 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's the Cube covering EMC World 2015 brought to you by EMC Brocade and VCE I'm Stu Manaman, my co-host for this segment is Steve Chambers. We're both with Wikibon analyst firm You can find all of our research on Wikibon.org I'm going to dig into the cloud for this segment. I'm really excited to have Rama Duohara, who is CTO and the interim CIO of the University of North Texas Rama, your first time at EMC World and first time on the Cube. So thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me All right, so you know first of all you'll be a Cube alum. Well, you know once we finish this Okay, for those that aren't familiar in the University of North Texas You got a couple of campuses there. Tell us a little bit about the organization in your role here. Sure I'm with the University of North Texas system. The system oversees three campuses We have a campus in Fort Worth that deals with the Health Science Center Then we have we have our flagship campus on the indenting and then we have a Dallas campus Which also has a College of Law as part of it overall We have over 41,000 students currently enrolled and we expect to grow that to 45,000 in the near future Excellent. I actually have some relatives that live in Denton. So I'm familiar with the area Definitely gets out there for a good part of the year So we're going to talk about cloud. Can we first you know, I you know not to get Definitional or you know arguing over semantics, but you know, what does it mean to have a hybrid cloud? What does that mean to you? Sure So cloud means a lot of things to a lot of people and what it means to us is it enables us to be a service broker and Deliver infrastructure as a service Our goal is to be an IT shared service organization and that's how we started out and On-premise we figured we could control the quality the performance and the delivery of our services and We can have one place for you to come in and request a service where we can provision this and have Automation and orchestration as part of it. That's what it means to be In a hybrid cloud for us. Tell me something about the consumer of that cloud to describe me some kind of use cases or what people You know, who who's renting the stuff off you? You know, who's right? So we have decentralized IT on campus So College of Engineering College of Arts and Science College of Business all these different types of colleges and the three campuses will be the Consumers of our cloud. Now. Can we extend it out further? Absolutely, but we're starting with that as the goal Can you talk to us because hybrid is fanning both the on-prem and Public type pieces, you know, what are you using today? Is it is it the EMC? You know enterprise hybrid cloud or Federation enterprise hybrid cloud. They call it today. That's correct So today what we have in production in fact part off the press as last week. It's in production So we have the Federation enterprise hybrid cloud The next phase of it is to we have already evaluated multiple hybrid clouds like Azure AWS Google has an offering Rackspace and we're partnering probably with Microsoft on the Azure cloud and Our primary goal is to do our test and development out there and then move it back into our on-premise for our Production environment so so Rama if you just went into production. Can you walk us through? You know, what was that like? You know, you know, what went where you know, what applications you have where You know, what does it how long did this take? So it's a pretty intense process initially You start off with a planning phase which consumes most of your time and then we chose V block is the infrastructure behind it and we see emc's part of that Federation and We it took us about 45 days to get that delivered Then we get into the on-premise migration from our current state into the future state That takes approximately about 12 weeks and there's a lot of planning that goes into it What's included in that enterprise applications? Well, what does an enterprise application mean? It serves more than one campus. We also have campus it that caters to unique needs on campus currently and That's what's going on at this point as part of that We'll also have a portal where you can come in and self-service what you want We have we set up the portal with the metals in mind. So we have four flavors bronze silver platinum gold Yeah, and then we have a custom configuration that you can request that goes through a workflow process And it's that and do I am I getting a VM there or am I getting an actual application or I think that's where it Starts to get fuzzy on the edges of hybrid cloud, isn't it? That's a great question. So what this hybrid cloud covers is infrastructure as a service So you get a VM you get storage you get all the computing and networking behind it right all of that's orchestrated through this Hybrid cloud cool. The next phase is to get Platform as a service and then get software as a service. That's how you extend the automation and on our hybrid cloud The reason we wanted on-premise is to work on those types of things which require some customization What are you what are you doing around? Identity of users and things because that seems to be can be can be easier It can be gnarly for people and I don't know what the requirements are in education So in terms of the consumer that you're dealing with here the identity The identity is kind of screened and pre provisioned Okay, and you can request it as a guest But that will require a longer process and on the back end We have single sign-on to integrate all that through active directly So active directory single sign-on so I'm not logging in every single time with my Okay, that's really good. And so you're talking about as you're so you have you connected these are you going to connect them? How's how's that going to how's that going to work? Are you going to connect networks? Stretch networks and things like that. So we're going into a high availability environment and to do that We use in these vplex metro solution and that's how we're stretching our current Enterprise data center and a secondary one the services to that right and that's the technology we use both always on always on if it goes down instantly up and The great thing is we have the entire stack of the storage tier Starting from extreme IO to V max to V max to I salon and all of that is Obstructed through the automation tool called Viper Yeah, so so Rama walk us through a little bit about that how you made the decision to kind of go with the EMC's cloud That you know, they're relatively new sure in this space there where you need to see customer to begin with or you know How walk us through some of that? Yeah, we were not an EMC customer to begin with so what we did is we looked at converged infrastructure and Did the evaluation on that and found out the VCEV block was the only truly converged Infrastructure the rest of them had reference models. Okay. Do you share who else you were looking at her? Yeah? We we looked at net apps Hitachi and a few others IBM HP What I would call the top six we kind of looked at all of them and Dell was one of them and they're they're all they all offer a good services But in terms of truly converged infrastructure where you can make one phone call and get your services we found V block to be the leader Cool, I think which is also validated by Gartner and the others so it's just not my observation Could you tell me a little bit about the structure of your staff because it yesterday? We had a really interesting day on emc code and talking about DevOps and the changing, you know It's not just about developers or operations. It's working together and we've heard from some customers today They're already doing that but they're not calling it DevOps, you know people get in along and they are working, you know You've hybrid cloud necessarily has lots of different technologies in it and you got to run it and you're talking about moving to an always-on That which for you sounds fantastic. How is your team structured to you know? Architects deploy it do the planning operate so the enterprise Architecture of this is one of our weaknesses that we hope to solve by going to the hybrid cloud solution So we're able to get pre-tested Converged infrastructure where we don't have to go in and do that in terms of us Staff where before the converged infrastructure, we were in silos as a VM team as a storage team backup team and a server team Yeah, going forward. That's one converged team And then you're talking about the application side of it where before they had to request a service and wait on infrastructure They would directly go in and get things provisioned to work on their infrastructure They don't need to wait on the infrastructure team. I think that's the biggest change The next change you're going to see is we're kind of breaking up it into two groups the demand and the supply group And the demand is always exceeding supply at this point So we're trying to balance that out and the application team falls on the demand side of it where most of their request comes from the business units and We're trying to offset those by shifting some of our resources currently on infrastructure into the application site or what I call project management side of it and We're brokering services externally also to meet those demands And would you say what you're and I like the direction that's going on? I really do and um, do you do you think that's typical amongst similar organizations like yourself or do you think you're kind of leading a charge here? I think we're pioneering this it is not it is typical that some organizations have ventured into shared services Yeah, that model has matured, but in the higher education vertical or public sector. It's in its infancy We have a long way to go there in terms of catching up with the private sector Yeah, so we're working hard on that currently so so Rama I'm curious from from the application standpoint What does moving to a hybrid cloud do to be able to allow you to serve the business, you know faster deploy applications faster? You know, how does it fundamentally change your business? So we have some key it initiatives For example data warehousing mobility a CRM project meeting our goals on retention advising enrollment for students At the end of the day, we're in the business of making students successful and to meet those objectives I think the hybrid cloud is able to give us the performance and the reliability We need from an infrastructure standpoint to meet the application needs from the application side What this enables us is to move very fast Before we couldn't do that and it's time to market And the other thing we're talking about is before we had a huge consumption gap We would over provision and under consume now We are able to bring that in line with the consumption needs of campus Thereby what I call removing waste and reallocating that to some of the application and business needs There's some interesting benefits there. It must be the hardest thing about it I mean as have you questioned your sanity while you've been doing this or yeah I think the people side and the transition Into how we do business has been a very hard part as the technology always worked flawlessly and interconnected very easily I wouldn't say it has worked flawlessly, but what has happened is every time there have been bumps on the road We've been able to resolve that Either with the EMC Tiger team people who have been part of the project it takes a Village to put this together. Yeah, I mean there are a number of different partners who are at the team and as part of the project And you have to have great project management. I think that's one of the challenges and as long as you have great project managers I think you can accomplish. So Rama having just put this in production. I'm wondering now that you have hindsight Consider, you know, what advice would you give your peers to say? Hey, I could have done this a little bit better I should have planned this a little bit better. You know, boy, I wish I had known this before I went into it yeah, so all this started off with our You know vision of how are we going to be a strategic partner to our business and how do you build a high-performance team? If you're constantly dealing with what I call the basics Then you're not able to get into the most strategic or innovative things you want to do so My advice to those who want to embark on this is you need great leadership That's that has to be at the table because many of these initiatives cannot be driven from what I call grassroot levels of bottom up It has to be top-down and bottom up at the same time You have to have a great vision and then you need to find some passionate people in your organization who can Bring their passion to execute and on top of that you got to have good values that you can Put out there that the people can emulate and go in the direction that you choose to go Those are the things I would say you need to bring to the table right off the back. So, so Rami So you're the interim CIO For the system there I was talking to Vic Bagat who's the CIO of EMC this morning and he said you know big challenges It used to be you know hand us 10 million dollars in 24 months and we can build it the Taj Mahal And we were IT is really good at doing that now. It's faster repetitive, you know, it's different You know, how do you prepare your organization for this kind of you know new world as we say it's always changing faster And there's always something new to learn. Yeah, the old adage used to be give me faster cheaper and better But choose any two and our philosophy on that is we need to do it faster better and cheaper But we also need to do it friendlier because there's a lot of consensus building you have to do to to accomplish this So if you embark on a journey, that's how you have to look at it The time to provision is no longer many years or many months. That's it's down to how soon can you do it? I'm talking 12 to 25 weeks here. Yeah, and It's interesting that the you know faster better cheaper right here if you listen the devox community or pivotal specifically is The guy that runs cloud boundaries James Waters friend of the queue we've had him on a number of times He said today it's faster faster faster Yeah, if you can go faster faster faster it can take care of everything. Do you believe that or you know? I mean, you know money's still got to be an object. It is I Think it's not that simplistic. That's the you know, that's how I view it Pivotals got great upside and in fact, I think a lot of what you're dealing with in terms of doing analysis of unstructured data They can play a great role But there has to be a foundation to get there and I think the hybrid cloud kind of lays that gives you that platform So this is not your termination point. It's not the end of what you're doing So we have a framework where there is Converged infrastructure. There's virtualization automation. These are the service desk. Yeah IT service management and then the financial side of this where we need to show transparency So we use v realized suite to achieve that It which is part of the Federation and on top of that we have to govern it with proper security and Governance structure and that that's also very challenging. Yeah, even though you say hey We need to get there. So this is the first phase of it Oh, so I'm a Rama you know management and orchestration layer is the next battle for the whole industry I mean it needs to be simple. It needs to be able to I know you've just deployed it But how's it going so far? How does this from an operational model? You know work for you for your environment. Yeah, so it's going well I think our challenge is we didn't have a team that was ready for automation and orchestration Yeah, so the people side of it We had to address it with training and proper change management to get those things going but Do you think from your experience you only find these things out? When you do it because obviously you've done a lot of planning and thinking but yeah, you know We heard stories yesterday from EMC themselves We've got a huge amount of IT and they said right we're going to treat infrastructure as code It's the right thing to do and they learned so many lessons which they shared yesterday I mean, I think that's one that you've been through as well Yeah, that's that's a great question and you know your spot on when you say you can plan all you want Yeah, but when you're on the pioneering or leading edge of this You're going to run into issues that you're unable to discuss it with others because they haven't done it, right? So what do you do? You have to have a team that can adapt fast, right? And that's a key thing. That's why I say build your team with some diverse life experiences There's only so much training you can do and then with that diversity you overcome some of the challenges that you face as a team Well, that's an interesting point of view. I mean, can you I Can't from what you've told me sounds like you're on a journey and are you past the point and no return now You know you mentioned leadership. Could someone turn around say to you look this is crazy. It's costing us money Let's just go back to the old way. Can you ever imagine that happening? I don't see that happening because We spend a lot of time planning and if you look at the TCO We did a lot of analysis using activity based costing studies Yeah, where we studied the enterprise cloud outside and the offerings Yeah, and we're anywhere from 30 to 60 percent cheaper unless you're moving workloads in daily in and out in production Which we don't do Then it makes sense to have an on-premise hybrid cloud solution So that's why I don't see us turning back at this point So we hope to build on this because as I told you there there are many more steps to take here to be a truly mature organization what would you say to Maybe a similar organized organization self that's not doing hybrid cloud You know if I was a peer of yours, you know, and I said I'm not I'm not doing a hybrid cloud You know what would you think I was crazy or you know, maybe just with their big good reasons for me not to be doing it I think I would ask you to keep an open mind on that because there could be things that You could do that are more efficient without a full analysis. It's hard to say but You're pretty safe in Betting that you're going to have some efficiencies Simply because of the maintenance time and all the back-end integration you're going to have to do Is it no longer there is almost a no-brainer to do it. It's almost a no-brainer All right, I think that's a perfect line to end it on Rama. I really appreciate you digging in to the hybrid cloud solution from We'll be right back with lots more customers Luminaries and more here from EMC world. This is the Cube Silicon angle TVs live coverage. I'm Stu Miniman with Steve Chambers Thanks for watching. We'll be back with our next guest right after this quick break