>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco it's The Cube covering Pure Accelerate 2017. Brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Welcome back to Pier 70 in San Francisco everybody. This is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with my cohost Stu Miniman. Ray Smith is here. He is the Assistant Director for Technology at the Mississippi Community College Board. Ray, thanks for coming to The Cube, it's good to see you. >> Glad to be here. >> We were having a good conversation off camera. Tell us a little bit about the college board. >> Well, Mississippi Community College Board is... We are the board that coordinates with the 15 community colleges in the state of Mississippi. Part of our job is to make sure that enrollment figures are taken care of. We look at budgets, we work with the legislature, and more importantly we work with the community colleges in helping to develop good outcomes for our students. >> Okay, so it's obviously a public institution, public funded, you've got a responsibility to report to the public. Do you also have responsibility for, well what services do you have responsibility for? You said enrollment, but.. >> I am, for instance, I'm responsible for a statewide network. The community colleges are a little different than some entities in that we have a shared network. In which all 15 community colleges they are connected back to the board office. We act as the ISP for the colleges. The colleges submit data to us. We also have in place a longitudinal data system in the state of Mississippi in which we collect information and we report that information up the line for our longitudinal data. But more importantly what we do is that we count students and we pay based upon enrollment. >> Community colleges play such a critical role today in education. Which we all know, anybody who has kids know how expensive it is to educate. And the colleges are way more open these days about accepting community college student transfers, allowing students to take summer classes at community colleges. My son, for instance, goes to GW, he's taking some math classes at community college. It really helps address the cost. It helps people who aren't ready to go to college. Talk a little bit about the mission and the role that your college plays. >> Our system, or the board office, what we do again is that we coordinate each community college as a separate entity amongst themselves, governed by a local board. But from the state level, we administer the payment based upon students. And one of the things that we do is we're heavily involved in the workforce. That's a real big issue in our system right now. To train more people for the jobs that we're trying to bring in to Mississippi. In addition to that, we have strong academics in which our students take two year academic courses that transfer to our universities. But more than anything our purpose is to try to make a better Mississippi, in providing our services, education and training to the people of Mississippi. >> You're a feeder system, in essence. It's a fast turnover, it's a two year cycle. So your job of enrollment has a lot of pressure on it. Now what kind of pressure does that put on the technology infrastructure. >> Well, a couple of things. Number one, community colleges are education based institutions but at the same time, people come there because of the lifestyle. Because coming out of high school, a lot of students aren't quite ready for the big universities. So, they come to the community colleges looking for a lot of the things that they have at home. Internet, fast internet, for instance, and also the ability to.. (laughs) that's the big one, and also the ability to have online classes where they don't have to come on campus or so forth. But our students want everything that the major universities have and they want everything they're used to as home as well as within coming out of K-12. >> Okay, so, let's get into the relationship with Pure Accelerate, let's talk about it. What led you to them? Talk about your journey, give us the before and after. >> Well, first of all, I have a real small staff at our agency, and we have a lot of big things to do. >> Dave: What's small? >> Small, three people including myself. >> Oh wow, for 15 colleges? >> 15 colleges for a statewide network, etc, etc. What we were looking for was a system that would allow us to bring all of our technical resources into a smaller unit. We looked at the converge systems of some other competitors to Pure early on. And what we were really wanting to see and what we needed help with was more of a technical infrastructure more than anything. But what we found, it was way too complex. And it actually required all of the additional services that you received in terms of technical support. When we moved to Pure, we looked at the Pure Storage, and one of the main reasons we did that was our current system was coming up for renewal. The renewal itself was triple what it was the year before. >> Dave: The maintenance renewal? >> The maintenance renewal. And it was the traditional forklift. We weren't ready to forklift. So looking at Pure, what we were looking for was number one, simplicity, we were looking for more speed, we were looking for all of those things that would make life easier for us. What we ended up getting was a situation where we were able to purchase the Pure array for the cost of maintenance of what we were looking at before. >> Dave: Wow. >> The cost of mainenance. We got the Pure array with three year maintenance on it. So it was a no brainer from our standpoint. >> And let me just put a point on that. When you say simplicity a lot of people what they say, "Oh well, give you more time to work, "but you're going to pay for it more upfront." But you're saying from a capital expense standpoint this was now a savings for you compared to keeping your old gear. >> Understand this, the Pure array is the first piece of technology equipment that I've ever purchased that would not be classified as an expense. It's an investment, simple as that. Because what we purchased, we will not have to throw it out when we upgrade. We simply, as we saw today in the presentation, we upgrade our software, we get same pieces and parts in place. It is, it's an investment. >> Can you walk us through that a little bit? Because you've got the full converged infrastructure solution. Were you using Cisco before or was that something you added? >> I was using Cisco from a UCS standpoint. But I was using another manufacturer's storage. We actually, we moved to the flat stack on our first conversion we kept our UCS, but we removed the storage and our converted it all to a flat stack. Then we subsequently purchased an additional flat stack. But what it has bought us is exactly what you mentioned earlier. We now have time to do things as opposed to just being a technology person. >> Ray, one thing when you talk about upgrades. You've got your computer, your storage, and your network. Storage sounds like you can upgrade it and move there, with converge you can upgrade it. Your network, too? Because network tends to be install it and don't breathe on it because I don't want to mess it up. So, does the full solution get upgraded or how do you manage it? Do you manage it as a stack or as the individual components? >> We manage our stack itself. Now from the infrastructure standpoint of what we do with internet service, that's handled with another piece of equipment. But we were able to number one, shut down two full racks of storage equipment down to four U, roughly. And it's changed our whole costing structure inside of our data center. The data center is much cooler. And of course, the whole support piece of it is just unbelievable. There's no one coming in to replace blades every other week. >> I was going to say, too. It had to have an IT labor impact. So what would you have done? You've got a small staff. It's yourself plus three individuals, correct? >> Ray: That's correct. >> What would you have done if you didn't get there? Would you just have to work more nights and weekends? >> That's what we would have done. We would have continued to do that. >> Dave: And you were doing that? >> That's what we were doing. >> Is it fair to say you got a lot of your nights and weekends back? >> Absolutely. >> So, presumably, people are more productive during the day. They're happier because they have more time with their families. >> Absolutely, and access to our data is a lot quicker than it was before. >> So, working less, you get more done. >> Correct. >> That's a good do more with less story, right? Because usually do more with less means you figure out how to work nights and weekends. I mean you remember that cycle of 20, ten, 15 years of hell after the dot come burst. It was like do more with less, do more with less, do more with less. And all it meant was more hours for IT people. I guess we hit the breaking point, and now technology's got us into this problem. Is technology finally getting us out of this problem? >> From our standpoint, it is solved. At least 50% of man hours that we have been using just to keep our systems up and running. Now I work it all from one pane of glass or from my cell phone. >> And here's the thing. What value did that really provide, that extra nights and weekends, to the organization? I guess the value was, if it didn't get done, IT would fail, was the value. But it wasn't incremental value, right? >> Well, what we've been able to do is move more into the job responsibilities that are actually there more along with the technical side. >> Dave: So the strategic stuff? >> Absolutely, I have a developer now that can spend his whole time developing as opposed to responding to some error message on a hard drive or whatever. >> I'll make a prediction. I think it was, it might have been Greenspan, but he said during the 80's, we all went to PC's, they said you see the productivity numbers aren't up ticking. But we're spending all of this money on technology, but you don't see it in the productivity numbers. And of course in the 90's we had this productivity boom. You're kind of seeing some flatness in productivity, but the stories that we get like this, I think we're going to have another boom. Do you feel that way as a technology practitioner? >> Absolutely. Even myself, I deal more with the infrastructure so far as our servers and so forth. I have time to do a whole bunch of things. We're redesigning, for instance, our websites. We're doing a lot of other things now that honestly we didn't have time to do. >> And I think that's a big factor in the flash. It's not just speed. >> Yeah, and Dave, it's something we've been talking about for years, some of the MIT guys. As automation and tools and platforms are actually going to free us up to do more. Stories like your developer wasn't developing and now they are. So, yeah, what are you seeing that's going to enable you to do even more? Is there anything you're asking for from the community that, either some announcements you've seen this week or other things you're looking for? >> Believe it or not, the announcement that I just heard today about the active active scenario, that's it. I have two data centers. >> The multi site replication? >> Absolutely. >> You used to work at EMC in the heyday and they referenced it today. SRDF was kind of the gold standard, expensive, complicated... >> Stu: In 1994 >> Dave: But it changed the business. What I heard, and maybe you alpha geeks can help me, but what I heard is that we're going to dramatically simplify that whole process. So, that's what you heard, but add some color to that. What does that mean for you? >> What that means for me is now my two sites will operate as one. And that I actually have a real active active configuration that I'm not afraid if something goes down that the other one's not going to be there. I don't have to go through the process of rebuilding on the other side because it's all automatic. There are a number of things that were said that if you understood what we have gone through in the past couple of years in working, trying to get together an active active environment, it was just like the creation of fire, as far as I'm concerned. >> It's something we've had in storage forever. The reason we over provision and get such low utilization is because if I have a failure or something goes wrong. If something's a little slow, I have trouble. If I go down, I'm out of a job. >> The traditional vendors weren't able to solve this problem for you. I mean they've been trying for a while, right? But you didn't see anything from those guys. >> If you attempted to do that using hardware base, using software base, it's more than just a notion. I have reasonable assurances, based on what I've seen with Pure that it is going to be as straightforward and as simple as they have described. >> That's great. Alright, Ray, give you the last word. Pure Accelerate, where you here last year? >> Ray: I was not here last year. >> So this is your first year? >> This is my first year, and it's great, it's wonderful. >> Are there things you are seeing that are interesting to you? >> Absolutely, everything, everything. >> Why do you come to these shows? >> Well, number one, I come to learn something new. I like to hear about the announcements number one. And I like to be able to have the opportunity to meet some of the people who actually building, designing, writing the source code for this stuff. It's amazing. >> I got to ask you a personal question. You shared with me you like to funkify, you're a bass player, do you play in a band? >> My band is getting back together for kind of a short reunion here. We have some roots that go back to hip-hop. And it'll be interesting to see Snoop tomorrow night. >> That's awesome, fantastic. Well, Ray, thank you so much for coming to The Cube. >> Appreciate it, appreciate it. >> Alright, keep right there and we'll be back with our next guest. Right after this short break, this is The Cube, we're live from Pure Accelerate 2017 in San Francisco. We'll be right back. (exciting music)

>> Voiceover: Live, from San Francisco. It's theCUBE. Covering Pure Accelerate 2017. Brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Welcome back to San Francisco, everybody. We're at Pier 70, one of the oldest piers in San Francisco which is not long for this place. It's going to be torn down after Pure Accelerate. I'm Dave Vellante and this is Stu Miniman, my co-host. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Kent Petzold this year is the enterprise storage manager at Intermountain Healthcare and Vic Nagjee is back. He's the CTO of Healthcare for Pure Storage. Gents, welcome to theCUBE. Good to have you. >> Kent: Thanks for having us. >> Dave: You're welcome. So Kent, let's start with you because we talked with Vic a little bit already but tell us a little bit about Intermountain and your role. >> So, Intermountain is the biggest healthcare provider in Utah. We've got 22 hospitals, 185 clinics. My role there is, I manage the storage team. We've got eight petabytes of usable storage that we manage. Do lots and lots of backups. You know, all things data protection is under my purview as well. >> Now, have you always been a healthcare you know, practitioner, or is this relatively new for you? >> I've been at Intermountain for 24 years. >> Okay, so that's enough... To qualify you as knowing a little bit about healthcare, and so, my question is, relative to sort of other industries what's unique about healthcare? I mean, obviously it's highly regulated. You've got serious privacy, but you're dealing with, you know, many businesses are dealing with dollars and cents. You deal with a lot of budget, but you also deal with lives. Talk about some of the differences of healthcare and the particular stresses that puts on I.T. >> One of the big things is just doing updates of your technology. Because we deal with people's lives we have to be careful about when we do updates. You know, we've got to be cognizant of you know, "Is the emergency room full?" things like that, so it puts an extra challenge on us for when we need to take systems down to do updates. >> So that means, yeah because updates means downtime. >> Yeah, in the past, yes. >> That's not the case with Pure? Tell us about that, Vic. >> Kent: (laughing) >> Okay, so. Maybe, actually tell us about that a little bit. So, if you guys make a big deal out of it, last segment I turned it into dollars and cents because, on average, a migration, a RAID migration is a minimum of $50,000, minimum. In healthcare, it could be lives. >> Yeah, I mean in healthcare it's definitely lives but it's also a little bit more expensive because this is specialty data. So, the minimum you're looking at is about $1,000 per gigabyte. >> Dave: Per gigabyte? >> Per gigabyte transitioned over. Depending on the kind of application you're dealing with. In this particular case, you know it's more than just the expenses like you mentioned. It's interruption of care, interruption of service, which is not acceptable. So, the technology that we have and the architecture that we have allows us to go in to healthcare organizations such as Intermountain and say "You know what? You can have an environment that's "going to get better with time, because we're going to be able "to come in and not only upgrade your software, "we're also going to be able to come in "and upgrade your hardware and keep you on the tock cycle "every three years, update your controllers, "and so on and so forth with zero downtime." And what we're seeing is this big shift in the healthcare industry where, you know, Kent can relate to this. Typically we have these updates all teed up and lined up for three o'clock in the morning on some obscure weekend day, right, where if something goes sideways the number of experts you can reach are very very low and now we're seeing a switch with this kind of technology to actually have people say "You know what, two o'clock in the afternoon on Tuesday? "I'm there. I'm doing it." >> Okay, so Kent. Take us through sort of your journey here. Sort of give us the before and after of Pure, what problem you're trying to solve, and how you solve that problem. >> So, we started down that with our insurance arm Select Health. We were getting calls pretty much every week. Sometimes two and three times a week for slow issues, and, you know, we're looking through logs. We're doing our monitoring and stuff and it was continuing and my architect was spending hours and hours every week >> Dave: Fun. >> trying to research this. So, we started looking at flash vendors. Pure was one of the only ones that came in, gave us the documentation we wanted, was able to answer the questions we had about our environment. It was a sybase database. AIX with some kind of weird settings, and we started testing it. We liked what we saw. We moved along, finally put it into production. They haven't called us about slows since we put it into production over there years ago. >> This is three years ago? >> Kent: Yeah. >> So it was really a performance issue you were having with your traditional apps, and you said you dropped in Pure Flash array and the problems just disappeared. >> Yeah, we haven't had any calls about slows since then. >> Dave: And if you had to sort of increase your capacity of the Pure system. >> We'd increase the capacity. In fact, because our three years was up we just did a head swap on them and added a little more capacity, and that went flawless. No outage for the business, and they were very happy about that. >> So as long-time storage practitioner... what's the difference in terms of... What difference does it make to you when you bring in a system like this? >> Some of the older systems to like do the head swap and get the new controller is weeks and weeks of planning and making sure you understand what's on their, what needs to move, what can take down times, what can't. I mean, there's a lot of planning that goes into that when you know there's going to be a disruption. So, with systems like Pure, we don't have to do as much planning. We still do a little bit so that we know what we're getting ourselves into and what's going to be at risk, but it's a lot less. There's no... >> So, Kent, how are you tracked by the business? What are kind of, do you have any measurements or KPI's that they look to you. We talked about uptime before, but, you know, how're you tracked, and how's that changed in say the last few years? >> It's changed quite a bit, cause we're not having to track, especially in our tier one apps that are on Pure we're not having to track the performance as much. So we're able to re-look at what our KPI's are, and come up with ones that are meaningful for us. And really, with the simplicity of it, it kind of helps us to become more of a trusted advisor to our business and be able to help them solve their problems instead of continually pulling knobs and fighting fires. >> Vik, I'm curious. How do you help the storage administrator today? I remember, Pure used to have streaming on its website. Certain data points from customers. What are you seeing today? What's helping them shift what they're working on, get more done with what they're doing? >> Kent: Yeah, absolutely. And just to come back to that and echo the point here Kent just made, essentially we're seeing the successful organizations in healthcare and possibly other verticals too, but I live and breath healthcare, right. So, healthcare. I.T. organizations that are able to make the transition to a trusted advisor, to a partner to the business are really making those leaps ahead. In terms of better patient care outcomes and also cost mitigation. Now, in terms of what we offer, right. So, it's the simplicity that's at the heart of everything. Once you set it up and you basically it's like Ron Popeil used to say. "You set it and forget it." Right? You have that experience. And then, it's not so much about having practitioners say "There's black magic going on "and we're going to just trust it." We have to build a transparency in there, and we have to demonstrate that at a glance, single pane there's answers to all of the questions and more that they might have. The telemetry that we're getting off of these systems allows us to do things with machine learning and AI and a lot of business intelligence the backend to be able to say "Hey, over eighty-some percent of all "of our problem tickets that are ever opened "are opened by Pure on behalf of our customers." And say "Hey, you have something that's demonstrating "a characteristic that is similar to what we've seen "across the world, somewhere else, "and you might run into a problem, "so let's just go resolve it." >> So, Kent, one of the things we've been poking at and they talked about in the key note this morning is how do you get more value out of your data? We talked about in an earlier segment with Vik. How do you look at your data? How are you sharing with other organizations or leveraging data internally better? >> Kent: Umm... >> Or are you? >> We've got quite a bit of data, and we're starting to go down the genomics road, and with that data we've got some good opportunities to be able to make some good advancements in healthcare and how different diseases are treated. So, we're kind of excited about that, and that's one of the areas my team's been really helping out, and being a trusted advisor to our genomics group. To get them set up with the things they need. >> You guys are talking on stage today about how backup and data protection is changing. It used to be kind of disk to disk to disk, and then sort of flash to disk to tape. Well, tape is still somewhere in there. You know, whatever, maybe it's the fourth level. You guys are talking flash to flash to cloud. We were talking off camera, Kent. You said "We're kind of looking at where to put "the right cloud workloads." Is backup one of those? >> Backup is possibly one of those. We talked a lot about how we off-site. Right now we still use a lot of tape. One of our key things that we think about when we're thinking about cloud and like off-siting stuff so we want to make sure we put it somewhere that, if we have a disaster, we can spin it up in that place. We're not trying to bring it back and bring it somewhere that is impossible during a disaster. So, we want to put it somewhere, and we want to be able to use it there and not just have it sit there and say "Yeah, we've got data protection. "It's right there, but we can't use it." >> Dave: Yeah, yeah. Can't recover. But, I mean, tape is still pretty prevalent in healthcare, right? It's a compliance issue,right? >> Vik: Very much so. >> I mean, your auditors aren't going to let you just throw away tape, right? >> Vik: Yes and no. I think it's just more of the "It's worked for so many years." Now, the problem that we run into is with the things, and we touched a little bit on this in the last segment. We talked about security, right? And sort of, in terms of insurance and protection against any of these threats that are malware et cetera, that are coming up, is getting more and more important for folks like Kent to prove to the business that "Hey, we're not only backing this data up "but we're restoring it. "We can restore it, and it's good." And we know how long this takes. So, all your iTell stuff comes into play. You have your SLO's. It's all back on. Try doing that with tape. Try doing that with tape that's been archived off-site. >> Dave: No, you can't. (laughing) >> And so this is why healthcare's actually moving in the direction of saying "You know what, let's just forget about that. "Let's just try to find different, better, faster "cheaper media if we can actually apply all of "the principals from today to do that." >> So you might still have tape, but you just never use it. Or you pray you never use it, just to have it there just in case. It's like that fire extinguisher in your barn that you don't know if it works or not but you have it there. >> Vik: It's there. It's good. It looks good, right? (laughing) >> Okay, and so, if you think about the experience that you've had with Pure. I told you I was going to put you on the spot, so are there things that you would do differently if you had to do it over again? Advice for your peers? Things that are on Pure's to-do list that you'd like them to do that'd make your life easier? >> I mean, yeah there's things that are on their to-do list. I mean, and I think they're announcing some of those today so that's probably pretty good. We want to do more with replication. Obviously, as a data protection, you need that. We'd like the price point of the M's to go down a little bit because there's kind of this misnomer about tier one storage and "Do I put my dev on tier one." Well, there's huge opportunities with cloning and things like that, and some of the partners that Pure has that we can actually bring up dev environments and not use as much storage as what we're using today. >> So that's a data sharing capability that you can give access to current data to your devs and not have to spin up multiple copies and separate infrastructure. And the use case that we talked about before was an enterprise data warehouse, right that you were trying to speed up. How about this, you heard from Scott Dietzen this morning the big push on analytics. Is that something, certainly your industry is pushing it. Is your organization there yet? Have you dipped your toe into the big data lake yet? >> Yeah. We've been doing analytics for a long time in one way or another. It's just, we're just getting more and more pressured to have the data available so they can continue to do that. >> Dave: Are you throwing Pure at that problem or is that... >> We hope to. Over time. We keep adding to our environment. >> Alright, Vik, we'll give you the last word. >> Pure and healthcare. What's the bumper sticker? >> Yeah, before you give me the last word I mean I think Kent's underselling what Intermountain's been doing in terms of analytics >> Yeah, add some color to it. >> over time, right? So, basically, they have been one of the pioneers in terms of really understanding drawing value from data. >> Really? >> Yes. It's been over time. It's been very much so of "I have this old data. I want to go run analytics on it. "Then I want to do some BI on it." And now we're getting to the real-time near real-time insight on data that really matters. And for that, we're hopeful that we're going to have an opportunity to actually participate and help build out those sorts of frameworks. And Intermountain's one of the organizations that's lead the way. A lot of the other organizations sort of following in the same footsteps. And, you know, right at the end, all I have to say is all of the benefits that we've talked about and we've talked about... We talked about across verticals and just horizontally in general that the Evergreen model brings to bare from Pure. I think they're really heightened, in terms of healthcare. So we talked about uptime. We talked about six ninths of uptime across our arrays And we're counting planned maintenance as part of your runtime. We're not saying exclude those, right? Very important. No data migrations. Super important. >> Dave: Downtime is downtime. >> Downtime is downtime. Exactly, thank you. Data migrations are super risky. Not only are they expensive, but they're risky. If you talk to any CMIO or CNIO and you say "Hey, how do you feel about your data being "picked up from here, put over there." See their reaction. >> Dave: It hurts. >> And they're expensive. And then the simplicity aspect of it. The simplicity is sort of at the function of the heart of everything. Its power is through simplicity, really is what it is. Giving him and his team and his organization time back to be able to go back and say to the business "How can we make your life better? "How can we make patient care better, "and how can we improve on resources?" >> Okay, good. Actually, Kent, we're going to give you the last word. Pure Accelerate 2017. Good event. What are you learning? Anything exciting? >> Kent: It's been a great event so far. Love the announcements. I just love being in this type of environment, because there's such a vibe here of wanting to help people do things and it's really great to be in a place like this. >> Dave: Yeah, it's fun too. We've got Snoop and... Snoop with the multi-cloud. That's an inside joke everyone. >> Vik: Multi-cloud. Are you sticking around? Are you sticking around for that tomorrow? >> Yeah, I'll be around. (laughing) Alright, good , we'll leave it there. Thanks you guys. We really appreciate you coming on. Okay, keep right there. This is theCube. We're live from Pure Accelerate 2017 in San Francisco. We'll be right back. (techno music)