>> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, Louisiana. It's theCUBE, covering .NEXT conference 2018, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, we're here in New Orleans in the state of Louisiana, and to help Keith Townsend and myself, Stu Miniman, wrap up we're glad to have one more customer. We have the great state of Louisiana here with us, we have Michael Allison, who's the Chief Technology Officer. We also have Derek Williams, who's the Director of Data Center Operations. Gentleman, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> All right, so I think we all know what the state of Louisiana is, hopefully most people can find it on a map, it's a nice easy shape to remember from my kids and the like. But, Michael, why don't we start with you? Talk to us first about kind of the purview of your group, your organization, and some of the kind of biggest challenges you've been facing in recent times. Sure, we are part of the Office of Technology Services, which is a consolidated IT organization for the state of Louisiana. We were organized about four years ago. Actually four years ago this July. And that brought in the 16 Federated IT groups into one large organization. And we have the purview of the executive branch, which includes those typical agencies like Children and Family Services, Motor Vehicles, Public Safety, Health and Hospitals, Labor, etc. >> And Derek, you've got the data center operations, so give us a little bit of a scope. We heard how many organizations in there, but what do you all have to get your arms around? >> Sure, so we had, you know, there's often a joke that we make that if they've ever made it we own one of each. So we had a little bit of every type of technology. So what we've really been getting our arms around is trying to standardize technologies, get a standard stack going, an enterprise level thing. And really what we're trying to do is become a service provider to those customers where we have standard lines of service and set enterprise level platforms that we migrate everybody onto. So do you actually have your own data centers? Your own hosting facilities? What's kind of the real estate look like? >> Absolutely, so we have, the state has two primary data centers that we utilize, and then we also use a number of cloud services as well as some third-party providers for offsite services. >> So obviously just like every other state in the union, you guys have plenty of money. >> Always. >> Way too many employees and just no challenges. Let's talk about what are the challenges? You know, coming together, bringing that many organizations together, there's challenges right off the bat. What are some of the challenges as you guys look to provide services to the great people of Louisiana? >> Well as Derek kind of eluded to, technology debt is deep. We have services that are aging at about 40 years old, that are our tier one services. And they were built in silos many, many years ago. So being able to do the application or actualization, being able to identify those services, then when we actually shift to the cultural side, actually bringing 16 different IT organizations into one, having all those individuals now work together instead of apart. And not in silos. That was probably one of the biggest challenges that we had over the last few years is really breaking down those cultural barriers and really coming together as one organization. >> Yeah I totally agree with that. The cultural aspect has been the biggest piece for us. Really getting in there and saying, you know a lot of small and medium size IT shops could get away without necessarily having the proper governance, structures in place, and a lot of people wore a lot of hats. So now we're about 800 strong in the Office of Technology Services, and that means people are very aligned to what they do operationally. And so that's been a big shift and kind of that cultural shift has really been where we've had to focus on to make that align properly to the business needs. >> Mike, what was the reason that led you down the path towards Nutanix? Maybe set us up with a little bit of the problem statement? We heard some of the heterogeneous nature and standardization which seems to fit into a theme we've heard lots of times with Nutanix. But was there a specific use case or what led you towards that path? Well, about four years ago the Department of Health and Hospitals really had a case where they needed to modernize their Medicaid services, eligibility and enrollment. CMS really challenged them to build an infrastructure that was in line with their MIDAS standards. There was modular, COTS, configuration over customization. Federal government no longer wants to build monolithic systems that don't integrate and are just big silos. So what we did was we gravitated to that project. We went to CMS and said, hey why don't we take what you're asking us to build and build it in a way that we can expand throughout the enterprise to not only affect the Department of Health but also Children of Family Services, and be able to expand it to Department of Corrections, etc. That was our use case, and having an anchor tenent with the Department of Health that has a partner with CMS really became the lynch pin in this journey. That was our first real big win. >> Okay how did you hear first about Nutanix? Was there a bake off you went through? >> It was, yes, very similar. It was the RP process took a year or so and we were actually going down the road of procuring some V blocks, and right before the Christmas vacations our Deputy CIO says hey, why don't you go look to see if there's other solutions that are out there? Challenge Derek, myself, and some others to really expand the horizons. Say, if we're going to kind of do this greenfield, what else is out there? And right before he got on his Christmas cruise he dropped that on our lap and about a month later we were going down the Dell Nutanix route. And to be honest it was very contentious, and it actually took a call from Michael Dell who I sent to voicemail twice before I realized who it was, but you know, those are the kind of decisions and the buy in from Dell executives that really allowed us to comfortably make this decision and move forward. >> So technology doesn't exactly move fast in any government because, you know, people process technology and especially in the government, people and process, as you guys have deployed Nutanix throughout your environment, what are some of the wins and what are some of the challenges? >> That's a funny point because we talk about this a lot. The fact that our choice was really between something like VBlock, which was an established player that had been for a long time, and something a little more bleeding edge. And part of the hesitancy to move to something like Nutanix was the idea that hey, we have a lot of restricted data, CJIS, HIPAA, all those kind of things across the board, RS1075 comes into play, and there was hesitancy to move to something new, but one of the things that we said exactly was we are not as agile as private sector. The procurement process, all the things that we have to do, put us a little further out. So it did come into play that when we look at that timeline the stuff that's bleeding edge now, by the time we have it out there in production it's probably going to be mainstream. So we had to hedge our bets a little. And you know, we really had to do our homework. Nutanix was, you know, kind of head and shoulders above a lot of what we looked at, and I had resiliency to it at first, so credit to the Deputy CIO, he made the right call, we came around on it, it's been awesome ever since you know, one of the driving things for us too was getting out there and really looking at the business case and talking to the customers. One of the huge things we kept hearing over and over was the HA aspect of it. You know, we need the high availability, we need the high availability. The other interesting thing that we have from the cost perspective is we are a cost recovery agency now that we're consolidated. So what you use you get charged for, you get a bill every month just like a commercial provider. You know, use this many servers, this much storage, you get that invoice for it. So we needed a way that we could have an environment that's scaled kind of at a linear cost that we could just kind of add these nodes to without having to go buy a new environment and have this huge kind of CAPX expenditure. And so at the end of the day it lived up to the hype and we went with Nutanix and we haven't regretted it, so. >> How are the vendors doing overall, helping you move to that really OP-X model, you said, love to hear what you're doing with cloud overall. Nutanix is talking about it. Dell's obviously talking about that. How are the vendors doing in general? And we'd love to hear specifically Dell Nutanix. >> We've had the luxury of having exceptionally good business partners. The example I'd like to give is, about four months into this project we realized that we were treated Nutanix as a traditional three-tier architecture. We were sending a lot of traffic more south. When we did the analysis we asked the question, a little cattywampus, it was how do we straighten this out? And so we posed a question on a Tuesday about how do we fix this, how do we drive the network back into the fabric? By Thursday we were on a phone call with VMWare. By the following Monday we had two engineers on site with a local partner with NSX Ninja. And we spent the next two months, with about different iterations of how to re-engineer the solution and really look at the full software-defined data center, not just software-defined storage and compute. It is really how do we then evolve this entire solution building upon Nutanix and then layering upon on top of that the VMWare solutions that kind of took us to that next level. >> Yeah and I think the key term in there is business partner. You know, it sounds a little corny to say, but we don't look at them as just vendors anymore. When we choose a technology or direction or an architecture, that is the direction we go for the entire state for that consolidated IT model. So, we don't just need a vendor. We need someone that has a vested interest in seeing us succeed with the technology, and that's what we've gotten out of Nutanix, out of Dell, and they've been willing to, you know, if there's an issue, they put the experts on site, it's not just we'll get some people on a call. They're going to be there next week, we're going to work with you guys and make it work. And it's been absolutely key in making this whole thing go. >> And as a CTO one of the challenges that we have is, as Derek has executed his cloud vision, is how do we take that and use it as an enabler, an accelerant to how we look at our service design, service architecture, how do we cloud optimize this? So as we're talking about CICD and all these little buzzwords that are out there, is how can we use this infrastructure to be that platform that kind of drives that from kind of a grass root, foundation up, whereas sometimes it's more of a pop down approach, we're taking somewhat of an opposite. And now we're in that position where we can now answer the question of now what, what do we do with it now? >> So sounds like you guys are a mixed VMWare, Nutanix hardware, I mean software, Dell hardware shop, foundation you've built the software-defined data center foundation, something that we've looked at for the past 10 years in IT to try and achieve, which is a precursor, or the foundation, to cloud. Nutanix has made a lot of cloud announcements. How does Nutanix's cloud announcements, your partnership with Dell match with what you guys plan when it comes to cloud? >> That's a perfect lead in for us. So you're absolutely right. We have had an active thought in our head that we need to move toward SDDC, software-defined data center is what we wanted to be at. Now that we've achieved it the next step for us is to say hey, whether it's an AWS or whomever, an Azure type thing, they are essentially an SDDC as well. How do we move workloads seamlessly up and down in a secure fashion? So the way we architected things in our SDDC, we have a lot of customers. We can't have lateral movement. So everything's microsegmentation across the board. What we've been pursuing is a way to move VM workloads essentially seamlessly up to the cloud and back down and have those microsegmentation rules follow whether it goes up or back down. That's kind of the zen state for us. It's been an interesting conference for us, because we've seen some competitors to that model. Some of the things Nutanix is rolling out, we're going to have to go back and take a very serious look at on that roadmap to see how it plays out. But, suddenly multicloud, if we can get to that state we don't care what cloud it's in. We don't have to learn separate stacks for different providers. That is a huge gap for us right now. We have highly available environment between two data centers where we run two setups active active that are load balanced. So the piece we're missing now is really an offsite DR that has that complete integration. So the idea that we could see a hurricane out in the golf, and 36, 48 hours away, and know that we might be having some issues. Being able to shift workloads up to the cloud, that's perfect for us. And you know, then cost comes into play. All that kind of stuff that we might have savings, economy of scale, all plays in perfectly for us. So we are super excited about where that's going and some of the technologies coming up are going to be things we're going to be evaluating very carefully over the next year. >> At the end of the day it's all about our constituents. We have to take data, turn it into information that they can consume at the pace that they want to. Whether it be traditional compute in a desktop or mobile or anywhere in between. It was our job to make sure that these services are available and usable when they need it, especially in the time of a disaster or just in day-to-day life. So that's the challenge that we have when delivering services to our citizens and constituents. >> All right, well Mike and Derek, really appreciate you sharing us the journey you've been on, how you're helping the citizens here in the great state of Louisiana. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks so much for watching our program. It's been a great two days here. Be sure to check out theCUBE.net for all of our programming. Thanks Nutanix and the whole crew here, and thank you for watching theCUBE. >> Thank you.