 Hi, everybody, this is Dave Vellante. Welcome to CUBE Conversations. We've been having a series of conversations with customers on the state of data protection, and we're really pleased to have Jamie Shepard here. He's the Senior Vice President at Luminate. Jamie, always a pleasure, good to see you. Thank you, Dave. Now, oftentimes we talk about you as an industry integrator, reseller, technologist. We're going to talk about Luminate as a customer. You guys are a customer of EMC's data protection, so I want to start there. So talk about the state of data protection at your shop prior to the bringing in data domain or Avamar, whatever it is you guys have. We'll talk about that, but what was keeping you up at night at that time? Yeah, I tell you, Dave, the challenges we were having, we're a global company, obviously nationally, based out of Dallas. I'm here out of the Boston office, and we were having a challenge with customer data, quite honestly, right? So not only our own data, we have Massachusetts laws we had it adhere to, so we had archived data. We had e-discovery, we had a deal with, so it's funny because when I look back at what Luminate did, we really should kind of follow EMC's whole information life cycle management. Remember when they coined that? Yeah, sure, ILM. ILM, yeah, so we definitely got involved with that where we were the prototypical exchange shop, file system, we had our backup target, we actually had an archive target with Centera's on that. We had a lot of NAS, a lot of file systems, heavy exchange, SharePoint and SQL, and we had the same challenge as everybody else. My biggest nightmares were two-fold. My nightmares that kept me up at night were systems going down and not having that backup that I needed. My businesses, if I lose an email, I've lost a deal. That type of thing, so we can't lose that stuff. The other thing is we hold a lot of customer data. So we have HIPAA healthcare. I do a lot in healthcare. We have HIPAA requirements. We have a lot of the PHI requirements out there. We're heavily regulated by not only state and federal regulations. We do a lot in SLED, so we have to adhere to everything, quite honestly. So if we don't have good policies in place, that's the killer. And that was the thing that we did. We lived by our four Ps of N-Cubed on methodology and its process, policy, people and product last. You're eating your own dog food on that. Had to, had to, and that was a key thing. So we kind of follow that whole thing, but it's evolved into something pretty unique today. So what specifically did you bring in? What did EMC do? Can you talk about the infrastructure? Yeah, EMC didn't have to do too much. As you guys know our model, we're very tight with EMC. We've been doing, we know all of their products, A to Z, except D for documentary, we're not there. But in any event, we basically were the guys that we kind of went down the prototypical way, but we also pushed the envelope in virtualization. So I saw my data center grow. You know where our old building was. And we, same issue, two data centers. One was innovation center to do demonstrations and all the one was production. And we'd also replicate between the two, okay? So I was just growing out of space, power, everything. I was adding dist to it, I was adding resources to it, CPU, I needed to consolidate that. So my first approach was let's upgrade and consolidate. And from there I wanted to streamline. Okay, so specifically what did you guys bring in? We basically took, we had two centers for archiving. So we archived all of our emails using, at the time email extender and disc extender, which is now source one. We were in a older exchange shop. So we were the typical, it's time to do it all together. And we did it all. And we did it in a phase of about eight months. So what we did first was we brought in data domain. Okay, and we brought in two data domain boxes. We standardized on network as a backup platform. We used FLR within our VNXs for the file level retention. And we migrated off of our centeras. That was a challenge for us, but not a technical challenge, more about how they store things and objects. And now we have to bring that back to the data world. So it was almost like a rehydrate of our archive. But I had to get the centeras out of there. The beauty for me for data domain was, we have limited resources like a lot of guys. As much as we do a lot, we're in the field a lot helping customers. So I can't really manage IT. I wanted it to manage itself. So if I had good processes, good policies, good people and a good product, I'll have to spend a lot of time with that. So we standardized on data domain. We lift that up as a, almost like a multi-tenant device, quite honestly. So we had part of it as a worm device. So I was right once read many type of device. That was my archive target. Once we moved everything over, we upgraded to exchange. 2010, virtualized everything. Networker 8.2 now. We actually just went to that upgrade. We implemented Syncplicity for a secure file in sync. So I've got a lot of this stuff within my data center that's helping us act very mobile, but keep everything secure. And you have a target onsite and then you vault off-site as well? We replicate to Texas, yep. Okay. All right, and then talk a little bit about the sort of before and after. Maybe sort of the business results. Business is not huge. I mean, at the end of the day, we probably saved about $195,000 on resources. I did a whole ROI on how much time and we actually spending, pulling things here, moving things around. And EMC's automation just makes it so easy. So this is arms and legs, people time, right? 100%. I mean, product-wise, you save on maintenance, you save on heating costs. We went to a smaller data center. It's all the typical stuff you read out there, which I have to say, I'm not a white paper fan. Usually it's made to sell, but it's as advertised. My deduplication rate on a lot of things are about 10 to one, sometimes 12 to one on certain types of applications. So I'm really happy with it. Do you use any tape? No, zero. No tape, whatever. Nope, nope. We have replicated devices, so we actually have a bi-directional replication as well. And as I said, I set it up as multi-tenant. So we have it segregated per the user. So we have legal, we have HR, we have healthcare division, we have general population, we have different states, you know, Massachusetts. It's pretty good how we have it broken down. So this is essentially your archiving system, your email archiving system? I'm like my own little service provider right now. Like I say, legal holds, any issues you have there, it's dealt with with this infrastructure. Yeah, we were able to, you know, we upgraded everything to source one as well for both SharePoint and Exchange. And we were able to, we actually had a situation where there was an employee, there was a breach, not that we caused, but we were part of the team at the customer. So we were requested to say, hey, do you have documents from their employee that was collaborating with us? And, you know, it was just a piece of cake for our legal department to go in without ITs in a vape and intervention and pull all those documents out. Let's talk about some advice that you give the customers. If you had to do it over again, would you do anything differently and or what would you advise people going through a similar project? That's a great question. I would advise them to work with us on N-Cube because honestly, if you don't align those four Ps up, you know, process, policy, people and product, you're just throwing these solutions out there. So we did do the best job of that, you know, early on. I think we were too eager to have the archive, too eager to get this done, too eager, and we didn't take the time to plan properly. Second time around, which was this time that we're in right now, we definitely planned it. And we did a great job of not only achieving what we wanted to in those results, but we're in a much better state right now. So I tell customers, please try to take the time up front and plan it, you know, try to know, my whole thing, Dave, is corporate governance, okay? To me, data protection is a piece of corporate governance, you know, yes, is it secure, is it compliant, but am I in a good corporate governance state? And right now we are. Is it a boardroom discussion at your company? 100%. Yeah. Have you guys ever had to do a recovery? Yeah, I mean, I didn't sell this internally as easy as I'm communicating. Okay, so. So talk about that. With the big illuminate, well with the big illuminate, I had to go to finance, I had to go to legal, and, you know, they thought I was coming to push my thoughts and ideas on what we should do. And quite honestly, I think I did a pretty good job of, you know, we are now governed where Texas-based organization, Dallas, with entities in Massachusetts, Ohio, Kansas City, Nashville, Southern Texas, Oklahoma, so in Ohio Valley, we're all over the place, right? So what I was able to show them is basically legal documentation that a company based out of Texas, they have to adhere to all these different state laws and regulations, and Massachusetts is pretty clear. You know, so I was able to sell them on the idea that we have to protect the business entity first. You don't want to be sued. Okay, so that's how we were able to roll this out in production. So it was all based on legal and compliance, you know, and that's the key thing. So that's kind of the original justification. Backup is, you know, expensive insurance, let's face it. But there's a lot of talk in the industry about getting more value out of it. Obviously the perpetual backup window, I always have this problem of trying to meet my backup window. Data growth is causing challenges for me. So what do you see as the future of data protection? Will we go beyond insurance? Will there be added business value? Will there be new ways of protecting data with all this, you know, explosion going on that can help us with this backup window? Where do you see it going? I see it there today, but we're not there. The industries there we're talking about, it's analytics. It's all analytics. It's big data analytics. I mean, if you go back, you and I are aged a little bit, but that's a good thing now in IT. And, because we have relevance and we can have a story and what goes around comes around but I'm seeing, you know, with data warehouses we're once built to build in all of this technology but this with data went to die. Everyone would say data warehouses, data went to die. You could pop on Cognos on Oracle and, you know, it was the user, if they didn't know how to ask the question and go search the data, you weren't getting anything. I look at backups now. That's live data. That's real data. That's, it's backed up. I get it de-duplicated and compressed and sent off from a compliance security data protection but that's intelligent data. I'm not using that data effectively. People are throwing that away. So their investment in data protection, to me, they're seeing a third of it. They should be looking at not just is it a corporate government thing and am I data protected and backed up? Can I recover? But can I mine that data? What can I do with that data? Is that data intelligent? Yeah, it's real stuff. I back it up every day. So actually getting value out of that data that used to just sit there and be sort of dead weight. And it still does that today, by the way. We have customers that are building in these big Hadoop infrastructures just to do exactly what I said and they're not touching backups. Well, no, the backups are the backups. No, that's not true. You know, this is like going back to the AS-100 days where that box just stayed in the corner and nobody touched that, you know? So it's like, no, there's a lot you can do with that. All right, good. About getting value out of your existing infrastructure and thinking ahead. So, Jamie, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to see you. No problem, thank you, Dave. All right, thanks for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante. This is theCUBE Conversations. We'll see you next time.