 from the Wynn Resort in Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference 2016. Brought to you by Nutanix. Now here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. Welcome back everybody. This is theCUBE, we're here live. This is our second day of coverage of the .NEXT Nutanix Conference. A lot of action going on here. Joris Vuvray is here. He's the head of networking and systems management at SwissLoss. Yes, that's it. Hello everybody. Welcome back to theCUBE, so SwissLoss. Tell everybody what SwissLoss is all about. SwissLoss is a Swiss lottery based in Basel in the north of Switzerland. And we're doing traditional lotteries, instant tickets, sport betting, horse races betting too. We have like 6,000 point of sales in Switzerland, 3,000 out of a point of sales of online connector or data centers. And we also have our own gaming platform on-premise running on Nutanix with almost 600,000 registered users or players. Yeah, so lottery is a big deal because we are a non-profit organization gathering money for the common goods in Switzerland. And we're making one million Swiss francs profits each day. So we have to keep the pace and make sure everything's running in the IT to have happy customers. Well in the last 10 years online gaming has exploded and it's an interesting dynamic because there's obviously some local opposition that's regulated, like you say, a non-profit. Talk about the dynamic in the industry and how you guys got started and how you're growing. So it's a very old company. So it grew up from sport betting actually and then we had many companies, other companies doing instant tickets. And we went all together to build SwissLoss for a couple of years. And we are doing all the IT by ourselves just as software development is done externally. And internet is becoming more and more important with the generation changes. People want to play mobile. People want to play on the internet. So it's a big deal to keep the pace with that and to also have interactive games on the internet. So for that you have to have a very good background infrastructure, having system which gives a good answer times and all that stuff has to be running milliseconds. So it's a big deal and that's the reason why we are always looking at a modern way to do IT, to simplify things and to make things run as easy as possible. So paint a picture, if you would, of the infrastructure and the sort of applications that it supports. What does it look like? So there's a workload we are running on Nutanix. It is mainly a web workload like Tomcat server, Gboss web servers or backend servers. We're not running any big databases on Nutanix. We're running Splunk on Nutanix, so big Splunk indexes for example, but not databases like Oracle or also big database. And we have two data centers, so two production blocks each with five nodes, 20 terabytes of Nutanix storage. It's a hybrid storage with SSDs and SATA disks. And we also have a test block to test everything. So the goal with Nutanix was to forget our infrastructure as Nutanix is saying to have an invisible infrastructure, to gain time for the engineer to focus on other goals and managing storage area networks and all that stuff. So I think it's like the David Allen way to go to forget things or getting things done another way, to write everything down and forget it. It's the same for Nutanix to install your system and then forget them to be able to focus on the application and having happy customers. Can you give us a little bit of a before and after? What did your infrastructure look like? How many people do you have? What were these doing their time and the picture after? So the team of engineers like six guys doing that stuff. So before we had traditional blade servers and HP storage, fiber channel storage. And we always bought new shelves, new disks to grow this storage because of our needs. And after sometimes you notice that this will come to this end of life. The lifecycle of the product will come to an end and you have to change everything. So when we talk about that with my boss, the ID popped up to do these things differently and to find another solution. We also wanted to run all of our rock load which is mainly most of the time based on Linux machines on the Linux hypervisor. So we went to the market and had a look at what was around and Nutanix was the only solution to bring as a KVM solution and VM management all in one box. But the Acropolis hypervisor was only announced last year and you're actually a beta customer of it. So can you walk us through? I mean, it's something unproven. I mean, Linux KVM's been around for a while but how did you convince management to go with this? How'd you even find it in the first place? That was not easy but we made a POC with Nutanix and we were amazed how this hardware was performing and KVM was efficient for our workload. And we spoke with Nutanix and told is there maybe something missing for the management of the VM? We'd like to have something really easy and you only had KVM but not the management of the VM on top of it. And a guy called Bass, our engineer in Europe, told me yes, you know, there's something around you just have to wait a little bit and you'll have early access to this and we'll make sure you'll be happy with the product. So it was called Acropolis. So we had early access to Acropolis in October 2014. We've installed it in two days, made the training of the teams and I think two weeks after we began to move virtual machines in production on top of Acropolis. Relative HV team. Yeah, yeah. And how did their operations change, their workflow? So the workflow changed because Nutanix is really easy to manage. I always said I could give an iPad to my kids and they will be able to manage HV and do that stuff. You know, there are no, most of the time playing Minecraft on their iPad, building blocks and I hope they will build Nutanix blocks later on their iPad too, but for the team it's like a move from a system administrator having to patch fiber channel, plug-in storage, plug-in servers to a more analytic way of doing IT and analyzing troubles in the application. So we can really focus on business application or business transactions that are important for us and focus on performance instead of having to have a look at hardware failure and all that stuff. And you said you're not running your database workloads on Nutanix? No, but I've heard about the ice-caze stuff that Nutanix is bringing now, so we were too early with our migration of Oracle databases, but it would be too expensive for us to virtualize Nutanix and virtualize Oracle on top of Nutanix, yeah. Because the database license cost? Yes, of course. Oracle is not cheap, so it's pretty expensive, so you have to license your work clusters and as a nonprofit organization we are not able to do that, yeah. So what do your Oracle run on? We run our Oracle database appliance, yeah. So you can cut your license cost to half? Yes, we could optimize our license with that, yeah. Yeah, so it's interesting. We have a lot of folks on, a lot of clients we work with that have that same issue. It's just what it is. I mean, it's a very large component of your TCO is the Oracle license and maintenance cost, and so... And that's what we appreciate with Nutanix. You know, we are a small company, so we can go to Oracle and tell them you have to change something because we can't afford this. Whereas with Nutanix, we had a good, good partnership. We could bring new... We could give us feedback to Nutanix for Acropolis and, for example, bring things that we needed as an early adopter and it's a really, really great partnership. So, George, you talked about kind of the operational impact. What about from the economic standpoint? Many out there, our feedback from the community is hyper-convergence is great, but it's not cheap, it's not necessarily, you know, from a capex standpoint less expensive. What's the overall economic picture look like for you? I've heard that many times. I mean, I've talked with many people here all saying, yeah, it's maybe good, but it's maybe too expensive or I don't know, but we wanted to choose the best product that fits for us so, I mean, the investment was not that huge and if you have a look at the simplicity of the solutions, there's a huge gain in time for the engineers and a huge return of investment when you have a Nutanix blocks running because you can just forget it and with all the solution, you have to do driver's updates or firmware updates or whatever and losing a lot of time with that. And also, one aspect which is important for me is the power and cooling. I mean, when you have huge blades servers or huge core switches, it's using a lot of power and it needs also a lot of cooling so we've also made some great improvement in that area for a lot of sensors. Have you quantified that at all? I mean, I've talked to some Nutanix customers to get from, you know, 10 racks down to one rack. Yeah, it's like one rack to four units. Wow. Yeah, yeah, it's huge, yeah. So it's a big deal, I mean. How do you, let's talk about performance, I mean. Yeah. Performance to me is I'm getting consistent, predictable performance, that's a good. Yeah. Is that the right way to think about it? Or are you actually looking at it? No, I'm increasing my, I'm shrinking my footprint and increasing my performance. No, we're trying to increase performance all the time. I mean, it's very important. So I think Docker will also be a big deal on Nutanix because you want to simplify everything and Docker is also a way to simplify things and to make your application run with better performance and also better security. I mean, security is also a big challenge and that's also something that Nutanix changed in my company to have the engineer be able to focus on performance and makes things easy. So you're using containers today? No, no, not yet in production. We've made some experimentation and I'm glad to hear that Nutanix will be integrating. Okay, so you feel you, by the time the roadmap matures from Nutanix and you're using it kind of. Yeah, I'm sure we'll use this feature. So what about security? Splunk customer? Obviously that's one of your primary use cases. Yeah, so we're using Splunk on top of Nutanix. So security is a big deal for us because we are certified for products like the Euro million, for example. So we have to be certified by the World Watch Reassociation to sell some kind of products and security is a big deal for us. So Nutanix was also important in that area because it's bringing also security in the iProvisor and in the World Solution which was also important for us. I would imagine too, I mean, this whole idea of simplicity, making the infrastructure invisible, dumbing it down if you will. I mean, it's not, it's complex but simplifying the infrastructure, what impact does that have on your ability to deal with security, respond to security incidents, spend more time on security? Are you able to shift resources toward things like security or? Or the skill sets too diverse? Yeah, it's too diverse, I think, because security is another area so it's nothing to do with these hyper-converged things but the gain in time was mostly to focus on other things and also one thing that's important when you look at Nutanix and take Nutanix and you suddenly have a gain of time to do other things, other areas of IT that you'd like to change, it's making you disruptive too as administrator or as IT manager, thinking IT in another way and also trying to push disruptive products in all the projects that you have to make things change and make things easier in another area of your IT things. So you're pretty early on the adoption standpoint. Where's the white space? What are you asking for the vendor community to help you kind of grow and move even faster? So we're always asking to have things that run easy and today everything is based on REST API and automation so that's a big deal that we'd like now to do to automate things. We've been using, for example, Cisco ACI for a couple of time now so I think now the big challenge is to make things stick together, integrate everything together and make things easier as it is now. So what's on Nutanix's to-do list from your perspective? From your perspective, what do you want to see Nutanix do specifically? I mean, you were talking generically just then about integration. What's on their to-do list? I think container was a big deal so we really wanted to see that but I don't know, I think the Nutanix roadmap is going in the right direction. I won't tell them what I expect them to do because they're always one step forward so they're always one step forward to our expectation and I think I was at the conf last year and I have the feeling that it was five years ago because they're bringing so much new features that it's just crazy. I mean, the announcements today or yesterday, that's just everything that we expected Nutanix to do so I want to allow me to tell Nutanix what they have to do. Another happy customer. We'll give you the last word, your experience here this week, second dot next conference. What are you going to tell your colleagues when you get back, what have you learned? Oh, I've learned a lot of things. I mean, the announcement that the keynote, that was just huge and I will tell my colleagues that they'll get the gain of time next year maybe to do all the things that there are now spending time on them. What about the announcement was most intriguing to you? Docker is for me the biggest deal. As I said, it was very important. Native Docker, persistence. Yeah, persistence storage for containers. That's a big deal and that was an issue for me before. And doing that inside of Nutanix natively and taking advantage of all the simplicity. Also self-provisioning is a great, great feature. George, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. Thank you. All right, see you again. Thank you, gentlemen. All right, keep it right there. Everybody, Stu and I will be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE. We're live from the win in Las Vegas at dot next. Right back.