brainer, made the trip. >> Awesome! So definitely, Jonathan Frappier who we asked to be on the program but he said Kyle's going to be way better. (Kyle chuckles) Speak better, you got the better beard. (Kyle laughs) I think we're just going to give Frappier a bunch of grief since he didn't agree to come on. Give us first a little bit about your background, how long you been VMware, what kind of roles have you had there? >> Yeah, absolutely! So I've probably been in IT for over 15 years, a long-time customer. I did that for about 10 to 12 years of the IT span doing everything from help desk working my way up to being on the engineer side. I really fell in love with automation during that time period and then made the jump to the vendor side. I've been at VMware for about two years now where I focus on creating content and being at events like these to talk about our automation strategy for vSphere. >> Before you joined VMware, were you a vExpert? Have you presented at VMUGs? >> Yes, yes, so I've been a vExpert. I think I'm going on seven years now. I've helped run the Indianapolis VMUG for five to six years. I've presented VMUGs all over the country. >> Yeah, one of the things we always emphasize, especially at groups like this, is get involved, participate, it can do great things for your career. >> Yes, absolutely! I certainly wouldn't be here without that kind of input and guidance. >> Indy VMUG's a great one, a real large one here, even though I hear this one here has tended to be a little bit bigger, but a good rivalry going on there. I want to talk about the keynote you talked about, automation and APIs. It's not kind of the virtualization 101, so what excites you so much about it? And let's get in a little bit, talk about what you discussed there. >> Yeah, absolutely! We were talking about using Ansible with the vSphere 6.5 RESTful APIs. That's something that's new, brand new, to vSphere 6.5, and really just being able to, when those were released, allow our users and our customers to make use of those APIs in however way that they wanted to. If you look back at some of our prior APIs and our SDKs, you were a little more constrained. They were SOAP-based so there was a lot of overhead that came with those. There was a large learning curve that also came along with those. So by switching to REST, it's a whole lot more user friendly. You can use it with tools like Ansible which that was just something that Jon knew quite well. I thought that was a perfect opportunity for me to finally do a presentation with Jon. It went quite well. I think the audience learned quite a bit. We even kind of relayed to the audience that this isn't something that's just for vSphere. Ansible is something you can use with anything. >> For somebody out there watching this, how do they get started? What's kind of some of the learning curve that they need to do? What skillsets are they going to build on versus what they need to learn for new? >> Sure. A lot of the ways to really get started with these things, I've created a ton of blog posts that are out there on the VMware {code} blog. The first one is just getting started with the RESTful APIs that we've provided. There's a program that's called Postman, we give a couple of collections that you can automatically import and start using that. Ansible has some really good documentation on getting started with Ansible and whichever environment you're choosing to work or use it with. So they've got a Getting Started with vSphere, they've got a Getting Started with different operating systems as well. Those are really good tools to get started and get that integrated into your normal working environment. Obviously, we're building on automation here. We're building on... At least when I was in admin, I got involved in automation because there was a way for me to automate and get rid of those tasks, those menial tasks that I didn't really enjoy doing. So I could automate that, push that off, and get back to something that I cared about that I enjoyed. >> Yeah, great point there 'cause, yeah, some people, they're a little bit nervous, "Oh, wait, are these tools going to take away my job?" And to repeat what you were just saying, "No, no." There's the stuff that you don't really love doing and that you probably have to do a bunch. Those are the things that are probably, maybe the easiest to be able to move to the automation. How much do people look at this and be like, "Wait, no, once I start automating it, "then I kind of need to care, and feed, and maintain that, "versus just buying something off the shelf "or using some service that I can do." Any feedback on that? >> Well, it's more of a... It's a passion thing. If it's something that you're really get ingrained in, you really enjoy, then you're going to want to care and feed that because it's going to grow. It's going to expand into other areas of your environment. It's going to expand into other technologies that are within your environment. So of course, you can buy something. You could get somebody from... There are professional services organizations involved, so you don't have to do the menial tasks of updating that. Say if you go from one version to a next version, you don't have to deal with that. But if you're passionate about it, you enjoy doing that, and that's where I was. >> The other thing I picked up on is you said some of these things are new only in 6.5. One of the challenges we've always had out there is, "Oh, wait, I need to upgrade. "When can I do it? "What challenges I'm going to have?" What's the upgrade experience like now and anything else that you'd want to point out that said, "Hey, it's time to plan for that upgrade "and here are some of the things that are going to help you"? >> We actually have an End of Availability and End of Support coming up for vSphere 5.5. That's going to be coming up in here later this year in September-October timeframe. So you're not going to be able to open up a support request for that. This is a perfect time to start planning that upgrade to get up to at least 6.0, if not 6.5. And the other thing to keep in mind is that we've announced deprecation for the Windows version of vSphere. Moving forward past our next numbered release, that's going to be all vCenter Server Appliance from that point forward. Now we also have a really great tool that's called the VCSA Migration tool that you can use to help you migrate from Windows to the Appliance. Super simple, very straightforward, gives you a migration assistant to even point out some of those places where you might miss if you did it on your own. So that's a really great tool and really helps to remove that pain out of that process. >> Yeah, it's good, you've got a mix of a little bit of the stick, you got to get off! (Kyle chuckles) I know a lot of people still running 5.5 out there as well as there's the carrot out there. All the good stuff that's going to get you going. All right, hey, Kyle, last thing I want to ask is 2018. Boy, there's a lot of change going on in the industry. One, how do you keep up with everything, and two, what's exciting you about what's happening in the industry right now? >> As far as what excites me right now, Python. That's been something that's been coming up a lot more with the folks that I'm talking to. Even today, just at lunch, I was talking to somebody and they were bringing up Python. I'm like, "Wow!" This is something that keeps coming up more and more often. I'm using a lot more of my time, even my personal time, to start looking at that. And so when you start hearing the passion of people who are using some of these new technologies, that's when I start getting interested because I'm like, "Hey, if you're that interested, "and you're that passionate about it, "I should be too." So that's kind of what drives me to keep learning and to keep up with all of the latest and greatest things that are out there. Plus when you have events like this, you can go talk to some of the sponsors. You can talk and see what they're doing, how to make use of their product, and some of their automation frameworks, and with what programming languages. That kind of comes back to Python on that one because a lot more companies are releasing their automation tools for use with Python. >> Yeah, and you answered the second part of my question probably without even thinking about it. The passion, the excitement, talking to your peers, coming to events like this. All right, Kyle Ruddy, really appreciate you joining us here. We'll be back with more coverage here from the VTUG Winter Warmer 2018. I'm Stu Miniman. You're watching theCube. (energetic music)

from Gillette Stadium in Foxborough Massachusetts it's the cube covering Vita winter warmer 2018 presented by silicon angle hi I'm Stu minimun and we're here at the Vita winter warmer 2018 have with me Chris Harney who's the founder yes and president Vita great to see you Chris great to you so 12th annual one of this event it's gone through a couple of name change it's actually the fifth year we've been doing it I'd been coming for a few years before that but for just for our audience that doesn't know explain kind of the why of the V Tugg you know and what's what's changed you know over the years so so V tug was originally a still founded on the principle that we can get smarter together you know if everyone learns a little piece and teaches everyone because back when it started there was no YouTube there was no Google he had to learn on your own and you know we started out learning how to virtualize machines we learned how the emotion worked well now you're talking serverless applications you're talking crowd or cloud native you talk it's tough going to the cloud is it staying on Prem how do you automate and it's changing I mean Moore's law has gone out the window you know change is happening win weeks rather than years yeah and Chris I always love this it's one of our first events of the year the last few years it's a user group it's good grounding for me to really understand you know the typical people NIT what do they care about what are they struggling you know in what's going on in their world so you know you're going to bring us some of the users that we have on here but from your standpoint you know what are you seeing you know what are you hearing yeah so I'm hearing that users are struggling you know that the old adage 80% of their job is maintaining systems and 20% as upgrades yet 20 of some of the budget is spent on upgrades and 80 so that the dumb numbers are skewed so that having trouble keeping up with technology yeah it you throw out some things you talked about you know server lists type applications you'd key notes this morning we had Microsoft Amazon yet some developer to tracks going on looking at you know orchestration and yet some stalwarts the in the industry you know talking about you know what what's happening from from an IT standpoint where is kind of there is no typical but you know when you look at the range of people that are here um you know are they still I'm doing my virtualization rollout are they you know where are they in the cloud journey have they heard about things like kubernetes and server list yet so this audience may have heard of kubernetes very few people are implementing it I still think you know we matured 10 years ago we haven't kind of made that next leap yet so people are still they've got VMware they've got they're looking at NSX and they're running on what's the next hardware platform hyperconvergence is still a big deal yeah uh and hyper-converged is a big deal I mean we've been watching you for many days as I said this is a good grounding for us because right it's like oh well why is that AWS reinvent I was at cube con and you talk about all this stuff where you know the future is going but you know what what's happening today is super important um I like you you talked about some of the dynamics about like how they spend budget you know we talk a lot today about you know it's got to be a switch from kappa to op X and consumption and you know that that's changing a lot people's roles so training education so super important what are they getting coming to an event like this and what are the resources are you seeing that's and that are important today so at this event I think there's a lot of validation you know we we get inundated with marketing go to the cloud go to cloud and all of these users are coming together hey what are you doing for cloud and they're realizing that everyone is pretty much in the same boat together you know so so that's one thing they get networking they share their problems and what the fixes are and then the vendors they bring their a-game they really do some great training sessions so you know we've got 20 different training sessions going on upstairs and the users will go up there and they'll be able to talk one-on-one with real engineers who are doing this stuff yeah so Chris you know both big Patriots fans we've got you know Tedy Bruschi behind us here the Patriots are actually on the practice field right now getting ready for yet another Super Bowl so yeah it's amazing hopefully bring in ring number six home I think we're good lucky were the cube every time we've done your event the Patriots have still been the hunt so you know we got to keep that going but you know you look at the Patriots you say they've done so well you know other than Belichick and Brady there's been a lot of change you know you're gonna have you know this Patriots alumni is coming and I'm hoping we'll talk to like Logan Mankins and be like you know the game it seen the people change you know the strategies change but you know how do you keep that winning formula and it's a lot of its same an IT I mean so much tech has changed you know in 12 years what's the same and we you know what what's different from your viewpoint so the same you know we all have end users you know we aren't applications delivered without without hesitation or without issues so that's that will always be the same what's changed is how do we deliver that you know we used to put a server in one application and then we had sans you know so we could put the sands in and have smaller servers to virtualization to automation you know people are still looking at clones and making that automation happen faster but I think security is starting to take a 4-4-2 that you know we're seeing what's the Intel some viruses and some weaknesses so I think a lot more people are spending more time remediating possible issues and less time building new stuff yeah great points they are I mean I'm in a first structure guy by background and right you talked we went from server to we went to a VM and even we talk about things like containers and then functions it's that delivery of how do I deliver my application right how do I build modernize applications you know term you know cloud native gets thrown out a lot you know developers you know are involved here and you know it still matters some of those underneath piece even something like serverless eventually somebody is responsible that for for that infrastructure it's just you know we looked at the wiki bond research looked at you know we see a big shift going to platforms whether that be a public cloud or even something like hyper-converged there's less that I need to be worried about building and playing with those geek knobs and more software is going to allow me to handle that as data grows as scale happens I can't have people you know in there having to worry about some of those pieces you know machine learning needs to help you know the the the software itself needs to do it in that that's a shift it's challenging for people to kind of embrace that change understand where they add value and where they need to go and it's events like this that I think help people you know make understand where they need to make those transition points and where they can keep adding value is spot on there and I think people just see a point they need to learn that the more things they can affect the more positive influence they can have on that company and the long longer they'll be there the long they'll want them there if you're just affecting one thing you don't add as much value if you're affecting a thousand things there's a lot more value to you all right well Chris once again it's pleasure having you on the program we really appreciated that we could come you know help share the user activity with our community so thanks so much and you know wishing the past good luck absolutely you up for addiction on the score I hate to do predictions when we're going to be there you know I'm confident the Patriots do well if history has shown us anything it's usually a close game absolutely you know so you know I've seen a couple of Eagles fans here but a lot of Patriots colors so thanks so much and we're gonna be back with lots more coverage here from the V tog winter warmer 2018 I'm stew min Amman and you're watching the cube

>> Narrator: From Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusets, it's theCUBE, covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2018. Presented by SiliconANGLE. (upbeat music) >> I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's fifth year at the VTUG Winter Warmer. 2018 is the 12th year of this event, always love when we get to talk to some of the users at the conference which's why I'm really happy to introduce to our audience Sue Morrow, who is a network manager at United Methodist Homes. Thanks for joining me Sue. >> No problem. >> First, tell me a little bit about yourself and what brings you all the way from Upstate New York to come to the VTUG. >> Well, I like to go to conferences whenever I can continue my education in IT. I grew up with computers in my house in the '80s. My dad was a physics teacher and a scientist so we always had a Commodore 64 or an Amiga in our house, growing up, when most people had Atari, we had computers. >> Totally, so Commodore 64, classic. I myself was a Tandy Radioshack, the TRS-80 Model III. So, in a similar era. >> Yep, I actually took a basic coding class on a TRS-80 when I was around 10, I think. Anyway, grew up with computers and somehow stumbled into IT later in life. So, that's why I'm here. >> United Methodist Homes, tell us just a little bit about what the mission of the company is. >> United Methodist Homes is a longterm care corporation. We have four facilities, two in the Binghamton area and two in Northeastern Pennsylvania. We have all levels of care from nursing homes, skilled care, up to independent living, and everything in between. >> Okay, and as network manager, what's under your purview? >> Well, it's kind of a silly title, actually. In longterm care or in healthcare or nonprofits, as we are, you often wear many hats and so that's, sort of, a weird title for me, but I supervise our help desk which we serve centrally from our corporate office. We serve about 600 actual computer users and, all in total, about 1200 employees who interface with the technology, in some way. So, I supervise the help desk, I make sure our network is running well. IT has changed over the years so that we're now providing more of a service and making sure that everything is up and running, network-wise, for everyone instead of keeping our servers running all the time. >> Yeah, reminds me of the old saying, it was like oh, the network is the computer, things like that, so you've got both ends of it. >> Sue: Yes. >> What kind of things are you looking at from a technology standpoint when you come to event like this? Did you catch some of the keynotes this morning, there was a broad spectrum? >> Yes. >> What are the kind of things that you're digging in to and find interesting? >> Yeah, the keynotes are really interesting. I think the first one that I went to with Luigi and Chris was great just to, kind of, expand your thinking about your own career personally, and where you want to go with your life was really interesting. I also watched Randall do his coding which is completely outside of what I do everyday, but was fascinating. And then the last major keynote was fantastic. I think that from my perspective in my company, we're kind of small and we don't do a whole lot of, we don't run apps and things like that, so the things that we have ritualized is mostly storage, so I'm looking at better ways that we can manage our storage and stuff. Most of the applications that we run now are SAS applications hosted by somebody else and their cloud, or a public cloud, or wherever, so I'm not so much looking at the cloud technologies like more businesses are that are providing an application for their company. >> It sounds like cloud and SAS's being a part of the overall strategy, have you been seeing that dynamic change in your company? How does it impact what you're doing or is it just a separate organization. >> It's definitely been a shift in the last few years, we used to run all of our applications in-house. Longterm care has caught up now, with the hospitals, so we have our electronic medical record which is a hosted application, whereas, up until five years ago, that was an on-premises application that we hosted and had to run and maintain, and update and upgrade, and make sure was available. That is definitely been a shift, that everything is now hosted. So we just make sure that our network is up and running and support our users and all of their issues when they break things, flip their screens, drop something, provide hardware for them all that sorts of stuff. >> The constant pace of innovation change. On the news this week they were saying, okay, medical records on your iPhone is up for debate. Does regulation impact your day to day activities and what are some of the challenges in that area? >> Absolutely. One of the other things we have to do is interface with the providers. We have medical providers that come in from the outside and they need to access our EMR also, so we need to provide access for them on, sometimes, whatever device they bring in, which is not always compatible, so we have a whole other set of challenges there. Where we can manage our computers for our employees by pushing out policies and things that are required for the application. When someone comes in from the outside, it isn't, necessarily, setup right, so we have that other set of challenges, and regulation-wise, yes. The government is always pushing out new and updated regulations for healthcare and we have to keep on top of that too. Of course, we have HIPAA concerns and things like that, which is also comes into play when you're talking about cloud host, and any hosted application. We have to be concerned about HIPAA, as well. >> Yeah, wondering when I look at the space that you're in, the ultimate goal is you want the patients, the people at your company, be able to spend more time, help them, not be caught up in the technology of things. Could you, maybe, talk a little bit about that dynamic? >> Yeah, one of the things that I always say is, we need to give our employees the tools that they need to do their job most efficiently. A nurse needs to be ready to go at the beginning of her shift on her laptop, ready to pass meds, and when they can't remember their password or that computer isn't working, my team needs to work as quickly as we can to get them back to work. We serve our users, really. We're not there being all techy. They want us to fix them and get them back to work, and that's what we do. We put tools in their hands, any device that they need to make them more efficient. I try hard to provide a variety of devices, people have different preferences on how they do their work. Some people prefer a laptop, some people prefer to stand at a wall-mounted touchscreen and document, some people want to carry a tablet with them. I try to provide a range of devices so that they can have whatever suits them and makes them most comfortable to get their job done. >> Love that, it's not, necessarily, about the cool or trendier thing, it's about getting business done, helping, and in you're case, enabling your employees to really help the people that are there. Anything you want to highlight as to things you're excited to look at this show, or just technology in general? >> I'm just kind of here for the general nature of it. I enjoy the networking and getting to talk to people, and keeping current in what's happening in the industry and my career, so that's why I come. >> Alright, well Sue Morrow, really appreciate you coming, sharing with our audience. >> Absolutely. >> User groups like this, all about the users. Happy to have lots of them on the program, so big thanks to the VTUG group for bringing us some great guests. We'll be back with more coverage here. I'm Stu Miniman, you're watching theCUBE. 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Las Vegas expensing the signal from the noise it's the cue interconnect 2016 brought to you by IBM we are here live in Las Vegas for exclusive coverage of IBM interconnect 2016 this is the cube Silicon angles flagship program where we go out to the events and extract the signal annoys I'm John four is my close Dave a lot a and we're excited to have our youngest guest we've ever had on the Cuban our six-year seventh year doing it ten Maybach che who's the star of the show coding since age five welcome to the cube well actually I was five and I started with Foxborough programming a really old computer forgot who manufactured it in general with my dad's help alright so how do you feel with all these old people around you like us you're the next generation so how do you feel about all this these sub celebrity status you're famous on YouTube a lot of people love your videos you've been great teacher yeah I love to help people so it feels great yeah was that what was the how many videos have you posted now I have around 80 videos 88 it's all sort of sort of self-help programming here's how to and and your community is growing I presume is your dad a programmer he does work as a programmer yes uh-huh so is that how you first first got into programming but now sometimes that you can teach my dad for teaching the teachers okay when did you surpass your dad in in the programming really when Iowa my first iOS app t-tables which helps you learn multiplication tables I was accepted into the iOS App Store and so right after that I started using the Internet as a tool to basically learn programming and at that point I just started learning more and more yeah and you like teaching people too so not only do you develop you also teaching folks and you'd like that yes yes all right so when was the last time you push code this morning today a little update for us to admit allows you to ask another question from the result page what's cool about the the current stuff you're seeing here are you playing with Watson at all Watson integrate actually I use Watson in the latest app that I've developed which I was actually presenting yesterday at the cloud Expo it's called a stamina and so basically it you can ask it person or organization questions like who is the CEO of IBM and it should be able to answer them and so it does use IBM Watson's api's in this case relationship extraction and natural language classifier are you using bluemix at all yes I love what makes it's really easy to use the Watson api's containers and so I like it was a developer you feel like the services the richness of the services in bluemix so to satisfy your your general needs and yes what what more would you like to see out of bluemix well mainly out of bluemix nothing that I can think off the top of my head but for Watson I really want more sort of api's don't have anything in general in specific that I can think of more IBM Watson api's would be great so you've also done some development for wearables right Apple watch is that right yes I have developed apps that are actually I have a to guess up it's a number guessing game app for the Apple watch and iPhone on the App Store I also have developed for Mac OS X but I don't have any apps on the App Store for that yet what are you what do you think about the wearables thing is remember when Google glass came out John actually went and got one of the first Google glass your son Alec was wearing at his graduation and but they were sort of you know kind of not they were sort of awkward you know didn't and people said have an Apple Developer Kit was pretty weak at the time there was something coming I thought was a great first version and I loved it it's it's sandbox stuff but so what do you what do you think about you know wearables the development environment yeah you encouraged about the future of them do they have a long way to go give us your thoughts on that Tanmay well we getting first of all on the Apple watch I love pretty much the portability of these sorts of devices and there's one more one thing that I sort of like the Apple watch and the Google glass it would be best if there were independent devices instead of connected to air phones they could be sort of like a Mac and an iPhone they can share data with each other but they shouldn't have to depend on each other that's one thing that I'm not too much of a fan of about them so I mean if my inference is that's a form factor related you know you can only do so much on this but do you I mean I know there's a lot going on in Silicon Valley with the future of the way in which we you know communicate I just wonder as a young person right you you've always been had a device like this right you're your disposal but it seems to me that using our thumbs to communicate to these devices is doesn't seem to be the right way it's asking the AI question yeah so exactly is is the future you know artificial intelligence what do you envision as a as a developer how are we going to communicate with these devices in the future first of all let me just tell you our computers sort of power is not with natural language it's with math because of human is better at sort of talking to people like we're right now not at sort of mass or it would be harder for a human to do math but a computer can do math easier natural language you can't do whatsoever and so first of all in order to program in even a Stanley it would take a lot of code and so what I can really think of is we for the next I don't know how many years it's going to take a long time to get through the sort of really powerful question of answering systems that can answer with a hundred percent accuracy not even here we could do that so Timmy you've been using the internet for outreach and in building a community to teach people then great the next step is you can't be everywhere so you use the internet but what about virtual reality oculus rift have you played with any of this stuff no yet but I plan on soon yes you enticed by that yes specifically excited about microsoft hololens virtual Tanmay you could be everywhere that way all right so what's the coolest language right now for you I mean I see your we heard Swift on stage you did the iOS app order what are some of the cool things as Ted made in Python and Java for the backend and HTML for the interface and PHP for the interface and back-end bridge but the most interesting language that I've ever used really is Swift first of all second I'd say as a close second is Java because it's portability you create something on Linux and it would almost easily work on the Windows and Mac as well this job is a good language for heavy lifting things how about a visualization are you thinking anything about rich media at all and visualization you have the swift absolute the mobile yes visualizing other media techniques with the T with math and with your truth your developers what are you using for visualization graphics for graphics I'm not actually a graphic designer I'm trying to focus more on the programming side of things but I do develop the user interface for example I actually had another app except of the a few days ago a goal setting app for which I had to write inside the user interface the sort of graphics themselves I don't but you know the libraries it's 10 May you mentioned the Swift is your favorite language what's so alluring about it from a developer's perspective this syntax is great and it's really powerful which is what I love about Swift so it's easy and and powerful yes exactly so you from Toronto right I'm sorry Toronto yes we say it right so is there a big developer community there I know there was a growing one but I don't really meet with people in person and develop together I'm more of an independent developer right now but I do definitely help people want to want on my youtube channel with really any questions or problems they have and if you'd like to see my youtube channel of course it's called team live actually get to it sir yes mine it's called Timmy Bakshi which is my name yes okay can google it up and you'll find it I teach stuff like computing programming algorithms Watson math and science and so yeah so actually if you like an example a few days ago actually another app called speak for handicap is accepted into the iOS App Store and I developed that with Vaughn Clement which is one who is one of my subscribers and so yeah it took us a few months of hard work and we were even that up again speak for handicaps it allows them to actually speak I'm gonna ask you the question so a lot of moma I have four kids - or about your age they are naturally attracted to programming it's fun it's like sports you know it's really fun for them and so that but a lot of them don't know how to wait a start you had you were lucky you fell right into it five what you get that a lot of ice knows you get a lot of questions on your on your YouTube channel around that you people excited for your next video but for the folks that are now seeing you and want to get in it might be a little scared can you share what you've learned and what advice would you give what I recommend is start out slow start doing some stuff in programming don't immediately get into the harder sort of thing start with really simple applications and don't develop when you need to develop you want to essentially programming things randomly for example I learned Swift like pretty much entirely due to the fact that first of all I'm writing a book on it it's for iOS app developers for beginners and also because I would just program in stuff randomly I didn't wait for me to need to programming something or for if I wanted to make an iOS app in order program and something it's one thing I trained a prime number checker the mastery number generator stuff like that and so just randomly anything I sometimes you look really YouTube video on it to help people you could also use again any YouTube channel as sort of a place to learn programming and so use resource every developer has to pull those late nights and sometimes you to pup to pull an all-nighter have you pulled an all-nighter code he was doing it into the covers but also developers also struggle sometimes on a really hard problem and then the satisfaction of cracking the code or breaking through can you give us an example where you were pulling your hair out you were really focused on the problem you were kind of thrashing through it and you made it through this actually many I could give you but the one that I remember most is during a Stanley's development at first I was using the multi processing library in Python in order to send multiple queries to relationship extraction at once but then what happened I don't know whether it was a memory management issue or something but after let's say five queries the sixth one would be painfully slow then I tried out the threading library why not and so next after around 10 queries the 11th one will be painfully slow again I have no idea why then now this was a Python and so what I decided to do was maybe reprogram it for threading in Java and then have Python communicate with Java and so what I did is I learned job I the day because I hadn't ever touched that before because again once you wanted programming basics it's really easy to move to another language and flipped and python there actually slipped in general is quite similar to Java except Java a little bit simpler and so yeah I learned drama a day the next day I programmed in a simple release abstraction threading module made a jar out of it and let Python communicate with the jar and so after that the glitch was mostly fixed it was just Python not threading properly or you could never got through the problem I was not able to find out what the problem was but I mean yeah so what kind of machine do you run it's like driving this car multi-threading you got a lot of processes how many cores what kind of machine you have on the advance your local host 27-inch 5k Retina iMac with 64 gigs of ram and 4 cores I mean 8 yeah 4 cores than hyper-threaded 8 cores until I seven and that's good for you right now yeah you're happy with it how about any external in the cloud any obviously SSD I don't actually I do have a wood set of course but then I don't really host anything online yet because I don't have a need for it yet but then what I'm going to make a semi-public of course I'm going to need a quite a powerful server you know her too so the industry needs your help have you thought about rewriting the Linux kernel years ago I was I didn't really have anything to do so that's why I started YouTube but before that I actually I was really interested in the operating systems I coated my little own with a hello world operating system assembly which could run on I forgot the architecture it runs on but it was quite interesting for them again after that my youtube I started to take that more seriously and I didn't really have enough time to do that any projects you're working on now that excite you that you can share with us maybe solving the speed of light problem or actually mainly right now I've been working on a STEMI but I do have many other applications that I'm working on including an app that could help University students and developers with essentially it's an algorithm lookup if you'd like an algorithm that can help you do path finding for example you just put in a path finding as a tag and some other things and then it'll give you a charred I sort of algorithms and it uses the concept insights service and walks and I've also made a tweet classifier where you can say like let's say there's a hashtag on Twitter where there are two separate sort of things that you could talk about for example the hashtag Swift laying on Twitter at one Swift was open sourced it was there are two different types of people just talk about soup in general like nothing ever happened or they're talking about open sourcing let's say you wanted to see only news about Swift being open source well then you give Watson some examples of tweets that you like and sweets that you don't like and then eventually it would be able to tell you or give you tweets that the only way you like variation in Jinan yes exactly and it uses the natural language classifier service so talk about social media I mean here at your age and what you've been through and what you know technically you have a good visit understanding of operating systems coding and all the principles of computer science but as it gets more complicated with social media people are all connected what's your view of the future going to be I mean is it if algorithm's gonna solve the problem what do you think about the future how do you think about it ten years out well first of all the world needs more programmers and I think more sort of algorithms and natural language processing are the means were the topics that we're going to focus on later have you ever been a Silicon Valley not not in a developer capacity just sort of visiting it would you like to sort of visit there spend time with some of your your colleagues in the heart of development John's out there your idols Steve Jobs Tim Cook Bill Gates how about like from a software developer perspective any cult following people you love like the early guys coders any names that did pop to mind jobs he was a good product guy so if you can invent the product right now on the cube what would it be it would be mostly iron wrong sort of a QA system with almost a hundred percent accuracy that would be best in 98 we have a hologram right here we have guests interface with us that would be cool would you like to come to work for us and develop that we'd love to have you I like congratulate you on being the youngest ever cube alum we have this community of cube you know alumni and you are the youngest ever so congratulations fantastic a very impressive you know young man and really very summery quadrants break you to all and congratulations thank thanks come on the cute things are spending the time this is the cute bringing you all the action here ten may doing some great stuff he's very young very fluent understands thread and understands coding and this is the future you know born in born in code that's that that's the future developers and we hope to see more great software developers come on the market the day to the analytics of course Watson is right there with you along the way thanks for coming on the queue preciate we right back with more cube coverage here exclusive coverage at IBM interconnect 2016 I'm John for what Dave a lot they'd be right back