 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Edge 2016, brought to you by IBM. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. Welcome back to IBM Edge, everybody. This is theCUBE, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. This is day two of our wall-to-wall coverage of IBM Edge. theCUBE's fifth year, we were here at the inaugural 2012 Edge in Orlando. Greg McCoy is here, he's the manager of IT Architecture at Henry Mayo New Hall Hospital. Greg, good to see you again. How are you doing? Good, thanks. We met last night, talked a little football. Let's talk tech. What's happening in your world of IT architecture? First of all, tell us about the hospital. What's it about? How many beds? You know, give us the critical stats. So Henry Mayo, we're a 238 bed. On the outskirts of Los Angeles, if you know where Magic Mountain is, we're in Valencia, California. So 238 beds, we're actually growing. We're building a new patient tower that we're going to be adding another 130 beds. So it's a real small community, but we're the only game in town. So we give care to a lot of patients there. And your role as IT Architect spans all infrastructure? Talk a little bit about that. It spans all infrastructure, from the servers, the desktops to the network, and everything in between. At storage as well. So I like this conversation because so many organizations, you got the storage guys, you got the server guys, you got the networking people, they don't talk to each other, and you're a smaller organization, so you can't afford to do that. But how do you manage the need to have technical specialization with general knowledge across all those different disciplines? Yeah, so in healthcare, and I think it's that way, definitely in a small hospital there, we have to wear many hats. I came in to the hospital as an engineer myself. Not really a storage guy, more of a server guy, but as the years have progressed, I've become a virtualization guy, I became the storage guy, I've become the desktop guy, I've become the server guy. And so those are all the hats that we all have to wear. We're a small engineering team, and so we expect all our guys to wear those hats. Did you find it was difficult to sort of wear those many hats, or did the technology, knowledge and servers translate well to other areas? Was it all just buzzwords that once you figured out what it did and how it worked and what it was that it applied, or was it more difficult than that? It was a little difficult. Stores for me was probably the most difficult. I grew up in IT with servers. Stores are the best. Stores is always difficult for me. I know the networking by the back of my head. I know the servers by the back of my head. Once I got into the storage, because I never dealt with the storage, I'd always just give it to our storage guys. But here at Henry Mayo, we have to wear all the hats. And so that was, it was interesting, but at the same time I've learned a lot. Yeah, so as a, describing your situation, you want storage that isn't like a science project every time you want to, whatever, provision a lawn or back it up, et cetera. So, and over the last decade or so, architectures have evolved to make things simpler. Obviously, virtualization helped a little bit, now converged is helping. Can you talk about how you've seen technology evolve to make your life easier? Has it? Is that a fair premise? That is really the key in what we do. Since we do have to wear those many hats, we want our systems to be easy to manage. We want them to be a point and click, something that we don't have to go in and, as you talked about, provision a lawn. I don't want to have to be the manual process of provisioning a lawn and then presenting it to a host or what have you. I want to just be able to just click it and done. It's there, storage is available and now I can provision VMs. What's happening on the business side of the hospital? You got, you got Obamacare, you got meaningful use, you got EMR, you got all kinds of, you know, mandated, many of them unfunded in the business. How is that affecting IT? Oh, it's affecting IT hugely. The very first thing that comes to mind is security. There have been many, many stories out there of security breaches and how hospitals have to pay when there is a security breach. You have to pay fines and so security is the number one concern, definitely where we're at and you have the ransomware attacks. And so we look at security very, very seriously. It drives our business. It's how we get payments back and it's something that we're going to continue to look at going forward. So, one of the gentlemen in the keynote yesterday had a stat, it was Michael Lawley. He said that 50% of the healthcare organizations have been attacked multiple times and my comment was the other 50% don't know they've been attacked. Exactly, exactly. So security has changed, right? I mean, it used to be you put all your effort in to try to secure the perimeter and build a moat and keep the bad guys out and now it's, I think it's fair to say that people have come to the realization that they're going to get in. It's what you do once again, how you respond to them. Keep the data from getting out. Yeah, so how do you manage all that? Yeah, so that's something that, again, it's at the forefront of our minds at all times. Every system we put in, every new technology we put in, security is at the top of the list of the check marks of what we have to be able to make sure that it has the correct parameters we're looking for in order to secure our environment. So Greg, paint a picture of your infrastructure, what's it look like, you know, server storage, networking, if we had to walk in your shop, what would we see? Well, you know, everywhere I go, I would say, you know, we're no different than everyone else. You know, we have a bunch of servers, we have a bunch of stores and we have a bunch of virtualization. The only thing that's different is we run an EMR system that absolutely has to be up 100% of the time, our clinicians, our physicians absolutely have to have this application available. Other than that, you know, we're a typical IT shop, we're running Exchange, we're running VMware, we're running, you know, the x86 servers, very, very few Linux, so it's mostly a Windows shop but it's no different than I would think a standard IT. Greg, so, you know, one of the topics that we talk about with practitioners a lot these days is cloud, you know, what can you, you know, push to a SaaS environment, you know, what are you doing in-house? You know, where do you offer differentiation? Healthcare has a lot of, you said, security's important, you know, compliance issues, so, you know, cloud might be something you might not be able to handle or work with. What is, do you guys use, you know, SaaS applications and, you know, any kind of public cloud or is cloud kind of off, not a lot today? Very few SaaS applications. We've discussed cloud, we've discussed cloud for several years. We seem to get to a point where we're looking at it but maybe we have to, you know, draw back because simply because the compliance issues is not there. We do have specific compliance issues that we have to adhere to and so we want to be able to be dynamic. We want to be able to look at cloud technologies but we have to do it in a safe manner and a cautious manner and be, you know, pretty diligent on what we choose. Okay, so even customers that aren't leveraging public cloud a lot, they're measured by public cloud so looking for things like, you know, can I, you know, purchase it in a simple manner like cloud? Is it easy to operate? You mentioned kind of point and click. So, you know, what are you doing with your infrastructure to make it easier to manage, take less of your time, your team, having to kind of touch the infrastructure? I think the biggest thing that we've done is we actually procured or purchased a VersaStack last year. We are in the midst of one of the biggest projects in the hospitals. We are upgrading our EMR system to the newest platform and when we went out looking for infrastructure for this, we specifically wanted to go converge. We wanted something that we weren't continually managing something that we didn't have to build ourselves as we did previously with, you know, like Legos pretty much, just we build the servers, we build this network, we build the storage and then try and put it all together. So we specifically went out looking for a converged environment because we wanted something that could be easily managed, something that we didn't have to maintain every single day and make sure this piece is now working with this piece, something that our engineers can then go out and do other things and look for other solutions. So the VersaStack was very true. That's great. We've been tracking converged infrastructure since the very early days. Can you walk us through a little bit of that journey? You know, what were some of the decision criterias and what led you to VersaStack? Were you a Cisco UCS customer? Were you an IBM storage customer? Or, you know, was it, you know, new on both of those fronts? So we were not a Cisco good. The VersaStack actually is our first foray into the Cisco servers. We were strictly an IBM customer. We had IBM x86 servers and IBM's storage as well. We're always a Cisco shop as far as networking is concerned. But we've had challenges with our existing EMR. And it's not that the existing storage was not performing badly. It's just that there would be maybe once or twice a week to where we would have latency issues. And we couldn't pinpoint it. We couldn't put our finger on it. But as I mentioned before, that system is the livelihood of our positions and our nurses. So we specifically went looking for a converged infrastructure with all flash storage to implement this new EMR system. Okay. Were you a VMware customer before? We were a VMware customer before. And I'm assuming you were running VMware on the VersaStack. Okay, can you walk, you know, how's the implementation go? What applications do you have on it today? And maybe share a little bit about where you see that infrastructure going. Sure. So we actually bought it last year. As I mentioned, we bought it specifically for a specific purpose. With the particular application that we have, we have to use certified integrators. And I can't stress enough how important it is to have key partners as well as integrators to bring in any, whatever infrastructure you choose. So we did go with our partner that we've used for a very long time with all of our IBM equipment. And we were introduced to a new integrator actually to implement the Meditech system. So once we had the partners in place, we actually brought the VersaStack in, wheeled it in the data center, and had it stood up and ready to go within six weeks. Something that definitely doesn't happen normally. It's something that would have taken a very long time. But with the VersaStack, we had it up and running and turned over to our Meditech partner within six weeks. In the business case for that, was to deal with the latency issues or was it a combination of things? The complexity, IT labor, time? So what definitely drove it was the latency issue. Was the response time from the application. We absolutely had to have this application have absolutely no response time. So that was the driving factor. From an IT perspective, we wanted to go convert because again, we're a small organization. From an IT perspective, we have few engineers and we didn't want the engineers constantly managing the system. So we wanted to go convert so it would allow them to do other things. So what do you do with your time? Now that you're not doing non-differentiated, heavy lifting, patching, all that stuff that you would have had to do. How do the engineers sort of create value, post putting in this converged system? Now it's about performance metrics. So now we can provide metrics on a dime. We can now show upper management how the system is performing, how it's trending. We're able to make future decisions much quicker. We're able to know when we need to either expand or we need to look in a different direction for more equipment. It's really about being proactive. Too many times IT organizations are reactive and the whole thought process behind bringing in infrastructure like the VersaStack was how can we be more proactive? How can we look for future projects to bring in other types of systems that will allow our clinicians to treat our patients on a better basis? And Greg, this was a tech refresh, right? This was a, actually it wasn't, it was a tech upgrade. I mean, we could call it a refresh, but it was an upgrade. So I call it an upgrade for the software, but in actuality we had to build new infrastructure. We weren't just going to upgrade what we currently have. But you didn't retire the old systems? We didn't retire the old systems. And you're still running those? We are still running the old system and we actually just migrated our existing system to the VersaStack. So we're now at the point where we're throwing anything and everything at the VersaStack because it has performed so well. You said you had this thing in production in six weeks? We had it up and running in six weeks ready to deploy VMs. Ready for what, I'm sorry? Ready to deploy VMs. Okay, and so you were in production within two months? Within two months, we were in production. And then, talk about the business impact. We talked about the performance. So you dealt with the latency. You now got performance metrics that you can deliver. You were spending less time doing stuff that's not valuable. From a sort of financial perspective, what did that all mean for the company? You could do more with less. You didn't have to buy new equipment as soon as you might have to. How would you, when you're talking to the CFO, what'd I get for this? What would you do for me lately? What would you say? We're definitely doing more with less. I kind of touched upon it, but like I said, traditionally you siloed everything. Our EMR application was sitting in its own little storage array in its own virtual environment. VDI sitting in its own little virtual environment. The rest of our servers are sitting in its own little virtual environment. So I have three silos of arrays and virtual environments. And with the VersaStack, I no longer have to do that. This thing, it's handling everything with sub millisecond response time and I'm throwing anything and everything at it. So I'm able to combine all of that infrastructure into one platform. Going with all flash now, does that change how you have to manage kind of performance? I'm wondering, do you have to manage performance anymore or do you just now have plenty of speed for all your applications? I don't have to manage performance anymore at all. The only thing I need to look at is the reports. I can generate reports on demand and know where I'm going. How's the flash work, the all flash with the VersaStack? I'm not as well versed as I should be. So it's the IBM, it's the Texas Memory Systems piece that's now combined with the UCS to create VersaStack, is that right? And then, well, since it's the B9000, it has the SVC in front of it. So the same utility we were using to manage the B7000, we're using it for the 9000. Okay, so you're using the stack inside the sand volume control or the spectrum virtualizer. Sorry, I forget the brand name sometimes, but. Exactly, so it was in training for any of our guys. We already knew the system. We already knew how to use it. As we mentioned, we already knew how to provision storage. So that's, I've called it the gift that keeps on giving because, and I've said that about three par two, which is the true, but the SVC is, allows you to connect in virtually any devices. There's a migration component there as well. I don't know if you took advantage of that. We took advantage of it. As I mentioned, we took our existing because we're not live on the new system yet. Okay. So we're scheduled to go live on the new system in 2017. But our existing system, we were able to take advantage of the SVC and migrate from the existing V7000 onto the VersaStack. Okay, and so what's next for you guys? Exciting projects that you might be working on. Next is VDI. Really? We've been trying to get VDI into the hospital for several years now. We finally have gotten that project approved. It's something that we're kicking off where you're currently piloting it. And it's going on the VersaStack. And that's going to fly in the flash. Greg, I have to ask, are you familiar with hyper-converged infrastructure solutions that are out there? I am. Okay, so kind of give us why VersaStack fits or why you're not looking at some of those other solutions which tend to get a lot of buzz these days. Well, with our EMR system, they are very stringent on what they certify to run on their system. So at the time that we purchased, none of the hyper-converged solutions out there were certified to run the EMR system. So we had to go with a certified array. And the B9000 was a certified array. As I mentioned, we were looking for converged. So it kind of all married themselves together. And what does that mean, the certification? That's the compliance with HIPAA and whatever other security? It's what they've tested their software to run with. They have a specialized backup procedure. So their backups have to run on a certain array because it has to run the way it queuesces and backs it up. It has to be at a certain threshold. So they only certify certain arrays. Now, there's abundance of arrays that get certified, but we happen to be an IBM customer. We were happy with the V7000. We actually tried an off-flash 840 and we're very happy with that. So we knew what we wanted to do and the V9000 was certified to run the EMR. And so it was an easy choice for us. So you're able to now throw new workloads at this system without having to deploy new infrastructure. Is that the expectation you mentioned? That is the expectation. And that's what's going to happen. That's what's going to happen. We're going to push it until we can't push it anymore. How far do you think you can push it? I mean, you know, before- So far it's handled everything. Again, our infrastructure isn't different. We're not doing big data. We have standard types of applications and it's handling it easily. What's your database? We run SQL database. We run a lot of SQL, very few oracle, but it's mostly SQL. And relatively small databases, you're saying, right? Exactly. Great, give us a little bit of view as to your activity here at Edge. You go into the sessions, getting some hand-on-time, meeting with your peers. What's been exciting you? Yeah, it's a little bit different for me at Edge. This is actually my third Edge. I'm not doing the ton of sessions like I did the first two years. I am more networking and more meeting with people and clients as well. So I think I've gotten all I can get out of the sessions. I'm more of a reader, more of a networker, trying to hear what other customers are doing as well because I like to get ideas. So that's pretty much what I've been doing at Edge. What do you talk about your personal career, like objectives, as an infrastructure person? You've seen such change with virtualization not only at the storage layer, but across the entire infrastructure. Now you're seeing things like microservices and containers come in and change the application model. As an infrastructure pro, you get cloud as well. Where do you see your career going? What are your objectives for your career goals? Talk to your peers. What do you guys talk about in terms of where do we go from here? I'm looking at new ways we can increase the hospital, new ways that we can improve patient care. This was my first position into healthcare. I came from Silicon Valley. I grew up in Silicon Valley, worked there for years, and then introduced to Henry Mayo. So healthcare was new for me when I came here and it's been great ever since. And so we're always looking for new ways that we can increase patient care. If you grew up in Silicon Valley, so what's your take on what's going on at Silicon Valley these days? I don't know if you watch the TV show, I haven't seen it, but I've seen a couple episodes, it looks pretty funny, but it's quite a vortex of innovation, right? You live there, what are your thoughts on what's going on? It's a great show, my wife loves the show. I mean, we watch it, so it's a good show. The show notwithstanding, what about the Valley itself? I mean, you've seen the ebbs and the flows, the star, the dot-com bubble, the emergence of Google, Facebook, self-driving cars now. It's come back very well, I mean, I was actually in the heart of Silicon Valley during the dot-com, so I was there for the peaks, and I was there at the lows. And it's great that it's come back, it's good, we need the tech companies to come back. I'm all about tech, this is all about tech, so it's great that it's back on time. Well, you remember that, post.com, I mean, buildings were empty. Oh yeah. Nobody wanted to go there, and it was like, jobs were scarce. Yeah, it was for several years there. There were some tough times when it's come roaring back. Do you spend much time there now, as sort of trend spotting, or just, you know, just keeping up? I do not, I mean, I have family back there, but I do not, you know, I travel there for, you know, occasions, things. Yeah, but that's not part of your sort of surveillance and reconnaissance on tech. You just say, how do you keep up? It's reading. It's a lot of reading, and it's a lot of, you know, going to conferences like Edge. Yeah, so what conferences do you do? Do you do VMworld, or? I've done the VMworld. I do a lot of the medical conferences. Definitely have to stay on top of what's going on with our industry. But yeah, I do VMworld. I do Edge. I do the work there. So when you go to medical conferences, what are you looking for there? It's not obviously not talking about storage infrastructure, networking. Maybe you are, but I mean, it's more you're looking for other. It's exactly like what I'm doing here. I'm looking to see what other customers are doing in regards to the medical industry. It's different. You know, there are different EMRs out there, and none of them talk to each other. So it's challenging to try to get orders and medications to talk in the different EMRs. So what makes it different? Obviously the language is different. You're servicing doctors. That's a unique set of folks. The compliance and privacy issues are pretty intense. It's highly regulated, right? So anything else? I mean, what are the really factors that you've sort of learned over the last several years of being in here? Well, you know, I hear the stories that just about an hour ago, you know, one of my peers was telling me how, you know, they're in the hospital and it's hard to get the results that they go to one hospital and that patient has never been to that hospital before, but they are normally going to another hospital. How do they get that patient information or the medical record over to the other hospital? And that's where the big challenge is in the medical industry is how do you interconnect and how do you interface with the different EMRs? And that's a big problem. So what is it? It's architectures, it's standards, it's complying to privacy rules, right? And is EMR sort of designed to solve that problem or is that just sort of one small step? The EMR is just the, it's really the database, it's the medical record. You know, there's other things that go into that medical record. If someone happens to get, you know, break their arm and get to a CT scan, you know, that's a different system. How do you get that into the patient's EMR? So you can get the full picture and the full story of that patient. And then once it's in the EMR, you got to get it from point A to point B. Point A to point B. So there's got to be some protocol or standard that is consistent across those locations. And that's the difficulty is not every facility runs the same EMR. So how do you get them to talk to each other? Now it's getting better. There's interfaces that are built, but that's always a challenge and continues to be the biggest challenge in health care is how do you get it solved? Are you optimistic that, you know, in the next, let's say half a decade, that that problem will largely be solved and sort of? I don't know if it'll largely be solved, but with the regulations and the compliance and the standards that are now being set, I wouldn't say it's mandated, but it's imperative that the companies do work together better. And meaningful use is part of that as well, right? You've got to demonstrate, now that's in order to get paid, right? That's a stick, isn't it? It's both, it's in order to get paid and you have to be at a certain level for compliance reasons. So it's not just the payback feature, it's also, you know, of course everything is looking out for the best interests of the patient, so. And that's a moving target, is it not? Does it sort of evolve? You have to be at a certain level. You have to be at a certain level at a certain time and you have to constantly, constantly try and increase that level. So you're racing, if you had to look at the pie of how much time you spend sort of complying versus other stuff that you need to do, strategy or strategic initiatives, new projects, how much of that time that pie gets taken up by the compliance requirement? Well, thankfully, and not a lot of organizations have it, is we actually have a certain part of the IT organization that is actually dedicated just for compliance and is not dedicated for technology. Now, there's still some overlap there and I still have to adhere to regulations and I still have to work with them for any infrastructure that I do put in place, but it's gotten to the point where you almost need a dedicated team to just do the compliance part. But it's a small piece of your personal activity. It is. Well, that's good. Last question, would you talk to your peers about sort of things that you do differently or advice you'd give them? What's your guidance? I think my guidance is make sure that you partner with the right integrators and the right vars. Again, I cannot stress enough how important it was for us to use our integrators and our vars for helping us implement the versus. Yeah, you mentioned that before and is that a matter of expertise or is it bandwidth or both? Well, it's a matter of expertise and don't be afraid to interview them because we actually interviewed several different integrators before we decided upon the one that we did. We had used an integrator before and things always change. Maybe they might not know what the next integrator knows. So we interviewed several different implementation specialists before we settled upon the one that we chose. All right, Greg McCoy, thanks for coming on theCUBE. I really appreciate your time. Thank you. All right, keep it right there, everybody. Stu and I will be back. This is theCUBE, we're live from IBM Edge in Las Vegas.