 Hi and welcome to a special presentation of theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman here in our East Coast Studio in Massachusetts and always love the opportunity when we get to talk to an IT practitioner about what is driving their business and the technologies that are helping them. So I want to welcome to the program Sheila Hartness, who is the lead software systems engineer at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. Sheila, thank you for joining us. Thank you, Stu, for having me today. All right, so Wake Forest, most people know the college, you guys are associated with them. The medical school, it's a business. You have so many changes over the last 100 years of your organization. Can you tell us a little bit about Wake Forest Baptist Medical and your role there? Sure, so I've been at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center for 30 years, so I saw a lot of change through that time. We are a healthcare organization research and we are the teaching hospital for Wake Forest University. So we are widespread in our scope of what we do. From a business standpoint, not only are we a healthcare for our patients, but we are a research and teaching hospital. So we try to provide the best infrastructure in IT that we can to provide the best resources for the business. So we are trying to bring our infrastructure up to more modern standards than we have been in the past, but we have went from just being no infrastructure to a very high availability infrastructure with our VCE V-blocking that we have implemented. Okay, so before we get into the infrastructure piece of it, Sheila, when I look on the website, there's a lot of talk about innovation. There is. And some people often say, well, IT has often been, it's a cost center. Somewhere, if the business asks for something, the answer is usually like, well, no, we're fill out all these forms or there. How does the organization's innovation mission fit with what happens in IT? So from an innovation standpoint, we are trying to grow how we fit into the environment to make sure that we are meeting all of our business needs. So when able to do that, then we are building the infrastructure to meet those needs. So not only are we growing in what we offer to our clients, we are growing our infrastructure to provide assets for the business so that we are in line so that we can provide those services whatever they may be, whether they be new facilities that we're bringing in or researchers. So we are trying to align the infrastructure with the direction the business is going. Okay, and can you sketch out for us a little bit? What's the scope of your facility and the team that you have there? I think I saw, it's like 11,000 employees, 100 buildings. I mean, this is not a single hospital or any means like that. So we have about 125, I think, outlying facilities, a couple of smaller hospitals. We have between 900 and 1,000 physicians, about 1,000 beds, acute care. So we are a large institute with multiple goals for us to meet. So we are striving to meet the needs of our environment, but we are very large organizations. We are the largest employer in Forsyth County in North Carolina. So we have pride in that. We are trying to be a leader in research and I know we're a leader in cancer research in other areas. So we're trying to bring our resources more out into the market so that we can meet the needs of what the health care is. Okay, so you've been there for 30 years. So we could spend a couple of hours walking through some of the ebbs and flows and changes there. But let's go to a few years ago before you had kind of converged infrastructure there. What did the environment look like? What were the challenges? How did budgets and kind of staffing levels affected by the infrastructure? So, you know, I tell you, a lot of time is looked at, the redhead is step-child because we are cost. We, you know, it's hard for the business to see the return on their investment. So we had a very aging infrastructure and we were needing to address that drastically and budget had been short for a few years. So the decision was made by our upper management, which I think was a very good decision for us to move into the V block arena. But, you know, we had aging network. We had aging storage. We had aging compute. Just things that had been in place for seven years or more that we needed to bring up to standards so that we would not have any outages because the health care is depending more and more on infrastructure, whether they like to think that or not because everything is being computerized, your records, you know, everything's online. Digitization is definitely the word of the day. It is. And we also offer web sessions with the doctors now. You can actually have sessions with the physicians and not come into the office. That's one of the new offerings. So we're trying to build our infrastructure to meet all the needs that we can see that our customers may want. Okay, so pretty typical. We talk to lots of companies and right, you say I've got my compute, I've got my storage, I've got my network. I'm, you know, fighting for budget, you know, always falling behind. So, you know, upper management understood that this was the challenge. And, you know, tell us, you know, what were the goals of, you know, kind of revamping it, modernizing, I think the word you use. You know, what were they hoping to change? So we were solid. From employment standpoint, we had storage group, network group, compute group. As we grow, what they were trying to do is to bring us all more in line with the modern. So with management deciding to go with the VBlock, what that has allowed us to do is to bring network compute and storage into one platform, so that it is all together. That way, it allows infrastructure to grow. I'm trying to think of the word I would like to use for that. It allows us to bring all that in scope more quickly than we were before, because we don't have to worry about is the compute gonna work with the network environment? Is the network environment gonna work with the compute? So, instead of spending time trying to figure out all that by having it all together and all of that determined before we get it, it has helped us tremendously. It's helped to reduce some of the walls from the silo from a team perspective. It causes us to be more collaborative together. It's gonna allow us to be more cross-trained so that we understand the environments more. Yeah, absolutely. Is that whole interoperability challenge? Yes. Because even when a vendor puts things together, you've got your own applications. I think Epic was a big one. Yes, it was. We know medical and healthcare have not only the applications, but then you've got all the governance and compliance. So, there's lots of challenges there. And at Wikibon, we say the more that that can be shifted off of your plate and to the platform of the vendors that are creating that, that's gonna free you up to do more things that add value to your business rather than doing stuff that should've been done already. That's right. Yeah. So that's, for myself, I can tell you my expertise is gonna be in the storage arena. And that has always been an issue because you spend a lot of time researching, is this code level gonna work with this power path because we use EMC or is it gonna work with the drivers, this on the host? Is the network infrastructure there if we need it for NAS storage? So, not having to worry about that, that is something that by going to the VBlock that we have been able to just, I don't wanna say forget, but it's not a headache that I have or the other teams have because all of that has already been tested out for us before it's brought onto the floor. So, the infrastructure or the VBlock is helping to reduce the time that we are spending figuring out what will work and allowing us to determine more how can we use that platform to build a business and how can we grow and become better in our field. It helps us to grow from a professional standpoint too. So, bring us inside some of those discussions because getting everybody on the same page, getting buy-in, there's usually kind of a natural pushback against change in general because these are the jobs I do, this is what I know I do my day and while I might be buried today, oh my gosh, what does this mean when kind of the end state comes in? So, in IT, particularly in infrastructure, a lot of times we can be proprietary or we don't wanna give up that control that we have. So, it is a culture change for you but don't look at it as job reduction. It is more of a growth pattern. So, from a cultural standpoint, we had to look at it as the whole, not on our individual, like from a storage perspective, it's like, did I really want the network guide to learn anything about my storage? How much do I really want the compute guide to learn about the storage? What does that mean for me? But allowing us to grow and understand how the infrastructure actually works together, it allows us to grow, it allows my career to grow so that I am a more rounded professional and it also allows me to understand exactly what my applications are, how I can impact the whole environment as it goes together. So, it helps us to be able to spend more time on providing a better understanding, implementing the applications, instead of spending the time figuring out, well, are we gonna be able to make these components work together from a hardware standpoint? So, did you put any kind of cross training or skills enhancement plans in place when you were looking at this deployment? We are currently doing that. So, before, we were just kind of departmentalized. Well, now we are changing the infrastructure from a employment standpoint. So, we are changing our job descriptions and our roles to fit what we're trying to make our environment look, which would be the converged infrastructure. So, what we have now is the converged infrastructure engineers who are your leaders are your top guys in the fields so that we are cross trained from storage to compute to networking. So, as we do that, then our more junior employees will become part of that process. So, the more senior people are doing that cross training in their own group, but then also we are allowing that cross training to flow down into the staff so that everybody has a career path so that we can all come up to snuff. So, which field do you want to be stronger in? You can be stronger in network if that's where your field is or in compute or storage, but you'll have a better understanding and you would be able to work through any of those tasks because you have that knowledge. And because it is in one platform, and I know the terminology that's used now is runbooks, you can put that together for me because I am an old main framer and trying to make all these things work together is kind of like when you put your DR plan in place. You want to be able to write that in a way that anyone who has any technology experience would be able to read those documents and move forward and be able to perform those tasks. So, my thought in some of this is, why do you want to pigeonhole yourself? Be willing to grow. Put yourself out there. The more you can learn, the more of an asset you are to your employer and the more of an asset you are to yourself. And the less bored you are with your job and the more energized you are, the more you want to really be part of that team. Yeah, it's interesting. Any time I talk to an IT person and there's that fear out there, one of the questions is like, if you had an extra day a week, would you have stuff to do? And it was like, oh gosh. Yeah, there's always more than I can do. And if you look at the tasks that you're taking away from them, those aren't necessarily the most fun things that you're doing. So, you know, it is a little bit daunting, but why don't you bring us through kind of some of the early deployment, how'd that go? Any surprises? You know, any bumps along the road that you kind of lessons learned that you'd want to share with your peers? So, we have actually implemented six V-blocks. And every time we've implemented that we have learned something new. I think the biggest hurdles that we've had to overcome as we have implemented the V-blocks is because one of the big things is when they're built, they're built and they're wired. In our shop, we did not have the floor space to be able to do that. So we had to put different pieces in the area that we had. So that was kind of a challenge because then we had to come back and we weren't able to have the benefit of everything just taking place, just plug and play. Although it was plug and play, it was just a little bit different. It was a learning experience for all of us because usually we don't work together as a team. I do my little solo part and another person would do their computer, whatever. So it allowed us to collaborate together more. From lessons learned, as each one has came into place, we've learned a little bit more about what do we need to provide VCE ahead of time when we build the LCS documents and everything. So we've learned more of what do we really want those documents to look like so that when it comes in-house, it's more of what we're expecting. The first time, like anything new, we did the best we could and it came through great, but we just learned a little more every time to have what we can do to make that experience better for us so that when it hits floor, we don't feel like we need to make any changes. I don't know anything else to say about that, but we have learned a lot of lessons. That's mostly what do we want the environment to look like? How should we really fill out the LCS? How do we work on that relationship with VCE and the vendors? So that's pretty much it. Okay, so what about from the business standpoint? Are there any kind of new projects working faster, responding to more requests? How does that translate back? So by bringing in the VBlocks, it has allowed us to deploy applications faster by having the infrastructure in place, not having to fit all the components together. One of the things that we were able to do is Epic 2014 because we were able to bring the infrastructure in place and have it up and running and all the testing we needed to do, we were able to bring testing up 10 weeks so that we would be able to meet the deadlines for the application. By bringing in the VBlock, it has allowed us to deploy virtual servers for the applications a lot faster. It's things that may have taken a week or two before because we have the infrastructure in place, we can provide server in the storage within a day which does help those applications move out faster. Another thing we're working on at this time, we don't have it in production yet, but we're working on self-service portal so that the individuals can just fill out the form and that server will be built for whatever timeline they need if it's for a test or whatever. So the infrastructure has allowed us to bring to the end users their requirements a lot faster so we can provide servers very quickly. We can help them work through any issues they may have deploying the applications. So from a business standpoint, it has allowed us to meet our end users needs a lot quicker. Okay, and how about the IT staff itself? I hear you talk about teamwork, collaboration. I think about a 10 week project. That's the kind of thing I think in your old world it would have been stressful and everybody pointing fingers and I did my piece and you didn't do this and how did the new environment help? So the new environment helps us work together more as a team because instead of us, I don't like to use the word fight within ourselves, but we like to make sure that our area is working correctly and we're the best. So what this has allowed us to do is to work together more as a team, more collaborative by us understanding what the needs are ahead of time that allows us to be able to focus on that and ask the correct questions if we see that the application is coming in line. I may from a storage standpoint know that I need to ask specific network questions or compute questions, but it allows us to work more as a team to understand what that end goal is so that we are all on the same page and we can do that very quickly because we're working in the same platform and we're not off on our different pieces. Yeah, as anybody knows in kind of team dynamics it's those boundaries of communication where you often have problems and now if we kind of blur some of those lines and blinded it more, we have less chance for there to be communication problems. So instead of having separate teams, we are one team now. So we are all working toward the same goal. Okay, awesome. So you've talked about some cross-training, retraining. Can you talk about, you know, has there been a change in how many people you have, balance of resources? You know, how's the kind of the team after look compared to before? So number was, we're the same. We have not decreased our staff. We have changed how we work as a group. So we're doing cross-training. So we're allowing the more senior staff to do more project research, more in-depth studies. How can we make our platform work for what we know the business needs are? It allows us to do cross-training within our group. It allows us to bring the more junior staff up to meet the needs of our group instead of having to do the mundane day-to-day task that some of the more senior people were doing in the past. Now they're being able to focus on projects and more interesting things within the group. And it does allow us more time to talk and train each other. All right. Sheila, talk about your relationship with the vendor side of things, you know, VCEs now moving back inside EMC. There's kind of Dell's acquiring EMC. Does that have any impact on what you're doing? And tell us about your relationship with the company over the last few years. So anytime that you have change, you need to work on that relationship. So we've been working with that relationship with VCE. And I think any success is according to how your relationship works with those companies. We've had a long-standing relationship with EMC. We've had a long relationship with our VAR. And our relationship with VCE is growing. Every time we deploy an environment that grows. So I can't express how important it is that you need to build on that relationship. I don't see that it's changing. I see that it's growing with the merger and with how EMC and VCE has worked together. I don't see the merger depleting that any. I see that expanding that environment. All it does is bring more resources in-house that can help us grow and look at what's out there for us. So as you build that relationship, it allows VCE to learn what our business needs are and what our goals are. And then it lets us work on that relationship with those individuals who work with us so that we're more of a team instead of two companies trying to make things work together. So Shelly, you've been through a number of deployments now with the benefit of hindsight. What advice would you give your peers as they look at more modern architectures such as converged infrastructure? Always go into any merger with an open mind. What can you learn from it? Don't look at it well. What is this gonna cost me as something new I have to learn? If you go into it with an open mind, you'll always be a success. You will always be able to grow from a professional standpoint. You'll meet your business needs and you will be an asset to your company instead of that liability. So anytime you do that, I saw a lot of change. I've been through a lot of infrastructure changes. I think the one that we have now has been one of the easiest ones because we were working together more as a team than solo defects. So that's what I would say. Just go into it with an open mind. If you do that, then you'll always be a success. All right, and for Wake Forest Baptist Medical Centers, you look forward, what are some of the big challenges? There's so many buzzwords out there and healthcare is involved. I mean, IoT seems to have a huge impact. The value of data and data security is always an issue. So what do you see as some of the big opportunities and challenges that you'll be facing going forward? So challenges will always be, how can we provide better healthcare for our patients? As you come with the patient portal, how can we provide a more stable environment for them, for the researchers? We need to be able to provide a stable environment for that. They have loads of data. How can we collect that so that we can be more of a premier research institute? I see being able to upgrade the infrastructure will put us in a better position from a business standpoint to meet all the needs that we have as we grow, because not only do we provide healthcare, we provide the teaching hospital and we provide the researchers area. So I can see that we will only continue to grow as we expand with that. All right, well, Sheila Hartness, really appreciate you sharing all the wisdom that you've gained through these environments, facing the change and creating new benefit for your business and the community around. So thank you so much. You've been watching theCUBE.