 Live from Vienna, Austria, it's theCUBE. Covering .next Europe 2016, brought to you by Nutanix. Here's your hoes, Stu Miniman. Welcome back. Always happy on theCUBE when we get to talk to the practitioners that are trying new technologies, poking at things, everything like that. Have a welcome to the program. Thank you. Sammy Bogart, who's a senior systems administrator from Dell and Private Bank. Thank you for joining me. Thank you. All right, Sammy, keep our audience just a little bit about what your role is, how long you've been at the bank and just set up the bank where it is, number of branches, things like that. So I'm a senior system administrator at Dell and Private Bank. We are headquarters in Antwerp in Belgium. We have remote offices across Belgium and also abroad in UK, Netherlands, Switzerland. I've been working there for two years now. And we've been working with Nutanix for four years. So we're quite one of the early adopters with Nutanix. The first one in Benelux and one of the first also in Europe. So we've quite some experience with the platform already and the people at Nutanix. Great, I want to get into Nutanix stuff, but before just the bank itself, how many branches, how many cities, how many people work on IT? So we have about 15 branches, 300 people working there. And in general, IT, including development, 50 people and our systems team is about 14 people. And if I go back four years ago, I mean, Nutanix, the product line's changed a lot since then. So bring us back to them. What were the challenges? Why were you looking at things? We were barely even talking about hyperconverged. It was more a new platform. I knew Nutanix back then, but everybody else I talked to was like, and just because I had a couple of friends that started working there, what led you down the path to look at Nutanix? So we were like the typical company, you have a legacy send, you have your hypervisors, you have your hardware, your servers, different platforms, different teams managing those, different admins, different applications to manage all these systems. And we wanted to get rid of the silos. And going hyperconversed with Nutanix, that was our vision to resolve that. So that really, that allowed us to break the barriers and making sure that it all became one. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, Sammy, unpack that a little for us. Cause I worked on some of the, you know, I helped architect some of the early kind of converged infrastructure solutions. I worked with blade terms before then. No matter how I package it, there's compute, there's storage, there's networking. So how does this packaging break the silos for you? Well, one of the first thing that you do, of course, if you're an admin, you do a login to the system, you open the web page to the system and the cool thing about Nutanix is you open it and you get a visual on everything. The compute, storage, network, the VMs running on it. Even if it's a different hypervisor, it doesn't matter. They visualize it for you. And you can manage it from that single interface. So the single pane of glass, it really works with Nutanix and you have it. Wait, wait, but some of the storage and networking guys, they love their CLI, they want to bang on some stuff. They've got their geek knobs, no? Yeah, I also like it, but you will still have it with Nutanix as well. You can still dig into the CLI, you can open it, you can do your thing. So talk a little bit about the simplicity. How is Nutanix today compared to trust even in Nutanix four years ago? Yeah, so the fun thing about Nutanix is software. Honestly, the artwork below it, it doesn't really matter. And the cool thing about software, it can evolve rapidly. And you see that a lot with Nutanix, new versions coming up, new functionality improvements, both in the interface, as in the core, as in additional stuff like replication, major availability, these are all things that they added afterwards. So that's one of the nice things that you have with Nutanix, they can evolve very rapidly because it's software based. So when you joined Dell in private bake, was it to, specifically the Nutanix, was that the reason why they brought you in? One of the things, they're quite ahead of things. They always tries to evolve rapidly. They're not afraid to use new technologies. And of course, as an admin, as a techie, that's one of the things I like. Is that typical of a bank or is just Dell kind of ahead of the curve? That's what we try to do. We try to be ahead of the curve by doing those things. Okay, and at the bank, was it like a VDI deployment or was it kind of a wholesale deployment? What's quite important in our bank is we do everything virtual. So server workloads, but also the end users. So we don't have a single laptop, we don't have a single workstation. Everything runs virtual, 100%. So that's pretty important for us. That also means that the performance of the system, that's huge to us. If there's a glitch in it, latency, we will immediately see that. So the performance of the system, that's key to us. And that's something that Nutanix also gives us. We've seen a huge bump in performance improvements. And of course, for our end users, that's what they notice. It's a very rapidly system, it responds very good. And it's easy to manage for us. So this is obviously the first European show that Nutanix is doing. You've been one of the longest customers in Europe. Talk about the team at Nutanix, your rep, the channel partners, the service. How's that experience been? How have you seen it mature over time? So what you see with Nutanix is they expanded a lot. They've grown very rapidly. But a lot of the early people, they're still around. And even though they have grown in Nutanix, they don't forget us. They still visit us. Even the high-ranked people at Nutanix, they still come by. So that's nice. We're still in touch with the people. We have a very good bond with them. And also with their support channel. Nutanix is software. Software is never perfect, and everything can fail. And it will fail. We have seen failures. We have to be honest about that. But it's the way how Nutanix deal with that. That's what's making them unique and a good value for us. And their support channel, that's truly amazing and excellent. Good people, no cues, no long waiting lines. And you see a lot of the high-skilled people, they always come back when you open a new case. You recognize the names. Oh, it's that guy, he's a good one. We will resolve it quickly. Yeah, the joke we have in the infrastructure world is, hardware will eventually fail. Software will eventually work. You've worked with other vendors in the past. How do you compare, yeah, how do you grade Nutanix compared to some of the big companies out there? What you often see with the companies that, as they grow, it usually means their quality of support declines. It's a shame, it shouldn't happen, but it's reality, it happens. Part of it is numbers. Getting five good people is a lot easier than getting 500. So I think that will be a challenge for Nutanix as well. Their rate of support is just excellent now. They have to keep that up. If that declines, they will probably lose customers. So that's an attention point for them. You said, I mean, look, every product goes through, there'll be something that you'll need support on in the future, but how's the reliability performance of the platform bid? Are you able to meet the SLA for your business that you need to level it? Yes, so the SLA in terms of reliability of the platform, no complaints. It works fine. We have seen hardware failures, not too many, just like with other kinds of hardware. But the platform itself, the software, it handled them nicely, so no real big issues. We had some support cases, just like with other systems, but they were all resolved nicely. Is there anything that Nutanix has added, say in the last year or some of the announcements that you've seen that are coming out in 5.0 that you're really excited about or? Yeah, so a lot of the additional functionality that they are including in 5.0 in the interface, the cluster check, file system, block system, those are definitely the things that we are looking at. And also, they're hypervisors. I think they made a bold move by going for their own hypervisors, but I think it's a good one. Okay, are you using the CropList hypervisor today now? Not yet. We've looked at it, we've did some tests with Xandastop, and it was quite nice. The integration worked very good. It's still in the early days, but it's evolving pretty rapidly, so. What are you using today? VMware. So we are a VMware shop for the hypervisor and also for the VDI platform. Sami, what about if you had kind of your wish list out there? What are you asking? Not just Nutanix, but they've got a lot of partners, the ecosystem here, what would help you do your job better on the business? They're evolving rapidly. We are following their evolutions. I think they're good on that. They're also working more closely now with partners. You see integrations with Citrix, with Convult, Rubrik. They didn't have that in the past, so they are already working on that. And I can only assume that the amount of partners, the partnerships, it will just grow and evolve over time. Are you using one of those partners for backup today or? Not yet. Our current backup does not yet integrate with AcropList, their hypervisors. Of course, it works with our hypervisor, with ESX on Nutanix, so that works good. But not yet on AcropList, so we will have to see what the future brings on that platform. Sami, in addition to being an attendee, you've also done some speaking here at the show. What have you been talking about? So we did one session about the all-flash array. We were one of the first customers, and I think still now, one of the few that are using an all-flash platform for high critical workloads. So we did a session about that, how we see that, our experience with it. So that's cool. I'm curious about that, because the people out there, the two fastest growing segments of kind of the, especially storage market, are hyperconverged in the all-flash arrays, and did you look at an all-flash array, because there's still some differences between an all-flash configuration, hyperconverged, and an AFA? Our vision is hyperconverged. So we're not going back to what we call a legacy, so. So you would look at an all-flash array, even a new architecture, it's still an external storage box. So that's legacy to you? Well, when we looked at the Nutanix all-flash platform, we evaluated other hyperconverged systems that were all on all-flash, but we went for Nutanix for the reasons, management, support, we're a happy customer, so we tried to keep it up. And you said there was a second session? Yeah, the other one about, and that was an interesting one, it was a closed door, no social media, no tweeting, no Facebook, so sensitive, secretly. It went about what happened in terms of support, failures. They're honest about it, I mean, they're not afraid to talk about it, it can fail, it will fail. And they wanted our story, what happened, what failed, but also how did Nutanix respond, and what did we learn from it, and what did Nutanix learn from it? Great, we're going to read a transcript of it. No, Sammy, I'm kidding, it's totally no. That's great, no, it's always good. Every company has their challenges that they'll work through, it's how you deal with those problems that's going to determine whether the customers are going to say so. You've said you've had challenges, you're happy, you're a happy customer, you're speaking, you've been here doing our stuff. All right, what would you tell your peers if they're looking at various architectures, obviously you're happy at Nutanix, anything that they should be doing kind of internally to prepare for it, or things that has caught you by surprise or that you've learned in the four years that you've been working and that you'd want with hindsight for them to know before. We try to convince a lot of people to go hyperconverse just because we think that's the future. We also have been saying everybody for years now that don't look at hybrid systems, go all flash. These are some of the messages that we try to tell to other people, to other peers, to colleagues. And we think a lot of people are adapting now. They're seeing that yes indeed, all flash is the future, hyperconversed also for a lot of customers. So that's our vision and we just try to make sure that our peers also try to do that. All right, last question I have for you is just this, the first European show, shorter trip for you than you haven't been to Nutanix show. How's the show been, what's big takeaways, why does Senior System Administrator come to an event like this? Well, first of all, we always come to a show to know your peers, look around, how is it evolving, how many people are there, just to know how many attendees there are. And I'm amazed by the amount of people that are here. I thought 600, 700, but it's more than a thousand. And that's cool. I mean, it means that it's alive. It's there. And it's nice, I've seen interesting people, nice conversations with other guys and those are the things that I expect from a conference. Nice talks with peers, with the vendors, suppliers, you get to know other people. You know what others are doing, what others are doing and that's the good thing about such a conference. All right, well, Sammy Bogart, really appreciate you sharing your story, your experiences with your peers. We'll be back with more coverage here from the Nutanix.nextEurope show, 2016. You're watching theCUBE.