 Live from Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE at the VTUG Winter Warmer 2015. Now here is your host, Stu Miniman. Welcome back to the VTUG Winter Warmer 2015. I'm Stu Miniman with Wikibon Research Organization and co-host of theCUBE, our live video program. We go out to all the big enterprise IT events, help extract the signal from the noise. Really excited in this segment to have Sean Markham, Senior Systems Admin from IDEX. Welcome for joining us. Thanks for joining us. Thank you, Stu. All right, so we're at the Virtualization Technology user group, so it's always great when we talk to the users and you are a long time VMware Systems Admin, been back there since the early, early days when most people thought that virtualization was some kind of Linux, right? Exactly. I remember when we first tried to get virtualization in our environment, my manager was kind of skeptical but he didn't understand why he was skeptical because they were doing virtualization on IBM mainframes for years. When we came to him with X86, he thought it was different but it didn't work. Sean, you were my straight man. theCUBE was just in New York City yesterday with the IBM Z announcement, talking about Z-Linux and virtualization, everything's done. As we all know that it had been in the industry for a long time, there's nothing new out there. The mainframe's been doing it for years, right? All right, let's level set a little bit. Tell us a little bit about IDEX. I know you're in the veterinary, biomedical space in your senior systems admin. What is IDEX? Who do they do? What do they do and what's your role there? We're actually a bunch of companies in one. Everything from when you bring your pet into the veterinarian in your local vet, they take a blood sample, that blood sample gets shipped off. IDEX is a lab that's analyzing that blood sample to find out what may be wrong with your pet. We have a water division that tests for cholera and different waterborne illnesses. We're into livestock and poultry. We're based in Westbrook, Maine, about 5,000 plus employees, and we're global around the world. All right, how many locations you have and can you give some of the speeds and feeds of your IT environment? How many people you have? How many servers? Things like that. Sure, sure. I would say, wow, I'm trying to rough number off the top of my head. Maybe 800 servers. We have employees in the IT group that it's in the 100 plus. Can't remember exactly the exact number of employees, but we're a big SAP shop. We're trying to virtualize everything we can possibly virtualize. All right, so where are you along that journey of virtualization? What percentage is virtualized today kind of mixed? In the window space, one of the spaces that I'm responsible for, where I would say we're up in the 90s of virtualization. There's a very few systems, maybe a few Microsoft SQL servers, and then some old deprecated systems that we're waiting for them to die and fall off. Why waste our time virtualizing them? Just let them go away. All right, so is that the biggest thing that's just certain legacy pieces that you'll wait for them to die and then you'll eventually be? Is there anything that can't be virtualized in your mind today? No, not really. Well, if you get into something where it has some proprietary hardware card, for whatever reason you might still need a Brooktrout card or something of that nature, then yeah, okay, maybe it can't be virtualized, but realistically, I don't know what couldn't be virtualized. If it's x86. All right, so boy, you've got a lot of history with virtualization. Walk us through a little bit of the journey. What have been the big inflection points and adoption? Let's start at the beginning. What really got you on board and how did you move the organization along? Well, I don't want to say in the early days, but early, there was a point and I think almost everybody's career where the manager came to him and says, we're going to build an app server and we're going to, because Windows servers are like bunnies, they're all over the place. We're going to build an app server and we're going to try to cram as many apps onto that one app server as we possibly can. And we went through it, we did that pain and anytime you needed to update any one app, you had to take them all down. So to update and patch and do whatever you need to do, it became a schedule and nightmare. Along that same period of time, ESX VMware came out or was coming out and us at the admin level said, this is a great solution, this is a great technology. And we started trying to get it in into the production environment. It took off great in test dev. Everybody was excited to see in test dev, but then as I can remember different vendors, application vendors saying we don't support it, we do not support virtualization. And nowadays it's hard to find people that say that. So it's good. It's... Sean, can you talk to me a little bit about the infrastructure underneath your virtualization? Server storage network, what are you using? How has that changed as you've rolled out more and more virtualization? Well, trying to think, how has that changed? Well, I mean today we're in blade technology. I remember when blades first started coming out, I was apprehensive to them because of port count, port density for the network. I needed X number of ports for my ESX host. I needed a V-motion port. I needed a management console port. I needed several different ports. And when blades first came out, they were very port limited. Now it's getting to the point where with flex fabric, 10 gigabit ethernet, there's no problem. So blade technology, chassis technology has made it very appealing to have blades. But in the early days, I remember, I kind of got away from blades. Can you share whose blades you're using? Oh, yeah, sure. We're using HP, HP blades, flex flabbex. Shoot, trying to think. Three-par storage in the back end. We're getting into some, shoot, my mind's gone blank now, but. It's all right, so let me poke on this. Have you looked at any kind of the converged type solutions? I mean, HP's got the virtual stack and app stack and everything. Yeah, not in my current role in my current company. There was some, I've been with some smaller companies. I've been with some larger companies. And we looked at some of the converged stuff in past lives, but I don't wanna drop any names, but simplicity looks pretty nice. But, you know. It's a little bit of a shame. Yeah, it's all right, yeah. But that's a neat looking product. I think the direction that my company's currently in, I don't know if it's a fit for us. We definitely like the HP environments that we have. Yeah, good to hear. I mean, HP is a long time VMware partner, a good solid solution for the whole stack, for that environment. So, you know, your company sounds like pretty happy with what you have overall. There's always got to be things, you know. And if you look at virtualization, you know, what causes you guys trouble still? What if you could wave a magic wand and say, you know, what would make your life easier in 2015 that you wish you didn't have to do that you did in 2014? You know, this may be just, I tend to be a little bit, I don't know if it's old school or I like to develop my own solutions at times, which probably could bite me. And as far as one of the things that's biting us right now is being able to deploy virtual machines rapidly enough to keep up with the business. So, you know, a business unit manager can go and say, I'm gonna swipe my credit card and go to AWS and they can get as many virtual machines and they can bypass IT and completely, as long as they get approval for swiping their cards. But it becomes difficult for IT to keep up with the speed of business. Yeah, let me ask you, Sean, is there policy in place at your company because you say as long as they get approval, there's plenty of people that have corporate credit cards that can sign off on that and you're doing it without IT's knowledge, the old stealth IT. So, you know, let's talk about cloud for a second. What's your experience at your current company and you know, in general, the balance of AWS is that, how does IT work with that or deal with that? Yeah, how much can I go into? We're researching the cloud. As far as IT is concerned, we want to go to the cloud. We're researching the cloud. I'm also a strong believer of internal cloud, you know, being able to make our environment internally as robust and as flexible as, and ideally I'd like to see it become as easy as an internal department being able to, whatever they do for AWS, they can easily do internally on our own systems. Cost savings, I don't see, I can't see the cost savings in the AWS space. I see we can provide as good a service and for cheaper money internally, but it's that ease of access to get into IT. A lot of times it throws up its own roadblocks. I guess, Sean, one of the questions is how much variability is there in your workloads and what applications you're doing and seasonality of what you're doing? Are your workloads, you know, what one premise is if you've got a lot of change, cloud can not only scale up, scale down really easily as opposed to if, you know, hey, this is an application and it's kind of the rent versus buy type discussion. So, you know, you usually say it's usually in the long term cheaper to buy than it is to rent. Despite the fact that renting in the cloud, prices are coming down, they're adding more features as opposed to when you buy something, you've got that box, you know, for however many years. So, you know, it's a nuanced discussion, but, you know, is that, is your environment a little bit more static then? I would say it's more static. The current environment where the employer I'm with right now, I've worked in retail businesses where you would have different peak seasons at different times of the year and it, depending if you can get past the compliance and PCI issues and that type of nature, you know, there's always a roadblock. If you can get past that, I can see cloud being very nice, being able to elastically grow out the data center and shrink it back down for those peak buy-in seasons, Christmas, you know, those type of, you know, annual years. But the company I'm with right now, you know, laboratory research, it's pretty constant, pretty steady, there is no, I don't see an ebb and flow in our data center. All right, our biggest challenge is making sure that we can react, we have the resources to react to the business's need to change direction. Yeah, absolutely. So you bring up a great point, Sean. You know, budgets are always tight. Nobody ever comes up and said, hey, great job. You know, we're going to give you even more budget than you have last year. You know, how's the technology space treating you? Is virtualization allowing you to keep up with the demands of the business and, you know, flat to negative, you know, budget? Yeah, I always like to be at least an N plus one type of a scenario. You always want to have enough capacity to grow to. I don't know if I'm answering the question. Well, right, it's, you know, right. So you're planning for growth. Yeah. I'm saying is, you know, the business keeps throwing new stuff at you to do, but they're not necessarily giving you more people or more budget to handling it. So how do you keep doing more with less? Automation. Okay. Yeah, I mean. Talk about it, what do you mean by automation? Is that being more specific, some certain products that you're using, or you know, what are you automating? Not so much products, well, products are specific in the sense that, you know, one of my major things that comes across my desk is building servers, being requests for building a new virtual machine, new server, you know, using the tools that are out there and available. Some of them cost, some of them are free. I mean, we're an SCCM shop. We were also looking, we also look at the free tools of MDT where we can build up a server, automate the build process and automatically deploy it. Templates kind of work for us, but we kind of want to go back to the build it from scratch. It's a lot of, anything that takes multiple steps, if we can power shell it, if we can automate it, if we can build a task and wrap it around that, that's how we're saving cycles, saving time to be able to respond quicker to what the business made. All right, so you said you do a lot of your own custom scripting and things like that. Are you allowing the business any kind of self-service portal or the things that they're able to take on that the IT used to do before? I want to get there. And this kind of wraps back around to that AWS discussion of they can go to a portal today on the web externally. I want that portal to be internal. I want them to be able to make their request internal and build that server for them and have it turn around in an hour or so. Whereas right now they have to go through a ticketing process. There's a lot of problems with that as well because a lot of times the end user or the server requester doesn't know what they need or they may be going off a spec list from an app vendor which may be written for physical hardware, not so much for virtual hardware. And so you get into that, do you really need eight CPUs and half a terabyte of disk space or is that just what the vendor is saying you need? So, I'm sorry, I would weigh off on that one. No, no, Shoshan, you're all good there. How many times have you been to the VTUG before? I was at the first one. The first one, nine years ago? No, the one that was in an Italian restaurant. Oh boy. With Mr. Harnie and Dan Sullivan. So, you're a truly old school on this. It's well before I knew. I think my fourth or fifth year coming to this one, I've been to the one up in Maine a couple of times. So, what brings you to the VTUG? What gets you excited when you come here? Well, there's a lot of things. Seeing the new technology, seeing the products that I, so I looked at a product today that was talking about printers. I'm not directly affected by printers in my environment. I mean, I built the print server that the printers run on but it's say the desktop group that manages that environment. But the technology I saw today about printers is something I'm gonna bring back to them and say, hey, you guys might wanna look into this a little deeper because it's a neat, neat technology and it might solve some of the issues that we have. So, it's a constant refresh of vendors and data and the camaraderie of talking with the different people that I've met over the years and hooking up and talking with those folks. All right. Well, Sean Markham with IDEX. Really appreciate you joining me for this segment. Always great to get the user discussion here and long time user of virtualization. Long way it's come, you know. And we will be right back with more coverage here from the VTUG after this quick break.