 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's The Cube at HP Discover 2014, brought to you by HP. Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. This is Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick. This is Silicon Angles, The Cube, and The Cube is our live mobile studio. We go out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. We're here at HP Discover in Las Vegas. Sean Henkel is here as the director of Enterprise Infrastructure at Spectrum Health. Big healthcare day today for us. We told you we were going to get some practitioners on. Sean, welcome to The Cube. Thanks. So tell us a little bit about Spectrum Health. So Spectrum Health is in West Side of Michigan. We're a not-for-profit. We're the largest not-for-profit on that side of the state. We currently operate 11 hospitals. We have roughly 170 service locations, 1,080 employed physicians, and other 1,600 affiliated physicians. We have a health plan that currently has about 575,000 members. We are over 21,000 employees. The last fiscal year we contributed about 250 million in community benefits out to the West Michigan area. We have been recently received a few new awards or affirmations of existing awards. The U.S. News & World Report has ranked our children's hospital, the Helen DeVos Children's Hospital, in three specialties nationally. We have magnet recognition status from nursing accreditation services, which really look at the total healthcare that you provide. Truman Health Analytics has named us a top 15 system in the nation. Our mission is to improve the lives of the communities we serve, and our mission is to be the national leader in health by 2020. How many beds do you have? We are over 2,000 beds right now between all the various community hospitals. Pretty sizable organization. The nonprofit, how are you funded? Is it self-funded at this point in time? Yep, self-funded, very philanthropic area we live in. They contribute a lot. They believe in the mission as we all do. It's awesome. So talk a little bit about what's happening in your industry. You've obviously got the Affordable Care Act. You're a regulated industry. You've got serious privacy issues, concerns that you have to pay attention to. What are the big drivers that are affecting your IT strategy? So yeah, so as you mentioned, availability has become so critical in our environments. 10, 15 years ago, your EMRs were just what the person went to after the care was provided to document what was done. And now we're at a point where they expect it up 24-7 for any of the EMRs. We have a few right now based on historical acquisitions that we've had. So keeping the data synced up between EMRs is very important. As you mentioned, the security of the data is incredibly important right now. So as much as we do with any specific applications for however important they are, is the security, the ingress, and the egress points of the network that one of my colleagues is responsible for. The things we have to consider every time we wanna look at any single app that may have one hook, or in a lot of cases not even have a hook into an EMR, they still have to examine that as crucially as any other application. Because at some point, if we need to open that up, expose it to the outside for any kind of access. We're obviously opening ourselves up to a tremendous amount of risk because of the millions of patient records that we have in these systems. So is cloud a bad word? External public cloud? Is that a scary thought in the world? It's not a scary thought, it's just one we have to proceed very carefully with. HIPAA, HITECH, as you said, P-PAC, Affordable Care Act, the things we're doing with ICD-10, there are so many moving parts right now. I joke, I think our PMO list of projects that are just queued up right now is about 1,600 projects that we're trying to do. And that could be anything from a small one system implementation up to standing up a brand new care for an integrated care campus, trying to change the model of health care. These are funded projects, they've been approved or? The first couple hundred are funded. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The rest of them are just waiting there, waiting to turn into a queue. The process and the business case and all that. Yep, absolutely, yes. Yeah, okay. So, do you use the public cloud? We have some instances that are taking advantage of the cloud. Yes, we're doing it. They're more in pilots or betas, whatever you want to call them. We do some small stuff with some file sharing for some business units that we don't have the privacy concerns, it's more about keeping the documentation, the manuals available to everybody at the same time, maybe keeping the log book, and that would be for the helicopter pilots and things like that. We're doing a few websites that we're hosting out at some of the bigger names that can very quickly and easily spin up and spin down infrastructure for us. How about this issue of meaningful use? How is that affecting your business generally and IT specifically? Maybe you could share with the audience what that means. Yeah, so the meaningful use is, that's a major driver in pretty much any project that we're working on. In fact, when you go through the form to fill out to get your project into the queue, that is one of the four things you can pick from. Right, I mean, there's IT-only projects, there's transforming the care model, there's meaningful use. So, driving the adoption, the use by our patients, by our members of what we're making available online to them, the updates that are coming from the software vendors, they're not called meaningful use updates, but they might as well be, right? I mean, everything that's coming out is enabling more and more capabilities to allow organizations like ourselves to be able to hit our attestations for meaningful use, phase one, phase two, and then as we keep going through the journey over the next hour of a long day. I'm curious, your project has IT-only, transformation, meaningful use, and what's the other one, like saving money or making money kind of thing? You're putting me on the spot now. Yeah, okay, I'm sorry. No, no, it's definitely not making money. It's actually growing with purpose. What is it? You're saying it's growing with purpose. Grow with purpose, okay. So it's sort of a growth. So that's sort of an alignment with strategic initiatives. And those are the four buckets by which you guys evaluate projects, is that right? That's it, and there's probably another. There's plenty of bullets under there, but that gets it in and at least allows the portfolio managers to know which direction to take the project, get it into what we call the huddles to discuss it and get more information and decide where we want to put it in the queue. I mean, that's critical, right? Because you can look at it as a portfolio, even those four simple categories, you can say, okay, what percent of our spend is in A, B, C, or D? Oh yeah, absolutely. Gee, do we need to rethink this? Do we need to shift this, you know? Yeah, it's funny, they're actually using some of the health analytics tools that we have, and they're turning those against the portfolios and being able to produce the dashboards that they're using to show which of those buckets are we spending the money and spending the time and spending the resources? I like it, it's great. And how much is kind of the natural methodology or DevOps methodology entered the way you deliver these projects, or is it still kind of waterfall and we define them and deliver them? Because you've got a big laundry list there, I don't know how you would kind of agile develop with continuous improvement across a list that big. Yes, it's all of the above. As recently as probably three, four years ago when I was primarily working on the insurance side, everything was waterfall, right? I mean, if we fail, it took us a long time to fail. It was very painful. If we succeeded, it took us a long time to succeed and we didn't get to really take a step back and take a breath, but the agile has entered fast and furious into our environment. We're even trying to explore that on the infrastructure side with rollouts of just migrating data centers, things like that. We're trying, I have the architects turned towards that methodology. We've reorganized teams, not necessarily an infrastructure, but NIS. We've reorganized these teams around agile. We've set them in rooms, given them their own space, given them their own coaches and PMs working on their stuff. They do these report outs that I've been bringing to my leadership to see these report outs. In fact, Friday when we get back, we have a meeting with one of the directors leading one of those teams that's going to tell my team how this is working for them, because I want to get my guys' mindset around that so that every project we do is not that boil the ocean mentality, but there's bite-sized chunks you can do of these things to make these small incremental gains and course correct as you're going through. And then talk a little bit about, because you're big, we had Bill on earlier, he was talking about the goodness of being small, he could move a little bit quicker. You've got a big organization. Talk a little bit about the evolution of the infrastructure behind this thing as with a rising increase in virtualization, how have you guys taken advantage of that and talked a lot about flash here at the show, which adds a whole different kind of performance component. I wonder if you can talk about your direction there on your infrastructure. So, yeah, so we've grown significantly, as you can imagine. I mean, the health plan was growing independently very quickly. Spectrum was growing very quickly, all in a span of about 10 years. Everything has tripled, quadrupled, even 10-fold. We've raised it in order of magnitude. Our storage footprint in five years has gone from two petabytes, I'm sorry, two petabytes. We're over seven petabytes right now, just around the healthcare system. We have more online storage than Netflix does right now. I don't know if you gotta pay Netflix money because I just said their name now. But in the virtualization space, that's obviously grown tremendously. We are 80% virtualized as a company and we have 3,000 servers. We have 2,000 databases. We're virtualizing anywhere and everywhere we can, which obviously brings with it its own challenges. When you are virtualized at every level, including the network. It's not just VMware. It's we're virtualizing at the network. You're virtualizing across storage arrays so that when you do have things that are impacting the systems, it makes it a little harder to troubleshoot. You got a lot of people in a room each looking at their own little piece of the pie. The consolidation of virtualization has helped us tremendously. We've been taking advantage more of just being able to throw those huge memory footprints down on things to support not only the virtualization environments, but also our database environments. As we've moved from the mentality of a lot of HP UX, running it more to trying to get to the x86 platforms, even while still running these mission critical databases, we've incorporated some of the flashcards into those servers. And we ease into those very carefully, because as those things are new, we've gotten out of the mentality of we always want to be the guinea pig going for the latest and greatest. Let's talk about that a little bit. Let's talk about your infrastructure. Yep. We're here at Discover. Let's talk about HP a little bit. What are you guys doing for your infrastructure? Maybe break that down a little bit. Maybe talk a little bit about vendor management. Do you typically go for the one throat to choke? Or do you like to have multiple vendors? Do you go with the best-of-breed approach for each of the segments? So talk about your infrastructure a bit and specifically what you're doing with HP. Yeah, so we've kind of diversified to put it nicely. We've been in situations where we had a lot of eggs in one vendor basket and that has had some negative impacts on the system as a whole. And I'm not going to name vendors here, but we took the approach of a little while back here. Netflix. No. We took the approach of diversifying among tiers. So in storage, for instance, we'll have one vendor at our tier two and then we have HP at tier one. And for us, that was a no-brainer of a decision. That's three-par? No, no, that would be the XP platform. So on the health plan side of things, we've been an XP customer since the 256 and we've been a part of the early adopter program. So we get unit one, two, or three in and mess with these things, run them through their paces, provide the feedback. What you mentioned before, our availability is key. I mean, that thing is the rock solid industry gold standard of availability. Well, it is quite honestly. That's kind of what we hang our hats on at the end of the day. Myself, my storage manager that we've been together, he and I have worked together for the last eight years at that organization. And if there is one system we have never had an issue with, it's the XP platform. Fully virtualized back in. Yeah, yeah, and when we start talking about three-par, anything like that, I always joke. If I ever needed to, if I was ever going to propose a move away from XP for some of those things, I probably need to be wearing a cup in that meeting, right? Because that is the one thing we will not compromise on. Don't touch my storage. Do not touch that. We actually, just this morning, the order went through for two more XP's, so that'll give us four of those in our environment, and that allows us to diversify our primary EMRs, our main claims adjudication system between arrays, such that we can say, you know what, we're never gonna run all three of these on one array. Not that there would be a problem running it on the XP, but. So the XP supports the major systems, but you've segmented them to reduce your risk. Yeah, we're even about to throw our mainframe application on there. We're still running a mainframe for. So the XP connects to the main billing, right? Yeah, we're working through the final pieces that is part of our move into a new data center. We're gonna take the mainframe off the old storage system it's on and put it on the XP. Yeah, XP is the Taji Data Systems Technology, obviously a great mainframe connectivity player, and has been in that business for many decades, so that is a rock solid, you know, tier one, shoot any hole you want, it won't go down, kind of box, right? Yeah, absolutely, it's quite honestly, it's the reason I'm in the position I am right now. Because we've never made a compromise on that, and that the success we've had in the storage area has kind of been what my career has succeeded based on. Really, the XP, the availability, reliability, and quality of that product has helped you get to where you are today. We are known for our storage. Above all else in the infrastructure space. And so where do you want to see that go? Obviously you can add flash in there, it's a highly virtualized environment, it's very easy to bring in other storage from a migration standpoint, or if you've got legacy storage you want to attach. Sometimes with the tier one platform at Joke, we're kind of boring, because we don't like to mess around on that, right? We need that rock solid, we need the bullet proof nature of it, we want that, for us, since the XP 256, never taken an outage at all. Never lost it. That's through every generation of these we've had, running the primary claims adjudication system and now the main EMRs for the hospital and for the medical group. We have never taken an outage. And that's what we love about that platform, is that we can throw anything at that. And it's just, that's it, it's steady. We've been doing a tremendous amount of work around metrics and gathering, trying to find these indicators that would show us, what's that range where we need to start thinking about adding something. And just last week, before coming out here, we ran a full gauntlet of performance graphs off the XP and I had the joke to my boss and I said, there's really nothing I can show you, because I can go back 10 years and I can show you the busiest times of the year, the slowest times of the year and that graph looks exactly the same, it never changes. So you don't see that, you don't want that platform to go away, you don't see that platform going away from an investments standpoint. You're going to continue to invest in that, maybe add flash over time to improve performance and things like that. HP just announced a new version of XP, you're hopping on it, that's part of your roadmap for the foreseeable future. Absolutely, and the flash piece, I was joking with somebody earlier that the only reason I need to add flash to that is to eliminate it as a blame point for other teams that'll say it's IO, it must be the storage. We know it's not the storage, we can prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that it's not the storage. Yeah, but hey look, there's flash in there so now you really have nothing to say. All right Sean, we have to leave it there, we're getting the hook. Really appreciate you coming on theCUBE, excellent segment and really welcome your thoughts down the road. Thanks for having me. Okay, you're welcome. Keep it right there, everybody, Jeff Frick and I will be right back. This is theCUBE, we're live from HP Discover, we're right back.