from the cube studios in palo alto in boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation hi lisa martin with the cube here covering some news from dell technologies i'm pleased to welcome one of its customers liam furlong the i.t manager from revelation software liam great to see you today thanks lisa it's fantastic to be with you and we're socially distant california you're down in australia i know it's early morning for you but we're pleased to be chatting with you so give me and our audience an overview of revelation software who are you and what do you do yeah sure revelation software is a software development company no surprises there and our primary product is a tool called revtrack and for all those sap users out there we help you get your changes navigated safely through the wide landscapes and the open seas of your sap environment so we're all about change management and delivering certainty in what is really rapidly changing landscapes uh in the it world so customers can go to you for all of their challenges with all their sap data and sort of offload that basically i mean that sounds lovely i'm sure many of them would take that so talk to me about your itune manager talking about your i.t environment i know you're highly virtualized just give us an overview of what your data environment looks like we um like a lot of software companies we give our development teams a lot of freedom and so over the years a lot has definitely built into our environment we have hundreds of vms and even more sap landscapes we are committed to our customers to provide a lot of previous version compatibility both in our product but also in sap we support more of sap's old versions than they do we just want to make sure that everyone is able to do their job and focus on what they're trying to do rather than worrying about you know do i have to upgrade am i going to be forced ahead uh in you know especially in a change management landscape and so we have a lot of history a lot of old environments and we manage that by using a lot of on-prem we have local data centers like everyone i guess but also we've got a great multi-cloud environment now and it helps us to really uh provide an excellent environment for our teams to develop in the way that they want to support our customers uh in an efficient way but also without us having to over commit to hardware and so on so you have highly virtualized environment about 150 vms nearly 500 sap landscapes so big administration of overhead talk to me about how you were protecting your data i'm assuming vms maybe some sap databases and servers how are you protecting that before using dell's new integrative approach yeah we uh used a targeted appliance uh style i guess we built up what we thought was the right solution we had a lot of legacy thinking really but uh tools we used a lot of scripts previously we used the veeam platform and that presented an ever increasing set of challenges as you can imagine with s s3 s4 hana rolling along the environment just had to change our backup load was increasing our backup windows weren't getting any larger and our backup targets weren't getting any larger so we really needed to ask some hard questions about what we were doing and whether it was working for us we had absolutely no cloud integration our off-site copies were completely inadequate and so as an i-team manager who is um the guy at the end of the road when it comes to rpo and rto and uh certainty of restorability i was not sleeping well it's fair to say well and that's something that obviously you you look to a company like dell technologies to help with sleep as a sleep aid but you guys i saw that after 20 years you were testing and a hosted version of your rev track insights product and needed cloud dr and you kind of talked about meeting customer slas and i was reading your case study and there was some big challenges there with respect to the sla front yeah definitely um i guess uh actually we were really fortunate to have started a conversation with dell even before we were bringing our cloud platform online we knew we were going to need to be able to address cloud dr it was on the horizon for us and so being able to talk with a vendor that had everything wrapped in uh the idea of an integrated appliance was really quite foreign to me the um the the thought that i could trust dell technologies to actually do this better than me i made that that sounds a bit uh arrogant but the truth is you know i knew my environment and they didn't but what was really stand out for us in the process is dell knew that too and they climbed into our environment and worked really hard they really actually wanted to understand well what were our challenges and what were our loads what was our environment really like and then work with us on a strong solution and i was amazed it felt really like the cavalry had arrived and they knew exactly what they were doing and then they worked overtime to help us find a great solution and it has been a fantastic solution not only solving the challenges we faced at that time of deployment but knowing what was on the horizon going into the cloud and having a sas platform uh we were future-proofed in a way that i was hopeful about but now that we're using it in that way i'm confident and every day i know that it's working properly for us that confidence is absolutely critical but you use the term that we hear so often in technology future proof talk to me about when you hear that as an i.t manager what does that mean to you and how is dell tech with the integrated approach delivering that yeah i think um i mean if i'm just being honest uh i generally dismiss that when i hear anyone say that they're future-proofed because no one knows what's coming i mean here we are living this year outright and uh we we knew 2020 was going to be a big year but not in the ways that it has been uh i think that even though we wanted to believe that this backup tool would cover us we weren't sure uh what it has meant is there are two real standout things one there's a suite of functionality and in the integrated appliance which we didn't need then but it was standing by and it was easy to turn on it wasn't like oh and now you'll have to pay this extra fee or now you'll have to deploy these extra tools it was all ready to go and so they've brought their years of experience and forecasting and built in a bunch of functions which you're not going to need and no one is going to need all of the tools out of the box but over time you can deploy it and the other really big one for us is all of the extra storage that we might need as our backup requirements grow shipped in the box which is a huge cost to the vendor um but it's just sitting there ready for us to consume as we need which is absolutely fantastic for me i don't need to take our backup system offline to upgrade i don't need to consume more rack space i don't need to use more power it's already doing everything it needs to and it's just about rolling forward easily as we move forward as a company so walk us through what the environment looks like now we mentioned 150 vms a big sap landscape give us a picture of the technologies and what dell is helping to protect in your environment yeah so um dell dell covers everything the the integrated appliance we're using um actually it meets all of our needs uh i'm a paranoid and in my job so we have extra bits and pieces kicking around but the power protect device is our go-to we know that it's going to be there it's going to be online it's going to have covered everything from our on-prem so we use a vmware environment locally and we're backing up all of those vms every night about 54 terabytes of data and we knock that out in about a 90 minute window which is absolutely fantastic so that backs up to local and then it ships up to our cloud environment so we've got our offsite covered in that same night then we've also got environment i guess using the amazon example we have a multi-cloud so we've got things in a couple of different cloud providers but to use amazon as an example we have production systems running up there we have our sas environment running up there and we capture that also with our power protect device and bring everything back down and so now we've got that covered as well and so no matter what our problem is i've just got one place to go to to say i need to restore this and i need to do it fast and we can get that done uh straight away it's fantastic and that's what i've been hearing i've spoken with a number of folks already including the vp of product marketing caitlin gordon and we're hearing a lot of that one-stop shop sort of description for the integrated appliance i'm wondering if you could give us a compare and contrast uh power protect the integrated appliance as you said and described the benefits that you've already achieved versus the targeted approach with theme that you had before yeah sure um what we came from was only being able to back up mission critical systems nightly and everything else had to be backed up weekly to achieve our backup windows even still monday morning was uh was a nerve wracking a few hours while the weekend back up kind of crawled through and finished and people are like oh systems are a bit slow this morning like oh yeah we're looking at that you know um we came from that to getting as i said earlier everything done every night which is a complete transformation for us it means that we don't need to worry about we used to have to supplement our veeam backup with scripts because we could get the scripted backup done uh much faster and so we would go oh we'll restore with veeam and then we'll lay a script over the top to recover everything up to last night but now um it's just all uh covered through that one appliance um again in our cloud environments we use the local tools to provide a local backup and that's great to have previously that was mission critical we had to have that working and we had to have our technicians up to speed with four or five different uh tool sets but now they it's great that they are aware of those tools but really it's just about understanding uh one application in regards to a targeted solution you end up having really all these building blocks that only one person really knows how they all string together but now not only do our whole team understand how it works together but it's one phone number to find a whole group of people who know how it works together and they can help us you know from upgrades deployments restores anything we need if i'm on leave then i know that someone else from deltek can step in and cover me for any of their questions it might normally bubble up to my level um one of my favorite numbers i'm sorry i feel like i'm ranting but one of my favorite numbers is you know we came from using a different hardware vendor's san and we were getting compression maybe of three to six times uh on data we get compression from a month view of 150 to 200 times and if we expand that out to an annual view we get compression rates of 300 times on our data which means instead of having literally 15 ru of storage we have two u of storage uh the cost per terabyte is down by hundreds of dollars it it makes me look really good and i haven't had to do anything all i did was just go yep you guys do it you guys deploy your solution so it's been those are huge deduplication numbers i know caitlin gordon shared with me on average 65 to 1 but you you basically at least double that and in terms of of making you look good that's something that's actually quite important in terms of i.t and the business uh making sure that what you can deliver to the business is the confidence and you and your team that their data is protected can you share a little bit about maybe the i.t business relations and how this technology has helped them just have that confidence yeah definitely um i mean as you say every part of the business sees a different thing our development team are paying attention to very different things to our accounting team these numbers definitely help me to make friends in both teams as a it manager if the backups do their job properly if this all works no one notices if this goes wrong i break the business so the stakes are pretty high with backup but even though that's true and we know that's true committing a big financial investment is still hard it's still a moment where you hold your breath and ask was it worth it but now that we've been able to show the numbers to our executive teams and they can see how much money they're saving how much money we would normally be reinvesting at this point but we can now make that available for other projects we can put that into further development we can put that into improving our sas platform that really works for us as a business we want to serve our customers better we don't want to waste our time and money on stuff that affects just our day-to-day we want to be really focused where our people are and with what they care about so by putting money back in the pockets uh that's a big win and by making our uh infrastructure teams more free their time is freer because they're not spending you know we do restores every week pardon me every week because those restores now run more smoothly and they are faster and there's less hunting around to try and find the backup that actually worked then that means our infrastructure teams are free to also now do other upgrades to work alongside say our developers they want to be running the current versions of the atlassian suite not you know a version from a year ago but we've got more time to do that work now it makes a big difference well that workforce productivity that you're alluding to it can be hugely impactful across the business it's not just that now you know you've got one solution one phone number to call if there's issues you've got more time back to be more innovative more strategic and so do the rest of the folks on your team so the business overall that workforce productivity can really be very widespread in a good way absolutely and it's well felt i think you know one of the things that it's really hard to put a dollar value on but it is really key is people don't like doing rework and backup recovery feels like reworking like i've been here before and so by mitigating particularly this aspect of our roles our teams are happier they generally are enjoying their work more because they're as i say they've got more time to work on things that are energizing and rewarding and across the business people feel better as well there are a lot of complications in anyone's job but certainly from the direction that hardware and storage and backup is being uh concerned we've taken away a big stress for me for example it's important that we test our dr scenario obviously everyone says that but now we can actually do it and now we can actually do a full dr production outage and go okay great let's shut it down and see what happens and we were able to do that a couple of times a year we don't have to pay for a cold dc or a warm dc in the wings we can recover to the cloud we our dr site is vmware cloud on amazon so we can spin it up and do the whole dr scenario our dr is engaged within about three hours from a full building loss and not only is that great peace of mind but also again it puts great data into the hands of my cio he's able to present on business continuity issues to the executive team and show that we're actually caring about the business and caring about the things that people do worry about and again makes people look good which is uh which is always helpful it is absolutely as you said it's really you know if you can't restore the data you're kind of stuck so now i know why you look so rested because you you have the solution you're sleeping better at night liam has been such a pleasure talking to you great work and we look forward to hearing more great stories to come from revelation software thanks so much lisa it's been a wonderful time per liam furlong i'm lisa martin you're watching the cube you