(upbeat Techno music) >> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, we are live day two of VMworld in Las Vegas, Mandalay Bay. It's apparently very hot outside but we're in here getting all the exciting scoop. I'm Lisa Martin with my esteemed co-host John Furrier. Hey, John. >> Great to see you, welcome back to the set. >> Thank you so much. John and I are pleased to be joined by a Fortinet customer, Ken Busby, Keith Busby, excuse me, the executive director of information technology and security at the school district of Philadelphia. Keith, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> So, the school district of Philadelphia, eight largest public school district in the United States. You've got over 134,000 students. >> Yes. >> Over 18,000 staff. If only your IT budget was enormous, right? >> Yes. (laughing) >> So you guys, something also interesting, this morning Malala Yousafzai was speaking with Sanjay Poonen. Very intriguing, on the whole spirit of education, let's talk about that. You guys gave Chromebooks to over maybe half the students, about 50, 60 thousand? >> Well it's not one to one, so they're shared resources, they have carts throughout the school. We have between 50 or 60 thousand Chromebooks on our network right now. >> So I imagine great for the students and the education, the firewall security maybe a bit challenged? >> As we started transitioning to the Chromebooks, it overwhelmed our legacy internet firewalls so we had to go out and do proof of concepts and test multiple vendors. >> Talk about the security, we had Pat Gelsinger sit in theCUBE, I think four years ago, Dave Vellante, co-host, asked him, "Is security a do over?" And he's like, "Yes, it's a do over, "we need to do a do over." I said mulligan, used all kinds of terms, resetting. How have you guys set up your security architecture because I've heard stories of fishing attacks just to get the bandwidth to do Bitcoin mining, to crazy things on the security front. How are you guys laying out your network security? >> Honestly, it changes on a day to day basis, right? Because as new vulnerabilities come out, you always have to adjust your posture. Over the last year and a half we redesigned to wear we're not, we were routing through web proxies, we're required to do web filtering for the students by the CIPA, Children's Internet Protection Act. When we replaced our legacy firewalls, we were able to transition everything over to that and just use the Fortinet firewall to do web filtering, intrusion prevention, anti-virus and traditional firewalling. >> How virtualized are you guys? >> Pretty much completely virtual. We still have a few legacy physical servers but pretty much all. >> One of the things that came up in keynote, today was Sanjay Poonen but yesterday Pat Gelsinger, referred it to, was the bridging of the ways, connecting computers together but he mentioned BYOD, bring your own device as one of the ways and that was really the iPhone kind of generation. Obviously kids got Instagrams and they're on all kind of devices these days, how is that impacting your IT? Is it up and running, is it solid? What are some of the details? >> We don't have a traditional BYOD policy. It's more teachers get devices and they bring them in and we just have to find ways to support it so it stretches us, we're a small staff so we can't always help the end user with their devices so if they bring their own device, we have issues, they're trying to use applications that we can't support for whatever reason so it's an issue. >> Obviously all the devices that come in to the school in addition to the 60,000 Chromebooks, needing to rethink your security architecture, what were some of the technical requirements that you were looking for that made Fortinet the obvious choice? >> Performance and cost, right? As we spoke about, we have budget constraints. They have an extremely high performing firewall at a reasonable price. After we did proof of concept with five different vendors, and theirs just out performed them all. >> How about automation? A big talk in cloud is automation. How are you guys handling automation? Are you micro segmenting? >> We're transitioning to the NSX and Fortinet VMX for our server firewall. That's going to allow us, since we're short staff, if our server team stands up a new server my policies automatically take effect, just through the use of their security tags. >> That's the Fortigate product, right? The VMX? >> Yes. >> How is that working for you guys? >> We just did the proof of concept, we haven't transitioned our live systems over to it. But so far all our tests have shown that it does what we expect it to do. >> What's it like working in such a huge school district? I mean it's basically like, it's probably like a case study in campus wide networking. (laughing) >> We look at it as we're an ISP, right? Every school comes through us. We always say that we're protecting the internet from our students. We have smart kids and they-- >> They're digitally native. >> Yeah. They find ways to do things and then next thing you know I'm getting a report by a website saying, "Hey, we got students coming and throwing attacks at us." >> I was talking to a guy in higher ed about the bandwidth, they have huge bandwidth so obviously people game, including gaming centers, have all kinds of IP management issues. Fortnite's pretty hot, I'm sure how many people are playing Fortnite on your-- >> Luckily we don't allow that, right? (laughing) >> But this is what kids want to do. They're like born hackers. >> It is. >> They're curious. >> Yes. >> And it's good thing but you also want to basically make sure they're safe. >> Yes, that's pretty much what my job is. I want them to learn but at the same time, don't use it for malicious purposes. >> Yeah, its' true. One of the things I liked about public sector is cloud really makes things more efficient. >> It does. >> What are some of the things that you've seen with virtualization and with cloud kind of on the horizon, how has tech helped you guys be efficient and be lean and mean, kind of the 10X IT kind of guy thing? >> Like you said, lean and mean, right? We have a very small staff. The school district's budget is 3.2 billion dollars and IT's operating budget is 20.8 million dollars so as you can see, we really have to be cost effective and that's where virtualization comes into play. >> What's some cool tech that you like on the horizon? We hear a lot about SDWAN, sure that might be something that's cool for you guys? >> I like the VPCs, right? AWS, virtual private clouds, where you can set up your own network out there in Amazon's world, attach it to your vSphere so you can have on premise virtualization and out in the cloud, I think that. >> One of things that Pat Gelsinger talked about yesterday we hear this a lot John, is tech for good. I liked how he described it as it's essentially neutral, it's up to us, VMware, everybody else, to shape it for good. I imagine that's challenging? We talked about the Fortnite explosion, which I have only heard of but you've got so many devices, I imagine there's some amount of security gaps that are probably acceptable. In terms of reducing the maliciousness of some of the things that happen in there, tell us about some of the things that you're achieving there, leveraging such things as the automation, how is that helping you guys to enable the Chromebooks and the BYOD for good? >> Well the automation frees up our time so that we can focus on the policies, the education, the different procedures for the district. This way we're not spending time hitting the keyboard, trying to review our traffic logs. >> You had a session yesterday which you were talking, a breakout session, and you were saying that there were some folks that were so interested in what you we had to say, you had limited time in your session. Give a little bit of an idea of some of the feedback or maybe even people that might be in your similar situation that want to learn from, hey, how did you guys tackle this huge problem? >> They were from a school district in Nebraska and they wanted to see how we were handling and they just became a Fortinet customer and they wanted to see what trials and tribulations we had implementing their equipment, any lessons learned and kind of, we just had a conversation about where we see our programs going. It was nice. >> What about compliance? One of the things that's come up is managing the laws of the land. >> Luckily, I don't have much compliance, right? So we're not PCI, CIPA's pretty much, and FERPA but the only reports that we really have to provide are for CIPA, we'll have to prove that we're doing web filtering. That's where the Fortinet analyzer comes into play. I'm able to just schedule the reports through there. Shows that I'm blocking based on categorization, and we're good. >> What's the biggest thing you've learned over the past couple years in tech and IT to be effective and to do your job, what's the learnings? (laughing) >> It's going to sound weird coming from a security guy but I think it's important to take the risk, right? Accept the risk. Most organizations won't try a piece of equipment live, right? I was the exact opposite, I put every firewall that we were going to try live and pushed our entire network through it. I mean, if it breaks some things, we figured it out but I think that's the only way to get a true test of whether or not it's going to fit your needs. >> One of the things that came up yesterday, I interviewed Andy Bechtolsheim, you know, legend, been called the Rembrandt of chips, Pat Gelsinger called him that down to Arista and other companies. He talked about how NSX has the security wrapped around the application, more around NSX, that's freed up his security teams from handling a lot of the network security which kind of like has been intertwined in the past. Are you seeing that same picture emerge? >> That's why I'm transitioning to that, to get out of the traditional IP base firewall rules. It's not really what it was designed for, it was more for a transport layer. So switching over to the NSX and the BMX, now we're basing it on the application, what it's purpose is. >> What's the impact to you guys? What's that mean for your operations and your benefits for staff, what's the impact? >> It frees us up. During the winter months when we're going to have a snow storm, our server team might have to deploy some more web servers to handle the traffic that's going to come in. Before they would have to reach out to my team, to get us to modify a policy because they have new device coming online, well now they just tag it as a web server and it's automatically in the roles. >> You know I love talking about this topic. I have four kids, two of them are still in high school, two are in college, so it's so funny how they all hacked their report cards because the sandbox was out there for testing the new curriculum so they all get it and they all share it and the school sends out a note, "Well, that's not actually officially updated yet." So the kids are smart, like you said, they're going to get what a sandbox is. They don't know why it's there, they know how to get to it, so you got student elections, all kinds of things that go on in the academic world that have been digitized that are vulnerable, you have to handle that. How do you stay on top, does Fortinet help you there? Or what's the main way to keep the secure access? >> I mean that's why we're going with the VMX, NSX, the micro segmentation, it really takes the effort off of us and allows the appliances to do what they're intended to do. >> That's awesome, well it's a great case study. Any advice for practitioners out there who are in your seat in their world who might be looking at, okay I got to reset, I got to start rethinking things, I got to do more with less, I got to be lean and mean? It's kind of command and control but you got to manage it, you got a lot going on, it's the battlefield of IT is changing. >> Yes. >> So what's your advice? >> Take the risk. (laughing) Try it out. I just recently hired another engineer and on his first day I pretty much told him, "Go ahead and break something, it's alright, "we'll figure it out, we'll fix it." He has his own little lab and I'm like, "Just go mess around and figure it out." >> Play, do some R and D. >> Yeah. >> Kick the tires, yeah, it's the best way to do it. Keith, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate it. It's theCUBE live here in Las Vegas, stick with us for more coverage after this short break. (upbeat techno music)

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2018 here in Las Vegas. We're about hitting the midway point of three days wall-to-wall live coverage on two sets. I'm Stu Miniman. My co-host is John Troyer. Happy to welcome to the program, first of all, a first time guest whose company was mentioned by Pat Gelsinger in the opening keynote, Chris Gregg, the CIO of Mercy Ships. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, Stu. >> And also happy to welcome back a regular on the program, John Siegal, who's the vice president product marketing with Dell EMC on the Infrastructure Solution Group. John, great to see you. >> Always glad to be here Stu, as you know. >> All right. So, always excite not only a customer but a customer, as Pat said, "doing good." So, tell us a little bit about Mercy Ships' mission. >> Thank you, Stu. It is great to be here. Super excited to have Pat mention us on the stage yesterday morning. Great great opportunity. We meet the need that Pat mentioned, the five billion people in this world who don't have access to safe and affordable surgical care. More than 30 percent of the deaths in this world are a result of that lack of that access. So, we meet that need. We operate hospital ships that provide surgical care in the developing world and support the countries by providing training and capacity building in those areas. >> It is a great mission. It's one of those things that, you know, we've had a few examples here at the show. Malala Yousafzai this morning was very inspiring. Just talk about the company itself, how big, where do you operate around the globe. >> So, we operate in primarily West and Southern and Eastern Africa. That's where you find many of the countries or most of the countries that are the least developed in this area. We're headquartered in the US. We have offices around the world for fund raising and recruiting. Our organization is a non-profit. We are funded entirely by donation and our hospital ships are staffed entirely by volunteers. >> Alright, and you've got the CIO hat on. >> I do. >> So talk to us a little bit about IT. I lived on the vendor side. I actually remember designing gear that was okay for those kind of environments. Ruggedizd and military and things like that. So, tell us your role inside and what that encompasses. >> Well, for us the most important thing is ensuring that the organization is efficient and that we are putting the, delivering the best for our patients, for the people we're serving in Africa. So, we want our IT to be effective, efficient, simple. Particularly with ships being staffed as volunteers, we want to maximize the effort onboard. And we don't want to spend a lot of time supporting IT, if you like. So, much of what we're doing and where we're going is around simplifying and that's where VxRails come in for us. >> Alright, well John, he's a straight man. He set you up. >> He set me up, right? >> Thank you for bringing us, you know, we love CIOs. We love missions for good here. So, yeah, he set you up on the Dell connecting. >> It doesn't get more inspirational than this though, does it, right? And so, of course, we've been focused with hyper-converged on simplifying IT now for years. And, you know, whether it's helping companies refocus there energies and there resources to innovate or it's helping non-profits literally save lives. I mean this is, to me, this is what inspires us to do good and actually, really to double down on really driving more and more simplicity into our products. >> Well, Chris, I'm really interested in some of the technical details because we heard a lot here at VMworld about the Edge, right? The Edge has a lot of different meanings and connotations but not everything can live up in a regional data center, up in the public cloud, right? And, you know, a ship is probably a canonical example. So I'm kind of fascinated with like, what kinds of things do you encounter that you wouldn't encounter were you in AWS east or something. What do you have to do on the ship? And you're all self-contained and etc.? >> Yeah, our primary constraint is availability of bandwidth. So, going back a couple years, we were relying purely on satellite, had a maybe about five meg connection for a full hospital ship, 400 people. We've gone up to about 100 meg now. So, we're still tiny. So that really constrains. We have this hybrid environment of a on premise on ship, with live-live data centers on ship, two data centers on a ship. Headquarters as well and then we're starting to look at what we can take into the cloud. So, the concept of a hybrid approach, especially with one vendor partnered with Vmware and Dell bringing it all together in one place and one support model is really fantastic for us. >> Yeah, you have amphibious cloud, is I think what you have, right? >> Yes, yes. (laughs) >> So, John, are there any special things that you have to do from a gear standpoint? From their standpoint? >> Well, it's interesting, you know. I think from their requirements perspective. So, first of all they're looking for small footprint, of course. And hyper-converts, by nature, is smaller. And so we've done that there. But in addition to that, I think as we've talked about too, is we're also helping them hyper-converge their operations as well, right? As he mentioned, as Chris mentioned, they have IT volunteers on staff that are literally coming, they're volunteering their own time. They don't stay for, what? A couple months at a time? >> Three months >> Three months at a time. Constant rotation of new staff. They can't be experts on storage, and servers and networking and all that. What they need is to be able to hyper-converge operations into more of a generalist type of approach. And so that's really where our efforts have really helped them, is I think has enabled them to have IT generalists be able to handle all the upgrades and the deployments so that it just works. But beyond that, from a hardware standpoint, no, nothing specific there other than the small footprint. >> But from a personnel standpoint, you want that easy button, right? >> Absolutely. >> You don't have to, right, training them up, maintaining it. I know when I talk to a lot of HCI customers they never touch the box. It's "oh great I've got some interface and I can do that". What's your experience been? How long have you had the solution? >> So, we've had the solution in headquarters for about a year. And we are building a new ship. It's ready to be launched in 2020. It's actually another aspect for us is, when we started looking at this in 2016, we were looking out four years, really, for the time it takes to build a ship and thinking forward to what would be coming four years time. What do we need to put our bets on, if you life. So, looking at VxRail when it started coming into play. We've actually started building the data centers for the new ship. Had a good experience so far. We're getting ready to pack that up and be sending out to be installed on the ship next year. >> As we've talked about, the faster you can deploy one of these floating hospitals, the quicker you can help patients. Right, so this is kind of giving a whole new meaning to the ability to really simplify deployment as well as the whole life cycle. And saving them. >> What are some of the workloads that you're running that on, on these active-active data centers. That's kind of interesting as well. >> Yeah, on ship we have, it's interesting we have such a mix. And we operate a hospital, of course. And we operate services to maintain plants, the machinery and all that sort of stuff. There's not too much IoT at this point, although our new ship will have some more. In the hospital you've got these radiology, patient records, all those sorts of things. We operate a school on board as well, There's the general office support as well. On the ship it's quite mixed and varied. >> Alright. >> But it really was the flexibility, right? I think the flexibility of hyper-converge that allows you to run some of your kind of run of the mill, the basic applications. But also, this ship's going to be deployed several years from now as well with the similar technologies. So it's important to be able to support not just today's applications, but some of the next-gen applications >> Absolutely that are coming down the pike to help you improve care. >> And with new ship we'll be deploying VDI as well. So we'll be taking that step as well with Horizon. >> I was curious that with the teaching and everything, there's lots of use cases-- >> Absolutely, yeah. >> that come to mind there. John, what does Dell do for the non-profits that obviously, HDI's designed to be affordable to begin with but for this class of customer anything special? Or is it just part of the regular future-proofing and everything like that that makes this possible? >> I think this is just a great opportunity to hear this and to see how simplicity is really being achieved and helping save lives. So, I think from that perspective we couldn't be happier. I think, also, what we've really poured is our heart and soul and energy into this product so that it just works. And I think a lot of what I think also Chris looked at was wanting to make sure he had a single vendor. So, we've made sure that we have everything from data protection to the actual infrastructure itself. We have Dell EMCI still on in there as well. But providing a single point of contact to support that whole stack so that you have volunteers onsite, on the ship, giving a whole new meaning to on-prem, by the way, on ship and yet, if there is an issue, they have the peace of mind to know that it's one call to Dell EMC to support that entire stack. So, again, that's really what we're proud of, is to see the value proposition that we envisioned years ago start to really be realized in a situation like this where it's really helping save lives. >> Chris, I understand it's your first time at this show-- >> It is, yes. >> We always, it's a very welcoming community. What's your impressions been so far? And you probably have a slightly different experience than the average person's not usually mentioned by the CEO of the company-- >> Yes. >> Up on the keynotes. >> Yes, it's been quite the introduction to be mentioned. We were brought in and sat right in the front row in the keynote. And that was very exciting, too. It's been fantastic to be here. Really inspiring to see some of the things that are coming along in the future. I've had lots of ideas, thinking about what we can do next and how we could continue to improve what we're doing so that can continue to serve more people, have a bigger impact for our organization. >> It's amazing. I was actually just looking at your volunteer page. You know, the beautiful thing about VMworld is that it's a, although there are a couple VM, there's a VMworld in Europe and a VMworld here, but this community is global. There are people here from all over the world. And some of them might be able to take a couple months off, right? >> Absolutely, yeah. >> And so what kind? I see you're looking. I see IS systems administrator, support specialist, all sorts of stuff. >> Yeah, so there's two vacancies in our team at the moment, as you mentioned. A system admin and a support specialist. Our website, mercyships.org, has all the volunteer opportunities. Last year we had volunteers from 68 countries. All sorts of skill, not just medical obviously, administrative, all sorts. So, go and have a look at the website. >> That's awesome. >> Chris, one thing I always like to talk to CIO's these days, how's your role changing? When you look at what's happen the last couple years, change is evident from everything you see at this show. What are you seeing from yourself and when you talk to your peers as to how things are moving? >> For me the role has really moved into trying to understand how Mercy Ships can multiply our impact and looking how technology can be a part of that. It's looking at how we optimize and make our operations more efficient. As an organization funded by donors, we want to make sure that we maximize those dollars to be delivering patient care. So, looking at how, as an organization, we can really double down and multiply what we do through technology. >> That's great. Look, IT used to be very internally focused. Mercy Ships' mission, obviously, very much looking external on the CIO. John, you talk to a lot of customers at this show. This is a great story. Any other things from the show... >> I got to say, as we were just talking about here though, it is such an inspiring story and it is an opportunity now for all the vcenter administrators here at the show. By the way, because VxRail, of course, you can just use familiar tools like vcenter, VMware Tools, this is a pretty good recruiting area for you right now. Again, it's all coming together for us here. And I think the opportunity for us to give back in a way here as Dell Technologies, as VMware together, this is what we envisioned. And we're just happy to be able to have a storyline like this. And we look forward to maybe being on theCUBE again with Chris in the future as they bring the next ship online as well. >> By the way, our studios are always open for the non-profits. No charge, have them in. We've got Palo Alto. We've got Boston area. We do love to be able to support that as we can. >> Alright, want to give you both the final word. Things looking forward, takeaways from your experience so far. >> Yeah, so, one of the things that really interesting for me is thinking through how we can start integrating Workplace One. So, looking at, with a turnover of volunteer staff, we want to make sure the Edge is really simple, that we can support that. Also, thinking through what we want to do to increase our resilience and dr capabilities. And starting to look at how we can use the Cloud more, particularly Hybrid cloud with multiple different providers. So, yeah, really exciting. Thank you so much for the opportunity. It's really been good to be here. And mercyships.org is the place to go and find out more. >> I'd just add to that again. We're honored to be able to be part of this story with you across the Dell Technologies family. And we look forward to continuing, to providing the best experience you can have for your ships going forward. Now we'll be continuing our partnership. >> Thank you, John. >> Thank you. >> John and Chris, thank you so much. Be sure, check out mercyships.org for those volunteer opportunities. And check out theCUBE.net where you can find all of the video content from this show and all the others. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman. Back with lots more coverage here from VMworld 2018. You're watching theCUBE.