 Hi, this is Stu Miniman with wikibond.org. Here with SiliconANGLE TVs, live continuous coverage from EMC World 2012 in Las Vegas. Find the smartest and brightest guests that we can and extract the signal from the noise. And joining me is a Rockstar CIO, Tony Vaden with American Tire Distributors. And I've talked to a bunch of people at EMC and they said that this should be one of the highlights of the end users that we have at the show. So Tony, first time on theCUBE, welcome. Yes sir, thank you very much. Glad to be here. So you are a CIO and could you tell us a little bit about kind of the rolling scope of your function and a little bit about your company? Sure, I am the CIO and I ultimately, as you would imagine, have ultimate responsibility for all of IT. We are an independent tire distribution company based out of Charlotte, North Carolina. We basically have service independent tire dealers, big box retailers, car dealer networks, and basically a large platter across the U.S. for redistribution models. Yep, and you can just talk right to me Tony. So absolutely no. So big piece of your environment is virtualized. If I heard correctly from the prep document I had, they said you're like 99% virtualized. Yeah, well you basically have only two small environments left that we have virtualized. So how many applications do you have in your portfolio and can you give us a little bit of the scope? We probably have 30, 40 applications. We have a core Oracle e-business suite is really the core process or the application that runs our technology footprint. We have a lot of answering applications that run around that as far as like CRM, different data nodes. We have a hybrid e-commerce platform that integrates well. We do a large part of our business from an online perspective. So yeah, we have probably, I would guess a portfolio that's fairly standard of most companies. Okay, so 30 applications. What's the size of your VM farm? We have about 500 VMs on about 75 physical nodes. Okay, and what's the underlying infrastructure? It's an HPC class blade system running on two VNX storage arrays and a Cisco Nexus, kind of a clear integration point within the networking. Okay, so when we talk with our community about kind of the journey towards virtualizing mission critical applications, Oracle is one of the kind of the hot button topics. There's kind of the support challenges sometimes, there's licensing things. Can you share with us a little bit about what your experience has been? Absolutely, we started in the virtualization path many years ago. And you know, we looked at this as a journey and really had to put the strategy together to be successful. It's like any other roadmap. If you really don't commit, and I think one of the things I've heard used here at the summit was no U-turns. So you basically, you got to put that roadmap together and stick with it. And I think once you start the virtualization story and you really test, you realize it's not that hard. I don't oversimplify it, but the application stack is really working with each of your partners from a technology, a support, and a licensing perspective. It's really a core to what we were successful with. And it's having proactive discussions. I know there's a lot of discussions around with Oracle support, with Microsoft support, with any of the technology providers, but at the end of the day, once you create that relationship and you discuss what you're trying to achieve, they all support me. Okay, great. So it sounds like it's really just partnering with your suppliers there. Did you have to fight for some of these solutions? Initially? You know, I think over the years, and again, you go back three, four, five years in the storyboard for this early on, it was like nobody wanted to. See, we had to feel like we had to prove to the provider that it would work. And over the years, almost everybody's now created their own virtualization strategy and story. It's kind of hard to say no, because they do it themselves. Okay, so one of the things that doesn't get talked about a lot is who helps kind of with the deployment and putting things together. I would think services would have to be pretty heavily involved for virtualizing some of those environments. Who's kind of your partner along that? Is that directly with EMC, or how did you kind of put together the architecture and the blueprints to do what you're doing? That's a very good question. Over the years, depending on which portion of the technology stack we've used partners, or we've used integration teams, we've used just resellers or bars that's been successful, we use a company in the Charlotte, North Carolina area called Vero, from the underlying virtualization stack. You said Vero, right? Vero, yes. Yeah, did you attend their Vero Madness Conference then? I have not, unfortunately, I'm not allowed out of the office that much. I was stuck there doing the strategy work, but my team has done a lot of work and interfaced with them. And really, creating that core virtual structure, early on it was virtual forums, now virtual clusters and how we built that, the dynamic nature of what we've done was successful. You know, and I think if you look at the architecture and the pieces that make this successful, the OS, going to an open source like a Linux, as opposed to proprietary Linux, I'm sorry, Unix platform, moving to the X86 architecture. One of the things that we talked with Oracle very early on was how do you develop your code? What platform do you use? They use a Linux stack. They use an X86 stack. So, and again, that was early on. In our story, that made sense for us to gravitate and that's been a huge part of our success. We've also used a company called House of Brick. That is what I would consider an expert in the field of Oracle virtualization. Actually, so we held a community call with Wikibon with House of Brick. We found that they are, you know, definitely on the leading edge of virtualizing Oracle. So, not surprised to hear them come on. They've been a great contributor to kind of sharing that information, blazing some of the path to show other people how to do that. So, you know, it's still kind of early days for a lot of people in that Oracle environment, but we love the proof points to be able to show that that can be done. Wondering if we could talk about your backup environment a little bit and how that plays into your virtualization journey. We found, you know, virtualization, you know, broke some of the underlying processes. You know, is there anything you can share with your peers on, you know, how virtualization affected your backup environment and what you've done there? Sure, and I would, if you don't mind, probably add to that, including DR and high availability, all the same bucket. Yeah, please, absolutely. I mean, it's certainly using Veritas and data domain as a way to backup our data. You know, all solid state, we eliminated tape from our infrastructure probably almost three years ago. And if you think about the amount of data and trying to recover for something like tape, it's impossible. And when you get into the petabyte range of storage, even if you're in, you know, even a half petabyte or even less, tape is just unpractical anymore. And so when we sat down with EMC and their portfolio of the companies that they've now knitted together, it works very well. So we use recovery point between 2V and Xs to copy immediately or on-the-fly real-time data between our locations and we actually back up in our data center, our secondary data center. So from a real-time perspective, we not only have that ability to track transactions from our data center, our primary data center to our backup data center, but we also do real-time backups from that perspective as well. Great, so you're 99% virtualized. Do you know, what's the outlier? Well, there's two. We actually have one production rack environment we haven't virtualized. Let me rephrase it. We haven't put in production. We have two rack environments that we have in production. One is virtualized, running very smoothly. The second one is just a matter of timing for us. We had a lot of workload on our plate. We have virtualized the rack in our secondary data center. It's running. We do all our dev and test. So all our heavy transactional testing volume is done in a rack environment. And honestly, it's just a little bit of a timing perspective. We'll probably do that the latter part of this year. And we have one BI instance that just from a volume of, again, timing, workload, we just haven't got to it yet. But we will be 100%. Yeah, so I'm wondering in the journey that you've gone through, was there anything kind of organizationally internal? There's a lot of times some kind of internal politics that you have to sort out. Anything that you learned along the way that you might tell people to look out for? You know, I think that depends on your company and your team makeup. I think I had to call it luxury of having a great staff that embraced it from the very beginning. Even the application development team, when you showed them the ability to spin up a virtual instance and expand it or move it and do that very dynamically, you didn't have to wait for a long provision time. You didn't have to get in a queue for a physical server. You didn't have to be told, oh, I'm sorry, we don't have the server this week. You've got to wait for six months or two weeks or whatever. It was actually a fairly easy story for us. So great point. Have you done any quantification on kind of your time to market for your applications and moving those out? Well, you know what I would say at this point is storage provisioning, server provisioning is almost a non-equation in our process. That's great. You know, even we have a fairly consistent PMO process. We use tool gates as how we deploy applications or business solutions. You know, there's a checklist from each tool gate of how we deploy. There's a check-off portion of what we do that's taken care of in the process, but it's usually a non-event from our perspective. Okay, great. So just trying to see, you know, if there anything else in your environment that we haven't touched on that I think would be something your peer should learn? Well, you know, again, I go back to, I think there's a lot of ambiguity out there or a lot of the cloud discussion probably should come into play. What is your strategy? You know, we've created what we would consider an internal cloud solution. Right. We are hybrid. We have taken some of our applications to the cloud like CRM or payroll or HRIS or several of those which makes sense for us to do. But we also, from a core competency and what we've kept internal have created an internal cloud. So we can change from dynamic nature of how we position the servers, the storage and all that stuff to be successful. And to me, the best advice I would give is you need to put a strategy together and it is virtual and it is cloud and it's real is to focus on that. Well, well, well, Tony, you know, I got a little sticker here that said I did. It looks like you're getting some recognition for sharing with your peers. We definitely at Wikibon and SiliconANGLE appreciate you coming to share with our community about all the things that you've learned. Thank you for coming on theCUBE and we will be right back after this brief break.