>>From around the globe. It's the cube covering Fortinet security summit brought to you by Fortinet. >>Welcome back to the cube. Lisa Martin here at the Fordham het championship security summit. Napa valley has been beautiful and gracious to us all day. We're very pleased to be here. I'm very pleased to welcome a first-timer to the cube. Rupesh Chuck Chuck Xi, VP a T and T cybersecurity and edge solutions at, at and T cybersecurity. Refresh. Welcome. >>Thank you. Thank you so much for having me, Lisa, I'm looking forward to our conversation today. >>Me too. First of all, it's we're in Napa we're outdoors. It's beautiful venue, no complaints, right? We're at a golf PGA tournament. Very exciting. Talk to me about the at and T Fordanet relationship. Give me, give me an, a good insight into the partnership. >>Sure, sure. So, as you said, you know, beautiful weather in California, Napa it's my first time. Uh, so it's kind of a new experience for me going back to your question in terms of the relationship between eight P and T and Ford in that, uh, a long lasting, you know, 10 plus years, you know, hand in hand in terms of the product, the technology, the capabilities that we are brought together in the security space for our customers. So a strategic relationship, and I'm so thrilled to be here today as a, Fordanet invited us to be part of the championship. Tommy, >>Talk to me. So your role VP of, and T cybersecurity and edge solutions, give me an, a deep dive into what's in your purview. >>Sure, sure. So I, uh, sort of, you know, run the PNL or the profit and loss center for product management for all of at and T cybersecurity and ed solutions and the whole concept behind putting the teams together is the convergence in networking and security. Um, so, you know, we are supporting the entire customer continuum, whether it's a fortune 50, the fortune 1000 to mid-market customers, to small businesses, to, you know, government agencies, you know, whether it's a local government agency or a school district or a federal agency, et cetera. And my team and I focus on bringing new product and capabilities to the marketplace, you know, working with our sales team from an enablement perspective, go to market strategy. Um, and the whole idea is about, uh, you know, winning in the marketplace, right? So delivering growth and revenue to the business, >>Competitive differentiation. So we've seen so much change in the last year and a half. I know that's an epic understatement, but we've also seen the proliferation at the edge. What are some of the challenges that you're seeing and hearing from customers where that's concerned >>As you stated, right. There's a lot happening in the edge. And sometimes the definition for edge varies when you talk with different people, uh, the way we look at it is, you know, definitely focused on the customer edge, right? So if you think about many businesses, whether I am a, a quick serve restaurant or I'm a banking Institute or a financial services or an insurance agency, or I'm a retail at et cetera, you know, lots of different branches, lots of different transformation taking place. So one way of approaching it is that when you think about the customer edge, you see a lot of virtualization, software driven, a lot of IOT endpoints, et cetera, taking place. So the cyber landscape becomes more important. Now you're connecting users, devices, capabilities, your point of sale system to a multi-cloud environment, and that, you know, encryption of that data, the speed at which it needs to happen, all of that is very important. And as we think ahead with 5g and edge compute and what that evolution revolution is going to bring, it's going to get even more excited because to me, those are kind of like in a playgrounds of innovation, but we want to do it right and keep sort of, you know, cyber and security at the core of it. So we can innovate and keep the businesses safe. >>How do you help customers to kind of navigate edge cybersecurity challenges and them not being synonymous? >>That's a great, great question. You know, every day I see, you know, different teams, different agendas, different kinds of ways of approaching things. And what I tell customers and even my own teams is that, look, we have to have a, a blueprint and architecture, a vision, you know, what are the business outcomes that we want to achieve? What the customer wants to achieve. And then start to look at that kind of technology kind of convergence that is taking place, and especially in the security and the networking space, significant momentum on the convergence and utilize that convergence to create kind of full value stack solutions that can be scaled, can be delivered. So you are not just one and done, but it's a continuous innovation and improvement. And in the security space, you need that, right. It's never going to be one and done. No >>We've seen so much change in the last year. We've seen obviously this rapid pivot to work from home that was overnight for millions and millions of people. We're still in that too. A fair amount. There's a good amount of people that are still remote, and that probably will be permanently there's. Those that are going to be hybrid threat landscape bloated. I was looking at and talking with, um, 40 guard labs and the, the nearly 11 X increase in the last 12 months in ransomware is insane. And the ransomware as a business has exploded. So security is a board level conversation for businesses I assume in any. >>Absolutely. Absolutely. I agree with you, it's a board level conversation. Security is not acknowledged the problem about picking a tool it's about, you know, the business risk and what do we need to do? Uh, you mentioned a couple of interesting stats, right? So we've seen, uh, you know, two things I'll share. One is we've seen, you know, 440 petabytes of data on the at and T network in one average business day. So 440 petabytes of data. Most people don't know what it is. So you can imagine the amount of information. So you can imagine the amount of security apparatus that you need, uh, to Tofino, protect, and defend and provide the right kind of insights. And then the other thing that VOC and along the same lines of what you were mentioning is significant, you know, ransomware, but also significant DDoSs attacks, right? So almost like, you know, we would say around 300% plus said, DDoSs mitigations that we did from last year, you know, year over year. >>So a lot of focus on texting the customer, securing the end points, the applications, the data, the network, the devices, et cetera. Uh, the other two points that I want to mention in this space, you know, again, going back to all of this is happening, right? So you have to focus on this innovation at the, at the speed of light. So, you know, artificial intelligence, machine learning, the software capabilities that are more, forward-looking have to be applied in the security space ever more than ever before, right. Needs these do, we're seeing alliances, right? We're seeing this sort of, you know, crowdsourcing going on of action on the good guys side, right? You see the national security agencies kind of leaning in saying, Hey, let's together, build this concept of a D because we're all going to be doing business. Whether it's a public to public public, to private, private, to private, all of those different entities have to work together. So having security, being a digital trust, >>Do you think that the Biden administrations fairly recent executive order catalyst of that? >>I give it, you know, the president and the, the administration, a lot of, you know, kudos for kind of, and then taking it head on and saying, look, we need to take care of this. And I think the other acknowledgement that it is not just hunting or one company or one agency, right? It's the whole ecosystem that has to come together, not just national at the global level, because we live in a hyper connected world. Right. And one of the things that you mentioned was like this hybrid work, and I was joking with somebody the other day that, and really the word is location, location, location, thinking, network security, and networking. The word is hybrid hybrid hybrid because you got a hybrid workforce, the hybrid cloud, you have a hybrid, you have a hyper-connected enterprise. So we're going to be in this sort of, you know, hybrid for quite some time are, and it has to >>Be secure and an org. And it's, you know, all the disruption of folks going to remote work and trying to get connected. One beyond video conference saying, kids are in school, spouse working, maybe kids are gaming. That's been, the conductivity alone has been a huge challenge. And Affordanet zooming a lot there with links to us, especially to help that remote environment, because we know a lot of it's going to remain, but in the spirit of transformation, you had a session today here at the security summit, talked about transformation, formation plan. We talk about that word at every event, digital transformation, right? Infrastructure transformation, it security. What context, where you talking about transformation in it today? What does it transformation plan mean for your customers? >>That's a great question because I sometimes feel, you know, overused term, right? Then you just take something and add it. It's it? Transformation, network, transformation, digital transformation. Um, but what we were talking today in, in, in the morning was more around and sort of, you know, again, going back to the network security and the transformation that the customers have to do, we hear a lot about sassy and the convergence we are seeing, you know, SD van takeoff significantly from an adoption perspective application, aware to experiences, et cetera, customers are looking at doing things like internet offload and having connectivity back into the SAS applications. Again, secure connectivity back into the SAS applications, which directly ties to their outcomes. Um, so the, the three tenants of my conversation today was, Hey, make sure you have a clear view on the business outcomes that you want to accomplish. Now, the second was work with a trusted advisor and at and T and in many cases is providing that from a trusted advisor perspective. And third, is that going back to the one and done it is not a one and done, right? This is a, is a continuous process. So sometimes we have to be thinking about, are we doing it in a way that we will always be future ready, will be always be able to deal with the security threats that we don't even know about today. So yeah, >>You bring up the term future ready. And I hear that all the time. When you think of man, we really weren't future ready. When the pandemic struck, there was so much that wasn't there. And when I was talking with 49 earlier, I said, you know, how much, uh, has the pandemic been a, uh, a catalyst for so much innovation? I imagine it has been the same thing that >>Absolutely. And, you know, I remember, you know, early days, February, March, where we're all just trying to better understand, right? What is it going to be? And the first thing was, Hey, we're all going to work remote, is it a one week? Is it a two week thing? Right? And then if you're like the CIO or the CSO or other folks who are worried about how am I going to give the productivity tools, right. Businesses in a one customer we work with, again, tobacco innovation was said, Hey, I have 20,000 call center agents that I need to take remote. How do you deliver connectivity and security? Because that call center agent is the bloodline for that business interacting with their end customers. So I think, you know, it is accelerated what would happen over 10 years and 18 months, and it's still unknown, right? So we're still discovering the future. >>There's a, there will be more silver linings to come. I think we'll learn to pick your brain on, on sassy adoption trends. One of the things I noticed in your abstract of your session here was that according to Gardner, the convergence of networking and security into the sassy framework is the most vigorous technology trend. And coming out of 2020, seeing that that's a big description, most vigorous, >>It's a big, big description, a big statement. And, uh, we are definitely seeing it. You know, we saw some of that, uh, in the second half of last year, as the organizations were getting more organized to deal with, uh, the pandemic and the change then coming into this year, it's even more accelerated. And what I mean by that is that, you know, I look at sort of, you know, three things, right? So one is going back to the hybrid work, remote work, work from anywhere, right. So how do you continue to deliver a differentiated experience, highly secure to that workforce? Because productivity, human capital very important, right? The second is that there's a back and forth on the branch transformation. So yes, you know, restaurants are opening back up. Retailers are opening back up. So businesses are thinking about how do I do that branch transformation? And then the third is explosive business IOT. So the IOT end points, do you put into manufacturing, into airports in many industries, we continue to see that. So when you think about sassy and the framework, it's about delivering a, a framework that allows you to protect and secure all of those endpoints at scale. And I think that trend is real. I've seen customer demand, we've signed a number of deals. We're implementing them as we speak across all verticals, healthcare, retail, finance, manufacturing, transportation, government agencies, small businesses, mid-sized businesses. >>Nope, Nope. Not at all. Talk to me about, I'm curious, you've been at, at and T a long time. You've seen a lot of innovation. Talk, talk to me about your perspectives on seeing that, and then what to you think as a silver lining that has come out of the, the acceleration of the last 18 months. >>She and I, I get the question, you know, I've been with at and T long time. Right. And I still remember the day I joined at T and T labs. So it was one of my kind of dream coming out of engineering school. Every engineer wants to go work for a brand that is recognized, right. And I, I drove from Clemson, South Carolina to New Jersey Homedale and, uh, I'm still, you know, you can see I'm still having the smile on my face. So I've, you know, think innovation is key. And that's what we do at, at and T I think the ability to, um, kind of move fast, you know, I think what the pandemic has taught us is the speed, right? The speed at which we have to move the speed at which we have to collaborate the speed at which we have to deliver, uh, to agility has become, you know, the differentiator for all of us. >>And we're focusing on that. I also feel that, uh, you know, there have been times where, you know, product organizations, technology organizations, you know, we struggle with jumping this sort of S-curve right, which is, Hey, I'm holding onto something. Do I let go or not? Let go. And I think the pandemic has taught us that you have to jump the S-curve, you have to accelerate because that is where you need to be in, in a way, going back to the sassy trend, right. It is something that is real, and it's going to be there for the next three to five years. So let's get ready. >>I call that getting comfortably uncomfortable, no businesses safe if they rest on their laurels these days. I think we've learned that, speaking of speed, I wanna, I wanna get kind of your perspective on 5g, where you guys are at, and when do you think it's going to be really impactful to, you know, businesses, consumers, first responders, >>The 5g investments are happening and they will continue to happen. And if you look at what's happened with the network, what at and T has announced, you know, we've gotten a lot of kudos for whatever 5g network for our mobile network, for our wireless network. And we are starting to see that, that innovation and that innovation as we anticipated is happening for the enterprise customers first, right? So there's a lot of, you know, robotics or warehouse or equipment that needs to sort of, you know, connect at a low latency, high speed, highly secure sort of, you know, data movements, compute edge that sits next to the, to the campus, you know, delivering a very different application experience. So we're seeing that, you know, momentum, uh, I think on the consumer side, it is starting to come in and it's going to take a little bit more time as the devices and the applications catch up to what we are doing in the network. And if you think about, you know, the, the value creation that has happened on, on the mobile networks is like, if you think about companies like Uber or left, right, did not exist. And, uh, many businesses, you know, are dependent on that network. And I think, uh, it will carry on. And I think in the next year or two, we'll see firsthand the outcomes and the value that it is delivering you go to a stadium at and T stadium in Dallas, you know, 5g enabled, you know, that the experience is very different. >>I can't wait to go to a stadium again and see it came or live music. Oh, that sounds great. Rubbish. Thank you so much for joining me today, talking about what a T and T is doing with 49, the challenges that you're helping your customers combat at the edge and the importance of really being future. Ready? >>Yes. Thank you. Thank you so much. Really appreciate you having me. Thanks for 49 to invite us to be at this event. Yes. >>Thank you for refresh talk. She I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube at the 40 net championship security summits.

>>Welcome to this IBM Watson health client conversation here. We're probing the dynamics of the relationship between IBM and its clients. And we're looking back, we're exploring the present situation and discussing the future state of healthcare. My name is Dave Volante from the cube and with me are Alex Dillard. Who's a senior director data analysis at blue choice, blue choice health plan, and Darryl decode, who is IBM with IBM Watson health. Of course. Welcome gentlemen. Good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Hey, >>So, you know, you think about lasting relationships. They're the foundation to any partnership and this past year, and it's tested all of us. We've had to rely on both personal and professional relationships to get us through the pandemic. So Alex, let me start with you. How has the partnership with IBM supported you in 2020? >>Well, uh, I've just a piece of a larger puzzle. Uh, the relationship that Darrell and I have had is confined to IBM Watson health, but blue cross blue shield, South Carolina, which food choice is a wholly owned subsidiary of has had a standing relationship with IBM on the it side. Uh, we are a mainframe shop, uh, about 70% of our it infrastructure is on a mainframe. And, uh, that puts us as a segment one client for IBM, we're in the top 300 of all of their clients in the Americans. And more specifically we're the fourth largest, um, uh, Linux on Z shop in the world. So, uh, we've got a lot of diversification at blue cross blue shield of South Carolina and the mainframe and the vastness of that. It infrastructure reflects that, uh, diversification. We are more than just a crossing the shield. Uh, that's typically what people think of is insurance when they think of crossing shield, but we also have a division that does a lot of subcontract work for government programs, uh, track air, which is the military healthcare, uh, claims processing and Medicare claims processing. >>We were a subcontractor of other folks that use our back office, it infrastructure to, to run their claims through. So that's, that's the larger, um, aspect of our relationship that, that blue cross blue shield of South Carolina house with IBM, uh, as it relates to Watson health, we have been a client since 1994 and obviously that predates the IBM proper. Uh, we were a client of med stat and then Truven, who then, uh, was bought by IBM. So we have used the products from Watson health throughout our system to support provider profiling, uh, count group reporting, um, and ad hoc analysis and to some extent to, uh, support our value-based products with, uh, ACO and PCMH, >>Uh, products. >>Awesome. Thank you for that. So Daryl is very long-term relationship. Obviously, if people forget sometimes that, uh, how IBM has modernized the Z Alex talked about, uh, Linux on the mainframe. That's pretty cool. I wonder if you could talk about specifically the things that, that you've done with Alex in his, in his, in his team, you know, thinking back last year, what were your accomplishments that you really stand out? >>Yeah, so, so one thing that jumps to mind is, uh, given the long standing relationship, I relied heavily on Alex to help us work through a multi-year renewal. And it was, it was a, um, a good adventure for us. We, we were able to laugh along the way. We certainly had some, some phone calls that, that were a little bit challenging, but the great thing about it was that the relationship that Alex and I had, he really views it as a partnership. And that was just so encouraging and uplifting. So to me, from my perspective, that was absolutely, uh, one of the highlights of my year and working through even through the pandemic and all that, we figured it out. >>So you guys, when you get together, go ahead, please. >>That's what I had as well. Um, you know, the, the unique thing about the Watson health contract is because it involves data. Uh, we take the stance that it's an it contract, so I'm on the business side. So I've got to just, as Daryl has to navigate it with me, we've got to navigate a large of your it bureaucracy. Um, and, uh, it, it was challenging. Um, you know, the business people kind of smooth the tracks and then you get the lawyers involved in, it just goes haywire. So, um, we were able to navigate that. Um, uh, so yeah, so it was a big accomplishment. So Alex, it's not real sexy to talk about, but we got it done >>Well. So Alex you're, you're in sales, so you're, you're used to role playing. So imagine you're, you're, you're sitting down, uh, sorry, Darryl. You're used to, role-playing out. Imagine you're sitting down with Alex and you're thinking about 20, 21 planning, so, you know, take it away. W what do you, what would you ask, what would you talk about or share with us? >>Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, so I, I know that, you know, one of the key objectives is, uh, continued to ingest, engage with your members and you have key business strategies. I know you recently migrated over to a new PBM, and so there, there's some complexities that come with that. Um, but just, you know, Alex, if you don't mind, why don't you share a little bit about kind of your, your perspective on what 2020 would hold for you in your organization? Well, I think that due to the pandemic, we are, I personally kick the, can down the road on a couple of things, particularly >>Having a strategic roadmap discussion, um, you know, uh, I was going to get into this later, but I enjoy doing things face-to-face rather than, uh, over the phone or, or virtually. And so, uh, I guess I was a little too optimistic about maybe being able to get together late 2020 to have that strategic roadmap discussion. Um, I think, uh, given what has developed with, um, the pandemic and vaccines and stuff, I may, I may be able to get everybody on the same page later this year, hopefully. Uh, but certainly we want to have a strategic roadmap discussion. Um, we license, uh, Watson Hills, uh, cat group insights, uh, tool, which we use for employer group reporting. And we are currently in the beginning stages of rolling that out to our external clients, whether it's agents, brokers, um, those types of folks. And then it vanished we as our core product that we use for analysis, and that product is transitioning to what is called health insights. And so from an analytical standpoint, my staff and the staff of our cluster areas will need to sort of move to health insights since that's where it's going, uh, from an analytic standpoint. So we're going to work on that as well. Um, and then some more detailed things around database rebuilds and stuff like that. Those are all sort of on the roadmap for 2021. >>Yeah. So, you know, you talk about strategic planning and you think about the way planning used to be. I mean, sometimes you take a longer term horizon, maybe that's five years, you know, technology cycles, you know, even though they go very fast, but you see major technology shifts, they're like go through these seven year cycles, you see that in financial world. And then with the, with the pandemic, we're talking about seven day cycles, you know, how do I support people work from home? Do I open the store or not? You know, it's a day-to-day type of thing. So I wonder if you could each talk about personally and professionally w how, how is 2020, you know, changed you and maybe position you for, for what's ahead, maybe Alex, you could start, >>Well, you know, I'm an analyst, so I always fall back to the numbers. What are the numbers show us, um, you know, people can have four perceptions, but, uh, the numbers give us a reality. So the reality is that a year ago, pre pandemic, uh, just 13% of blue cross blue shield employees were working from home a hundred percent, uh fast-forward to today. And that number is now 87%. So think about, uh, just the lift from a it infrastructure to support that we almost, all of those people are using Citrix to get in to our network. Uh, we're using a remote desktop. So you've got this pipeline that probably had to go from, you know, this small, to huge, to get all this bandwidth, all this data and everything. So you've got that huge lift. Um, and then it affects different areas, um, differently. Uh, I don't have any first-line staff, any staff that are member facing, so I didn't really have to navigate, you know, how do these people talk to our member? >>How does staff talk to our members on the phone when they're at home, as opposed to in the office, and, you know, is there background noise, things like that. So I've got analysts, uh, they're just crunching numbers. Um, but my, my, my personal, uh, feeling was I like doing managing by walking around, you know, stopping and talking to other, working on. So that went away and I like face-to-face meetings, as I've mentioned, and that went away. So it was really a culture change for me personally, it was a culture change for our organization. Uh, and, and now we're having conversations with executive management that, you know, if you've got staff who have been doing a good job and they remain productive, you know, give me a reason they got to come back in, which is just, as you told me that I'm going to be the case a year ago, I would have been, you know, flabbergasted, but that's where we are right now. >>And so on a personal standpoint, you know, I went home for a little while and then came back. And so my wife also works for blue cross blue shield of South Carolina. Um, so, you know, she set up in the dining room working, uh, I have my own book in our living room working, and then we've got a great side, you know, the school is not in session, you know, in person. So he's doing virtual learning. So combine all those things, and you've got all kinds of crazy things that could happen. Uh, and then you've got staff who are in the same situation. Um, so it was a lot to handle. And the longer it goes on the novelty of working from home wears off, and you kind of realize, you know, I can't go do this. I can't go out to eat. I can't do all types of things that I used to do. And so that affects your mental health. So as, as a leader, um, of my small area, and then our executives really had to become more, uh, uh, in, in people's faces. So we've got, we've done a lot more video, uh, messages, a lot more emails. Um, I have been tasked with being very deliberate about checking on how everything is going at their house. Are they getting what they need? Um, you know, how are they feeling? Are they getting up and exercising, all those things that you took for granted, uh, beforehand. >>Yeah. So Daryl, anything you'd add to that in terms of specifically in terms of how you might, how you might change the way in which you interact with your clients generally, uh, an Alex specifically, Alex likes, face to face, you know, we can't wait. All right. >>Yeah, yeah. It's funny. We never quite got to do it Alex, but we were talking about doing a virtual happy hour at one point too, to just celebrate the success. Um, but for me, you know, typically I would travel and visit Alex face-to-face on maybe a monthly basis. And so it it's been really hard for me. I didn't realize how, how much I enjoyed that in-person interaction. And so that, that was something that I I've been, you know, working through and finding ways to, to still interact with people. And I'm certainly making, making the best of, of the video phone calls and, you know, that sort of thing. So, uh, just work working to maintain those relationships. >>I wonder if I could ask you when, when, when this thing, when we're through the pandemic, what do you expect the work from home percentage? I think I heard 13% prior to the pandemic, 87% today. What do you think is going to be post pandemic? >>That is a good question. Um, it, it may go back to maybe 60% at home. I think, I think there will be a simple majority, uh, working from home. Um, that's, that's from our planning, uh, space planning standpoint. That's, that's what we are, uh, what we're expecting, um, if, if production stays, um, at acceptable levels, um, >>Do you feel like productivity was negatively impacted positive? It will be impacted or it's kind of weird. >>Yeah. All the metrics that we track show that it was, it was sustained and in some areas even better. Uh, and if you really think about, um, sort of your typical day when you work from home, I found, uh, that I was logged on an hour earlier. That's probably what's happening with other staff as well is they're, they're motivated to get up and, and get online, uh, earlier. >>Yeah. Mostly tech leaders that I talk to share that sentiment, that the productivity is actually improved. So Darryl, I presume you see the same thing in your observation space. Yeah. >>Yeah. I, I do. And, and I have other clients too, and, and, and they are definitely looking at ways to continue to work remotely. I know that for a lot of people who are in the office all the time, uh, having a little bit more flexibility when you work from home can be a good thing. And, and like you said, you, you have to make sure that the productivity is still there and the productivity is up. Um, but I, I could see that the trend continuing absolutely >>I'd love for you to, to look at Darryl and say, and tell him what the kinds of things that IBM can do to help you both today, immediately 20, 21, and in the future and a Darryl, how, how your, how you'll respond. >>Well, I'll tell you that. Um, so in 2020, what, what changed most dramatically for us as a health plan? Uh, and, and I, it echoes what we see across the country is the gigantic shift in telehealth. Um, you know, if, if, again, if you look at the numbers, uh, our telehealth visits per thousand, so that's the number of visits per thousand members in a given month, went up 1472%. And so, you know, the common response to that is, well, you know, your visits overall probably, you know, were flat because, uh, you know, they just weren't happening in that. And that's not necessarily true for us. So if you look at visits overall, they written down four and a half percent. Um, so there was a shift, but it, it was not a big enough shift to account for, uh, visits overall sustaining the level that they were pre pandemic. >>Um, so as we look into 2021, uh, we will be investigating how we can maintain, uh, the, uh, the accessibility of our healthcare providers via telehealth. Um, you know, one of the projects that we started in 2020, uh, was based upon the choosing wisely campaign. So if you're not familiar with choosing wisely, it's a very well thought out process. It involves many, many provider specialties and its sole target is to reduce low value care. Uh, so we took it upon ourselves to Institute sort of a mirror of that plan or that program at, at blue cross here in South Carolina. And so as we moved to 2021, obviously those low value services just because of the pandemic were reduced, uh, and some of the high-value care was reduced as well. And so what we are going to try to do is bring back habit, bring back that high value care, but not bring back that low value care and so low value care or things like vitamin D testing. Uh, it can be other things like, um, uh, CT for head headaches, um, imaging for low abdominal pain, things like that. So, uh, we want to focus on low, uh, eliminating what value care, bringing back high value care, >>Okay, Dale, you're up? How are you going to help Alex achieve that? So, so good news is, is that we've got the analytic warehouse and the database where all of the data is captured. And so we we've got the treasure trove of information and data. And so what we'll do is we'll come alongside Alex and his team will do the analytics, we'll provide the analytic methods measures, and we'll also help him uncover where perhaps those individuals may be, who had postponed care, um, because of the pandemic. And so we can put together strategies to help make sure that they get the care that they need. Uh, I also a hundred percent agree that tele-health hopefully is something that will continue because I do think that that is a good way and efficient way to get care for people. Um, and, you know, as a, as, as a way to, to address some of their needs and, and in, in a safe way too. >>So, um, I, I look forward to working with Alec and his team over this coming year. I think there is, uh, knowing Alex and, and the partnership and his readiness to be a client reference for us. You know, those are all great, um, recognition of how he partners with us. And we really value and appreciate, uh, the relationship that we have with blue cross blue shield, South Carolina and, and blue choice. Excellent. Daryl's right. The, the, the database we use already has some of that low value care measures baked into it. And so throughout 2020, I've worked with our analytic consulting team. Uh, it's under Daryl too, to talk about what's on the product product roadmap for adding to the cadre of live low value care measures inside advantage suite. Uh, so that's something that we'll actively be, um, uh, discussing because certainly, you know, we're, we're obviously not the only client only health plan clients. So there may be other plans that have priorities that very different made very differently than ours. Uh, so we want to give them what we're studying, what we're interested in, so they can just add it in to all their other client feedback, uh, for advantage suites, roadmap. Excellent. >>Look, my last question, Alex is how would you grade IBM, if you had to take a bundle of sort of attributes, you know, uh, delivery, uh, value for service relationship, uh, et cetera, how would you grade the job that IBM is doing? >>I, the thing that I enjoy most about working with IBM and Darryl specifically, is that they're always challenging us to look at different things. Um, things that sometimes we hadn't considered, because obviously it may be an issue for another health plan client or an employer client that they've got. Uh, they tell us, this is what we're seeing. You know, you should look at it. Uh, a lot of times they do some of the foundational work in producing a report to show us what they're seeing in our data that is similar to what is in some of their other clients data. So that's refreshing to be, uh, challenged by IBM to look at things that we may not be, uh, looking at, uh, or maybe missing, because we've got our eye on the ball on something else you >>Care to put a letter grade on that. >>Oh, definitely. Definitely. Thank you. >>Well, Darryl, congratulations, that says a lot and, uh, we have to leave it there and one at a time, but, but Daryl, anything that I didn't ask Alex, that you, you wanted me to, >>So, um, Alex re able to keep your tennis game up during the pandemic? Uh, I, yes, I tried as, as often as my wife would let me good. I would play every time I was asked, but, uh, yeah, so I, I did have to temper it a little bit, although when you spend all day with her and, and my son, you know, she may be a little more, uh, lenient on letting me leave the house. Well, maybe she's >>Yeah. The tribute to the late great comedian Mitch Hedberg, who says, uh, you know, when I, I played tennis, I played against the wall walls. Really good, hard to beat if it's pandemic appropriate. >>Oh, that's good. That's a true statement. And there was a lot of that going on, a lot of that play and playing against the wall. >>Hey, thanks so much, stay safe and really appreciate the time. Thank you. >>Thank you. Thank you. You're >>Really welcome. It was a great conversation and thank you for watching and spending some time with client conversations with IBM Watson health.

one thing i'd point out is well flashblade one of our products is scale out flasharray our first product is not scale out um you know scale out isn't a capability for a customer it's an architecture in how you build the product uh you know when i scale out i have more complicated software i have more components more components lead to more failures right if i have a piece of memory and it's going to fail at a certain annual failure rate and i have 10 pieces of memory i'm going to fail at 10 times that same rate so scale out introduces complexity it introduces more components and then you have to say what do you get from it so if our customers needed a lot more performance than we're delivering if they needed a lot more scale than we're delivering in the flash array product we then react to that and go build scale out where the flash array sells we don't see that as a major market need it's more of a niche where flashblade sells then there is much more of a need for that and that's why flashblade would scale out from day one the tam expansion really is following where solid state takes us you know we've gone from um a world that was where believe it or not most computers still had mechanical systems operating them it's sort of like having a mechanical calculator rather than an electronic calculator right we had mechanical disks in our computers literally spinning rust right and it's only been in the last decade where a semiconductor you know where solid state has taken uh the place of that called flash right well as that continues to get less expensive we now can bring not only flash performance into disk economics but more importantly now we can finally have modern software that is driving the need for having greater flexibility with our data as data grows it now we say it has gravity that is it gets heavy it gets hard to manage hard hard to move uh between different environments and now a lot of infrastructure operators are spending much more time managing their data managing the storage systems for their data than they are managing anything else in the data center environment we want to eliminate all that we want to automate all of that you know on the theme of decades two decades ago every application had its own individual communication stack there were dozens of different protocols and a dozen different networks in every company one decade ago ago every application had its own um custom hardware stack and and custom operating systems stack well today there's one network it's called the internet uh today everything every application every server is virtualized allowing mobility and yet storage is still static we we want this decade a bit to be about making storage and data dynamic and really responsive to the needs of the application environment sure so it's a it's a deep relationship that's only getting deeper and it's really at all levels it starts with the executive alignment you think about charlie giancarlo from cisco we've got a lot of just common cross-pollination there but now it extends certainly the field level tom and i are doing a lot of planning together in terms of having our teams go after common use cases but now it extends to engineering as well we had a ucs director plug-in that we've had for some time now uh but but pure is now first in terms of having integration into cisco intersight so we are first and only to have storage integration at the cisco intersight so that cisco and pure customers can really manage their uh environment from from one console so a lot of simplicity uh the single sas interface for managing everything tom why pure why first with that well you know nathan he articulated it well you can look at the executive level we talked about charlie but even you know all of our cisco executives but also to the engineering this the we started really strong uh with the field sales teams but even if you look at the little things that our customers notice but a lot of people may not like the internal development of validated design guides use cases we churn them out um with pure as uh you know our top ecosystem partner more than anybody and there's a lot of work being done our customers see that and it's really helped drive you know our go to market together it's really a very strong strategy and what is the type of data that's going to be the best fit for it there are a lot of common patterns for consumption in a.i uh speech recognition image recognition places where you have a lot of unstructured data or it's unstructured to a computer it's not unstructured to you when you look at a picture you see a lot of things in it that a computer can't see right because you recognize what the patterns are and the whole point about ai is it's going to help us get structure out of these unstructured data sets so the computer can recognize more things you know the speech and emotions that that we as humans just take for granted it's about having computers being able to process and respond to that in a way that they're not really capable of doing today absolutely absolutely yeah no i mean i think it's been a really exciting conference for us so far like you said a lot of payload coming out um you know as far as the building the bridge of the hybrid cloud this has been you know we this has been i would say a long time coming right we've been working down this path for uh for a couple years we started by bringing some of the cloud-like capabilities that customers really wanted and were able to achieve into the cloud back into the data center right so you saw us do this in terms of making our on-prem products easier to manage easier to use easier to automate you know but what working with customers over the last couple of years you know we realized is that as the cloud hype kind of subsided and people were taking a more measured view of where the cloud fits into their strategies what tools it brings you know we realized that we could add value in the in the public cloud environment the same types of enterprise capabilities the same type of features rich data services uh feature sets things like that that we do on premise in the cloud and so what we're looking to achieve is actually quite simple all right we want to give customers the choice whether whether customers want to run on premise or in the cloud that's just a choice of we wanted to we wanted to make an environmental choice we don't want to we don't want to put customers in a position where they have to make that choice and feel trapped in one location or another because of lack of features lack of capabilities um you know or or economics and so the way that we do that is by building the same types of capabilities that we do on-prem in the cloud giving customers the freedom and flexibility to be agile sure well we're a two-year-old uh startup uh headquartered out of bellevue washington and we really focus on two primary uh businesses we have a blockchain business and we have an ai business uh in blockchain we are one of the largest blockchain cryptocurrency hosting companies in north america uh we've got uh you know facilities uh uh four facilities in north carolina south carolina georgia and kentucky and you know really the the business there is helping companies to be able to take advantage of blockchain and then position them for uh the future you know um and then on the ai side of our business uh really you know we we operate that in two ways one is we can also co-locate and host people uh just like we do on the blockchain side but primarily we're focused on uh creating a public cloud focused on gpu-centric computing and artificial intelligence and we're there to help you know really usher in the new age of ai how does pure actually take that word simple from a marketing concept into reality for your customers yeah you know i i think i think simple is um the most underappreciated but biggest differentiator that pure has um i was recalling for someone you talked to cause earlier today i had a conversation about three weeks into the existence of pure excuse me with cause and we were just debating i mean this is before we wrote any code at all about what would be pure's long-term differentiator and i was kind of like i will be you know the flash people or high performance or whatever he's like no no we're going to be simple we are going to deliver a culture that drives some plus into our products and that will be game changing and i thought he was a little crazy at the time um but he's absolutely turned out to be right and if you if you look over the years that started with just an appliance experience a tent card install you know just a really easy environment but that's manifested itself into every product we create and it's really hard to reverse engineer that you know it's an engineering discipline thing that you have to build in the dna of the company so how do you see the partnership with splunk just in terms of supporting that tam expansion the next 10 years so analytics particularly log analytics have really taken off for us in the last year as we put more focus on it um we want to double down on our investments as we go through the end of this year and in the next year with with a focus on splunk um as well as other alliances um we think we are in a unique position because the uh rollout of smart store right customers are always on a different scale in terms of when they want to adopt a new architecture right it is a significant uh decision that they have to make and so we believe between the combination of flash array for the hot tier and flashblade for the cold is a nice way for customers with classic splunk architecture to modernize their platform leverage the benefits of data reduction to drive down some of the cost leverage the benefits of flash to increase the rate at which they can ask questions and get answers is a nice stepping stone and when customers are ready because flashblade is one of the few storage platforms in the market that is scale out bandwidth optimized for both nfs and object they can go through a rolling non-disruptive upgrade to smart store have you know investment protection and and if they can't repurpose that flash rate they can use pure as a service to have the flash raise the hots here today and drop it back off to us when they're done

>> Narrator: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. We are wrapping up a three, the first day of a three-day show. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We are joined by Scott Lowe. He is the CEO of ActualTech Media. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you for having us. >> And also David Davis, director of events at ActualTech Media. Thank you so much for coming on. >> Thank you. >> So, you are a former CIO that started ActualTech Media in 2012, tell our viewers, a little bit about Actual, what was the vision and what did you set out to create? What kind of content were you setting out to create? >> You know what we started and what we have today are actually very, very different things. We started off to create sort of an empire of websites that provide content to people. What we do now is we're helping connect enterprise IT vendors with buyers, that's really what we've settled on over the years. We've found our path about six years ago, five years ago, and we've been executing on that ever since. And that's our mission, is to help buyers find the right enterprise IT solutions. >> So how do you do that? I mean, what's the lead generation that it takes? >> Sure. I mean we basically for our clients who are companies including Cohesity and companies like it, we do event series we call MegaCast, EcoCast, virtual summits, webinars, things like that. We have a significant audience that we draw from to drive those events. And we also created our own content series, we call Gorilla Guide, which is a series of books to help educate IT buyers about solutions on the market about different technologies and try to help them understand the lay of an ever-evolving landscape that seems to be changing faster than it ever has before. >> Yeah, and actually one of the reasons I invited the two of you is, you both have deep background in this environment. Scott, before the Gorilla Guides, you wrote big books about Microsoft, and David, you've been training people on this ever environment but the pace is faster. You're talking about it's changing all the time. So I'd love for both of you, just here 2019 Microsoft Ignite, first impressions, how you think of Microsoft in the ecosystem. David, let's start with you. >> I mean, it's my third Microsoft Ignite and every time I come here I'm really blown away by kind of the scope of the show compared to the typical infrastructure shows that I go to. Those shows are more you know, the plumbing of the data center. This show is the keynote, is like using AI and ML to cure cancer and provide food for the world and it's just, like, really empowering and exciting and I find it very personally exciting. And Microsoft Azure just seems to be on a breakneck pace to catch up with AWS and Office 365 and all these innovations they keep coming out with, have been really impressive so I've been excited about the show, what about you Scott? >> Same, I mean, I think that when we talk about other shows, we are really looking at plumbing. That's a good word. When we're here we're looking at real solutions that are helping solve big problems. And because Microsoft has such a wide ecosystem from which to, in which it participates, from productivity and enterprise to driving quantum computing, to artificial intelligence to help tractors talk to the internet. I mean just, it does everything and it does it increasingly well. Microsoft hasn't always been thought of as the most innovative company in the world but I think in the last few years we've seen a different Microsoft and I think that has a lot to do with Satya, and the leadership change but it also has to do with just a renewed vision for what the future looks like in the terms of IT. >> And what does that future look like? I mean it is interesting because Microsoft is a middle-aged company compared to all these young upstarts that really, that much more DNA of innovation, of course Microsoft has innovation in its DNA but how would you describe what is driving the change at Microsoft? This is not your father's Microsoft. >> Honestly, the Microsoft we see today and the Microsoft we saw 10 years ago are not the same company. This is, I feel like Microsoft is almost a startup again. And I think if you look at Microsoft as a company, it has its hands in so much that each individual silo is almost a startup feel in the way it's brought to market. Let's just look at Azure. I mean, Azure has been playing catch up in a lot of ways to AWS for a lot of years just like a lot of smaller companies are playing catch up to some of their bigger cousins in the market. But Azure has proven itself, it's still not quite as capable as its bigger, you know, its bigger sibling AWS but it's more capable than GCP for example. But as Microsoft continues to iterate that service, it gets ever more capable, it gets ever deeper into the organization and I think it's something that I see that across Microsoft and everything that it's doing. It's not just Azure that's like this. It's like this with, you know, we've been looking at Windows virtual desktops. That's not all that sexy and exciting on the surface, no pun intended on surface, sorry. But it's something that the world needs at this point. And how we're trying to handle computing in the enterprise as we move into 2020. >> There's so much, you know, there's a few shows I go to every year where you just drink from the fire hose when you go to the keynote. This absolutely is one. Amazon absolutely is one where you come through in the breath and depth of what they offer. So we've spent a lot time saying something like Azure Arc, it is early. And still trying to understand exactly where that fits, by the end of the day, I'm like, wait, it's management but actually it's highly tied to the application, which really is the strength of Microsoft if you talk about what Microsoft knows. Microsoft knows your apps, you're running so many of those apps, not just Office but SQL and some of the various pieces. I'd love to hear what, give me one or two things that jumped out at you either that you want to dig into or that you've been saying "Oh I've been waiting for that." >> I mean I was really impressed with the technical keynote where they talked about Azure Stack Edge and they have this mini server that can be ruggedized or even put in a backpack, and he had the demo going with the server, a person sitting next to him using the server and he said "It has battery power," so he pulled the power plug on it and it kept working and then he said "And it's rugged," and he just dropped it on the ground and it bounced on the ground and he said "See, the demo just keeps on running." So I was like okay, that's cool, that's pretty impressive. >> Yeah we actually had the HPE, an HPE representative on the program. They're super excited to have their gear in the keynote and those of us with a hardware background do like to wrap our arms around some sheet metal every once in a while and touch this thing, software might be eating the world. >> We call you server huggers too. >> Exactly, am I an Edge hugger now? >> I guess you probably are. >> Yeah it's free shruggs. >> When it comes to, in my opinion, Arc and Edge, I'm sorry, Azure Stack, I think it shows some incredible opportunity for Microsoft moving forward. I mean Microsoft has a formidable presence in the enterprise and not just the enterprise, from the SMB to the mid-market to the enterprise. Everybody, almost, has something Microsoft. So there's an opportunity for Microsoft to further that incursion into the enterprise that can help them be a driver for Azure. Because when you think about a lot of the challenges people have with cloud it's around adoption and integration. That's not quite a soft problem but close enough when you start thinking about the myriad of technologies that Microsoft is bringing out. >> Yeah, so Scott I think your background, you worked in some of the commercial markets, you talk about the education space, areas where Microsoft had a strong history. Are they still as prominent today as they might've been back in the days when you were a CIO? >> Yes and no, it depends on the organization. If I look K12, I think Google's had a lot of inroads there because of Google Apps for Education, whether that's good or bad is really a different opinion but I think Google's taken a lot of Microsoft's market share there. And higher education, we still see a lot of Google colleges and universities of course, but we see a lot with O365. And a lot of that is because of the pricing which you can't beat free. But it also has to do with the capability that the Stack brings to bare. So I think that Microsoft is playing differently than they used to, not necessarily, probably a little bit more strongly in some ways and weaker in others. >> Another, I'd love to hear you say, think about is, the Microsoft of old I think of as rather proprietary and you will do all Microsoft. We had one of the Microsoft partner executives on the program today and he was talking about embracing VMware, embracing Red Hat, not something that you would've thought of Microsoft in the past. How do you think of Microsoft just as a trusted partner in the ecosystem today? >> Yeah, you bring up that word trust and in fact we were talking about that at lunch, Microsoft, we feel like has so much more trust when it comes to our data, when it comes to our applications. I mean there's another cloud provider that starts with a G that's well-known for selling data, selling data that they own, you know. And he talked about in the keynote today, we protect your data and the security around your data and I feel like trust is going to be a big factor in the future when people think about which cloud should I trust? Microsoft seems like they have a leg up on some other competitors. >> I may be naive but I actually trust Microsoft and I have for a long time. There's other companies I don't trust. And Microsoft I actually do trust because for Microsoft, our data is not their resource to mine. They're using it to give me things but they're not using it to sell things to other people. Does that make sense? I mean, that is we're not the product of Microsoft. And it might be a little more expensive because of that in some ways but I think it provides that layer of trust that you're not necessarily going to get from other providers in the near term. >> So we're nearing the end of 2019, what is on deck for IT pros in 2020? I'll start with you, I want to hear both your impressions but I'll start with you. >> That's a great question, we're actually doing a big event this week. In fact and that's the topic is the pillars of IT for 2020. >> I might've done some research. >> Yeah, yeah. So I mean, in fact, I was at a local user group recently and I was asking IT professionals that very question. You know, where are you going to spend your budget in 2020? What are you going to re-architect? And there was a lot of answers around security. That was I think probably the most popular one that I heard. Automation, some people were interested in that and improving the efficiency of their infrastructure I think overall. No matter how they do it, hyperconvergence or something like that, just overall improving things to make their life easier. >> For me, I look at the role of the CIO and to look into 2020, I think we see a lot legacy challenges that are still not solved. Some new opportunities is probably a good word. Some of the legacy challenges are what's the role of IT? That's the age old question. I think we saw the next phase of IT business align with digital transformation and now we're going to look for what's next, right? 'Cause that phrase is now going out of style. But we're still looking for ways that we can do more with technology than we ever have. And as I look at some of the things that happened at the show this morning that were announced, I see a lot opportunity for CIOs and for organizations as a whole to do more than they ever have before without having to bring a whole lot more complexity to the organization. But I also think to see some of the things that have to be addressed. Security is a board level issue and it's a top issue for the CIO, it's a make or break your career type issue at this point. And I think going into 2020 as we look at some of these technologies, it becomes even more important because it's going to all require new focus on security. We have an opportunity around to actually solve the data analytics problem at some point here in the near future. That hasn't always been possible and now we have the tools to do it. And we have tools that can do it without having to hire a whole bunch of IT experts through some of things like companies like Microsoft can bring into market. >> Would love to get your viewpoint on the future of work. We've been saying what is the role of IT? And we say in its best light, IT helps drive innovation and actually can be a leader inside the business. But we know that the roles have been changing inside a company. Microsoft talks rather aspirationally about citizen developers, and we're going to empower everyone to be their best out there. But what does that mean to the person that has been a Cis Admin or going through certifications or trying to learn the latest on hyperconvergence infrastructure and Kubernetes and the latest buzzword that they heard of? >> I mean, I think that's exciting, especially for people who are new in IT or people who have the time to invest in learning development, they were talking about power apps in the keynote. I was excited, I wanted to try it for myself, it looks fun and easy. But in reality, in the real world of IT organizations, things take time. I mean I talked to a CIO at a large bank and he said "Hey, I have 10 stand administrators "and we're going to move to hyperconvergence "when they die or retire." So things take time, that's my take, Scott. >> For me, I think it's the enabling new ways to work. If you look at ActualTech Media, we're 100% virtual. We don't have, people ask where we're headquartered, we have a PO box in North Charleston, South Carolina and the rest of us work in Microsoft Teams. For me one of the most exciting things I've looked at in the last year is Teams. I absolutely adore the tool. >> I've heard a couple of people talking about you know people thought Teams was dying and Slack was killing it but Teams is really good. What is it about it that drives your business? >> So we used to use Slack, we used Skype, and then we used Slack. And Slack was good for what it was, it's an instant messaging tool that makes sure that you can get in touch with people right away and you can share a file. What it lacks is context. Once something is scrolled off the screen, that's it, you don't ever look at it again. And what we get with Teams is an ability to provide context for the work we do. So we were working on one of our Gorilla Guide books this week collaboratively inside Teams. We had the document open in one window and we were chatting about it in a chat in Teams in the other window. But the document lived in the same channel that we were having the conversation. So enabled a great degree of collaboration that we just couldn't get with Slack. That's not to say Slack's not a great tool, for what it is, it's a great tool and I still use it for other teams, which sounds weird. But I love the ability that we've had to bring additional tools into Teams that we didn't have before. When we bought, when we bought, when we deployed Teams, we got rid of Slack, we got rid of Smartsheet and we're in the process of getting rid of Dropbox. And it wasn't 'cause we wanted to save money, I mean it's nice, but at the end of the day it's about improving workflows especially when you don't live in the same office. You don't get to talk to each other over the water cooler. >> So particularly for distributed virtual teams, Microsoft Teams. >> It's a beautiful thing >> It's a beautiful thing. >> And also even with clients, now that Teams has guest capability, we have guest teams that we work on, work with clients in the same way we work internally. So it's become a central hub for just about everything we do. Literally Teams is open on my laptop and on my phone 24/7. It's an app that never closes. >> That's a powerful endorsement. >> It is. >> Scott, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, David thank you so much. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, we will see you tomorrow for more of theCUBE's live coverage from Microsoft Ignite.

>> Announcer: From Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE Covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2019. Brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, Lisa Martin live on the Pure Accelerate floor in Austin, Texas. Dave Vellante is joining me and we're pleased to welcome a couple of guests from Core Scientific for the first time to theCUBE. We have Jim Benedetto, Chief Data Officer and John Curran, the SVP of Business Development. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. >> Both: Thank you. >> Pleasure to be here. >> So John, we're going to start with you. Give our audience an overview of who Core Scientific is, what you guys do, what you deliver. >> Sure, well, we're a two year old start up. Headquartered out of Bellevue, Washington and we really focus on two primary businesses. We have a blockchain business and we have an AI business. In blockchain, we are one of the largest blockchain cryptocurrency hosting companies in North America. We've got facilities, four facilities in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Kentucky. And really the business there is helping companies to be able to take advantage of blockchain and then position them for the future, you know. And then on the AI side of our business, really we operate that in two ways. One is we can also co-locate and host people, just like we do on the blockchain side. But primarily, we're focused on creating a public cloud focused on GPU centric computing and artificial intelligence and we're there to help really usher in the new age of AI. >> So you guys you founded, you said two years ago. >> Yes. >> From what I can tell you haven't raised a ton of dough. Is that true or are you guys quiet about that? >> John: We're very well capitalized. >> Okay, so it hasn't hit crunch base yet. >> Yeah, no. So we're a very well capitalized company. We've got, you know, to give you-- >> 'Cause what you do is not cheap. >> No, no, we've got about 675 megawatts of power under contract so each one of our facilities is about 50 megawatts plus in size. So no, it's not cheap. They're large installations and large build outs. >> And to even give you a comparison, a standard data center is about five to 10 megawatts. We won't even look at a facility or a plot of land unless we can supply at least 50 megawatts of power. >> So I was going to ask you kind of describe what's different between sort of blockchain hosting at conventional data bases or data centers. You kind of just did, but are there other sort of technical factors that you guys consider? >> Absolutely. We custom build our own data centers from the ground up. We've got patent pending technology, and if you look at virtually every data center in the world today, it's built with one thing at it's core and that's the CPU. The CPU is fundamentally different than the GPU and if you try to retrofit CPU based data centers for GPUs you're not going to fully maximize the performance and the capabilities of the GPU. So we build from the ground up data centers focused with the GPU at the center and not the CPU at the center. >> And is center in quotes because I mean, you have all this alternative processing, GPUs in particular that are popping up all over the place. As opposed to traditional CPU, which is, okay, just jam as much as I can on the real estate as possible, is that a factor? >> Well there's also a lot, the GPU at the center but there's also a lot of supporting infrastructure. So you got to look at first off the power density is very, very different. GPU, they require significantly a lot more power than CPUs do and then also just from a fluid dynamic prospective, it's very, the heating and cooling of them is again fundamentally different. You're not looking at standard hot, cold aisles and raised floors. But the overall goal also is to be able to provide a supporting infrastructure, which is from an AI ready design, is the interconnected networking and also the incredibly fast storage behind it. Because the name of the game with GPUs is different than with CPUs. With GPUs, the one thing you want to do is you want to get as much data into the GPU as fast as possible. Because compute will very rarely be your limiting factor with the GPU so the supporting infrastructure is significantly more important than it is when you're dealing with CPUs. >> So the standard narrative is, well, I don't know about cryptocurrency but the underlying technology of blockchain has a lot of potential. I personally think they're very much related and I wonder if you guys can comment on that. You started during the real, sort of the latest, most recent sort of big uptick, I know it's bounced back in cryptocurrency and so must you must've had a lot of activity in really, in your early days. And then maybe the crypto winter affected you, maybe it didn't. Some of those companies were so well capitalized, it was kind of their time to innovate, right? And yeah, there were some bad actors but that's really not the core of it. So I wonder what you guys have seen in the blockchain market. We'll get to AI and Pure and all that other stuff but this is a great topic, so I wonder if you could comment. >> So you know, yes, there's certainly classicality in the blockchain market, right? I think one of the key things is being well capitalized allows you to invest through the down turns to position to come out stronger as the market came out and you know, we've certainly seen that. Our growth in blockchain continues to really be substantial. And you know, we're making all the right strategic investments, right? Whether it's blockchain or AI, because you have such significant power requirements you know, you got to be very strategic about where you put the facilities. You're looking for facilities that have large sustained power capabilities, green. You know we've seen carbon taxes come in, that'll adversely affect folks. We want to make sure we're positioned for long term in terms of the capabilities. And then some geo political uncertainty is certainly affected, you know. The blockchain side of the business and it's driven more business to North America which has been fantastic for us. >> To me you're hosting innovation, you're talking blockchain and AI and like you're saying include crypto in there, you have some cryptocurrency guys, right? >> We do blockchain or cryptocurrency mining for ourselves as well. >> For yourselves, okay. But so my take on it is a whole new internet is being built and the crypto craze actually has funded a lot of that innovation. New protocol, when's the last time, the protocols of the internet, SMTP, HTDP, they're all government funded or education funded, academic institutions and the big internet companies sort of co-opted them. So you had a dirt of innovation, that's now come back. And you guys are hosting that innovation, that's kind of how I look at it. And I feel like we've seated the base and there's going to be this massive explosion of innovation, both in blockchain, crypto, AI automation and you're in the heart of it. >> Yeah I agree, I think cryptocurrencies or digital currencies are really just the first successful experiment of the blockchain and I agree with you, I think that is is as revolutionary and is going to change as many industries as the internet did and we're still very in a nascent stage of the technology but at Core, we're working to position ourselves to really be the underlying platform, almost like the alchemy of the early days of the internet. The underlying platform and the plumbing for both blockchain and AI applications. >> Right, whether it's smart contracts, like I say, new innovation, AI, it's all powering next generation of distributed apps. Really okay, so, sorry, I love this topic. >> I know you do. (laughs) >> Okay so where do these guys fit in? >> John: So do we. >> I mean, it's just so exciting. I think it's misunderstood. I mean the people who are into it are believers. I mean like myself, I really believe in a value store, I believe in smart contracts, immutability, you know, and I believe in responsibility too and that other good stuff but so. >> Innovation in private blockchain is just starting. If you look at it, I think there's going to be multiple waves in the blockchain side and we want to be there to make sure that we're helping power and position folks from both an infrastructure as well as a software perspective. >> Every financial institution, you got VMware doing stuff, Libra, I love Libra even though it's getting a lot of criticism, it just shined a light on the whole topic but bring us back to sort of commercial mainstream, what are you guys doing here, what's going on with Pure? >> So we have built, we're the first AI ready certified data center and we've actually partnered very closely with Pure and INVIDIA. As we went through the selection process of what type of storage we're going to be using to back our GPUs, we went through a variety of different evaluation criteria and Pure came out ahead and we've decided that we're going with Pure and we, again, for me it boils down to one thing as a Chief Data Officer is how much data can I get into those GPUs as fast as possible? And what you see is if you look at a existing, current Cloud providers, you'll see that their retro fitting CPU based centers for GPUs and you see a lot of problems with that where the storage that they provide is not fast enough to drive quote unquote warm or cold data into the GPUs so people end up adding more and more GPUs, it's actually just increased GPU memory when they're usually running around a couple percents, like one or two percent, five percent compute but you have to add more just for the memory because the storage is so slow. >> So you, how Jim you were saying before when we were chatting earlier, that you have had 20 years of experience looking at different storage vendors, working with them, what were some of the criteria, you talked about the speed and the performance, but in terms of, you also mentioned John that green was, is an important component of the way that you build data centers, where was Pure's vision on sustainability, ever green, where was that a factor in the decision to go with Pure? >> If you look at Pure's power density requirements and things like that, I think it's important. One thing that also, and this does apply from the sustainability perspective, where a lot of other storage vendors say that they're horizontally scalable forever but they're actually running different heads and in a variety of different ways. Pure is the only storage vendor that I've ever come across that is truly horizontally scalable. And when you start to try to build stuff like that you get into all the different things of super computing where you got, you know, split brain scenarios and fencing and it's very complex but their ability to scale horizontally with just, not even disc, but just the storage is something that was really important to us. >> I think the other thing that's certainly interesting for our customers is you're looking at important workloads that they're driving out and so the ability to do in place upgrades, business continuity, right, to make sure that we're able to deliver them technology that doesn't disrupt their business when their business needs the results, it's critically important so Pure is a great choice for us from that perspective and the innovations they're driving on that side of the business has really been helpful. >> I read a stat on the Pure website where users of Core Scientific infrastructure are seeing performance improvements of up to 800%. Are you delighting the heck out of data scientists now? >> Yeah, I mean. >> Are those the primary users? >> That is, it again references what we see with people using GPUs in the public Cloud. Again, going back to the thing that I keep hammering on, driving data into that GPU. We had one customer that had somewhere 14 or 15 GPUs running an analytics application in the public Cloud and we told them keep all your CPU compute in one of the largest Cloud providers but move just your GPU compute to us and they went from 14 or 15 GPUs down to two. GV-100 and a DGX-1 and backed by Pure Storage with Arista and from 14 GPUs to two GPUs, they saw an 800% in performance. >> Wow. >> And there's a really important additional part to that, let's say if I'm running a dashboard or running a query and a .5 second query gets an 800% increase in performance, how much do I really care? Now if I'm the guy running a 100 queries every single day, I probably do but it's not just that, it's the fact that it allows, it doesn't just speed up things, it allows you to look at data you were never able to look at before. So it's not just that they have an 800% performance increase, it's that instead of having tables with 100s of millions of rows, they now can have tables with billions of rows. So data that was previously not looked at before, data that was previously not turned into the actionable information to help drive their business, is now, they're now getting visibility into data they didn't have access to before. >> So you're a CDO that, it sounds like you have technical chops. >> Yeah, I'm a tech nerd at heart. >> It's kind rare actually for a CDO, I've interviewed a lot of CDOs and most of them are kind of come from a data quality background or a governance and compliance world, they don't dress like you (laughs) They dress like I do. (laughs) Even quite a bit better. But the reason I ask that, it sounds like you're a different type of CDO, like even a business like yours, I almost think you're a data scientist. So describe your role. >> I've actually held, I was with the company from the beginning so I've held quite a few roles actually. I think this might be my third title at this point. >> Okay. >> But in general, I'm a very technical person. I'm hands on, I love technology. I've held CTO titles in the past as well. >> Dave: Right. >> But I kind of, I've always been very interested in data and interested in storage because that's where data lives and it's a great fit for me. >> So I've always been interested in this because you know the narrative is that CDOs shouldn't be technical, they should be business and I get all that but the flip side of that is when you talk to CDOs about AI projects, which is you know, not digital transformation but specifically AI projects, they're not, most CDOs in healthcare, financial services, even government, they're not intimately involved, they're kind of like yeah, Chief Data Officer, we'll let you know when we have a data quality problem and I don't think that's right. I mean the CDO should be intimately involved. >> I agree. >> In those AI projects. >> I think a lot of times if you ask them, you ask, a lot of people, they'll say are you interested in deploying AI in your organization? And the answer is 100% yes and then the next follow up question is what would you like to do with it? And most of the time the answer is we don't know. I don't know. So what I have found is I go into organizations, I don't ask if people want to use AI, I ask what are your problems and I think what problems are you facing, what KPIs are you trying to optimize for and there are some of those problems, there are some problems on that list that might not be able to be helped by AI but usually there are problems on that list that can be helped by AI with the right data and the right place. >> So my translation of what you're asking is how can you make more money? (laughs) >> That what it comes down to. >> That's what you're asking, how can you cut costs or raise revenue, that's really ultimately what you're getting to. >> Data. >> Find new customers. I think the other interesting thing about our partnership with Pure and especially with regards to AIRE, AIRE's is an exciting technology but for a lot of companies is they're looking to get started in AI, there's almost this moment of pause, of how do I get started and then if I look at some of the greatest technology out there, it's like, okay, well now I have to retrofit my data center to get it in there, right. There's a bunch of technical barriers that slow down the progression and what we've been able to do with AIRE and the Cloud is really to be able to help people jumpstart, to get started right away. So rather than you know, let me think for six months or 12 months or 18 months on what would I analyze, start analyzing, get started and you can do it on a very cost effective outback's model as opposed to a capital intensive CAMP-X model. >> Alright, so I got to ask you. >> Yeah. >> And Pure will be pissed off I'm asking this question because you're talking about AIRE as a, it's real and I want some color on that but I felt like when the first announcement came out with Invida, it was rushed so that Pure could have another first. (laughs) Ink was drying, like we beat the competition but the way you're talking is AIRE is real, you're using it, it's a tangible solution. It's a value to your business. >> It's a core solution in our facility. >> Dave: It's a year ago. >> It's a core thing that we go to market with and it's something that you know, we're seeing customer demand to go out and really start to drive some business value. So you know, absolutely. >> A core component of helping them jumpstart that AI. Well you guys just, I think an hour or so ago, announced your new partnership level with Pure. John, take us away as we wrap here with the news please. >> Yeah, so well we're really excited. We're one of a handful of elite level MSP partners for Pure. I think there's only a few of us in the world so that's something and we're really the one who is focused on bringing ARIE to the Cloud and so it's a unique partnership. It's a deep partnership and it allows us to really coordinate our technical teams, our sales teams, you know, and be able to bring this technology across the industry and so we're excited, it's just the start but it's a great start and we're looking forward to nothing but upside from here. >> Fantastic, you'll have to come back guys and talk to us about a customer's who's done a jumpstart with ARIE and just taking the world by storm. So we thank you both for stopping by theCUBE. >> Absolutely, we'll love to do that. >> Lisa: Alright John, Jim, thank you so much for your time. >> Thank you. >> Absolutely. >> John: Really appreciate it. >> For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE from Pure Accelerate 2019. (upbeat techno music)

>> Live from San Francisco, California. It's theCUBE, covering the IBM Chief Data Officer Summit. Brought to you by IBM. >> We're back at Fisherman's Wharf at the IBM CDO conference. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Volante, Joe Selle is here. He's the Global Advanced Analytics and Cognitive Lead at IBM, Boston base. Joe, good to see you again. >> You to Dave. >> And Jerry Gupta, the Senior Vice President and Digital Catalyst at Swiss Re Institute at Swiss Re, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you for having me Dave. >> You're very welcome. So Jerry, you've been at this event now a couple of years, we've been here I think the last four or five years and in the early, now this goes back 10 years this event, now 10 years ago, it was kind of before the whole big data meme took off. It was a lot of focus I'm sure on data quality and data compliance and all of a sudden data became the new source of value. And then we rolled into digital transformation. But how from your perspective, how have things changed? Maybe the themes over the last couple of years, how have they changed? >> I think, from a theme perspective, I would frame the question a little bit differently, right? For me, this conference is a must have on my calendar, because it's very relevant. The topics are very current. So two years ago, when I first attended this conference, it was about cyber and when we went out in the market, they were not too many companies talking about cyber. And so you come to a place like this and you're not and you're sort of blown away by the depth of knowledge that IBM has, the statistics that you guys did a great job presenting. And that really helped us inform ourselves about the cyber risk that we're going on in cyber and so evolve a little bit the consistent theme is it's relevant, it's topical. The other thing that's very consistent is that you always learn something new. The struggle with large conferences like this is sometimes it becomes a lot of me too environment. But in conference that IBM organizes the CDO, in particular, I always learn something new because the practitioners, they do a really good job curating the practitioners. >> And Joe, this has always been an intimate event. You do 'em in San Francisco and Boston, it's, a couple hundred people, kind of belly to belly interactions. So that's kind of nice. But how do you scale this globally? >> Well, I would say that is the key question 'cause I think the AI algorithms and the machine learning has been proven to work. And we've infiltrated that into all of the business processes at IBM, and in many of our client companies. But we've been doing proof of concepts and small applications, and maybe there's a dozen or 50 people using it. But the the themes now are around scale AI at scale. How do you do that? Like we have a remit at IBM to get 100,000 IBMers that's the real number. On our Cognitive Enterprise Data Platform by the end of this calendar year, and we're making great progress there. But that's the key question, how do you do that? and it involves cultural issues of teams and business process owners being willing to share the data, which is really key. And it also involves technical issues around cloud computing models, hybrid public and private clouds, multi cloud environments where we know we're not the only game in town. So there's a Microsoft Cloud, there's an IBM Cloud, there's another cloud. And all of those clouds have to be woven together in some sort of a multi-cloud management model. So that's the techie geek part. But the cultural change part is equally as challenging and important and you need both to get to 100,000 users at IBM. >> You know guys what this conversation brings into focus for me is that for decades, we've marched to the cadence of Moore's laws, as the innovation engine for our industry, that feels like just so yesterday. Today, it's like you've got this data bedrock that we built up over the last decade. You've got machine intelligence or AI, that you now can apply to that data. And then for scale, you've got cloud. And there's all kinds of innovation coming in. Does that sort of innovation cocktail or sandwich makes sense in your business? >> So there's the innovation piece of it, which is new and exciting, the shiny, new toy. And that's definitely exciting and we definitely tried that. But from my perspective and the perspective of my company, it's not the shiny, new toy that's attractive, or that really moves the needle for us. It is the underlying risk. So if you have the shiny new toy of an autonomous vehicle, what mayhem is it going to cause?, right? What are the underlying risks that's what we are focused on. And Joe alluded to, to AI and algorithms and stuff. And it clearly is a very, it's starting to become a very big topic globally. Even people are starting to talk about the risks and dangers inherent in algorithms and AI. And for us, that's an opportunity that we need to study more, look into deeply to see if this is something that we can help address and solve. >> So you're looking for blind spots, essentially. And then and one of them is this sort of algorithmic risk. Is that the right way to look at it? I mean, how do you think about risk of algorithms? >> So yeah, so algorithmic risk would be I would call blind spot I think that's really good way of saying it. We look at not just blind spots, so risks that we don't even know about that we are facing. We also look at known risks, right? >> So we are one of the largest reinsurers in the world. And we insure just you name a risk, we reinsure it, right? so your auto risk, your catastrophe risk, you name it, we probably have some exposure to it. The blind spot as you call it are, anytime you create something new, there are pros and cons. The shiny, new toy is the pro. What risks, what damage, what liability can result there in that's the piece that we're starting to look at. >> So you got the potentially Joe these unintended consequences of algorithms. So how do you address that? Is there a way in which you've thought through, some kind of oversight of the algorithms? Maybe you could talk about IBM's point of view there. >> Well we have >> Yeah and that's a fantastic and interesting conversation that Jerry and I are having together on behalf of our organizations. IBM knowing in great detail about how these AI algorithms work and are built and are deployed, Jerry and his organization, knowing the bigger risk picture and how you understand, predict, remediate and protect against the risk so that companies can happily adopt these new technologies and put them everywhere in their business. So the name of the game is really understanding how as we all move towards a digital enterprise with big data streaming in, in every format, so we use AI to modify the data to a train the models and then we set some of the models up as self training. So they're learning on their own. They're enhancing data sets. And once we turn them on, we can go to sleep, so they do their own thing, then what? We need a way to understand how these models are producing results. Are they results that we agree with? Are these self training algorithms making these, like railroad trains going off the track? Or are they still on the track? So we want to monitor understand and remediate, but it's at scale again, my earlier comments. So you might be an organization, you might have 10,000 not models at work. You can't watch those. >> So you're looking at the intersection of risk and machine intelligence and then you're, if I understand it correctly applying AI, what I call machine intelligence to oversee the algorithms, is that correct? >> Well yes and you could think of it as an AI, watching over the other AI. That's really what we have 'cause we're using AI in as we envision what might or might not be the future. It's an AI and it's watching other AI. >> That's kind of mind blowing. Jerry, you mentioned autonomous vehicles before that's obviously a potential disruptor to your business. What can you share about how you guys are thinking about that? I mean, a lot of people are skeptical. Like there's not enough data, every time there's a another accident, they'll point to that. What's your point of view on that? From your corporation standpoint are you guys thinking is near term, mid term, very long term or it's sort of this journey, that there's quasi-autonomous that sort of gets us there. >> So on autonomous vehicles or algorithmic risk? >> On autonomous vehicles. >> So, the journey towards full automation is a series of continuous steps, right? So it's a continuum and to a certain extent, we are in a space now, where even though we may not have full autonomy while we're driving, there is significant feedback and signals that a car provides and acts or not in an automated manner that eventually move us towards full autonomy, right? So for example, the anti-lock braking system. That's a component of that, right? which is it prevents the car from skidding out of control. So if you're asking for a time horizon when it might have happened, yeah, at our previous firm, we had done some analysis and the horizons were as sort of aggressive as 15 years to as conservative as 50 years. But the component that we all agreed to where there was not such a wide range was that the cars are becoming more sophisticated because the cars are not just cars, any automobile or truck vehicles, they're becoming more automated. Where does risk lie at each piece? Or each piece of the value chain, right? And the answer is different. If you look at commercial versus personal. If you look at commercial space, autonomous fleets are already on the road. >> Right >> Right? And so the question then becomes where does liability lie? Owner, manufacturer, driver >> Shared model >> Shared, manual versus automated mode, conditions of driving, what decisions algorithm is making, which is when you know, the physics don't allow you to avoid an accident? Who do you end up hitting? (crosstalk) >> Again, not just the technology problem. Now, last thing is you guys are doing a panel, on wowing customers making customers the king, I think, is what the title of it is. What's that all about? And get into that a little bit? >> Sure. Well, we focus as IBM mostly on a B2B framework. So the example that I that I'll share to you is, somewhere between like making a customer or making a client the king, the example is that we're using some of our AI to create an alert system that we call Operations Risks Insights. And so the example that I wanted to share was that, we've been giving this away to nonprofit relief agencies who can deploy it around a geo-fenced area like say, North Carolina and South Carolina. And if you're a relief agency providing flood relief or services to people affected by floods, you can use our solution to understand the magnitude and the potential damage impact from a storm. We can layer up a map with not only normal geospatial information, but socio-economic data. So I can say find the relief agency and I've got a huge storm coming in and I can't cover the entire two-state area. I can say okay, well show me the area where there's greater population density than 1000 per square kilometer and the socio-economic level is, lower than a certain point and those are the people that don't have a lot of resources can't move, are going to shelter in place. So I want to know that because they need my help. >> That's where the risk is. Yeah, right they can't get out >> And we use AI to do to use that those are happy customers, and I've delivered wow to them. >> That's pretty wow, that's right. Jerry, anything you would add to that sort of wow customer experience? Yeah, absolutely, So we are a B2B company as well. >> Yeah. >> And so the span of interaction is dictated by that piece of our business. And so we tried to create wow, by either making our customers' life easier, providing tools and technologies that make them do their jobs better, cheaper, faster, more efficiently, or by helping create, goal create, modify products, such that, it accomplishes the former, right? So, Joe mentioned about the product that you launched. So we have what we call parametric insurance and we are one of the pioneers in the field. And so we've launched three products in that area. For earthquake, for hurricanes and for flight delay. And so, for example, our flight delay product is really unique in the market, where we are able to insure a traveler for flight delays. And then if there is a flight delay event that exceeds a pre established threshold, the customer gets paid without even having to file a claim. >> I love that product, I want to learn more about that. You can say (mumbles) but then it's like then it's not a wow experience for the customer, nobody's happy. So that's for Jerry. Guys, we're out of time. We're going to leave it there but Jerry, Joe, thanks so much for. >> We could go on Dave but thank you Let's do that down the road. Maybe have you guys in Boston in the fall? it'll be great. Thanks again for coming on. >> Thanks Dave. >> All right, keep it right there everybody. We'll back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE live from IBM CDO in San Francisco. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Massachusetts, it's theCUBE! Covering WTG Transform 2019. Brought to you by Winslow Technology Group. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and we're here at WTG Transform 2019, across the Mass Pike from Fenway Park where we're hoping the rain's going to stop in time for the game tonight where we have 189 users here with Winslow Technology, digging in a lot of technology, networking with their peers, and I'm thrilled to have on another one of the ED users on the program. Plamen Dimitrov is director of Information Technology at Kiawah Island Golf Resorts coming to us from South Carolina. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> All right, as I was actually telling you, I'm familiar with Kiawah, my father is retired down to John's Island right off of Charlestown, South Carolina. You have a beautiful golf course there, there've been professional events there, we actually have one of our Cubeos, does some PGA coverage, John Walls, so he and I have talked about Kiawah a few times, but for those of our audience that aren't as familiar, haven't been able to enjoy it, tell us a little bit about Kiawah. >> Kiawah is a beautiful island, over about 10 miles of oceanfront, side, where the Kiawah Golf Resort is spread out. We have different accommodations with a lot of different activities for all ages, starting with the Sanctuary Hotel, which is a Five Star by Forbes and a Five Diamond by AAA. Or you can choose any of our villas from one to eight bedroom villas. We have five beautiful golf courses, which one of them is ocean course, previously hosted Ryder Cup in 1991, and PGA in 2012, and we are also proud to be a host of the PGA 2021, very exciting. Apart of that, we are announced to be Tennis Resort #1 in the world by tennisresortonline.com. We have over 22 tennis course, different variations from car course to clay. On top of that, we have a lot of pools, swimming pools, water parks, a lot of recreation, kayaking. It can be a beautiful journey for any visitors. >> Yeah, so, Plamen I know some of the IT people listening to this are going to be like, "Boy, he's got a tough job there!" Sounds gorgeous, right on the ocean, so many things there, bring us a little bit inside the IT, your world, what that entails, and, boy, there's got to be some different challenges and opportunities that you face, versus the kind of traditional business IT. >> As every island, we have all of our friends, like salty water and all things like that. And besides that, I've mentioned that the company's spread out over 10 miles, we have a total of 23 locations, and all they share the same systems and applications. Our current challenges, from an IT standpoint, are things that not all of the vendors that can keep up with the current technology and the all new and moderns, so we have some, what we call, old school applications, they can't keep up, and then you have the new applications that can be hosted on the Cloud, for instance. In the same time, those applications need to somewhat work with each other and have some interfaces, so this is where we face the, these days a challenge, a little bit, and where our partnership with Winslow, were able to help us determine which is the best route for us. And we determined that having a data center on island, and they have another one off the island, is the best for us to go. They helped us go through the planning of what's the right set up to be used, and I think we're in the right direction. >> Okay, great, so you have two data centers and you're also using Cloud services, if I heard right? >> Correct. >> Okay. There's been a big discussion here, is like, all right, what is the Cloud's strategy and it is an ever changing world and there is no one right answer, so, when you look at yourselves, what is your Cloud strategy today and what makes you help determine where you'll be moving in the future? >> In one of the sessions, they mentioned it's all about checks and balance, and it's to be able to measure how to apply your cash in a way that it makes sense, and one day, maybe, for some applications makes sense to be on premise, another day makes sense to bring it on the Cloud. And I can give you an example, recently what we did was, we were looking into switching to Office 365, pretty much everybody knows about it, and there's a good study that, after you go over a certain threshold, it's much easier to, and much more cost effective, to have something on premise versus going to a Cloud version. Now, again, it depends on the size of the company, it depends on the... Your future projects and goals, for some people it may be different than us. But I think that the future more and more, things will be what's called colocating the Cloud, which is mainly by other providers, and we're going to have two called a key that you can get to those applications from anywhere. >> Plam, bring us inside a little bit that the data centers, you said you have two of them, what's your infrastructure stack look like today? >> We've been looking at the various solutions, hyper-converged, and hybrids, and with the help of Winslow, we determined that sticking to the 3-2-1 traditional solution is the way we go. We use their Compellent products, all flash erase, very flexible and very reliable, very nice speed it provides, performance-wise they're a great product. Then, after that story solution, you have two data switches and then a number of servers. We use, on top of that, the VMware as our hypervisor, along with their VDI environment called Horizon for some remote clients that they don't need much, but that's basically our setup. >> Great, and how long have you been using the Compellent solutions? >> The Compellent solutions, we've been using them for a year and a half, since I joined the company, but my relationship with Winslow goes far back, since 2013 where I used to work for another company here in Nantucket. And the very first person I worked with was John Cliffords from Winslow. Very great guy, and he introduced us to the Dell world. This is when we bought the first EqualLogic and afterwards, I went to Belmont, where we also bought (mumbles), and we just keep going along. >> All right, great, Plamen, last question I have for you, what brings you to an event like this, what were you hoping to get out of it, and how's it been going for you so far? >> Well, what brings me to an event like this, most of the time is on one side to see what Dell has to offer, and some people attend, they'll conference, but I think a place like this, where you have smaller scale conference, it's much more beneficial for me. A, from a learning experience and B, from creating connections, making connections with other users, which this is the best because sales rep can say, "Yeah, this is what you need." But then, from a user perspective, it's priceless to absorb experience. >> All right, well, Plamen Dimitrov, I really appreciate you sharing your journey, and everything that Kiawah Golf Resorts is doing, thank you so much. >> Thank you very much. >> All right, we'll be back with more coverage here from WTG Transform 2019, I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watching theCUBE. (funky electro music)

(electronic music) >> From Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering WTG Transform 2018. Brought to you by Winslow Technology Group. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman, and we're at WTG Transform 2018, happy to be welcoming one of the users at this show, Jerry Flick, who's with Belmond. He's the Divisional Director of I.T. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> All right, and welcome to the Boston area. You're from Charleston, South Carolina. >> I live in Charleston now, yeah. But I'm familiar with the area. I'm from the Northeast, but I love being here. Boston's a great town. >> Yeah, we had a lovely weather. It's in the low '70s, you know, the Sox should have a nice game here, so. Have you been to this event before? >> I have, this is my third year. >> Okay, excellent. You've been to more of 'em than me. >> Okay. >> So, let's start with Belmond. Tell us a little bit about the organization, for those that don't know. >> Absolutely, so Belmond is a worldwide luxury hotel experience, hospitality industry. So we have hotels, we have restaurants, there's train excursions, river cruises, and really, the focus on Belmond is providing a superior level of service to the guests that take part in our experiences. >> Well Jerry, the great thing I love talking about users is, their lives are pretty stable. There's not these things like Airbnb, and you know, other technologies left that are just saying oh yeah, we'll spin up an app and just put your company that's been around for decades out of business, right? It's nice and stable. >> Yeah, that sounds like a little sarcasm, but. (laughs) >> I've been known to be a little sarcastic. So yeah, Jerry, tell us how long has Belmond been in business? You said it's worldwide, how many employees, and how does Belmond deal with the digital transformation? >> Oh, absolutely. >> That's, you know, coming down? >> Well, they took the name five years ago. They used to be Orient Express prior to that, and many people know the Orient Express from the Agatha Christie novels. >> My wife loved the new movie, so. >> Yes, so did mine actually. But what they do is, we have over 50 properties worldwide. I joined about seven months ago, and one of the initiatives they have now is to double the amount of properties and experiences they have by 2020. So, as part of what I do in the division I manage, I have North America, Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean, and I have about eight properties under my belt, and we have to make sure that we coordinate with corporate for our company policies, our I.T. structure, which is kind of complicated because you're dealing with multiple countries, and different technologies that people like, different flavors, so it certainly presents its own challenges. >> All right, so Jerry, when you say you've got those properties, and really the I.T., what does that mean? What's under your purview from an I.T. perspective? >> Sure, so each property has either an I.T. director or a manager, and then depending on the size of the property they have different I.T. personnel that handle everything from the infrastructure, the servers, as well as through user support and even interfacing with the clients. Guest wifi is a big thing, so people want to come to our properties and make sure that they can get on the internet well, they can watch T.V., and they can do that, and that all comes down to what we have to provide them. >> Yeah, I love that. Yeah, help connect us a little bit, you know, the role of I.T. and the pressures put on you, versus wow, we've got lots of challenges from the business side these days. I'm sure cost pressure are there, you need to able to know when things are available, know that the client is getting great service when they're at your facilities. >> Yeah, actually they like to use the term, we need to be cost neutral. >> Okay. >> So everything that we do, of course I.T. is a cost within itself, but when the clients come in, and again, they expect that high quality of service, that internet connectivity, and really just whatever it is that the technology can drive to make their experience better, they look to us. But from a standpoint of support, we're 24/7. We have to keep the systems running, we have to make sure that everything from property management is going, and that we keep them moving, we keep business running. >> Yeah, so in my career in I.T., I've gotten to get under the covers sometimes in hospitality. When you've got hundreds or thousands of rooms, just even the basic phone system, let alone the internet and everything, there's a lot that goes into it. There's a lot of gear, maintaining. People talk about their data centers, but boy, you've got so many properties to deal with. What are some of the challenges there, and you know, bring us inside that infrastructure as to, how you have to build and architect it to fit that cost neutral mandate that you have. >> Yeah, we definitely want to be innovative, so for example with our Charleston facility, we recently deployed a Nutanix cluster on a Dell XC series, and we did that through Winslow Technology. And some of the things that we look to that for is, we don't have a lot of data, we don't have big data. And recently, we had to implement a GDPR policy, because we are worldwide, so that really kind of limits, you know, we're going to have even less data within our system. So having an implementation of Nutanix is really a great way to provision the service we need. We do have a mix of Cloud systems, as well as on-prem, so definitely a hybrid Cloud model would be something that I would like to see moving forward, as well as within the division, try to synchronize everything. Make everybody synergized, so that we can try to be like a flagship to the brand, and really set the standard for what is the best in technology. >> Yeah, so a lot of conversation in the keynote this morning about hybrid cloud. Want to get your reaction as to what you heard, as well as, you know, the big question is, how do you figure out what to put where? >> Yeah, that's a good question, and I've had a lot of sessions with Rick. I think he's really in tune with what's going on, so, pretty much the whole Winslow staff. You can reach out to them, and if you don't specialize in something, you know, you're not going to know everything in I.T., especially when you're dealing with as you mentioned, what's underneath. But to be able to reach out to a partner like that and say hey, do you have a subject matter expert in this? It really gives you a good idea of where the industry's going, and that's my goal is to make sure we stay ahead of that, so that we can provide the business what's a cost neutral way to make it better, and continue to provide that superior service. >> Okay. You said that you've deployed the OEM Nutanix solution with Dell. Can you give us a little bit of insight, you know, what applications sit there? What kind of scale do you go to with that? Is it something that mostly just runs, and you don't need to touch it, or is it something that's growing over time? >> Yeah, I mean, we recently did it within the last month. So what we did, fortunately we were able to just build it, and not initially have to migrate anything over. But for our use, property management, we have an Opera property management system, and that's going to be key to keeping that running, and we are looking to keep that on-prem. Everything else, like our point of sale service, they do need a cached systems within the infrastructure. And then we're looking to upgrade our phone system which depending on if we do that Cloud based or not, having a Nutanix cluster in play like that, and really just the reactions I'm getting from my team that's working with it, they've used other systems. They've used the huge SAN systems of the past, and to be able to spin up a Windows server in less than six minutes, you know, they really love it. We're using the Acropolis Hypervisor, and the simplivity of it, it's easy to use. The buttons, it's real, it's just very simple. It's not as layered as a lot of the systems, so I think as we move forward the performance of it, we're really going to see a quick turnaround, and it's going to make the employees happy working with it, as well. >> Awesome, Jerry. Last thing I want to ask you, you've been to this show for three years. What bring you up besides, you know, the beautiful Boston weather. You mentioned talking to Rick and the team, maybe checking out the Red Sox. What's the value of coming to events like this? >> Well, you know, and again, Winslow's a unique company. They're smaller, and they have a certain niche in an area, but you know, I've worked with several of the account reps, I've worked with the engineers, and they really have a good foothold on technology, but their process of getting to know the customers, and being able to really anticipate what they need, as well as they're not going to oversell you. They're not going to sell you something you don't need, and even if they present something and you're not interested, there's no pressure there. So, they really make it easy to work with them. And so, aside from being here in Boston and loving it, I do enjoy being with the Winslow team, and being treated so nicely by them. >> All right. Jerry, pleasure meeting you. Thanks so much, and congrats on the progress with Belmond. >> Awesome, thank you. >> All right, always love talking to the users, and we'll be back with lots more coverage. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (electronic music)

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] ladies and gentlemen please welcome Red Hat senior vice president of engineering Matt Hicks [Music] welcome back I hope you're enjoying your first day of summit you know for us it is a lot of work throughout the year to get ready to get here but I love the energy walking into someone on that first opening day now this morning we kick off with Paul's keynote and you saw this morning just how evolved every aspect of open hybrid cloud has become based on an open source innovation model that opens source the power and potential of open source so we really brought me to Red Hat but at the end of the day the real value comes when were able to make customers like yourself successful with open source and as much passion and pride as we put into the open source community that requires more than just Red Hat given the complexity of your various businesses the solution set you're building that requires an entire technology ecosystem from system integrators that can provide the skills your domain expertise to software vendors that are going to provide the capabilities for your solutions even to the public cloud providers whether it's on the hosting side or consuming their services you need an entire technological ecosystem to be able to support you and your goals and that is exactly what we are gonna talk about this afternoon the technology ecosystem we work with that's ready to help you on your journey now you know this year's summit we talked about earlier it is about ideas worth exploring and we want to make sure you have all of the expertise you need to make those ideas a reality so with that let's talk about our first partner we have him today and that first partner is IBM when I talk about IBM I have a little bit of a nostalgia and that's because 16 years ago I was at IBM it was during my tenure at IBM where I deployed my first copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for a customer it's actually where I did my first professional Linux development as well you and that work on Linux it really was the spark that I had that showed me the potential that open source could have for enterprise customers now iBM has always been a steadfast supporter of Linux and a great Red Hat partner in fact this year we are celebrating 20 years of partnership with IBM but even after 20 years two decades I think we're working on some of the most innovative work that we ever have before so please give a warm welcome to Arvind Krishna from IBM to talk with us about what we are working on Arvind [Applause] hey my pleasure to be here thank you so two decades huh that's uh you know I think anything in this industry to going for two decades is special what would you say that that link is made right Hatton IBM so successful look I got to begin by first seeing something that I've been waiting to say for years it's a long strange trip it's been and for the San Francisco folks they'll get they'll get the connection you know what I was just thinking you said 16 it is strange because I probably met RedHat 20 years ago and so that's a little bit longer than you but that was out in Raleigh it was a much smaller company and when I think about the connection I think look IBM's had a long long investment and a long being a long fan of open source and when I think of Linux Linux really lights up our hardware and I think of the power box that you were showing this morning as well as the mainframe as well as all other hardware Linux really brings that to life and I think that's been at the root of our relationship yeah absolutely now I alluded to a little bit earlier we're working on some new stuff and this time it's a little bit higher in the software stack and we have before so what do you what would you say spearheaded that right so we think of software many people know about some people don't realize a lot of the words are called critical systems you know like reservation systems ATM systems retail banking a lot of the systems run on IBM software and when I say IBM software names such as WebSphere and MQ and db2 all sort of come to mind as being some of that software stack and really when I combine that with some of what you were talking about this morning along hybrid and I think this thing called containers you guys know a little about combining the two we think is going to make magic yeah and I certainly know containers and I think for myself seeing the rise of containers from just the introduction of the technology to customers consuming at mission-critical capacities it's been probably one of the fastest technology cycles I've ever seen before look we completely agree with that when you think back to what Paul talks about this morning on hybrid and we think about it we are made of firm commitment to containers all of our software will run on containers and all of our software runs Rell and you put those two together and this belief on hybrid and containers giving you their hybrid motion so that you can pick where you want to run all the software is really I think what has brought us together now even more than before yeah and the best part I think I've liked we haven't just done the product in downstream alignment we've been so tied in our technology approach we've been aligned all the way to the upstream communities absolutely look participating upstream participating in these projects really bringing all the innovation to bear you know when I hear all of you talk about you can't just be in a single company you got to tap into the world of innovation and everybody should contribute we firmly believe that instead of helping to do that is kind of why we're here yeah absolutely now the best part we're not just going to tell you about what we're doing together we're actually going to show you so how every once you tell the audience a little bit more about what we're doing I will go get the demo team ready in the back so you good okay so look we're doing a lot here together we're taking our software and we are begging to put it on top of Red Hat and openshift and really that's what I'm here to talk about for a few minutes and then we go to show it to you live and the demo guard should be with us so it'll hopefully go go well so when we look at extending our partnership it's really based on three fundamental principles and those principles are the following one it's a hybrid world every enterprise wants the ability to span across public private and their own premise world and we got to go there number two containers are strategic to both of us enterprise needs the agility you need a way to easily port things from place to place to place and containers is more than just wrapping something up containers give you all of the security the automation the deploy ability and we really firmly believe that and innovation is the path forward I mean you got to bring all the innovation to bear whether it's around security whether it's around all of the things we heard this morning around going across multiple infrastructures right the public or private and those are three firm beliefs that both of us have together so then explicitly what I'll be doing here number one all the IBM middleware is going to be certified on top of openshift and rel and through cloud private from IBM so that's number one all the middleware is going to run in rental containers on OpenShift on rail with all the cloud private automation and deployability in there number two we are going to make it so that this is the complete stack when you think about from hardware to hypervisor to os/2 the container platform to all of the middleware it's going to be certified up and down all the way so that you can get comfort that this is certified against all the cyber security attacks that come your way three because we do the certification that means a complete stack can be deployed wherever OpenShift runs so that way you give the complete flexibility and you no longer have to worry about that the development lifecycle is extended all the way from inception to production and the management plane then gives you all of the delivery and operation support needed to lower that cost and lastly professional services through the IBM garages as well as the Red Hat innovation labs and I think that this combination is really speaks to the power of both companies coming together and both of us working together to give all of you that flexibility and deployment capabilities across one can't can't help it one architecture chart and that's the only architecture chart I promise you so if you look at it right from the bottom this speaks to what I'm talking about you begin at the bottom and you have a choice of infrastructure the IBM cloud as well as other infrastructure as a service virtual machines as well as IBM power and IBM mainframe as is the infrastructure choices underneath so you choose what what is best suited for the workload well with the container service with the open shift platform managing all of that environment as well as giving the orchestration that kubernetes gives you up to the platform services from IBM cloud private so it contains the catalog of all middle we're both IBM's as well as open-source it contains all the deployment capability to go deploy that and it contains all the operational management so things like come back up if things go down worry about auto scaling all those features that you want come to you from there and that is why that combination is so so powerful but rather than just hear me talk about it I'm also going to now bring up a couple of people to talk about it and what all are they going to show you they're going to show you how you can deploy an application on this environment so you can think of that as either a cloud native application but you can also think about it as how do you modernize an application using micro services but you don't want to just keep your application always within its walls you also many times want to access different cloud services from this and how do you do that and I'm not going to tell you which ones they're going to come and tell you and how do you tackle the complexity of both hybrid data data that crosses both from the private world to the public world and as well as target the extra workloads that you want so that's kind of the sense of what you're going to see through through the demonstrations but with that I'm going to invite Chris and Michael to come up I'm not going to tell you which one's from IBM which runs from Red Hat hopefully you'll be able to make the right guess so with that Chris and Michael [Music] so so thank you Arvind hopefully people can guess which ones from Red Hat based on the shoes I you know it's some really exciting stuff that we just heard there what I believe that I'm I'm most excited about when I look out upon the audience and the opportunity for customers is with this announcement there are quite literally millions of applications now that can be modernized and made available on any cloud anywhere with the combination of IBM cloud private and OpenShift and I'm most thrilled to have mr. Michael elder a distinguished engineer from IBM here with us today and you know Michael would you maybe describe for the folks what we're actually going to go over today absolutely so when you think about how do I carry forward existing applications how do I build new applications as well you're creating micro services that always need a mixture of data and messaging and caching so this example application shows java-based micro services running on WebSphere Liberty each of which are then leveraging things like IBM MQ for messaging IBM db2 for data operational decision manager all of which is fully containerized and running on top of the Red Hat open chip container platform and in fact we're even gonna enhance stock trader to help it understand how you feel but okay hang on so I'm a little slow to the draw sometimes you said we're gonna have an application tell me how I feel exactly exactly you think about your enterprise apps you want to improve customer service understanding how your clients feel can't help you do that okay well this I'd like to see that in action all right let's do it okay so the first thing we'll do is we'll actually take a look at the catalog and here in the IBM cloud private catalog this is all of the content that's available to deploy now into this hybrid solution so we see workloads for IBM will see workloads for other open source packages etc each of these are packaged up as helm charts that are deploying a set of images that will be certified for Red Hat Linux and in this case we're going to go through and start with a simple example with a node out well click a few actions here we'll give it a name now do you have your console up over there I certainly do all right perfect so we'll deploy this into the new old namespace and will deploy notate okay alright anything happening of course it's come right up and so you know what what I really like about this is regardless of if I'm used to using IBM clout private or if I'm used to working with open shift yeah the experience is well with the tool of whatever I'm you know used to dealing with on a daily basis but I mean you know I got to tell you we we deployed node ourselves all the time what about and what about when was the last time you deployed MQ on open shift you never I maybe never all right let's fix that so MQ obviously is a critical component for messaging for lots of highly transactional systems here we'll deploy this as a container on the platform now I'm going to deploy this one again into new worlds I'm gonna disable persistence and for my application I'm going to need a queue manager so I'm going to have it automatically setup my queue manager as well now this will deploy a couple of things what do you see I see IBM in cube all right so there's your stateful set running MQ and of course there's a couple of other components that get stood up as needed here including things like credentials and secrets and the service etc but all of this is they're out of the box ok so impressive right but that's the what I think you know what I'm really looking at is maybe how a well is this running you know what else does this partnership bring when I look at IBM cloud private windows inches well so that's a key reason about why it's not just about IBM middleware running on open shift but also IBM cloud private because ultimately you need that common management plane when you deploy a container the next thing you have to worry about is how do I get its logs how do I manage its help how do I manage license consumption how do I have a common security plan right so cloud private is that enveloping wrapper around IBM middleware to provide those capabilities in a common way and so here we'll switch over to our dashboard this is our Griffin and Prometheus stack that's deployed also now on cloud private running on OpenShift and we're looking at a different namespace we're looking at the stock trader namespace we'll go back to this app here momentarily and we can see all the different pieces what if you switch over to the stock trader workspace on open shipped yeah I think we might be able to do that here hey there it is alright and so what you're gonna see here all the different pieces of this op right there's d b2 over here I see the portfolio Java microservice running on Webster Liberty I see my Redis cash I see MQ all of these are the components we saw in the architecture picture a minute ago ya know so this is really great I mean so maybe let's take a look at the actual application I see we have a fine stock trader app here now we mentioned understanding how I feel exactly you know well I feel good that this is you know a brand new stock trader app versus the one from ten years ago that don't feel like we used forever so the key thing is this app is actually all of those micro services in addition to things like business rules etc to help understand the loyalty program so one of the things we could do here is actually enhance it with a a AI service from Watson this is tone analyzer it helps me understand how that user actually feels and will be able to go through and submit some feedback to understand that user ok well let's see if we can take a look at that so I tried to click on youth clearly you're not very happy right now here I'll do one quick thing over here go for it we'll clear a cache for our sample lab so look you guys don't actually know as Michael and I just wrote this no js' front end backstage while Arvin was actually talking with Matt and we deployed it real-time using continuous integration and continuous delivery that we have available with openshift well the great thing is it's a live demo right so we're gonna do it all live all the time all right so you mentioned it'll tell me how I'm feeling right so if we look at so right there it looks like they're pretty angry probably because our cache hadn't been cleared before we started the demo maybe well that would make me angry but I should be happy because I mean I have a lot of money well it's it's more than I get today for sure so but you know again I don't want to remain angry so does Watson actually understand southern I know it speaks like eighty different languages but well you know I'm from South Carolina to understand South Carolina southern but I don't know about your North Carolina southern alright well let's give it a go here y'all done a real real know no profanity now this is live I've done a real real nice job on this here fancy demo all right hey all right likes me now all right cool and the key thing is just a quick note right it's showing you've got a free trade so we can integrate those business rules and then decide to I do put one trade if you're angry give me more it's all bringing it together into one platform all running on open show yeah and I can see the possibilities right of we've not only deployed services but getting that feedback from our customers to understand well how well the services are being used and are people really happy with what they have hey listen Michael this was amazing I read you joining us today I hope you guys enjoyed this demo as well so all of you know who this next company is as I look out through the crowd based on what I can actually see with the sun shining down on me right now I can see their influence everywhere you know Sports is in our everyday lives and these guys are equally innovative in that space as they are with hybrid cloud computing and they use that to help maintain and spread their message throughout the world of course I'm talking about Nike I think you'll enjoy this next video about Nike and their brand and then we're going to hear directly from my twitting about what they're doing with Red Hat technology new developments in the top story of the day the world has stopped turning on its axis top scientists are currently racing to come up with a solution everybody going this way [Music] the wrong way [Music] please welcome Nike vice president of infrastructure engineering Mike witig [Music] hi everybody over the last five years at Nike we have transformed our technology landscape to allow us to connect more directly to our consumers through our retail stores through Nike comm and our mobile apps the first step in doing that was redesigning our global network to allow us to have direct connectivity into both Asia and AWS in Europe in Asia and in the Americas having that proximity to those cloud providers allows us to make decisions about application workload placement based on our strategy instead of having design around latency concerns now some of those workloads are very elastic things like our sneakers app for example that needs to burst out during certain hours of the week there's certain moments of the year when we have our high heat product launches and for those type of workloads we write that code ourselves and we use native cloud services but being hybrid has allowed us to not have to write everything that would go into that app but rather just the parts that are in that application consumer facing experience and there are other back-end systems certain core functionalities like order management warehouse management finance ERP and those are workloads that are third-party applications that we host on relevent over the last 18 months we have started to deploy certain elements of those core applications into both Azure and AWS hosted on rel and at first we were pretty cautious that we started with development environments and what we realized after those first successful deployments is that are the impact of those cloud migrations on our operating model was very small and that's because the tools that we use for monitoring for security for performance tuning didn't change even though we moved those core applications into Azure in AWS because of rel under the covers and getting to the point where we have that flexibility is a real enabler as an infrastructure team that allows us to just be in the yes business and really doesn't matter where we want to deploy different workload if either cloud provider or on-prem anywhere on the planet it allows us to move much more quickly and stay much more directed to our consumers and so having rel at the core of our strategy is a huge enabler for that flexibility and allowing us to operate in this hybrid model thanks very much [Applause] what a great example it's really nice to hear an IQ story of using sort of relish that foundation to enable their hybrid clout enable their infrastructure and there's a lot that's the story we spent over ten years making that possible for rel to be that foundation and we've learned a lot in that but let's circle back for a minute to the software vendors and what kicked off the day today with IBM IBM s one of the largest software portfolios on the planet but we learned through our journey on rel that you need thousands of vendors to be able to sport you across all of your different industries solve any challenge that you might have and you need those vendors aligned with your technology direction this is doubly important when the technology direction is changing like with containers we saw that two years ago bread had introduced our container certification program now this program was focused on allowing you to identify vendors that had those shared technology goals but identification by itself wasn't enough in this fast-paced world so last year we introduced trusted content we introduced our container health index publicly grading red hats images that form the foundation for those vendor images and that was great because those of you that are familiar with containers know that you're taking software from vendors you're combining that with software from companies like Red Hat and you are putting those into a single container and for you to run those in a mission-critical capacity you have to know that we can both stand by and support those deployments but even trusted content wasn't enough so this year I'm excited that we are extending once again to introduce trusted operations now last week we announced that cube con kubernetes conference the kubernetes operator SDK the goal of the kubernetes operators is to allow any software provider on kubernetes to encode how that software should run this is a critical part of a container ecosystem not just being able to find the vendors that you want to work with not just knowing that you can trust what's inside the container but knowing that you can efficiently run that software now the exciting part is because this is so closely aligned with the upstream technology that today we already have four partners that have functioning operators specifically Couchbase dynaTrace crunchy and black dot so right out of the gate you have security monitoring data store options available to you these partners are really leading the charge in terms of what it means to run their software on OpenShift but behind these four we have many more in fact this morning we announced over 60 partners that are committed to building operators they're taking their domain expertise and the software that they wrote that they know and extending that into how you are going to run that on containers in environments like OpenShift this really brings the power of being able to find the vendors being able to trust what's inside and know that you can run their software as efficiently as anyone else on the planet but instead of just telling you about this we actually want to show you this in action so why don't we bring back up the demo team to give you a little tour of what's possible with it guys thanks Matt so Matt talked about the concept of operators and when when I think about operators and what they do it's taking OpenShift based services and making them even smarter giving you insight into how they do things for example have we had an operator for the nodejs service that I was running earlier it would have detected the problem and fixed itself but when we look at it what really operators do when I look at it from an ecosystem perspective is for ISVs it's going to be a catalyst that's going to allow them to make their services as manageable and it's flexible and as you know maintainable as any public cloud service no matter where OpenShift is running and to help demonstrate this I've got my buddy Rob here Rob are we ready on the demo front we're ready awesome now I notice this screen looks really familiar to me but you know I think we want to give folks here a dev preview of a couple of things well we want to show you is the first substantial integration of the core OS tectonic technology with OpenShift and then the other thing is we are going to dive in a little bit more into operators and their usefulness so Rob yeah so what we're looking at here is the service catalog that you know and love and openshift and we've got a few new things in here we've actually integrated operators into the Service Catalog and I'm going to take this filter and give you a look at some of them that we have today so you can see we've got a list of operators exposed and this is the same way that your developers are already used to integrating with products they're right in your catalog and so now these are actually smarter services but how can we maybe look at that I mentioned that there's maybe a new view I'm used to seeing this as a developer but I hear we've got some really cool stuff if I'm the administrator of the console yeah so we've got a whole new side of the console for cluster administrators to get a look at under the infrastructure versus this dev focused view that we're looking at today today so let's go take a look at it so the first thing you see here is we've got a really rich set of monitoring and health status so we can see that we've got some alerts firing our control plane is up and we can even do capacity planning anything that you need to do to maintenance your cluster okay so it's it's not only for the the services in the cluster and doing things that you know I may be normally as a human operator would have to do but this this console view also gives me insight into the infrastructure itself right like maybe the nodes and maybe handling the security context is that true yes so these are new capabilities that we're bringing to open shift is the ability to do node management things like drain and unscheduled nodes to do day-to-day maintenance and then as well as having security constraints and things like role bindings for example and the exciting thing about this is this is a view that you've never been able to see before it's cross-cutting across namespaces so here we've got a number of admin bindings and we can see that they're connected to a number of namespaces and these would represent our engineering teams all the groups that are using the cluster and we've never had this view before this is a perfect way to audit your security you know it actually is is pretty exciting I mean I've been fortunate enough to be on the up and shift team since day one and I know that operations view is is something that we've you know strived for and so it's really exciting to see that we can offer that now but you know really this was a we want to get into what operators do and what they can do for us and so maybe you show us what the operator console looks like yeah so let's jump on over and see all the operators that we have installed on the cluster you can see that these mirror what we saw on the Service Catalog earlier now what we care about though is this Couchbase operator and we're gonna jump into the demo namespace as I said you can share a number of different teams on a cluster so it's gonna jump into this namespace okay cool so now what we want to show you guys when we think about operators you know we're gonna have a scenario here where there's going to be multiple replicas of a Couchbase service running in the cluster and then we're going to have a stateful set and what's interesting is those two things are not enough if I'm really trying to run this as a true service where it's highly available in persistent there's things that you know as a DBA that I'm normally going to have to do if there's some sort of node failure and so what we want to demonstrate to you is where operators combined with the power that was already within OpenShift are now coming together to keep this you know particular database service highly available and something that we can continue using so Rob what have you got there yeah so as you can see we've got our couch based demo cluster running here and we can see that it's up and running we've got three members we've got an off secret this is what's controlling access to a UI that we're gonna look at in a second but what really shows the power of the operator is looking at this view of the resources that it's managing you can see that we've got a service that's doing load balancing into the cluster and then like you said we've got our pods that are actually running the software itself okay so that's cool so maybe for everyone's benefit so we can show that this is happening live could we bring up the the Couchbase console please and keep up the openshift console both sides so what we see there we go so what we see on the on the right hand side is obviously the same console Rob was working in on the left-hand side as you can see by the the actual names of the pods that are there the the couch based services that are available and so Rob maybe um let's let's kill something that's always fun to do on stage yeah this is the power of the operator it's going to recover it so let's browse on over here and kill node number two so we're gonna forcefully kill this and kick off the recovery and I see right away that because of the integration that we have with operators the Couchbase console immediately picked up that something has changed in the environment now why is that important normally a human being would have to get that alert right and so with operators now we've taken that capability and we've realized that there has been a new event within the environment this is not something that you know kubernetes or open shipped by itself would be able to understand now I'm presuming we're gonna end up doing something else it's not just seeing that it failed and sure enough there we go remember when you have a stateful application rebalancing that data and making it available is just as important as ensuring that the disk is attached so I mean Rob thank you so much for you know driving this for us today and being here I mean you know not only Couchbase but as was mentioned by matt we also have you know crunchy dynaTrace and black duck I would encourage you all to go visit their booths out on the floor today and understand what they have available which are all you know here with a dev preview and then talk to the many other partners that we have that are also looking at operators so again rub thank you for joining us today Matt come on out okay this is gonna make for an exciting year of just what it means to consume container base content I think containers change how customers can get that I believe operators are gonna change how much they can trust running that content let's circle back to one more partner this next partner we have has changed the landscape of computing specifically with their work on hardware design work on core Linux itself you know in fact I think they've become so ubiquitous with computing that we often overlook the technological marvels that they've been able to overcome now for myself I studied computer engineering so in the late 90s I had the chance to study processor design I actually got to build one of my own processors now in my case it was the most trivial processor that you could imagine it was an 8-bit subtractor which means it can subtract two numbers 256 or smaller but in that process I learned the sheer complexity that goes into processor design things like wire placements that are so close that electrons can cut through the insulation in short and then doing those wire placements across three dimensions to multiple layers jamming in as many logic components as you possibly can and again in my case this was to make a processor that could subtract two numbers but once I was done with this the second part of the course was studying the Pentium processor now remember that moment forever because looking at what the Pentium processor was able to accomplish it was like looking at alien technology and the incredible thing is that Intel our next partner has been able to keep up that alien like pace of innovation twenty years later so we're excited have Doug Fisher here let's hear a little bit more from Intel for business wide open skies an open mind no matter the context the idea of being open almost only suggests the potential of infinite possibilities and that's exactly the power of open source whether it's expanding what's possible in business the science and technology or for the greater good which is why-- open source requires the involvement of a truly diverse community of contributors to scale and succeed creating infinite possibilities for technology and more importantly what we do with it [Music] you know what Intel one of our core values is risk-taking and I'm gonna go just a bit off script for a second and say I was just backstage and I saw a gentleman that looked a lot like Scott Guthrie who runs all of Microsoft's cloud enterprise efforts wearing a red shirt talking to Cormier I'm just saying I don't know maybe I need some more sleep but that's what I saw as we approach Intel's 50th anniversary these words spoken by our co-founder Robert Noyce are as relevant today as they were decades ago don't be encumbered by history this is about breaking boundaries in technology and then go off and do something wonderful is about innovation and driving innovation in our industry and Intel we're constantly looking to break boundaries to advance our technology in the cloud in enterprise space that is no different so I'm going to talk a bit about some of the boundaries we've been breaking and innovations we've been driving at Intel starting with our Intel Xeon platform Orion Xeon scalable platform we launched several months ago which was the biggest and mark the most advanced movement in this technology in over a decade we were able to drive critical performance capabilities unmatched agility and added necessary and sufficient security to that platform I couldn't be happier with the work we do with Red Hat and ensuring that those hero features that we drive into our platform they fully expose to all of you to drive that innovation to go off and do something wonderful well there's taking advantage of the performance features or agility features like our advanced vector extensions or avx-512 or Intel quick exist those technologies are fully embraced by Red Hat Enterprise Linux or whether it's security technologies like txt or trusted execution technology are fully incorporated and we look forward to working with Red Hat on their next release to ensure that our advancements continue to be exposed and their platform and all these workloads that are driving the need for us to break boundaries and our technology are driving more and more need for flexibility and computing and that's why we're excited about Intel's family of FPGAs to help deliver that additional flexibility for you to build those capabilities in your environment we have a broad set of FPGA capabilities from our power fish at Mac's product line all the way to our performance product line on the 6/10 strat exten we have a broad set of bets FPGAs what i've been talking to customers what's really exciting is to see the combination of using our Intel Xeon scalable platform in combination with FPGAs in addition to the acceleration development capabilities we've given to software developers combining all that together to deliver better and better solutions whether it's helping to accelerate data compression well there's pattern recognition or data encryption and decryption one of the things I saw in a data center recently was taking our Intel Xeon scalable platform utilizing the capabilities of FPGA to do data encryption between servers behind the firewall all the while using the FPGA to do that they preserve those precious CPU cycles to ensure they delivered the SLA to the customer yet provided more security for their data in the data center one of the edges in cyber security is innovation and route of trust starts at the hardware we recently renewed our commitment to security with our security first pledge has really three elements to our security first pledge first is customer first urgency we have now completed the release of the micro code updates for protection on our Intel platforms nine plus years since launch to protect against things like the side channel exploits transparent and timely communication we are going to communicate timely and openly on our Intel comm website whether it's about our patches performance or other relevant information and then ongoing security assurance we drive security into every one of our products we redesigned a portion of our processor to add these partition capability which is adding additional walls between applications and user level privileges to further secure that environment from bad actors I want to pause for a second and think everyone in this room involved in helping us work through our security first pledge this isn't something we do on our own it takes everyone in this room to help us do that the partnership and collaboration was next to none it's the most amazing thing I've seen since I've been in this industry so thank you we don't stop there we continue to advance our security capabilities cross-platform solutions we recently had a conference discussion at RSA where we talked about Intel Security Essentials where we deliver a framework of capabilities and the end that are in our silicon available for those to innovate our customers and the security ecosystem to innovate on a platform in a consistent way delivering that assurance that those capabilities will be on that platform we also talked about things like our security threat technology threat detection technology is something that we believe in and we launched that at RSA incorporates several elements one is ability to utilize our internal graphics to accelerate some of the memory scanning capabilities we call this an accelerated memory scanning it allows you to use the integrated graphics to scan memory again preserving those precious cycles on the core processor Microsoft adopted this and are now incorporated into their defender product and are shipping it today we also launched our threat SDK which allows partners like Cisco to utilize telemetry information to further secure their environments for cloud workloads so we'll continue to drive differential experiences into our platform for our ecosystem to innovate and deliver more and more capabilities one of the key aspects you have to protect is data by 2020 the projection is 44 zettabytes of data will be available 44 zettabytes of data by 2025 they project that will grow to a hundred and eighty s data bytes of data massive amount of data and what all you want to do is you want to drive value from that data drive and value from that data is absolutely critical and to do that you need to have that data closer and closer to your computation this is why we've been working Intel to break the boundaries in memory technology with our investment in 3d NAND we're reducing costs and driving up density in that form factor to ensure we get warm data closer to the computing we're also innovating on form factors we have here what we call our ruler form factor this ruler form factor is designed to drive as much dense as you can in a 1u rack we're going to continue to advance the capabilities to drive one petabyte of data at low power consumption into this ruler form factor SSD form factor so our innovation continues the biggest breakthrough and memory technology in the last 25 years in memory media technology was done by Intel we call this our 3d crosspoint technology and our 3d crosspoint technology is now going to be driven into SSDs as well as in a persistent memory form factor to be on the memory bus giving you the speed of memory characteristics of memory as well as the characteristics of storage given a new tier of memory for developers to take full advantage of and as you can see Red Hat is fully committed to integrating this capability into their platform to take full advantage of that new capability so I want to thank Paul and team for engaging with us to make sure that that's available for all of you to innovate on and so we're breaking boundaries and technology across a broad set of elements that we deliver that's what we're about we're going to continue to do that not be encumbered by the past your role is to go off and doing something wonderful with that technology all ecosystems are embracing this and driving it including open source technology open source is a hub of innovation it's been that way for many many years that innovation that's being driven an open source is starting to transform many many businesses it's driving business transformation we're seeing this coming to light in the transformation of 5g driving 5g into the networked environment is a transformational moment an open source is playing a pivotal role in that with OpenStack own out and opie NFV and other open source projects were contributing to and participating in are helping drive that transformation in 5g as you do software-defined networks on our barrier breaking technology we're also seeing this transformation rapidly occurring in the cloud enterprise cloud enterprise are growing rapidly and innovation continues our work with virtualization and KVM continues to be aggressive to adopt technologies to advance and deliver more capabilities in virtualization as we look at this with Red Hat we're now working on Cube vert to help move virtualized workloads onto these platforms so that we can now have them managed at an open platform environment and Cube vert provides that so between Intel and Red Hat and the community we're investing resources to make certain that comes to product as containers a critical feature in Linux becomes more and more prevalent across the industry the growth of container elements continues at a rapid rapid pace one of the things that we wanted to bring to that is the ability to provide isolation without impairing the flexibility the speed and the footprint of a container with our clear container efforts along with hyper run v we were able to combine that and create we call cotta containers we launched this at the end of last year cotta containers is designed to have that container element available and adding elements like isolation both of these events need to have an orchestration and management capability Red Hat's OpenShift provides that capability for these workloads whether containerized or cube vert capabilities with virtual environments Red Hat openshift is designed to take that commercial capability to market and we've been working with Red Hat for several years now to develop what we call our Intel select solution Intel select solutions our Intel technology optimized for downstream workloads as we see a growth in a workload will work with a partner to optimize a solution on Intel technology to deliver the best solution that could be deployed quickly our effort here is to accelerate the adoption of these type of workloads in the market working with Red Hat's so now we're going to be deploying an Intel select solution design and optimized around Red Hat OpenShift we expect the industry's start deploying this capability very rapidly I'm excited to announce today that Lenovo is committed to be the first platform company to deliver this solution to market the Intel select solution to market will be delivered by Lenovo now I talked about what we're doing in industry and how we're transforming businesses our technology is also utilized for greater good there's no better example of this than the worked by dr. Stephen Hawking it was a sad day on March 14th of this year when dr. Stephen Hawking passed away but not before Intel had a 20-year relationship with dr. Hawking driving breakthrough capabilities innovating with him driving those robust capabilities to the rest of the world one of our Intel engineers an Intel fellow which is the highest technical achievement you can reach at Intel got to spend 10 years with dr. Hawking looking at innovative things they could do together with our technology and his breakthrough innovative thinking so I thought it'd be great to bring up our Intel fellow Lema notch Minh to talk about her work with dr. Hawking and what she learned in that experience come on up Elina [Music] great to see you Thanks something going on about the breakthrough breaking boundaries and Intel technology talk about how you use that in your work with dr. Hawking absolutely so the most important part was to really make that technology contextually aware because for people with disability every single interaction takes a long time so whether it was adapting for example the language model of his work predictor to understand whether he's gonna talk to people or whether he's writing a book on black holes or to even understand what specific application he might be using and then making sure that we're surfacing only enough actions that were relevant to reduce that amount of interaction so the tricky part is really to make all of that contextual awareness happen without totally confusing the user because it's constantly changing underneath it so how is that your work involving any open source so you know the problem with assistive technology in general is that it needs to be tailored to the specific disability which really makes it very hard and very expensive because it can't utilize the economies of scale so basically with the system that we built what we wanted to do is really enable unleashing innovation in the world right so you could take that framework you could tailor to a specific sensor for example a brain computer interface or something like that where you could actually then support a different set of users so that makes open-source a perfect fit because you could actually build and tailor and we you spoke with dr. Hawking what was this view of open source is it relevant to him so yeah so Stephen was adamant from the beginning that he wanted a system to benefit the world and not just himself so he spent a lot of time with us to actually build this system and he was adamant from day one that he would only engage with us if we were commit to actually open sourcing the technology that's fantastic and you had the privilege of working with them in 10 years I know you have some amazing stories to share so thank you so much for being here thank you so much in order for us to scale and that's what we're about at Intel is really scaling our capabilities it takes this community it takes this community of diverse capabilities it takes two births thought diverse thought of dr. Hawking couldn't be more relevant but we also are proud at Intel about leading efforts of diverse thought like women and Linux women in big data other areas like that where Intel feels that that diversity of thinking and engagement is critical for our success so as we look at Intel not to be encumbered by the past but break boundaries to deliver the technology that you all will go off and do something wonderful with we're going to remain committed to that and I look forward to continue working with you thank you and have a great conference [Applause] thank God now we have one more customer story for you today when you think about customers challenges in the technology landscape it is hard to ignore the public cloud these days public cloud is introducing capabilities that are driving the fastest rate of innovation that we've ever seen in our industry and our next customer they actually had that same challenge they wanted to tap into that innovation but they were also making bets for the long term they wanted flexibility and providers and they had to integrate to the systems that they already have and they have done a phenomenal job in executing to this so please give a warm welcome to Kerry Pierce from Cathay Pacific Kerry come on thanks very much Matt hi everyone thank you for giving me the opportunity to share a little bit about our our cloud journey let me start by telling you a little bit about Cathay Pacific we're an international airline based in Hong Kong and we serve a passenger and a cargo network to over 200 destinations in 52 countries and territories in the last seventy years and years seventy years we've made substantial investments to develop Hong Kong as one of the world's leading transportation hubs we invest in what matters most to our customers to you focusing on our exemplary service and our great product and it's both on the ground and in the air we're also investing and expanding our network beyond our multiple frequencies to the financial districts such as Tokyo New York and London and we're connecting Asia and Hong Kong with key tech hubs like San Francisco where we have multiple flights daily we're also connecting Asia in Hong Kong to places like Tel Aviv and our upcoming destination of Dublin in fact 2018 is actually going to be one of our biggest years in terms of network expansion and capacity growth and we will be launching in September our longest flight from Hong Kong direct to Washington DC and that'll be using a state-of-the-art Airbus a350 1000 aircraft so that's a little bit about Cathay Pacific let me tell you about our journey through the cloud I'm not going to go into technical details there's far smarter people out in the audience who will be able to do that for you just focus a little bit about what we were trying to achieve and the people side of it that helped us get there we had a couple of years ago no doubt the same issues that many of you do I don't think we're unique we had a traditional on-premise non-standardized fragile infrastructure it didn't meet our infrastructure needs and it didn't meet our development needs it was costly to maintain it was costly to grow and it really inhibited innovation most importantly it slowed the delivery of value to our customers at the same time you had the hype of cloud over the last few years cloud this cloud that clouds going to fix the world we were really keen on making sure we didn't get wound up and that so we focused on what we needed we started bottom up with a strategy we knew we wanted to be clouded Gnostic we wanted to have active active on-premise data centers with a single network and fabric and we wanted public clouds that were trusted and acted as an extension of that environment not independently we wanted to avoid single points of failure and we wanted to reduce inter dependencies by having loosely coupled designs and finally we wanted to be scalable we wanted to be able to cater for sudden surges of demand in a nutshell we kind of just wanted to make everything easier and a management level we wanted to be a broker of services so not one size fits all because that doesn't work but also not one of everything we want to standardize but a pragmatic range of services that met our development and support needs and worked in harmony with our public cloud not against it so we started on a journey with red hat we implemented Red Hat cloud forms and ansible to manage our hybrid cloud we also met implemented Red Hat satellite to maintain a manager environment we built a Red Hat OpenStack on crimson vironment to give us an alternative and at the same time we migrated a number of customer applications to a production public cloud open shift environment but it wasn't all Red Hat you love heard today that the Red Hat fits within an overall ecosystem we looked at a number of third-party tools and services and looked at developing those into our core solution I think at last count we had tried and tested somewhere past eight different tools and at the moment we still have around 62 in our environment that help us through that journey but let me put the technical solution aside a little bit because it doesn't matter how good your technical solution is if you don't have the culture and the people to get it right as a group we needed to be aligned for delivery and we focused on three core behaviors we focused on accountability agility and collaboration now I was really lucky we've got a pretty fantastic team for whom that was actually pretty easy but but again don't underestimate the importance of getting the culture and the people right because all the technology in the world doesn't matter if you don't have that right I asked the team what did we do differently because in our situation we didn't go out and hire a bunch of new people we didn't go out and hire a bunch of consultants we had the staff that had been with us for 10 20 and in some cases 30 years so what did we do differently it was really simple we just empowered and supported our staff we knew they were the smart ones they were the ones that were dealing with a legacy environment and they had the passion to make the change so as a team we encouraged suggestions and contributions from our overall IT community from the bottom up we started small we proved the case we told the story and then we got by him and only did did we implement wider the benefits the benefit through our staff were a huge increase in staff satisfaction reduction and application and platform outage support incidents risk free and failsafe application releases work-life balance no more midnight deployments and our application and infrastructure people could really focus on delivering customer value not on firefighting and for our end customers the people that travel with us it was really really simple we could provide a stable service that allowed for faster releases which meant we could deliver value faster in terms of stats we migrated 16 production b2c applications to a public cloud OpenShift environment in 12 months we decreased provisioning time from weeks or occasionally months we were waiting for hardware two minutes and we had a hundred percent availability of our key customer facing systems but most importantly it was about people we'd built a culture a culture of innovation that was built on a foundation of collaboration agility and accountability and that permeated throughout the IT organization not those just those people that were involved in the project everyone with an IT could see what good looked like and to see what it worked what it looked like in terms of working together and that was a key foundation for us the future for us you will have heard today everything's changing so we're going to continue to develop our open hybrid cloud onboard more public cloud service providers continue to build more modern applications and leverage the emerging technology integrate and automate everything we possibly can and leverage more open source products with the great support from the open source community so there you have it that's our journey I think we succeeded by not being over awed and by starting with the basics the technology was key obviously it's a cool component but most importantly it was a way we approached our transition we had a clear strategy that was actually developed bottom-up by the people that were involved day to day and we empowered those people to deliver and that provided benefits to both our staff and to our customers so thank you for giving the opportunity to share and I hope you enjoy the rest of the summer [Applause] I got one thanks what a great story would a great customer story to close on and we have one more partner to come up and this is a partner that all of you know that's Microsoft Microsoft has gone through an amazing transformation they've we've built an incredibly meaningful partnership with them all the way from our open source collaboration to what we do in the business side we started with support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux on hyper-v and that was truly just the beginning today we're announcing one of the most exciting joint product offerings on the market today let's please give a warm welcome to Paul correr and Scott Scott Guthrie to tell us about it guys come on out you know Scot welcome welcome to the Red Hat summer thanks for coming really appreciate it great to be here you know many surprises a lot of people when we you know published a list of speakers and then you rock you were on it and you and I are on stage here it's really really important and exciting to us exciting new partnership we've worked together a long time from the hypervisor up to common support and now around hybrid hybrid cloud maybe from your perspective a little bit of of what led us here well you know I think the thing that's really led us here is customers and you know Microsoft we've been on kind of a transformation journey the last several years where you know we really try to put customers at the center of everything that we do and you know as part of that you quickly learned from customers in terms of I'm including everyone here just you know you've got a hybrid of state you know both in terms of what you run on premises where it has a lot of Red Hat software a lot of Microsoft software and then really is they take the journey to the cloud looking at a hybrid of state in terms of how do you run that now between on-premises and a public cloud provider and so I think the thing that both of us are recognized and certainly you know our focus here at Microsoft has been you know how do we really meet customers with where they're at and where they want to go and make them successful in that journey and you know it's been fantastic working with Paul and the Red Hat team over the last two years in particular we spend a lot of time together and you know really excited about the journey ahead so um maybe you can share a bit more about the announcement where we're about to make today yeah so it's it's it's a really exciting announcement it's and really kind of I think first of its kind in that we're delivering a Red Hat openshift on Azure service that we're jointly developing and jointly managing together so this is different than sort of traditional offering where it's just running inside VMs and it's sort of two vendors working this is really a jointly managed service that we're providing with full enterprise support with a full SLA where the you know single throat to choke if you will although it's collectively both are choke the throats in terms of making sure that it works well and it's really uniquely designed around this hybrid world and in that it supports will support both Windows and Linux containers and it role you know it's the same open ship that runs both in the public cloud on Azure and on-premises and you know it's something that we hear a lot from customers I know there's a lot of people here that have asked both of us for this and super excited to be able to talk about it today and we're gonna show off the first demo of it just a bit okay well I'm gonna ask you to elaborate a bit more about this how this fits into the bigger Microsoft picture and I'll get out of your way and so thanks again thank you for coming here we go thanks Paul so I thought I'd spend just a few minutes talking about wouldn't you know that some of the work that we're doing with Microsoft Asher and the overall Microsoft cloud I didn't go deeper in terms of the new offering that we're announcing today together with red hat and show demo of it actually in action in a few minutes you know the high level in terms of you know some of the work that we've been doing at Microsoft the last couple years you know it's really been around this this journey to the cloud that we see every organization going on today and specifically the Microsoft Azure we've been providing really a cloud platform that delivers the infrastructure the application and kind of the core computing needs that organizations have as they want to be able to take advantage of what the cloud has to offer and in terms of our focus with Azure you know we've really focused we deliver lots and lots of different services and features but we focused really in particular on kind of four key themes and we see these four key themes aligning very well with the journey Red Hat it's been on and it's partly why you know we think the partnership between the two companies makes so much sense and you know for us the thing that we've been really focused on has been with a or in terms of how do we deliver a really productive cloud meaning how do we enable you to take advantage of cutting-edge technology and how do we kind of accelerate the successful adoption of it whether it's around the integration of managed services that we provide both in terms of the application space in the data space the analytic and AI space but also in terms of just the end-to-end management and development tools and how all those services work together so that teams can basically adopt them and be super successful yeah we deeply believe in hybrid and believe that the world is going to be a multi cloud and a multi distributed world and how do we enable organizations to be able to take the existing investments that they already have and be able to easily integrate them in a public cloud and with a public cloud environment and get immediate ROI on day one without how to rip and replace tons of solutions you know we're moving very aggressively in the AI space and are looking to provide a rich set of AI services both finished AI models things like speech detection vision detection object motion etc that any developer even at non data scientists can integrate to make application smarter and then we provide a rich set of AI tooling that enables organizations to build custom models and be able to integrate them also as part of their applications and with their data and then we invest very very heavily on trust Trust is sort of at the core of a sure and we now have more compliant certifications than any other cloud provider we run in more countries than any other cloud provider and we really focus around unique promises around data residency data sovereignty and privacy that are really differentiated across the industry and terms of where Iser runs today we're in 50 regions around the world so our region for us is typically a cluster of multiple data centers that are grouped together and you can see we're pretty much on every continent with the exception of Antarctica today and the beauty is you're going to be able to take the Red Hat open shift service and run it on ashore in each of these different locations and really have a truly global footprint as you look to build and deploy solutions and you know we've seen kind of this focus on productivity hybrid intelligence and Trust really resonate in the market and about 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies today are deployed on Azure and you heard Nike talked a little bit earlier this afternoon about some of their journeys as they've moved to a dot public cloud this is a small logo of just a couple of the companies that are on ashore today and what I do is actually even before we dive into the open ship demo is actually just show a quick video you know one of the companies thing there are actually several people from that organization here today Deutsche Bank who have been working with both Microsoft and Red Hat for many years Microsoft on the other side Red Hat both on the rel side and then on the OpenShift side and it's just one of these customers that have helped bring the two companies together to deliver this managed openshift service on Azure and so I'm just going to play a quick video of some of the folks that Deutsche Bank talking about their experiences and what they're trying to get out of it so we could roll the video that'd be great technology is at the absolute heart of Deutsche Bank we've recognized that the cost of running our infrastructure was particularly high there was a enormous amount of under utilization we needed a platform which was open to polyglot architecture supporting any kind of application workload across the various business lines of the third we analyzed over 60 different vendor products and we ended up with Red Hat openshift I'm super excited Microsoft or supporting Linux so strongly to adopting a hybrid approach we chose as here because Microsoft was the ideal partner to work with on constructs around security compliance business continuity as you as in all the places geographically that we need to be we have applications now able to go from a proof of concept to production in three weeks that is already breaking records openshift gives us given entities and containers allows us to apply the same sets of processes automation across a wide range of our application landscape on any given day we run between seven and twelve thousand containers across three regions we start see huge levels of cost reduction because of the level of multi-tenancy that we can achieve through containers open ship gives us an abstraction layer which is allows us to move our applications between providers without having to reconfigure or recode those applications what's really exciting for me about this journey is the way they're both Red Hat and Microsoft have embraced not just what we're doing but what each other are doing and have worked together to build open shift as a first-class citizen with Microsoft [Applause] in terms of what we're announcing today is a new fully managed OpenShift service on Azure and it's really the first fully managed service provided end-to-end across any of the cloud providers and it's jointly engineer operated and supported by both Microsoft and Red Hat and that means again sort of one service one SLA and both companies standing for a link firmly behind it really again focusing around how do we make customers successful and as part of that really providing the enterprise-grade not just isolates but also support and integration testing so you can also take advantage of all your rel and linux-based containers and all of your Windows server based containers and how can you run them in a joint way with a common management stack taking the advantage of one service and get maximum density get maximum code reuse and be able to take advantage of a containerized world in a better way than ever before and make this customer focus is very much at the center of what both companies are really centered around and so what if I do be fun is rather than just talk about openshift as actually kind of show off a little bit of a journey in terms of what this move to take advantage of it looks like and so I'd like to invite Brendan and Chris onstage who are actually going to show off a live demo of openshift on Azure in action and really walk through how to provision the service and basically how to start taking advantage of it using the full open ship ecosystem so please welcome Brendan and Chris we're going to join us on stage for a demo thanks God thanks man it's been a good afternoon so you know what we want to get into right now first I'd like to think Brandon burns for joining us from Microsoft build it's a busy week for you I'm sure your own stage there a few times as well you know what I like most about what we just announced is not only the business and technical aspects but it's that operational aspect the uniqueness the expertise that RedHat has for running OpenShift combined with the expertise that Microsoft has within Azure and customers are going to get this joint offering if you will with you know Red Hat OpenShift on Microsoft Azure and so you know kind of with that again Brendan I really appreciate you being here maybe talk to the folks about what we're going to show yeah so we're going to take a look at what it looks like to deploy OpenShift on to Azure via the new OpenShift service and the real selling point the really great part of this is the the deep integration with a cloud native app API so the same tooling that you would use to create virtual machines to create disks trade databases is now the tooling that you're going to use to create an open chip cluster so to show you this first we're going to create a resource group here so we're going to create that resource group in East us using the AZ tool that's the the azure command-line tooling a resource group is sort of a folder on Azure that holds all of your stuff so that's gonna come back into the second I've created my resource group in East us and now we're gonna use that exact same tool calling into into Azure api's to provision an open shift cluster so here we go we have AZ open shift that's our new command line tool putting it into that resource group I'm gonna get into East us alright so it's gonna take a little bit of time to deploy that open shift cluster it's doing a bunch of work behind the scenes provisioning all kinds of resources as well as credentials to access a bunch of different as your API so are we actually able to see this to you yeah so we can cut over to in just a second we can cut over to that resource group in a reload so Brendan while relating the beauty of what you know the teams have been doing together already is the fact that now open shift is a first-class citizen as it were yeah absolutely within the agent so I presume not only can I do a deployment but I can do things like scale and check my credentials and pretty much everything that I could do with any other service with that that's exactly right so we can anything that you you were used to doing via the my computer has locked up there we go the demo gods are totally with me oh there we go oh no I hit reload yeah that was that was just evil timing on the house this is another use for operators as we talked about earlier today that's right my dashboard should be coming up do I do I dare click on something that's awesome that was totally it was there there we go good job so what's really interesting about this I've also heard that it deploys you know in as little as five to six minutes which is really good for customers they want to get up and running with it but all right there we go there it is who managed to make it see that shows that it's real right you see the sweat coming off of me there but there you can see the I feel it you can see the various resources that are being created in order to create this openshift cluster virtual machines disks all of the pieces provision for you automatically via that one single command line call now of course it takes a few minutes to to create the cluster so in order to show the other side of that integration the integration between openshift and Azure I'm going to cut over to an open shipped cluster that I already have created alright so here you can see my open shift cluster that's running on Microsoft Azure I'm gonna actually log in over here and the first sign you're gonna see of the integration is it's actually using my credentials my login and going through Active Directory and any corporate policies that I may have around smart cards two-factor off anything like that authenticate myself to that open chef cluster so I'll accept that it can access my and now we're gonna load up the OpenShift web console so now this looks familiar to me oh yeah so if anybody's used OpenShift out there this is the exact same console and what we're going to show though is how this console via the open service broker and the open service broker implementation for Azure integrates natively with OpenShift all right so we can go down here and we can actually see I want to deploy a database I'm gonna deploy Mongo as my key value store that I'm going to use but you know like as we talk about management and having a OpenShift cluster that's managed for you I don't really want to have to manage my database either so I'm actually going to use cosmos DB it's a native Azure service it's a multilingual database that offers me the ability to access my data in a variety of different formats including MongoDB fully managed replicated around the world a pretty incredible service so I'm going to go ahead and create that so now Brendan what's interesting I think to me is you know we talked about the operational aspects and clearly it's not you and I running the clusters but you do need that way to interface with it and so when customers are able to deploy this all of this is out of the box there's no additional contemporary like this is what you get when you create when you use that tool to create that open chef cluster this is what you get with all of that integration ok great step through here and go ahead don't have any IP ranges there we go all right and we create that binding all right and so now behind the scenes openshift is integrated with the azure api's with all of my credentials to go ahead and create that distributed database once it's done provisioning actually all of the credentials necessary to access the database are going to be automatically populated into kubernetes available for me inside of OpenShift via service discovery to access from my application without any further work so I think that really shows not only the power of integrating openshift with an azure based API but actually the power of integrating a Druze API is inside of OpenShift to make a truly seamless experience for managing and deploying your containers across a variety of different platforms yeah hey you know Brendan this is great I know you've got a flight to catch because I think you're back onstage in a few hours but you know really appreciate you joining us today absolutely I look forward to seeing what else we do yeah absolutely thank you so much thanks guys Matt you want to come back on up thanks a lot guys if you have never had the opportunity to do a live demo in front of 8,000 people it'll give you a new appreciation for standing up there and doing it and that was really good you know every time I get the chance just to take a step back and think about the technology that we have at our command today I'm in awe just the progress over the last 10 or 20 years is incredible on to think about what might come in the next 10 or 20 years really is unthinkable you even forget 10 years what might come in the next five years even the next two years but this can create a lot of uncertainty in the environment of what's going to be to come but I believe I am certain about one thing and that is if ever there was a time when any idea is achievable it is now just think about what you've seen today every aspect of open hybrid cloud you have the world's infrastructure at your fingertips and it's not stopping you've heard about this the innovation of open source how fast that's evolving and improving this capability you've heard this afternoon from an entire technology ecosystem that's ready to help you on this journey and you've heard from customer after customer that's already started their journey in the successes that they've had you're one of the neat parts about this afternoon you will aren't later this week you will actually get to put your hands on all of this technology together in our live audience demo you know this is what some it's all about for us it's a chance to bring together the technology experts that you can work with to help formulate how to pull off those ideas we have the chance to bring together technology experts our customers and our partners and really create an environment where everyone can experience the power of open source that same spark that I talked about when I was at IBM where I understood the but intial that open-source had for enterprise customers we want to create the environment where you can have your own spark you can have that same inspiration let's make this you know in tomorrow's keynote actually you will hear a story about how open-source is changing medicine as we know it and literally saving lives it is a great example of expanding the ideas it might be possible that we came into this event with so let's make this the best summit ever thank you very much for being here let's kick things off right head down to the Welcome Reception in the expo hall and please enjoy the summit thank you all so much [Music] [Music]

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering Dell Technologies World, 2018, brought to you by Dell EMC and it's ecosystem partners. >> Well welcome back to Las Vegas, the Cube, continuing our coverage here of Dell Technologies World 2018, with some 14 thousand strong in attendance. This is day two by the way, of three days of coverage that you'll be seeing here live on the Cube. Along with Keith Townsend, I'm John Walls and we're now joined by Alex Almeida, who is the consultant of product marketing at Dell EMC, and Bob Bender who is the CTO of Founders Federal Credit Union, Bob, good to see you as well, sir. >> Thank you, thank you for having me. >> You bet, thanks for being here to both of you. First off, let's just set the table for what you do at Founders and what Founders is all about and then why Dell, and how Dell figures into your picture. >> Sure, so Founders Federal Credit Union established in 1950 we're a regional financial institution providing basic services for that area in South and North Carolina. We now service over 32 areas and we have about 210 thousand plus members. So I'm Chief Technology Officer and we're looking to Dell EMC to really give us a lift in the cyber resilience of our data, what we're trying to protect today. >> Keith and I were talking too, and said we always like hearing on the customer side of this, especially on the financial side, right? Because your concerns are grave concerns, right? We all care about our money, right? And obviously that's first and foremost for you, having trust, credibility, liability. So tell us a little bit about that thought process in general, what drives your business and how that then transfers over to DIT. >> Sure, and as a member, you look at us, big or small, you expect the same cyber resilience, protection for your personal information, you don't think there's going to be a difference there. So if you look at the Carolina's, you're going to see a significant, or the southeast, we've been picked on with malware, with that data extortion of what the name, ransomware, so we had to find a solution quickly and we looked at Dell EMC for data protection and cyber recovery to really help us in that area and really protect our data. >> So let's talk about some of the threats faced. Outside of malware, typically the line of thought is, you know what, don't assume that you can prevent getting hacked, assume that you are hacked, what personas do you guys wear as a bank, or as a credit union? >> Well, we looked at that and what we did is we get really involved and we go out and we see that event, the breach, the malware, the ransomware, and so we really thought, we lack the ability of bringing assets under governance, so how do we really roll that up so that everybody knows at any point in time, we can recover, that we have kind of a isolated recovery, an air gap, or a data bunker, and then a clean room to bring that up, a Sandbox. And we really saw that our tape media backup recovery was not going to recover for the events that were happening, the old days, you're looking at one or two critical systems that are being recovered. Today, they're locking 500, 1500 servers in a matter of minutes. So, when you rehydrate that data, you know, the deduplication, we're seeing 72 to one and that's done very fast, through the product lines of Dell EMC, significant, but when you want to rehydrate that, the data's gone, it's just not there. Well, if you take away that air gap situation, what're you left with? And if they're smart enough to figure out where your backups are, you're left with no protection, so we really needed to isolate and put off network all that critical data. And because of that 72 to one dedupe rate, and I realize we may be unique, there's others that may have to choose what those critical systems are, we're not going to have to, we're going to protect everything, every day, and so that we have a recovery point that we can point to and show management and our board and our members, such as you guys, that we can recover, that you're going to have trust in us handling your financial responsibilities. >> So what specific technologies are you guys using from Dell to create this environment in which you can recover within these isolated bubbles? >> You know, I'll let Alex talk more specific, but we really looked at the data protection solution, and a cyber solution, we said phase one, we want to stand this up very quickly because it's any minute this could happen to us. It's happening to very smart establishments. We really picked what was going to optimize our first iteration of this, and we did it quickly, so we're talking a roll out in 45 days. We used Data Domain, Avamar, DD Boost, we've got Data Protection Advisor, which gives me, whether I'm here or I'm off at another conference, or I'm showing up at the office, I get instant results of what we did the day before for that recovery. I know that we're in the petabyte storage business, I don't know when we crossed that line, but now we store you know, a huge amount of data very quickly. I mean, we took their product line and went from hours down to seconds and I can move that window any which way I want, and so it's just empowering to be able to use that product line to protect our data the way we are today. >> Yeah, I think the Dell EMC cyber recovery solution really is kind of looking at solving the problem, most people look at it from solving it as a preventative thing, how do I prevent malware from happening, how do I stop ransomware from attacking me? The thing is is that it's all about really, how are you going to recover from that? And having plan to be able to recover. And with the way we approached it, we started talking to customers like Bob, and they were really coming to us and saying, you know, this is increasing, this is an increasing problem that we're seeing and it's inevitable, we feel we're going to be attacked at some point. And you see on the news today, you know, we're only a little bit through the year and there's been a lot of news on cyber attacks and things like that. The key thing is how do you recover? So we took at that in conversations with our customers and went specifically back and designed a solution that leverages the best in industry technology that we have with our data protection portfolio. So when you look at data deduplication, you look at Data Domain, that technology in the industry provides the fastest recovery possible. And from there, that makes it realistic for companies to really say, yeah, I can recover from a ransomware attack. And the more important thing is, we look at this as the isolation piece of the solution is really where the value comes in. Not only is it to get a clean copy of the data, but you can use that for analysis of that data in that clean room to be able to detect early on problems that may be happening in your production environment. And it's really important that that recovery aspect be stressed and really the Data Domain solution is kind of the enabler there. >> It's still a really tough spot to be in, right? Because on one hand you're protecting, you're trying to prevent, so you're building the fortress as best you can, and at the same time, you're developing a recovery solution so that if there is a violation, an intrusion, you're going to be okay, but the fact is the data's gone, you know, it went out the door, and so I'm just curious psychologically, you know, how do you deal with that, with your board, with your ownership, with your customers? How do you deal with it, Alex, to your customer, just saying we're going to do all we can to keep this safe, >> Absolutely. >> But so that but is a big caviada, right? How do both of you deal with that? >> Yeah. >> First off... >> I'll say this, working with the Dell EMC engineers and their business partners, I'm sleeping better at night, and I'm not just saying that being here, what I mean is that they've shrunk my backup window, they've guaranteed me reporting and a infrastructure IQ of that environment that I have more insight, integrated, so across, holistically, my enterprise. So no longer am I adding on different components to complete backups, this backup, this company, this... I never get that insight, and I never really have the evidence that we're restoring, I can do the store and the restore at the same time and see that next day in reporting, that we're achieving that. I hear that but, but that but is a little quieter because you know, it's just a little less impactful because I'm confident now that I've got a very efficient window. I'm not effecting again, with those add on, ad hoc products, not condemning 'em, but, they're impactful to critical applications, I can see response time during peak times, the product doesn't have that effect. And it's really exciting because now I can, you know, I've got to rip and replace, I got to lift and shift, you decide what the acronyms you want to add to it, but we... The big thing I want to add, and sorry to ramble here a little, >> You're fine. >> Yep, yep. Our run books are becoming smaller. And this is, the less complex, now we're taking keep the lights on people that are very frustrated with our acronyms and our terminology and the way we're going and I'm starting to bring them into the cyber resilience, cyber security environment and they're feeling empowered and I'm getting more creative ideas and that means, more creative ideas means we're back as a business solving problems, not worrying if our backups are done at two in the morning. >> And from a Dell EMC perspective, I think we're really uniquely positioned in the industry, in that, not just from Dell EMC, but we look at all of Dell technologies, right? When we incorporate the fact that we have best in class data protection solutions to do operational recovery, disaster recovery, the next logical step is to really augment that and really start looking at cyber recovery, right? And then when you look at that and you look at the power of Dell technologies, it's really a layered approach, how do I layer my data protection solutions to do operational recovery, to do disaster recovery? And then at the same time, throw in a little RSA and SecureWorks in there into the picture and we're really uniquely positioned as a vendor in the industry, no other vendor can really handle that breadth in the industry from a cyber recovery standpoint when you throw in the likes of RSA and SecureWorks. >> So, Alex, let's drill down in the overall capability versus the rest of the industry. There's been a ton of investment in data protection, 90 million, 100 million, we're seeing unicorns pop up over just this use case of data protection. And they're making no qualms at it, they're going right at the Data Domain business. What is the message that you're going out and telling any users like Bob, that, you know what, stay the course, Data Domain, the portfolio of data protection at Dell is the best way to recover your environment in case of a breach. >> Yeah, absolutely. So in terms of that, what I say to customers I talk to every day around this, that are maybe doubting you know, going forward and what they're going to do, is that we are continuing to innovate, that Data Domain platform continues to innovate, you see that in our cloud scenarios, in the cloud, you know, use cases that we're talking about, and really kind of working together with our customers as a partner on how we apply things like cyber recovery for their workloads that go into the cloud, right? And that's really through that working relationship with customers and that very strong investment that we're making on the engineering side with our roadmaps is really what customers, at the end of the day become convinced that Data Domain is here to stay. >> So, Bob I'd love to follow up on-- >> Bob: Can I add on to that? >> Please. >> You know, I think the couple things you pointed on that I probably missed, is one, you've given me options, I can be on pram or off pram or back to on pram, and that is with the product line. And again, that integration across that, I have to have that insight, but at the end of the day, Dell EMC's product line delivers and that's what we experienced in our relationship. We're not talking about... 72 to one dedupe rate, I know that's, I triple checked the facts, it's like really, we're achieving that? That's impactful to my project lines, right? I'm no longer a bottle neck because I'm back at the projects and we're getting stuff moving and we're just not confused by the technology or the way we have to, you know, kind of bandaid them together, it's just one place to go and it delivers. And we see that delivery, especially with the growth of the Data Domain and the addition of the Sandbox, it's very exciting, we're seeing some great performance on our new systems. >> Yeah, and we hear that a lot about the flexibility of the portfolio and the data protection, the fact that, Bob mentioned it many times, making the backup window disappear is really where the heart of it is. And now Bob's team an all the customers that I've talked to and their teams can go off and actually move the business forward with more innovation and bringing more value back to the business. >> Part of security is disaster recovery. Do you guys integrate your disaster recovery practice as part of your Data Domain implementation? >> I think that's a great question. We've challenged our DR group, external also, we saw incident response component, just a big empty hole, it's missing. And I think that's a change in mindset people have to implement, as you pointed out, incident response is going to be before the disaster. And if you don't stand up, you're, look our data's gone mobile, that means it's everywhere, and we have to follow it everywhere with the same protection in the end of the day, no matter where we sit, we own it, we're responsible for it, so we have to go after it in the same protection. So I think it is part of that, we're integrating it, I think we confused a couple companies with that, but you got to stand up those foundation services, the cyber security, the data life cycle has made the cyber security become much more complex. And the use, the business use of that data is becoming more demanding, so we had to make it available, so we had to be transparent with these products and Kudos to Dell EMC and all the engineers making this happen. I don't know what I would be doing if it wasn't there for me. >> Keith: Well thank you, Bob. >> You know, and I'll tell you what strikes me a little bit about this, as we have just a final moment here, is that we think about cyber invasions and violations, what have you, we think about it on a global or a national scale. I mean, you are a very successful regional business, right? And you are just as prime of a target for malfeasance as any and you need to take these prophylactic measures just as aggressively as any enterprise. >> Right, right. If you look at the names, I mean, you just go down the list, Boeing, Mecklenburg County, City of Atlanta, you know, not to name 'em and pick on 'em but they're still recovering. And our business resilience, our reputation is all we have, we're there, you know, our critical asset is your data, that is what we say, you know, the story we tell is how we protect that and that's our services and if at the end of the day you don't trust our services, what are we? >> Alex: That's right. >> Not enough just to protect and prevent, you have to be able to recover. >> So to have a business partner that really understands, and I know I'm a little, maybe a little smaller than some of your others, but you still treat me like I'm... And you still listen to me, I bring you ideas, you say this fits, let's see what we can do. Your engineers go back and they say, you know, we can't say yes, but we can say we're going to take a different approach and come back with a solution. So it's very, very exciting to have a partner that does that with you. >> No, it's a great lesson, it is, it's great. Although, as I say goodbye here, I am a little disappointed when I heard you're from South Carolina I was expecting this wonderful southern accent to come out. (laughing) it just, Bob, what happened? >> You know, I'm an Iowa boy. >> John: You got a little yankee in ya'. >> There you go. Maybe they'll say a little more than a little. >> Alright, gentlemen, thanks for being with us. >> Thank you very much for having us. >> Thanks for sharing the Founders Federal story. Back with more from Las Vegas, you're watching the Cube, we're in Dell Technologies World 2018.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCube. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC, and it's ecosystem partners. (light music) >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with my co-host Keith Townsend. Craig Nunes is here, he's the CMO of Datrium. >> Yeah. >> Dave: Long time CUBE's alum, it's great to see you again. >> Great to be back, awesome. >> Dave: And James Stock is a Datrium customer, he's the Vice President of IT at Grow Financial. James, welcome, first time on theCUBE, looking good man. >> It is, yes, thank you very much. >> All right, Craig, Datrium-- >> Yeah. >> You guys are smoking hot, changing the storage world give us the quick update, we'll get into it. >> Look, we are filling a huge gap, bigger, I think, than we had imagined. Because, a lot of, it's no secret, the array market is in decline. And Hyper Converged has tried to reinvent that market. And it has to a degree on the low end, BDI, that kind of stuff. But data centers need an answer that scales. They need an answer that's got resilience. And it turns out, after all these years, back up is still a problem. Figuring out the cloud is still a problem. And so we put together a system that really takes a tier one approach to HCI, a full on scale out back up system and a cloud DR approach built into one convert system. And customers love it. From cloud to back up to performance in primaries, it's been awesome reception. >> Well, let's see if they really love it, I guess. So James, first of all, so let's start with Grow Financial, your role, you heard the pitch, and then we'll get into how it your applying it to new business. But, tell us about your company. >> So we started in 1955 in a broom closet in McDowell Air Force bases headquarters, there in Tampa. And over the years, we've grown. We're now a $2.4 billion in assets. We have over 200,000 members, and we do lending throughout the south eastern United States. Offices in Tampa, and in South Carolina. >> So in your role, head of IT-- >> Basically, what I tell people, is that if it plugs in, I'm responsible for it. >> (laughs) okay. All right, so, take us through the Datrium project of before and after, what was the motivation? >> So, really, the issue that we were running into is that our existing storage solution, which was the Dell SE, was our trays were running end of life, and if we only had a couple of them, it probably wouldn't have been a problem. We might not of even entertained it, but we had probably two dozen. So, we started looking around and said, "all right, "well, what does it cost to replace what we've got? "and what else is on the market?". And we started to find out that just replacing what we had with like, was going to cost almost 200 grand more than what our full Datrium replacement cost. So, it started making financial sense, right away. But, we met up with Datrium probably, might've been summer of 2016, when they were on version one. And it looked good, you could see the promise, the whole idea of having that back in storage, that was really intriguing, because none of the other players had anything like that at the time. And we said, "All right, we're not ready." And then when they came back out in May of last year, whoa, the difference in what they've done in such a short period of time is what really kind of blew us away. >> Okay, but, we're here at Dell Technologies World, where you guys are a partner of Dells, right? So you're using Dell servers and right? >> James: Yep. >> That's part of the deal here, so, they let you in. >> They let us in, in fact, our compute nodes, it's no secret, our Dell branded compute nodes, and in fact we have partnered with Dell in one of their data centers to set a world record IO mark on Dell here, just to prove a lot of the performance specs that we've shared in the market, proved it out. And we've proved it out on Dell here. >> Cool, so James, talk to me a little bit about your perception of Olby converge. Because I've talked to Craig about Olby convergence versus Hyper convergence versus Converge infrastructure, at the end of the day, you just want a reliable, fast system, however, what about the Olby convergence story drew you today? >> So, I didn't have to replace any of the nodes I had, if I really didn't have, if I wanted too. So I've got CISCO nodes around my call center, I've got Dell nodes, I've got Datrium nodes now. But at the time, it wouldn't have mattered. I could've just, like, in my CISCO environment, I actually had to add a raid controller to the UCS box and then I could throw any solid state drives that I wanted into the device. So that was where it really got compelling, and I'm like wait a minute, so you're telling me, I don't have to buy enterprise flash drives, and stick these into each of my servers. I could just go down to Best Buy, or wherever local, grab something off the shelf, and throw it in there, as long as the server supported it? And, okay, where do I sign up? >> So we've heard that story, and one of the things that some of the hyper converge infrastructure players say, you know what, we could do that, but it's almost impossible to support. Because of firmware issues, et cetera, et cetera. Did you guys run into any of those issues? >> Nope, that's been the greatest thing. When we first started to do our reference calls, it was like everybody I talked to, I said, well, where's the catch? >> Keith: Right. Because that really seemed too good to be true. And customer after customer that I called, they said, "we ran into it with our back ups." But they finished a third of the time faster. I said, "how is that even possible?" and, so we didn't believe it either. We actually had to go back and check because some of our backup jobs finished so fast, we thought it was an error or something like that. They were fine, it was just, you're backing up from flash now, instead of backing up from old spinning discs. >> Okay, so you put the system in, talk about the business impact. It sounds like there was some residual impacts from the initial motivation? >> Right, right, so from the business impact, that's a tough story to sell. Because, really, where we saw it, it was on the backend. And that was the way our systems were before, there really wasn't a huge deal of impact in the business with our old system, until it came back to back up times. Now, where I will say that we still have reductions is, if I have to reboot a server today, our call center application, buyers are putting it on Datrium, it took anywhere from 15 to 20 minutes for that to boot up. Well, 15 to 20 minutes while our call centers down, is like an eternity. Now, that time's down to about five to seven minutes. So, like overnight, you've more than halfed that time. And the same thing with web servers, or anything else that would be member facing, those times have been greatly reduced. So, if I do have to reboot something, because everybody knows it happens, it's sped up the process tremendously for us. >> And what's the secret sauce here? We're talking architecture, just sort of modern approach? Software design? >> So that the secret sauce, if you will, is this split design that runs your workloads. Especially read intensive workloads, on flash, on the host with powerful software, Datrium software. All of your durable data does not live on those hosts, those hosts are not stay full, they can fail at any time, and you still have data availability. So you've got that bullet proof availability, and on the back end, your data's kept secure, it is shared so we don't have any network traffic between hosts, your network doesn't blow up when you install, like it does with a hyper converged approach. And that split provisioning, that split architecture is the breakthrough, and that's why we talk about beyond HCI, we took a good step there. The scale line attributes, VIUM centric admin, but then we really built in tier one capabilities, full on backup, and of course, we haven't talked about it, but access to AWS re-offset backups. >> So, James, let's talk about day two operations. What are the advantages of hyper converged? There's this idea of like I'm one pane of glass. Like, firmware updates, I can free line my operations. Do you guys see similar advantages, day two, versus your previous infrastructures? >> Yeah, I mean, one of the things that saves us a lot of times now, is the fact that there's just one big pool of data out there, instead of having to provision lunds, we were setting up our exchange conversion, so we're building out four or five servers for that. Well, normally, that'd be about a two hour process, not that we were sitting there waiting the whole time, but, all right, we'll carve out some space in this one, twiddle your thumbs, go do something else. Come back, and maybe they'll be done. Well, now, that's like an instant process. So those sort of things are like, "wow, you know what, "I'm saving tons of time", just in admin experiences. In terms of pane of glass, it is a single pane of glass. One of the cool things that we've run into is every now and then, of course, we've got to do our disaster recovery testing, we're a financial institution. Well, Datrium's approach is really unique, and a problem that we used to have, is if I failed over to our DR facility, well, now I've got to bring that data back. Because if you fail in over, it's not a problem, you've already seated that data. Well, it doesn't work the other way around. It does with Datrium. So with Datrium, when I go to bring that data back, it's now doing a differential copy back, so I'm not sitting there for days and days and days, waiting to finish my DR testing anymore. So, there's just so many different benefits that have just been great for us. >> I mean, that's huge, because a lot of times, organizations, they can't test DR's, it's too risky, or they just don't have time, and even on the resources. >> James: Right. >> Did you have that problem beforehand? Or are you guys-- >> Well, yeah, because what you would run into is that it took so much to do it before, that I had to run my guys ragged for two or three weeks. I'm like, "All right, stay up overnight, make sure "it all copies" and then once it's copied, okay bring it back up. So, I mean, yeah, that was a challenge before that's not a problem anymore. >> Burning the team out, right. And or missing your window. >> Well, and because of the way that it's architected with the production groups, I no longer need to use a third party recovery tools to do the transitions back and forth. I can do that, natively, inside their application. >> I would also like to ask practitioners, if you had to mull it again, what would you do over. And it sounds like nothing, or what kind of advice would you give to your peers embarking on a similar journey? >> Do all of your reference calls. See it for yourself, I mean, I take quite a number of reference calls because people are in the same boat I was. Is it true, does it really work the way that you say it does? Yeah, it does. I'll screen share with them, if they want to see our numbers, I'll show them. >> All right, last word, what are we looking for? >> What are we looking for? >> Dave: Looking forward. >> So you're going to see us double down on the work we just went into market. Our DVX 4.0 software which comes with that cloud DVX, cloud based capability. And take that in to full on disaster recovery, orchestration. And not in the too distant future, you'll get the whole run down, so stay tuned. >> Awesome, Craig, thanks for coming on. James, pleasure meeting you. >> Likewise, thank you. >> Good luck with everything. Thanks for hanging out with me. >> Always. >> All right, Keith, good job, good questions. All right, keep it right there everybody, we will be back with our next guest, right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE live, from Dell Technologies World 2018. We'll be right back. (light music)