>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCube. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC, and it's ecosystem partners. (light music) >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with my co-host Keith Townsend. Craig Nunes is here, he's the CMO of Datrium. >> Yeah. >> Dave: Long time CUBE's alum, it's great to see you again. >> Great to be back, awesome. >> Dave: And James Stock is a Datrium customer, he's the Vice President of IT at Grow Financial. James, welcome, first time on theCUBE, looking good man. >> It is, yes, thank you very much. >> All right, Craig, Datrium-- >> Yeah. >> You guys are smoking hot, changing the storage world give us the quick update, we'll get into it. >> Look, we are filling a huge gap, bigger, I think, than we had imagined. Because, a lot of, it's no secret, the array market is in decline. And Hyper Converged has tried to reinvent that market. And it has to a degree on the low end, BDI, that kind of stuff. But data centers need an answer that scales. They need an answer that's got resilience. And it turns out, after all these years, back up is still a problem. Figuring out the cloud is still a problem. And so we put together a system that really takes a tier one approach to HCI, a full on scale out back up system and a cloud DR approach built into one convert system. And customers love it. From cloud to back up to performance in primaries, it's been awesome reception. >> Well, let's see if they really love it, I guess. So James, first of all, so let's start with Grow Financial, your role, you heard the pitch, and then we'll get into how it your applying it to new business. But, tell us about your company. >> So we started in 1955 in a broom closet in McDowell Air Force bases headquarters, there in Tampa. And over the years, we've grown. We're now a $2.4 billion in assets. We have over 200,000 members, and we do lending throughout the south eastern United States. Offices in Tampa, and in South Carolina. >> So in your role, head of IT-- >> Basically, what I tell people, is that if it plugs in, I'm responsible for it. >> (laughs) okay. All right, so, take us through the Datrium project of before and after, what was the motivation? >> So, really, the issue that we were running into is that our existing storage solution, which was the Dell SE, was our trays were running end of life, and if we only had a couple of them, it probably wouldn't have been a problem. We might not of even entertained it, but we had probably two dozen. So, we started looking around and said, "all right, "well, what does it cost to replace what we've got? "and what else is on the market?". And we started to find out that just replacing what we had with like, was going to cost almost 200 grand more than what our full Datrium replacement cost. So, it started making financial sense, right away. But, we met up with Datrium probably, might've been summer of 2016, when they were on version one. And it looked good, you could see the promise, the whole idea of having that back in storage, that was really intriguing, because none of the other players had anything like that at the time. And we said, "All right, we're not ready." And then when they came back out in May of last year, whoa, the difference in what they've done in such a short period of time is what really kind of blew us away. >> Okay, but, we're here at Dell Technologies World, where you guys are a partner of Dells, right? So you're using Dell servers and right? >> James: Yep. >> That's part of the deal here, so, they let you in. >> They let us in, in fact, our compute nodes, it's no secret, our Dell branded compute nodes, and in fact we have partnered with Dell in one of their data centers to set a world record IO mark on Dell here, just to prove a lot of the performance specs that we've shared in the market, proved it out. And we've proved it out on Dell here. >> Cool, so James, talk to me a little bit about your perception of Olby converge. Because I've talked to Craig about Olby convergence versus Hyper convergence versus Converge infrastructure, at the end of the day, you just want a reliable, fast system, however, what about the Olby convergence story drew you today? >> So, I didn't have to replace any of the nodes I had, if I really didn't have, if I wanted too. So I've got CISCO nodes around my call center, I've got Dell nodes, I've got Datrium nodes now. But at the time, it wouldn't have mattered. I could've just, like, in my CISCO environment, I actually had to add a raid controller to the UCS box and then I could throw any solid state drives that I wanted into the device. So that was where it really got compelling, and I'm like wait a minute, so you're telling me, I don't have to buy enterprise flash drives, and stick these into each of my servers. I could just go down to Best Buy, or wherever local, grab something off the shelf, and throw it in there, as long as the server supported it? And, okay, where do I sign up? >> So we've heard that story, and one of the things that some of the hyper converge infrastructure players say, you know what, we could do that, but it's almost impossible to support. Because of firmware issues, et cetera, et cetera. Did you guys run into any of those issues? >> Nope, that's been the greatest thing. When we first started to do our reference calls, it was like everybody I talked to, I said, well, where's the catch? >> Keith: Right. Because that really seemed too good to be true. And customer after customer that I called, they said, "we ran into it with our back ups." But they finished a third of the time faster. I said, "how is that even possible?" and, so we didn't believe it either. We actually had to go back and check because some of our backup jobs finished so fast, we thought it was an error or something like that. They were fine, it was just, you're backing up from flash now, instead of backing up from old spinning discs. >> Okay, so you put the system in, talk about the business impact. It sounds like there was some residual impacts from the initial motivation? >> Right, right, so from the business impact, that's a tough story to sell. Because, really, where we saw it, it was on the backend. And that was the way our systems were before, there really wasn't a huge deal of impact in the business with our old system, until it came back to back up times. Now, where I will say that we still have reductions is, if I have to reboot a server today, our call center application, buyers are putting it on Datrium, it took anywhere from 15 to 20 minutes for that to boot up. Well, 15 to 20 minutes while our call centers down, is like an eternity. Now, that time's down to about five to seven minutes. So, like overnight, you've more than halfed that time. And the same thing with web servers, or anything else that would be member facing, those times have been greatly reduced. So, if I do have to reboot something, because everybody knows it happens, it's sped up the process tremendously for us. >> And what's the secret sauce here? We're talking architecture, just sort of modern approach? Software design? >> So that the secret sauce, if you will, is this split design that runs your workloads. Especially read intensive workloads, on flash, on the host with powerful software, Datrium software. All of your durable data does not live on those hosts, those hosts are not stay full, they can fail at any time, and you still have data availability. So you've got that bullet proof availability, and on the back end, your data's kept secure, it is shared so we don't have any network traffic between hosts, your network doesn't blow up when you install, like it does with a hyper converged approach. And that split provisioning, that split architecture is the breakthrough, and that's why we talk about beyond HCI, we took a good step there. The scale line attributes, VIUM centric admin, but then we really built in tier one capabilities, full on backup, and of course, we haven't talked about it, but access to AWS re-offset backups. >> So, James, let's talk about day two operations. What are the advantages of hyper converged? There's this idea of like I'm one pane of glass. Like, firmware updates, I can free line my operations. Do you guys see similar advantages, day two, versus your previous infrastructures? >> Yeah, I mean, one of the things that saves us a lot of times now, is the fact that there's just one big pool of data out there, instead of having to provision lunds, we were setting up our exchange conversion, so we're building out four or five servers for that. Well, normally, that'd be about a two hour process, not that we were sitting there waiting the whole time, but, all right, we'll carve out some space in this one, twiddle your thumbs, go do something else. Come back, and maybe they'll be done. Well, now, that's like an instant process. So those sort of things are like, "wow, you know what, "I'm saving tons of time", just in admin experiences. In terms of pane of glass, it is a single pane of glass. One of the cool things that we've run into is every now and then, of course, we've got to do our disaster recovery testing, we're a financial institution. Well, Datrium's approach is really unique, and a problem that we used to have, is if I failed over to our DR facility, well, now I've got to bring that data back. Because if you fail in over, it's not a problem, you've already seated that data. Well, it doesn't work the other way around. It does with Datrium. So with Datrium, when I go to bring that data back, it's now doing a differential copy back, so I'm not sitting there for days and days and days, waiting to finish my DR testing anymore. So, there's just so many different benefits that have just been great for us. >> I mean, that's huge, because a lot of times, organizations, they can't test DR's, it's too risky, or they just don't have time, and even on the resources. >> James: Right. >> Did you have that problem beforehand? Or are you guys-- >> Well, yeah, because what you would run into is that it took so much to do it before, that I had to run my guys ragged for two or three weeks. I'm like, "All right, stay up overnight, make sure "it all copies" and then once it's copied, okay bring it back up. So, I mean, yeah, that was a challenge before that's not a problem anymore. >> Burning the team out, right. And or missing your window. >> Well, and because of the way that it's architected with the production groups, I no longer need to use a third party recovery tools to do the transitions back and forth. I can do that, natively, inside their application. >> I would also like to ask practitioners, if you had to mull it again, what would you do over. And it sounds like nothing, or what kind of advice would you give to your peers embarking on a similar journey? >> Do all of your reference calls. See it for yourself, I mean, I take quite a number of reference calls because people are in the same boat I was. Is it true, does it really work the way that you say it does? Yeah, it does. I'll screen share with them, if they want to see our numbers, I'll show them. >> All right, last word, what are we looking for? >> What are we looking for? >> Dave: Looking forward. >> So you're going to see us double down on the work we just went into market. Our DVX 4.0 software which comes with that cloud DVX, cloud based capability. And take that in to full on disaster recovery, orchestration. And not in the too distant future, you'll get the whole run down, so stay tuned. >> Awesome, Craig, thanks for coming on. James, pleasure meeting you. >> Likewise, thank you. >> Good luck with everything. Thanks for hanging out with me. >> Always. >> All right, Keith, good job, good questions. All right, keep it right there everybody, we will be back with our next guest, right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE live, from Dell Technologies World 2018. We'll be right back. (light music)