 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE covering EMCworld 2015, brought to you by EMC, Brocade, and VCE. I'm Stu Miniman with wikibon.com, joined by my co-host, Steve Chambers, also with wikibon. Join for this segment by Mike Kosolowski, VP of IT for Old Republic National Tile. Mike, thanks so much for joining us. My pleasure to be here. Awesome. So, theCUBE, we always love being able to really get into kind of the mini case studies, talk about what practitioners are actually doing. On the wikibon side, we actually founded the company on allowing IT practitioners to share with their peers. So, just pretend we're sitting at the bar after we've deployed some solution. So, let's vent a little bit about what's going on. So, first of all, before we get into the technology, tell us a little bit about your company. I know you're located in the Twin Cities, but tell us a little bit about the organization and your role there. All right. Well, Old Republic National Tile is a title in escrow insurance company. We operate in pretty much all 50 states, and that's it. We're not an international organization. Just about a $2 billion revenue on annual sales. If you've closed down a house or purchased a house, you've probably had our paperwork. Hopefully you've had our paperwork sitting in front of you here in the United States. Our corporate headquarters is in Tampa now, but our data centers are in Minneapolis, Minnesota and Roosevelt, California. We service about 250 remote sites throughout the country. Yeah. I have to imagine your industry has a lot of kind of the mergers and acquisitions, various companies coming together. Is that something that you've had to tackle in your time there? Well, there's been a lot of, I guess, divestiture of some of the title industry. Some of the smaller, maybe less financially fluid organizations haven't been able to get past the downturn of the real estate markets. We've absorbed some of that. But our organization is pretty fiscally conservative. There's a reason there's title hold. And we maintain this real solid portfolio to support our claims that come through. So Mike, VP of IT, how big a staff do you manage and what skill set, what roles do you really own? My staff, I've got about 20 on my staff direct reports. We manage, monitor, maintain the entire infrastructure. That includes the data center with the floor space, the heating and cooling. We have server farm, the storage arrays, parts of the network infrastructure. We also support the Citrix farm. And one application that I consider the most important of any organization, that's your email. So if your email goes down and you're over public, I'm responsible for it. So wow, you host all your stuff, even the email still. Are you using Exchange? He's Exchange and we use Source 1 as our archiving tool. All right, I have to ask, is Microsoft been telling you to move to Office 365? They're talking to us a little bit, right. But it's one thing to go there, it's another thing to bring it back if you need to. That's true. And the kind of business you're in sounds like people depend on you, don't they? If you're going to insure their house and their property, they're going to depend on you. And I'm thinking you must be working in some pretty tough kind of regulatory environment, or you mentioned the word, it sounds like quite a risk averse business. Does that reflect itself in the IT? Is it protection above everything else? It does, yeah. We take security and compliance is very seriously. I have a saying, my team is responsible for the capacity, the reliability of the environment, the availability, the performance and the security of it. You put those words together, you'll figure out what an acronym is. And I just won't say it here on TV. We're not regulated by the FCC, but we appreciate you taking that on. It's something you can remember, and that's what I like to do. But yeah, we're heavily regulated internally. From the banking industry, our partners regulate us very well. We're audited 50 to 60 times a year by our different partners. Assessments come through on a regular basis that we have to address. So what's your attitude to, you know, we had a DevOps Day yesterday here at EMC World, and it was all about innovation and speed of change and agility. How do you balance that with that kind of risk management approach? You just have smart people on your team, you know, to be able to have the flexibility and the maneuverability to get to where you need to in the time frame. And when I mention your team, not just the people you've hired that's working directly for you, but your partners that you engage with outside. So Mike, one of the things we want to focus on in this interview is the data protection side of the house. Can you talk to us a little bit about, I mean, obviously, you know, risk averse, you need to make sure, you know, your data maintain. Can you talk to us about the role of data protection in your IP shop? Right now we've got, basically, we'll cover upwards of five to six different copies of the same data, either through our backups and replication technologies, or just through different copies and, oh, I'm losing track of the word, the snapshots, thank you, of the data. It's important that that data is available immediately. It's important that, you know, the normal family, everyday American family, relies on us heavily when they're buying a house. It's a stressful opportunity for everybody. You want to make sure the paperwork, and more importantly, the checks are available. So we cut a lot of checks, we cut a lot of paperwork. We have to have that data accurate, and it's got to be secured. So it's encrypted, and it's behind locked doors and locked firewalls. Okay, can you talk to us about your relationship with the EMC and how they're helping you with your data protection challenges? That's interesting. When I started at ORT about almost seven years ago now, we were running different backup systems for our two regions. We have a Western region out of Roseville, California, and a national out of Minneapolis. We were running different backup strategies, different replications. We basically didn't replicate things. It was backup and then copied over. EMC came in and started talking to us about EMAR, data domain, recovery point, and we implemented that about four or five years ago now. It's taken a lot of worries off my head, I'll be honest with you. I used to worry about things at night if I could restore them, because it doesn't do any good to back something up if you can't restore it. Yeah, as they say in the industry, backup is needed, but restores everything, right? Exactly. But then we needed to turn our DR around at a little quicker pace. We're at a 12-hour turnaround time. We've got that down to probably, we can bring up the infrastructure in less than an hour right now, fully if we have a hole in the ground at one of our data centers. And that's all due to the recovery point appliances that we put in, our ability to replicate it and also make sure it's backed up and safe and secure. That's what the EMC has done for us. Is it complicated? You know, is it a complicated architecture? Well, I'm probably the wrong guy to talk to, because I can't really explain it. So, yeah, to me, it is complicated. But that's why I hire smart people around me. It's complicated in that fact that it's not what I consider fully automated yet. I still have to rely on human intervention to make sure the backups occur, that they're, you know, restoreable, the replications occur, that I can actually bring those systems up in relatively short order. Sooner or later, we're going to have to have that all replicated. And, you know, who knows, maybe run at high availability of full time across multiple. I mean, that's kind of what we're talking about now, I think, but Vplex, who's we're talking with our folks now back in the cities. All right. So, it sounds like you're touching a lot of the pieces of the portfolio that EMC has in their data protection group. Can you maybe just paint a little bit of a picture for us as to, you know, what you use and how those various pieces fit? Well, right now, we use Evamar data domain primarily as our backup. So, we back them up at our two data centers, and then we basically replicate those off to the, our Colo facility. Recover point, we replicate dynamically all our critical systems and basically all of our virtual systems. So, we're running about 73% of all of our systems are virtualized right now. So, they're getting replicated dynamically. We have a little problem with our Islam backup. It's taken too long. We need EMC to kind of step up to the plate. So, and it's, that's where it's a little complicated. We have in the real estate industry, you have a lot of small files that are associated with a real estate transaction. Pictures of land or building, you know, the paperwork, the title itself. All of that is in basically millions of directories and there's small files and millions of directories. It's tough to back it up. We've got to figure out a way to get that down from a, right now it's taking us three days to back it up down to a 12-hour to eight-hour window. Yeah, I mean, Mike, one of the questions we've had is, you know, should the backup window be killed? I mean, it's, you know, it gets tougher and tougher to be able to handle that, you know, data's growing so fast, you know, how do you still manage with the backup window, I guess. Well, if you can, what my thought is, and maybe I'm unique in this, is that if I can get a high-availability fault tunnel and architecture in place where I can run the application in both different diverse locations, really, regardless of where the user is located at, I don't need to worry about disaster recovery. You know, it's going to be available. The data is going to be the same regardless of where it's at. That's kind of the vision that I think I'm going to take the organization. That's great. I mean, you know, we had a customer on here earlier from Australia and they were talking about that exact architecture and just like the peace of mind. You know, clearly that's something we all want, right? When we've got people relying on us. So definitely possible. That sounds great. Do you guys cover operations as architecture? How does that split in your team? I'm sorry. Operations, you know, for operating the infrastructure, is that under your team as well? It's all one team. It's all one team. Yeah, my team is constructed. I have an operations group, which is my more junior team. Yeah. I have an architecture team. You don't have silos of technology? I don't like the word silos. I like the word tornado better. Chad Tackett from EMC calls them cylinders of excellence. Chad and I had a conversation a couple weeks ago about that. I explained the tornado to him. The concept is you start small and gathering the data or the information across these different disciplines and as you gain that, you gain strength and momentum and all of a sudden that tornado is capturing more and more information, more and more data, more and more, what's the word I'm looking for? Integration. Right. So that you can operate more efficiently. But the tornado doesn't get out of control. Oh no, that's my job. I got to control the tornado. And because they do say that the structure of your team tends to be reflected in the way you buy and deploy equipment. It sounds like you want things to be simpler and easier to write. Maybe the architecture might be more complex, but you want that always available when I get rid of back up windows if you can. So can you envisage your team changing as that gets more simpler, or have you always got more problems to solve? I think our industry is we're always going to have new and interesting problems to solve. We're going to have to get better. We're going to have to understand the businesses that we're supporting better. We have to be more aware of the end users experience. I mean, people every day work on a PC, but they're not experts in it. And they expect utility like delivery. And that's what we have to provide. So Mike, EMC's got a really diverse portfolio. Do they make it simple for you to be able to choose? How do you manage with that kind of consultative solution? I wouldn't say simple. It's more of an educational opportunity across the board. They learn about us and me in particular, and I learn about the technologies and the culture of EMC. Both of those play a part, not only the technologies that EMC provides, but the culture of the organization. How it interoperates with each other. Absolutely. They're not saying, we have a hammer. Here's a hammer. Use a hammer. They're saying, you get to know your business. That's what you want with the kind of consultative partnership. I probably said too much already, but I can't speak highly enough about the guys that I work with. I trust them implicitly with my professional life. Let's put it that way. One of the interesting themes from yesterday from the EMC, DevOps Day, EMC Code Day, was this concept from companies like Puppy Labs to give technical people freedom to experiment. I don't know if that applies across the board though, or do you think that's more of a startup thing more than a traditional business? I hope it's not. My background as a network architect and engineer, I got into management because somebody told me that I should take control of something. Believe me, managers don't control anything. It's the staff and the people that do the work that actually do it. What I try to do is empower my staff to be creative. I need them to be creative. I need them to think out of the box. I need them to think outside of the EMC envelope and how does it integrate with the other technologies that we deploy? Citrix is a major piece of our environment and how does it work together there? I know your relationship with VMware is very, very tight. It's very tight with us. We've got a VBlock deployed. My boss likes to say, we've got almost everything EMC provides. We don't have quite at all of it yet. I need my team and I need myself to be challenged and think outside of the box. Mike, the simplicity has come up a bunch. What could EMC or the industry as a whole do to make your job easier? Have people stop calling my boss. That's the message. I've got to build an architecture and infrastructure where people rely on it like they're turning the water on in their house and their electricity in their home. That's it. That's what we have to do. IT is a utility. That's exactly what it is. We can no longer afford outages of any kind. We can't afford maintenance windows. We can't afford not having the data available for the people wherever they need. When you say can't afford it, I think you've touched on two or three reasons why that is. I think to start with it was the we don't let people down kind of attitude which is great. But when you think can't afford it, what are the reasons would there be? What would be the consequences of you losing data? What's the losing data? I just do not get into that. For instance, you have a home and the title is in your name and we ensure that title is yours but all of a sudden we lose that data and somebody comes and says no I own that piece of property and they've got a piece of paper that says that. Yeah, we've got a long lengthy legal battle right in front of us right now. But if you're insured through us or any others we're there to back you up. If we lose that we can't back you up and I understand that from a business perspective I have to maintain that data. As you know the question you mentioned you've got like a younger team doing operations you know one of the things we're hearing a lot and it was in the keynote today talking about your father's VMAX you know how technology is changing really quickly and I wonder if some of the stuff on your team have they had a better experience of technology outside of work as a consumer with their iPhone and everything or is the stuff they're working on cutting edge or what's their attitude? What did they say? When I talk about more junior I talk about not the years of experience and not just in the technologies but in the business world as well because you've got to integrate the two you've got to understand what business you're supporting in order to really develop the right architectural solutions as you mature in that area and I'm not talking about age I'm talking about your ability to understand the business and the technologies you'll be able to develop those more and more I'm a staunch believer that most of us in the professions that we've chosen are dealing with the twitters the Facebooks all of the social media all of the new fangal technologies which by the way drive me completely insane just because everybody's an expert at them but that's okay you have to be on top of it you have to stay with it and for the most part we chose this profession because we like that sort of thing so we're going to be in there we're going to be in the forefront of that my guys are always telling me get new phones for them about every other day so Mike I want to give you the last word you know if you've done kind of your backup environment and all these data protection solutions from EMC what lessons learned to you that you would want to share with peers? don't underestimate it don't oversell it we in the IT profession tend to over commit and under deliver and I step back when I see things happening or people say things one of the things that drives me completely insane as well is somebody telling me or my business that I can turn up a VM in five minutes technically I can but practically there's no way you can't apply what you need to to the environments to make it work and integrate with the other things in that five minutes those are the things Mike you better watch out because we're going to get you on container soon we can split it up in five seconds it does billions of them a week those lessons learned to step back make sure you know where your direction you're going and go for it don't change midstream go for it keep your direction that's the point all right well Mike Kosolowski really appreciate you coming to share your story from the Twin Cities here you know last thing you've been to EMC World before okay so what brings you back to EMC World what are you excited about this week why somebody like you come to this event actually just to find out what else is going on in the industry I mean I get a lot of visitors and a lot of propaganda not only for me at EMC but others and I got to stand in tune with it and see what else is going on you kind of hear side conversations from other people too all right well yeah always the hallway conversations some of the best reasons to come to the event I appreciate you sharing some of your frank comments about what you're doing with data protection with EMC as a partner overall in the industry so this is Stu Miniman with Steve Chambers you know wall to wall coverage here from EMC World 2015 and we'll be right back after this quick break