>> From the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering AT&T Spark. (techy music) Now here's Jeff Frick. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco at the AT&T Spark event. It's all about 5G, you know we've been hearing about 5G for a long, long time, that 5G is coming, it's in cities, there's more cities that it's rolling out to, it's lots of special networks, so we're excited to be here as it becomes real, and we've got a guy who's right in the middle of the weeds, right in all the devices. He's Gordon Mansfield, the VP of converged access and device technology at AT&T, Gordon, welcome. >> Thank you. >> So, what do you think? You've probably been looking at this 5G stuff for a long, long time. It feels like we're finally getting pretty close. >> We're getting really close, you know, we're gearing up to launch our first 12 markets this year, and just this past weekend we made the first end-to-end call across our production network with a mobile form factor device, so we're real close and we're real excited. >> So, that just happened, right, this first call? >> It just happened this past weekend. So, what were some of the final hurdles to finally get that little milestone that you guys have probably been looking forward to for while? >> Yeah, so the final hurdles is really getting the device modems into, you know, that form factor device, that mobile form factor to where it can be portable, you can carry it-- >> Right. >> And make these fantastic mobile data calls, and so getting that technology, working together, communicating with the network infrastructure, that work just finished, or there's multiple stages, but a critical stage just got completed last week. We were able to take that technology straight to the field in Waco, Texas, and start demonstrating and working with it live in our production network. >> So, do you get the dog out and he can hear his master's voice when you do that first phone call? >> Well... (laughs) You know... >> The old RCA. >> It's pretty close. >> I know, nobody knows what we're even talking about, right, too old. >> (chuckles) They don't, do they? >> So, the other thing that's really interesting about 5G compared to the other, prior roll-outs is really the focus on devices, and you're in charge of devices and devices is a lot more than just handsets, right? >> Yeah. >> This was really designed for the industrial internet and IoT, and really a whole swath of device-to-device communication. How did that kind of change the way you look at your job? >> Yeah, so you know, we've been working on IoT and modules in the IoT space, but with 5G you start to enable lots of new capabilities with very high bandwidth, low latent applications, which allows us to revolutionize various vertical industries, and so now it's no longer just about the smartphone or the tablet, but it's about anything and everything that you can imagine-- >> Right. >> And so, you know, I tell people all the time, you know, when we first start talking about technology we really think about some cool things, but the reality is we barely touch the surface, and so you know, people will just begin to imagine the capabilities that 5G will unleash and you'll start to put, you know, the capabilities into everything from a refrigerator to robot arms on a manufacturing floor and all kinds of points in between. >> Right, you know it's funny, we go to a lot of tech conferences, and we were just at VMworld a couple weeks ago and you know, Michael Dell said on air that, you know, the edge will actually be bigger than the cloud, and right, it's been all about cloud for the last several years. >> Yeah. >> Now it's all about edge. Well, the key to edge is connectivity, and that's a really important piece of the 5G story. >> Absolutely, if you take your compute power and you push it further to the edge you've got to then connect, and so you can put very low-cost, low horsepower components on the edge, connect them, you know, so in a device, connect them to the edge and come up with some pretty powerful capabilities. >> Yeah, and the other interesting thing from your guys' point of view, having dealt with handsets for so long, is just the whole low power, and a lot of the edge type applications are going to be in remote areas, difficult to get to areas, difficult to plumb areas, so the whole experience with low power combined with the low latency is really a big game changer. >> That's absolutely correct, so when you take low power you can put battery devices that last years-- >> Right. >> And have them in remote locations, sensors, et cetera, and have them connect in a low-latent, high-bandwidth way to deliver, you know, anything that you can imagine. >> Right, so it feels to me that there's really not the buzz around 5G that there should be, and I don't know because we've kind of heard about it for a while and it's kind of been in extended development or people just aren't paying attention, but what's interesting, a lot of conversations in the keynotes talking about experiences. >> Mm-hm. >> Really changing the way you can think about developing applications for experiences based on this technology. We saw the NVIDIA demo where they're running NVIDIA processors in their cloud and sending it to a laptop here, where before you'd have to spend thousands of dollars on a local machine. As you look back, what are some of the things that you've seen, either in testing or conversations, that maybe people just don't have any perception of how this is going to change some of their day-to-day activities? >> So, I don't think people, you know, unfortunately we've become immune. The devices, right, the processing power that we put in devices that people carry in their pocket, they keep going up and up. The reality is at some point you've got to flatten that to... From a consumer perspective you've got to flatten that to have a device that people can afford. >> Right. >> And so, with 5G and you start putting things to the edge you start taking away some of the processing power that physically is in the phone and you put that at the edge, to where now people can have really high speed, high capabilities in a relatively low-cost device. >> That's pretty interesting, you're the first person. So, it is really this redistribution of, you know, networking, compute, and store-- >> Mm-hm. >> That's now enabled with this fast networking, where before your options were really not so great. >> Yeah, it's always a balance, but today your only option is to continue to put more and more horsepower into the device itself-- >> Right. >> More processing, compute storage, into the device. By spreading that and having some of it maintained in the network you can maintain, you can manage cost in the end user device that people carry in their pocket. >> Okay, so give you the last word, when you are at a cocktail party on the weekend talking to some people about what you do, what surprises people most about 5G once you tell them it's this new thing that's coming down the pike? >> Well, you know, look, in my job I get to see lots of cool things, and when I start describing some virtual or augmented reality, imagine walking down the street with a pair of glasses and suddenly images, right, start, you know, being fed on top of what you're really looking at. You start, you know, you can imagine a day where, you know, an advertisement may pop up in your field of view, or you know, points of interest that you might want to see, and you know, obviously we've got to control that and manage it to consumer expectations, but that's not as far away as people might imagine. >> Right, and just to recap, you're in 12 markets. >> 12 markets-- >> You're in seven, five more, and then another seven coming, right? >> That's right, so 12 by the end of '18, and seven more in early '19. We're off to a fast start and looking to grow from there. >> All right, Gordon, well congratulations on progress to date and good luck with the roll-out. >> All right, thank you. >> (chuckles) All right, he's Gordon, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at AT&T Spark in San Francisco, thanks for watching. (techy music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Fransisco It's theCUBE Covering PURE Accelerate 2017. Brought to you by PURESTORAGE. >> Welcome back to PURE Accelerate. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Stu Miniman. This is PURE Accelerate. We're here at Pier 70. Brian McDaniel is here he's an infrastructure architect at the Baylor College of Medicine, not to be confused with Baylor University in Waco Texas, anymore. Brian Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me appreciate it. >> You're very welcome. Tell us about the Baylor College of Medicine. >> So, Baylor College of Medicine is a, first and foremost, a teaching facility but also the leader in research and development for healthcare in the Texas Medical Center in Houston Texas. We currently employ roughly 1,500 physicians and so they occupy a multitude of institutions, not only at Baylor but other facilities and hospitals in and around the Texas Medical Center. >> So, it's kind of' healthcare morning here Stu. We've been talking about electronic medical records, meaningful use, the Affordable Care Act, potential changes there, HIPAA, saving lives. These are big issues. >> We're not at the HIMSS Conference Dave? >> We should be at HIMMS. So these are big issues for any organization in healthcare. It's just exacerbates the challenges on IT. So, I wonder if you can talk about some of the drivers in your business, compliance, and in new tech and maybe share with us some of the things that you're seeing. >> Absolutely so first and foremost, we are an Epic system shop. That's our EMR. So, from a enterprise and clinical operation, that is our number one mission critical application. It provides your electronic medical records to our staff, regardless of where they're physically located at. So that alone is a demanding type of solution if you will, the mobility aspect of it. Delivering that in a fast manner and a repeatable manner is upmost important to our physicians because they're actually seeing patients and getting to your records and being able to add notes and collaborate with other institutions if necessary. So, time to market is very important and accessibility is also up there. >> Right so, you mentioned that collaboration and part of that collaboration is so much data now, being able to harness that data and share it. Data explodes everywhere but in healthcare, there's so much data to the extent we start instrumenting things. What are you guys doing with all that data? >> Right now, it lives within the clinical application, right in Epic, but as you pointed out that is where the value is. that is where your crown jewels so to speak are at. That data is now being looked at as a possible access point outside of the clinical operation. So, it's environment is going to be even more important going forward, when you look to branch out into some of the basic sides in more of a research, to gain access to that clinical data. That historically has been problematic for the research to be done accessing that information. >> So, in the corporate we like to think of, from an IT perspective, you got to run the business, you got to grow the business, you got to transform the business. It's a little different in healthcare. You kind of got to comply. A lot of your time is spent on compliance and regulation changes and keeping up with that. And then there's got to be a fair amount that's at least attempting to do transformation and in kind of keeping up with the innovations. Maybe you could talk about that a little bit. >> Absolutely, particularly on the innovation side, we work closely with out partners at Epic and we work to decide roadmaps and how that fits into the Baylor world. Case in point, a year ago we were set to go to the new version of Epic, which was 2015. And Epic is nice enough to lay out requirements for you and say, here's what your system needs to meet in order to comply with Epic standards. So, they give you a seal of approval, so to speak. And there's monetary implications for not meeting those requirements. So it's actually dollars and cents. It's not just , we want you to meet this. If you do then there's advantages to meeting it. So, they provided that to us and went though the normal testing phases and evaluations of our current platform, both from compute and storage. And honestly we struggled to meet their requirements with our legacy systems. So the team was challenged to say well, what can we do to meet this? We have our historical infrastructures, so if we're going to deviate from that, let's really deviate and look at what's available to the market. So, Flash comes to mind immediately. So, there's a multitude of vendors that make Flash storage products. So we started meeting with all of 'em, doing our fact finding and our data gathering, meeting with all of 'em. First and foremost, they have to be Epic certified. That eliminated a couple of contenders right off the bat. Right? You're not certified. >> I would expect some of the startups especially. >> It did. Some of the smaller, Flash vendors, for example, one of 'em came in and we said, well, what do you do with Epic? And they said what's Epic. And you kind of scratch your head and say thank you. >> Thank you for playing. >> Here's the door. So, it eliminates people but then when we meet with PURE, and we talked to them and we meet 'em and you get to really know that the family and the culture that they bring with the technology. Yes it's got to be fast but Flash is going to be fast. What else can you do? And that's where you start learning about how it was born on Flash, how it was native to Flash and so you get added benefits to the infrastructure by looking at that type of technology, which ultimately led us there, where we're at running Epic on our Flash arrays. >> And Brian, you're using the Flash stack configuration of converge infrastructure. It sounds like it was PURE that lead you that way as opposed to Cisco? Could you maybe walk us through that? >> That's very interesting, so we're a UCS shop. We were before PURE. So when PURE came in, the fact that they had a validated design with the Flash stack infrastructure, made it all that more easier to implement the PURE solution because it just is modular enough to fit in with our current infrastructure. That made it very appealing that we didn't have to change or alter much. We just looked at the validated design that says, here's your reference architecture, how it applies to the Flash stack. You already have UCS. We love it, we're a big fan. And here's how to implement it. And it made the time to market, to get production work loads on it, very quick. >> And the CVD that you got from Cisco, that's Cisco plus PURE but was it healthcare Epic specific or was that the PURE had some knowledge for that that they pulled in? >> So, that was one of the value adds that we feel PURE brought was the Epic experience. And whether that's scripting, the backups, and if you're familiar with Epic, the environmental refreshes that they have to do. There's seven Epic environments. And they all have to refresh off of each other and play off of each other so, >> So you have a window that you have to hit right. >> And you do right? And historically that window's been quite large. And now, not so much which makes everybody happy. >> Hey, that's what weekends are for. >> Absolutely, yeah, our DBAs attest to that right? So, we would like to think we've made their world and life a little bit more enjoyable 'cause those weekends now, they're not having to babysit the Epic refreshes. Back to the point of Epic experience, that was instrumental in the decision makings from a support with the PURESTORAGE help desk, awareness of what it takes to run Epic on PURE, and then going forward knowing that there's a partnership behind Epic and PURE and certainly Baylor College of Medicine as we continue to look at the next versions of Epic, whether that's 2018 and on to 2020, whatever that decision is, we know that we have a solid foundation now to grow. >> And Brian I'm curious, you've been a Cisco shop for a while, Cisco has lots of partnerships as well as, they've got a hyper-converged offering that they sell themselves. What was your experience working with Cisco and do they just let you choose and you said, I want PURE and they're like, great? Do you know? What was that like? >> To your point, there's validated designs for many customers and Cisco is kind of at the hub of that, that core with the compute and memory of the blade systems, the UCS. They liked the fact that we went with PURE 'cause it does me a validated design. And they have others with other vendors. The challenge there is how do they really integrate with each other from tools to possibly automation down the road, and how do they truly integrate with each other. 'Cause we did bring in some of the other validated design architecture organizations and I think we did our due diligence and looked at 'em to see how they differentiate between each other. And ultimately, we wanted something that was new and different approach to storage. It wasn't just layering your legacy OS on a bunch of Flash drives and call it good. Something that was natively born to take advantage of that technology. And that's what ultimately led us to PURE. >> Well, PURE has a point of view on the so called hyper-converged space. You heard Scott Dietzen talking this morning. What's your perspective on hyper-convergence? >> Hyper-converge is one of those buzz words that I think gets thrown out of there kind of off the cuff if you will. But people hear it and get excited about it. But what type of workloads are you looking to take advantage of it? Is it truly hyper-converged or is it just something that you can say you're doing because it sounds cool? I think to some degree, people are led astray on the buzzwords of the technology where they get down to say, what's going to take advantage of it? What kind of application are you putting on it? If your application, in our case, can be written by a grad student 20 years ago that a lab is still using, it does it make sense to put it on hyper-converged? No, because it can't take advantage of the architecture or the design. So, in a lot of ways, we're waiting and seeing. And the reason we didn't go to a hyper-converged platform is a, Epic support and b, we were already changing enough to stay comfortable with the environment and knowing that come Monday morning, doctors will be seeing patients and we're already changing enough, that was another layer that we chose not to change. We went with a standard UCS configuration that everyone was already happy with. That made a significant difference from an operational perspective. >> Essentially, your processes are tightly tied to Epic and the workflow associated with that. So from an infrastructure perspective, it sounds like you just don't want it to be in the way. >> We don't. The last thing we want in infrastructure getting in the way. And quite frankly, it was in the way. Whether that was meeting latency requirements or IOPS requirements from the Cache database or the Clarity database within the Epic system, or if was just all of are just taking a little bit longer than they expect. We don't want to be that bottleneck, if you will, we want them to be able to see patients faster, run reports faster, gain access to that valuable data in a much faster way to enable them to go about their business and not have to worry about infrastructure. >> Brian, PURE said that they had, I believe it's like 25 new announcements made this morning, a lot of software features. Curious, is there anything that jumped out at you, that you've been waiting for and anything still on your to do list that you're hoping for PURE or PURE and it's extended ecosystem to deliver for you? >> Great question, so at the top of that list is the replication of the arrays, whether that's in an offsite data center or a colo and how that applies to an Epic environment that has to go through this flux of refreshes, and from a disaster or business continuity standpoint, we're actively pursuing that, and how that's going to fit with Baylor. So, we're very excited to see what our current investment, free of charge by the way, once you do the upgrade to 5.0, is to take advantage of those features, with replication being one of 'em. >> And then, I thought I heard today, Third Sight is a service. Right? So you don't have to install your own infrastructure. So, I'm not sure exactly what that's all about. I got to peel the onion on that one. >> To be determined right? When we look at things like that, particularly with Epic, we have to be careful because that is the HIPAA, PHI, that's your records, yours and mine, medical records right? You just don't want that, if I told you it's going to be hosted in a public cloud. Wait a minute. Where? No it's not. We don't want to be on the 10 o'clock news right? However, there's things like SAP HANA and other enterprise applications that we certainly could look at leveraging that technology. >> Excellent, we listen, thank you very much Brian for coming on theCUBE. We appreciate your perspectives and sort of educating us a little bit on your business and your industry anyway. And have a great rest of the show. >> Yeah, thank you very much. Appreciate it. >> You're welcome. Alright keep it right there everybody. This is theCUBE. We're back live right after this short break from PURE Accelerate 2017. Be right back.