>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering Dell EMC World 2017, brought to you by Dell EMC. (electronic music) >> Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of Dell EMC World here in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host John Walls. Today we are talking to Chhandomay Mandal. He is the Senior Consultant Product Marketing here at Dell EMC, as well as Pat Harkins who is the CTO Informatics and Technology Services at Royal Victoria Health Center. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having us. >> Glad to be here. >> So, Pat, I want to start with you. Tell us a little bit about Royal Health. >> Sure. Well, Royal Victoria Regional Health Center in Barrie, Ontario. We're about an hour north of Toronto, Ontario. It's a regional health center, variety of services. We provide oncology, cardiac, child and youth mental health, and what we're doing up there is providing a regional role, regional services for Meditech. We're host Meditech for a number of other hospitals in our area, and we're currently looking to expand that, and increase our volume, but also change platforms as well. >> So tell us about some of the biggest challenges that you see. >> Some of the biggest challenges that we're seeing right now is within Ontario, is the actual funding model, of course. Everything's a little bit tighter. But from a technology perspective, is actually staying with technology, with limited budgets and so forth, and staying with the latest, greatest, providing the best service to our customers, our physicians, our clinicians, which in turn is the best patient care. >> Chhandomay, you look at a client like Pat, who has very specific needs in health care. You've got time issues, you've got privacy issues. How do you deal, or what do you see as far as health care IT fitting in to what you're doing and the services you're providing to somebody like Pat, specifically knowing that these are very unique challenges and critically important challenges? >> Sure. We at Dell EMC look at what the problem is holistically. As Pat was mentioning, in the health care IT, one of the challenges we see is providing consistent high performance with low latency so that the clinicians, physicians can access the patient data in a timely way, quickly, they do not spend more time entering the data or accessing the data, rather spending more time with the patients. Then there is another problem that Pat alluded to. For any EHR, electronic health record systems, it is actually a consolidation of many workloads. You have the EHR workload itself, then you have analytics that needs to be run on it. There are other virtualized applications, and then there is distal partualization, because all the physicians now says they need to access the patient data. So effectively, we need to have platforms, and in this particular case, essentially All-Flash platforms that can offer very high performance, consistently low latency, high storage efficiency in terms of reduced footprint so that Pat and other health providers can consume less rack space, less space in the data center, reduced power and cooling, all those things, and at the end of the day, ensuring the copy data that they have between all the databases, those are efficiently managed and kind of like transforming the health care IT business workflow. That's what we at Dell EMC come with our All-Flash portfolio for health providers like Royal Victoria Health. >> So Pat, on your side of the fence then, from your perspective, limited resources, right? You've got to be very, very protective of what you have, and obviously you have your own challenges. How do you balance all that out in today's environment, where speed matters? Efficiency matters now more than ever. >> And that's, efficiency matters big time with our physicians, and what's happening is we look for partners like Dell EMC to help us with that. One thing that was happening in our experience with efficiency and with timely presentation of data, we weren't getting that with our previous vendor. And when we went to Dell EMC we work with them as a partner and said, "How can we improve on that? "What can we look for?" And we looked at Flash as being that solution, not only providing the performance that we were looking for but also providing built-in security that we were looking for, but also providing even more efficiency, so when the physician, the clinicians were getting that data, they get it in a timely manner, and that means that they're actually spending more time with the patient, they're not searching for the data, they're not searching for reports and so forth. >> Are you hearing any feedback from the patients themselves about how things have changed at the health center? >> Well, for me I'm still stuck in the dungeon. I'm in IT, so we're in the basement, right? so I don't necessarily-- >> John: Glad you could get out for the week. (laughing) >> Exactly. You know, we grow mushrooms in that area. So what's happening with, I don't necessarily talk with the patient, but we're getting the positive feedback from our clinicians and physicians who are then, if they're happy, that means they're providing usually, providing better patient care, and so that means the patients are happy. (audio cuts out) >> Is understanding the true, the point of patient health care from the point they're born to the point that their life ends, and what we're understanding is how getting that data and being able to provide that information to clinicians, see trends, be able to treat, be more proactive instead of a reactive in health care. That's the goal, and with technology and the storage and collecting the data and analytics we'll actually be able to provide that in the future. >> Chhandomay, from your perspective here, what is it about XtremIO you think that makes this a good match? And now you've had X2, right, and sorry Pat. >> Pat: No, it's fine. >> You just deployed, what, six months ago, you said? But now you've got an X2 version to consider, perhaps for your next deployment. What's the fit? Why does it work? >> So you mention Dell EMC XtremIO. So the core premise of XtremIO is we will be able to provide high performance, consistently in low latency no matter what workload you are running, no matter how many workloads you are consolidating on the same array. It is the same high-performance, low-latency, and we have in line all the time, data reduction technologies that are all working on in-memory metadata, which essentially boils down to we are doing all those storage operations at the control plane level without touching the data plane where the data actually lives or exists. So that in turn helps us to consolidate a lot of the copies. You mentioned analytics, right? You have your production database for your patient data, then you need to load those data in an ETL system for running the analytics, then you possibly have your instant development copies, copies for back-up. Now with XtremIO, all the copies, we do not store anything that's not unique, through that entire cluster, and all the metadata is stored in memory, so for us we can create copies that do not take any extra space, and you can run your workloads on the copies themselves with the same performance as in production volume and with all those data reduction and all those technologies that all those data services run. So what that in turn makes Pat's life easier is he can reduce the footprint, he can reduce or consolidate all the workloads on the ATA itself, and his application developers can bring the medical applications online much more faster, he can run his analytics and reports faster, being proactive about the care, and in a nutshell, pretty much taking the storage maintenance, storage planning, storage operations out of the picture so that they can innovate and they can spend time innovating in IT, helping patient care, as opposed to doing routine maintenance and planning. >> So it lets him focus on what he wants to do. You're not spending a majority of your time on mundane tasks, you're actually improving your operations. Give me a real-life example if you can. We talk about more efficiency and better speed, these are all good things and great terms to talk about, but in terms of actually improving patient care, or providing enhanced patient care, what does it mean? How does it translate? >> Well, how it translates is in a lot of cases with the physicians and what we've seen already with them, just with them, they're able to, because we actually improve performance, we're actually able to get more data in analytics, as we say, but then we're able to produce those reports and turn it around in a lot of cases, a lot quicker than what we've been able to do before. An example was, once we moved to XtremIO and our decision support team. Used to take 14 hours to run some of the reports that they were getting. They would start 'em at four o'clock in the evening, they would run to six a.m. in the morning, roughly. When we put the XtremIO in and they ran the same reports they started at 4 o'clock. By six p.m. that night they were completed. They actually called me because they thought they had something wrong. (laughing) It's never been that quick. >> John: Boss, this is too good. >> Exactly. >> John: I messed up. >> And so they actually ran the report three times, and they cued the QA against the report to understand that yeah, it is that efficient now. Now that we've turned that around we actually provide that to the clinicians. We're getting better patient care and they're able to get their information and react quicker to it as well. >> Talking about the massive amounts of data that's being generated that now needs to be analyzed in order to optimize performance, how much do your developers know about data, and are you doing more training for them so that they know what they're doing? >> Well, we always provide training. We're always working on that, but the thing is, we are providing more training and we're providing it to the point that they actually have to be able to mine that data. There's so much data, it's how to manage the data, mine the data. Our analysts at RVH is that we look to Meditech, our EHR vendor as well, to help us on that, but at the same time we're looking to, we're increasing our data warehouses, we're increasing our repositories and registries so that when we do have that data, we can get at it. >> I'm wondering too if using this kind of cutting-edge technology has had an impact on your recruitment. Michael Dell in his keynote mentioned how increasingly, employees are saying the kinds of technologies that's being used is having an impact. >> No, absolutely. I know our vendors, our staff are very excited about the technology. Where we were going before, they weren't, not that they weren't happy, but we were always dealing with mundane tasks. We had some issues that were always repetitive issues that we couldn't seem to get through. Now that we've actually upgraded to the Flash storage and moving through that, they're excited. They love the management, the ease of use, they have a lot of great ideas now it's actually, they're becoming innovative in their thoughts because they know they have the performance and the technology in the back end to do the job for them. >> I hate to ask you what's next because you're six months into your deployment, but this is a constantly evolving landscape, constantly improving. Obviously the pressure is at Dell EMC is responding really well, competitive pressures. What is your road map? If you look two, three years down the road in terms of the kinds of improvements you want to get, the kinds of efficiencies that you can get gains in, and then realistically from a budgetary standpoint, how do you balance all that together? >> Budgetary, there's always the constant discussion with our CFO, and so he's been very supportive, but where we see it going is we want to be able to actually, maybe not even necessarily go to the Cloud but become a private Cloud for our partners and be able to provide a lot of these regional services that we couldn't before with the technology that we had, and be able to expand the services. In Ontario we're seeing some budget constraints, as I mentioned. A lot of these smaller sites, the patients, the customers, as we would say are expecting the service, but with technology and the dollars, they might not be able to do it on their budget, but as we bring stuff back into our data center and be able to provide the technology, we've been able to spread that out, not only from storage, compute side, as well as virtualization, VDI desktops and so forth. That's where I see we're going over the next little while. >> How much learning goes on between your colleagues at CTOs at other health centers, and even health centers and hospitals in the states? Do you talk a lot about-- >> You know what? We do talk a lot. We share stories. Some good, some bad, but we try, we all have the same problems, and why re-create the wheel when you could actually learn from other people? So a lot of the CTOs, we do get together, informally and formally, and understand where we're going and then we also reach out through our vendors and through some of our user groups and so forth to the US and to some of our cohort CTOs down there to understand what they're doing, because they look at it from a different lens at times. >> So speaking of a different lens, from the other side of the fence, Chhandomay if you would, where are you see this headed in terms of your assistance in health care IT, what X2 might be able to do? What kinds of realizations do you think are on the horizon here, and what's possible for a health care provider like RVH? >> So all the organizations, if you look across the industry, they are in the digital transformation journey. Health care providers are no exception, and what we are enabling is the IT transformation part, and Dell XtremIO, and with the XtremIO X2 that we just announced, we are enabling that IT transformation for all of our customers, including health care providers like Royal Victoria Health. Now, with X2, specifically, we continue to improve upon the high performance, the unmatched storage efficiencies that we offer, effectively, again, bringing down the cost of hosting different types of workloads, managing it on a single platform with a much lower total cost of ownership for the health care providers like Pat, so that at the end of the day, they will be able to provide better patient and better care for the patients, be it like a doctor or clinician, trying to access the data from their endpoints or the finance or billing department trying to turn over the bills in a much shorter span as opposed to the typically 45 days turnover that we see. So that's where we see not only just XtremIO X2, but Dell EMC, the All-Flash storage portfolio, helping the customers in their digital transformation journey in health care, and with the IT department, going into the IT transformation journey to help with it. >> Chhandomay, Pat, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> It was great, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Walls. We will have more from The Cube's coverage of Dell EMC World after this. (electronic music)