 Live from the Mendeley Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2016. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. Now here's your host, Stu Miniman. Welcome back to theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's flagship program here at VMworld 2016. Of course, VMware's big bash, their user conference and no better way to go into a user conference than have two users here at the event, go figure. So happy to welcome the program for two first-time guests, Justin Brooks, who's with Pitt, Ohio, and Steven Seneca, who's a travel port. Gentlemen, thanks so much for coming to me on the program here. Third day of the show, how you both doing? Pretty good. Tired, tired, but good. All right, Justin, come on on cameras, the lights are going, we're smiling, I'm doing great, I don't care how late you were out last night, we keep going. Pat Kelsgers would say, we out partying too late last night. But just let's start with you for our audience that's not familiar with Pitt, Ohio, tell us a little bit about the organization and your role role there. Okay, Pitt, Ohio is a trucking company based out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was started in 1979 by the Hamill brothers. Truck Hamill now is our sole president of the company. And they started off small and expanded into different regions and different markets. So primarily Pitt, Ohio, they spread from New Jersey all the way over to Chicago, Illinois and down into the South a little bit. So it's a great company to work for. Great, and your role there? My role, I'm a systems engineer, so I work on the systems team, we deal with the infrastructure and operations inside of our data center. All right, Steven, travel board, I had a little time to dig in with you at a previous event, to throw it into a little bit about your company and your role there. Sure, travel port is a GDS, a global distribution system, supporting air, car, hotel, crews and train systems. So I've been there 23 years, have a blast every single day. There's always new challenges because of the customer base that we support. So love it, it's a great company. So I want both of you to sketch out just kind of the scope of what you're working on. Number employees, number sites, Steven? Travel port's in 170 countries. We have just around 5,000 employees. We have multiple facilities in North America and in EMEA, Asia PAC as well. All right, Justin? We're more regional, so we're not international or anything, but we have a couple thousand employees. Primarily we do all of our operations back in Pittsburgh, but we do have our trucking terminals in different states, in different cities. We have around, I think, 22 or 23 terminals that we service. And that's pretty much the span of our operations. Great, we always love the diversity of customers here, whether you're a global one that, you know, every single person that came here probably had interaction with services that leverage your technologies or some of us, you know, different scope. So just let's start with you, talk about kind of some of the IT transformation you guys have been doing. You know, what were you working with before from a technology standpoint? Why did you make some changes? Primarily we were a UCS customer. So we had UCS for our compute, dealing with multiple storage vendors, storage arrays, we had VMAX and Clarion, Nimbol, even an EVA, HP EVA. And we recently made a switch to our transition to the hyper-converged solutions and we chose SimpliVity. Okay, and Justin, what was the business driver for this? It was just kind of trouble managing it. Did you have a refresh? What was the kind of driver for looking at a change? Well, it was a couple of things. We were an early adopter of UCS in our area. So we had multiple generations of blades. Some were coming out of life. We were dealing with multiple storage arrays, some capacity, maybe some performance, some performance issues. Because of capacity, you know, storage growth, business growth, having to back up more of that data, having to buy more licensing for net backup and having to expand on our data domain where we're sending our backups to. It was getting expensive and it was getting complex. And also at the time we were dealing with only, there was only two engineers on my team, myself and one other person who we just brought on. So we were dealing with training, and we were dealing with all these different technologies and different portals, and it was starting to become a headache. So that was the primary driver behind going hyper-converged. All right, so Stephen, I'm sure complexity in IT is not something that you've ever encountered in your career. Tell us what was going on in your business when you were looking to make changes. Well, like Josh just mentioned, Trout Port was also an early adopter with UCS in 2009, we have over 80 Cisco UCS domains. One of the big challenges that Josh touched on was, for us, we're connecting out to traditional fabrics, lots of backend storage arrays. While everybody on all the different support teams were building in redundancy, one of the challenges is over time, over the years, it grew very complex and that complexity impacted resiliency. So that was one of the things I started to deep dive into is looking at the different challenges and complexities of the environment and looking at ways to be more resilient. And through my journey of looking at hyper-converged solutions, the SimpliVity solution helped us be more resilient and eliminate some of the complexities. All right, so let's talk about kind of that journey, that transformation, what you're going through. Stephen, we'll start with you and then go with Justin as to kind of the implementation, what was new, what changed, how long did that take? The proof of value, proof of concept took us about maybe 60 days to do the evaluation. The rest was building out the ROI plans, looking at all of the different hardware elements and software components that we were using in our infrastructure and then painting the picture or creating the story and executive slide decks to show that an HCI solution could come in and completely disrupt how we were doing our traditional storage business. So all in all, finished up the POC in July and had POs going in November. All right, and how did that go? Did everything move as you expected it? It was, a lot of times we talk about hyper-converged, it's that day one simplicity should be there, goes in, works real quick, up and running fast. What was your experience? Yeah, it was one of the activities that stood out the most was we actually had an activity to actually start racking our first SimpliVity nodes and when I got into the office and I checked the actual log, I actually saw that our infrastructure services team had already had the nodes racked, cable powered and I went over to one of our systems engineers and I'm like, did that activity go through? And they're like, oh yeah, they've already got it racked, cable ready to go. So from there it was just creating the service profiles under Cisco ECS and start configuring how we wanted those CT-40s to come into the infrastructure. Right, and so both of you are using UCS as the platform for the SimpliVity, correct? We are using the Dell on the Cube solution and we actually just purchased another phase of SimpliVity which we're leveraging the Lenovo solution. Okay, great, so Justin, I'd like you to walk us through as though you were Cisco shop, you brought something in. Was there a big delta for kind of the deployment, the learning curve operationally and how did the deployment go for you? As a UCS customer, dealing with all the different generations of blades, dealing with UCS manager and everything that comes into that, we got into a particular situation where we had a bug that came up in our UCS stack and in order to get on a supported version of firmware, there was all this X, Y and Z that we had to do. Upgrading ESX infrastructure, having to deal with topping our net back of infrastructure and it was kind of a pain. So we kind of separated it out from UCS and we decided to go the on the Cube route. Okay, great, and how long have you been running now in production? We've been running for approximately 12 months. It's done its due diligence, it's working great. Don't really have any complaints about it. If not, it's made us more efficient. Backup windows are super small. Yeah, and have you added onto it since you've put in and also I'm curious, SimpliVity has done a lot of work to build lots of features and function very robust and deep stack, so replication, backup, kind of the way in optimization. How many of those pieces are you leveraging? Okay, so originally we're running a three plus one configuration, so three nodes in production, one used for our remote site backups and in case there's a problem, we can bring a system up over there. We've been pretty happy, especially with the backups. The backup windows on our UCS side, we're talking about an eight hour backup window and with leveraging the SimpliVity backups, we have that down the one hour window and we're backed up in minutes, which was a huge pain point for us. Also DR, we didn't really have a good DR solution in place. Our DR basically consisted of sending our backups to our Kolo, to another data domain, so we really didn't have a good DR solution in place, so it wasn't really a hard sell to the business when they look at the numbers and we're getting a DR solution for X amount of dollars versus having to buy smaller versions of UCS and all this other added infrastructure, so the feature sets that are included are all in there and they have no additional cost compared to some other vendors that we were looking at at the time. All right, Steven, what you've been experiencing, so what are you leveraging, what's kind of the future and expansion of the solution look like for you, and what applications are you running on the SimpliVity option? Right now our web and app tier, we're just now starting to migrate some Microsoft SQL, IBM DB2, we got about 7% of our non-production databases migrated into the SimpliVity infrastructure at the moment. You know, backups are our key and moving away from the traditional backup software and having to purchase separate backup storage for that. Today, just in one of our eight nodes SimpliVity clusters, I just looked at it at the beginning of the week, I got 1.3 petabytes of combined VM data and backup data and it's only consuming 37.5 terabytes, so the efficiencies are phenomenal. The backup and restores are super quick and it's giving back more man hours to the infrastructure services team to not have to spend time going back into the legacy backup and recovery infrastructure to restore VMs. And you bring up a great point there, wondering if you go into a little bit, the operations, what your people are doing now, was there a little bit of fear involved bringing in some of these solutions and how has it changed really kind of the, you know, the day-to-day activity for your business? It's not so much fear, it's just, they're so just used to the traditional methods and the pains that it would take to have to reach out and figure out how to get into the old legacy backup technologies and actually restore that particular VM. And so when I see specific problem tickets come out and I'm looking to see how it's going, what I'll end up doing, I'll grab the staff that was on that support ticket, create a little Webex form and I'll walk them through into this new hyper-converged solution, how quicker they could have recovered that system. And once they see it, once they experience it, they just can't believe that they can restore a VM in seconds. All right, so I'm wondering, so they're saying, wait, I'm not getting pinged as much, I might not have to run on the data center as much. You know, it sounds like quality of life's a little bit better for everybody. Well, the other thing too is we're also flattening out our infrastructure services teams. So we're empowering the OS engineers, the server compute folks to be able to use and go into vCenter and actually do those recoveries themselves, so. All right, Justin, how about you? I know it was the resources, one of the main reasons you looked at this, how have you found, what's that happened to the roles for you and your team? I would say the big differentiator just in our group is how easy it is to use training and manageability, using a single pane of glass to manage your entire environment, leveraging vSphere, which we're all pretty much used to using. It's a new guy that comes onto the team and I have pretty much showed him one time, this is subplumity, this is how we do our backups, restores, and I hardly ever get any additional follow-up questions from it. Great, a couple quick, last minute follow-ups, number one is what would you tell your peers now that you've gone through this, either lessons learned, things you'd recommend to them, or what you'd like to see going forward from the vendors that support your solutions? Justin, to start with you? So what I'd have to tell my peers, especially other people local who know that we have hyperconverged in place and they ask questions, is get involved in it. There's a reason why the market has expanded the way it has from just a couple players to, and what are we up to, maybe 30 plus players now in the hyperconverged space, and if they do their diligence and they do their research, take a look at subplumity because it's been a great success story for us. Stephen? I would just ask my peers to look at their traditional infrastructure, look at their availability zones or fault domains, and they're gonna have to walk down memory lane on those specific weekend disasters when they've had some type of catastrophic failure within their storage environment that has impacted hundreds of VMs. Here with hyperconvergence, you can build out smaller availability zones or smaller fault domains and you can minimize your risks. Also with the capabilities, you can make multiple replications within your data center, across sides of your data center or even outside of your data center. So the flexibility is there and everybody should be considering looking at hyperconvergence over the traditional. All right, I wanna give you both kind of a last item. Let's put aside the hyperconverged topic. Stephen, it's your first time at VMworld, Justin, you've been a few times. What's the coolest thing, either the cool technology you saw as I said, outside of hyperconverged or just an interaction that you have for people that haven't been to the show, Justin, something that excited you this week. I would say just from, I did a couple little booth presentations for SimpliVity. Just the interaction between the peers and the interest and the guts of the technology and what we're running in our infrastructure and our data center. And that social interaction, that's what I really appreciate about this type of show. All right, Stephen, first time guest here at VMworld and what was it like for you? I enjoy meeting my peers for breakfast and lunch and really just opening up and getting to know them, getting to know some of their challenges and that to me is just invaluable information and the sessions have been really good too. Well, we all wish we had more time for some of those in-depth conversations. I know the peers of mine that I get to talk to at the show, all the users of the technology are definitely the highlight for me at the show. We're always thrilled to be able to bring that to our audience, so we'll be back with more coverage here, day three, VMworld 2016. Thanks for watching theCUBE.