 Hi everybody, we're back. This is Dave Vellante with David Floyer with Wikibon.org and this is theCUBE, Silicon Angles production of VMworld 2013. This is our fourth year here at VMworld. We're happy to be back in San Francisco at the Moscone Center. This is the spotlight on data protection. We talked a lot, David and I talked earlier about how virtualization really stresses not only storage, but generally, but data protection specifically back up. And Ed Ricks is here. He's the Vice President of Information Services and CIO at Buford Memorial Hospital in South Carolina. And Ed, I got to say it. First of all, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. Thanks, Dave, no problem. I got to believe that when you wake up in the morning, the last thing you want to worry about is packing up your data, you got, you got lives to save, you got, you know, applications to run. And so, so we're going to talk about that a little bit. But again, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Yep, no problem, thanks. So you've been at IT for a while. You've seen virtualization transform the industry and your company. So why don't we start there? Why don't we talk a little bit about, actually, before we do that, why don't we talk about the hospital, talk about Buford and what you guys are all about. So, Buford Memorial Hospital, we're the perfect niche community hospital. We're private, not-for-profit, independent. So we don't have a business alliance with any other health system. We do have some clinical affiliations with Duke University and a couple other hospitals for certain service lines, but we're on our own. So that means that we've got to do everything ourselves and we've got to do it right. We can't afford to make mistakes on that. Beautiful place, very, very busy, great retirement area. So we've got a lot of people that move down from the Northeast, particularly, to retire or at least live half the year in Buford. And that does a couple of things for us. One, it brings in a whole different expectation level of our patient base for the kind of service that we provide because they're used to a certain quality of service. So for a community hospital, just from a healthcare perspective, we're pretty progressive in some of the things we've done. And that's what's driven us from an IT perspective to do some of the same things and make sure that we deliver that. Because we're not an IT organization. We are a healthcare organization and I understand that our role in that is making sure that we can provide that care. How large is the hospital? We're a 200 bed hospital, pretty full most of the time. A lot of our patients, we have a lot of physician practices now that we own and employ the providers at and it's kind of the common trend in the industry right now. So talk about your virtualization journey. It's always useful to just sort of set up a point in time that you guys started to go down that path. When was that and where are you now? We've been working on server virtualization. I've been with the organization five years, I guess I should say that. So we started right then and I'd been actually a VMware user in my prior two hospitals. So we were pretty early adopters. So when you came into the hospital, there was no virtualization? There was not, no. Okay, you said, hold on. Yeah. Five years, what, not that long ago? No, it wasn't that long ago. We've done a lot in that time. I mean, I guess it's an EON in this industry, but still, we've seen enough memory. Funny is healthcare happens to be one of the verticals I think that we've always been behind. And there are always plenty of reasons in the healthcare why you don't. There's a lot of FDA. Very regulated in the environment. We need to change actions to come in and say, okay, we're gonna do this. So did you have to take, were you aggressive in doing it? Did you have to take a little risk with the odd application or two? Yes, but we had to push a lot of vendors to help us do the right thing, you know? And so I guess there was risk. To me, it didn't seem like risk because I knew the technology was going to work, but it was definitely working with vendors since the FDA regulations on a lot of the physiological devices integrate, slow down. You still have a few legacy things, but we're probably 95, 96% virtualized on the server side. And for us, that's about 225 servers that we run in a virtual environment. And then we're about maybe 80% virtualized on the desktop side. So most of our users now are using a virtual computer. So you say 90% of the physical servers are virtualized. Is that right? And how about the apps? So same, probably, yeah, probably 95, 96%. All right, so that was five years ago. You were the change agent. I would imagine people, maybe there was some friction early on, but now you're a hero in the organization. Some days, but yeah. Well, some days, right, when the email's not down. No, but yeah, so what was the business outcome? I mean, you simplified things, saved money, things go fast. I mean, it's a common refrain, but share with us your story. It is, and I've never been a big fan of calculating ROIs because that's what they are as a calculation. Really, if you're achieving what your business goals are, and again, we sort of stick to the same thing. My goal is to make sure we can deliver healthcare quickly, efficiently, safely, and all the things that it takes to do that. And so my role is to make sure that the clinicians can do that in any interruption. But at the end of the day, we still have a lot of things that we benefited from from an IT perspective, from the virtualization. Pretty small staff at our hospital. I've got seven, eight technical guys total. And that includes the help desk, you know, with all the user calls. That's pretty small, very busy. We support a little over 2,000 users. So it's a pretty active environment, and really only three engineers out of that group. Really, okay. So I hear you, it's a point of going back and calculating, it's just a number. But the business impact is stuff gets done faster, you can do more, you got more money to spend on other things. So what was the, how did you know that? Was it just the users saying, hey, this is great, you just sort of knew it. Morale went up, how did you sort of even, even roughly measure that? Yeah, it's kind of funny. We bundled a lot of things together at one time for the clinician. So we had a new software system that we were getting used to, and then we changed all this technology. And so we were calling it our invisible solution. But it was virtualizing the environment, zero client devices everywhere, integrating voice recognition through that system for all the physicians to do that. Single sign-on solution at the same time, which is a nice win. Doctors had a doctor actually tell me after they understood what that really was going to mean. It says, oh, nice. Now you're finally doing something for us, instead of to us. And it's a pretty good backhanded compliment, but okay. So now you take us through when you consolidated your physical servers, and what did you go from what to what? So we went from, at that time, we were probably about 175 physical servers. And now we have about 15 or so physical servers that are legacy that are outside of our virtual environment. Okay, so you had all these underutilized servers, and now you consolidate them, and now they're highly utilized. And of course the one application that was not underutilized was backup before you consolidated. And now you consolidate all these physical resources. You don't have any backup, which is this big resource-sucking application. So did that cause a lot of stress? It did, you know, and same thing, because of the regulations that we have, and because of the sensitivity of the data. And I don't think we're different than any other organization, but it is something that we take seriously, that that data is our medical record now, and so we have some legal obligations to protect that, and know that we have it. So if something does go wrong, and the hardware breaks, you know, but we've got to make sure we can at least recover that data. It was a huge problem for us. So it had a legacy tape backup system, and everybody did five or six years ago. You know, that's really all that was out there, and it was slow. We couldn't even really turn around our backups and get them done before it was time for the next backup, which was again a day later. So we had no shortness of that cycle, and there was no really ability to fix that. So anything went wrong during that cycle. You're missing the window, or you're not backing up, or you're making trade-offs that you don't want to make. So what's our strategy now? Where are you trying to take back up? Well, what we've done in the last, I guess, two and a half years or so has implemented a totally disk-based backup system now, and everything, and we've been, I guess, fortunate from a community hospital perspective. We don't have a ton of resources, but we try to do the right thing. If we do the right thing, we're willing to spend the money and do it the right way. So we basically have done, it's like Noah's Ark, we have two of everything. So we've got our live data replicated on another stand. So we used RecoverPoint for that. So that's kind of our real-time or new real-time. And then we've got two different backup systems, depending on the databases. They work better with each one's data domain for our main healthcare application. And it's just kind of fine-tuned to work really well with that. And again, two versions of that, and one geographically far away from us. So you talked about Beaufort, beautiful place. I mean, not a lot of places you can sit in the cafeteria lunchtime and see dolphins outside the window, literally playing out there. But what goes along with that is we get hurricanes. So we're right on the coast, obviously, and there's a lot that you have to worry about with that. And so, you know, we've got to be prepared. So geographic isolation was really important. And we did the same thing with Avamar. So everything but our one healthcare app goes to the Avamar's, and we've got two of those also. So one on campus and one of my data centers, and then in some leases. So wait, I need to understand. So you brought an Avamar first, and then dated them out another way around. Pretty much at the same time. How did you help us understand, how did you decide where to use each technology? David always talks about horses for courses. Which horse did you use for which course? Right, you know, I love the Avamar technology, and I love the D-dupe at the source and carving out some of that traffic to go over the network. And it fits well in the virtualized environment. And it fits really well in the environment. Our main healthcare app is a proprietary database, and the way they do their serverless-based backup now, it really works best in the EMC environment to work with data domain and the networker software. They've got a nice little plug-in EMC has that make the two top nicely together. That was an integration. It was an integration. It was great. So you feel big chunks of data, you've got to keep it together all. So that you want to do as fast as possible. And that's with the data domain, essentially. Both are really fast. I mean, we've been able to carve those cycles down so that we can actually back up our important data more than one time a day, which is fantastic. So something more to happen, and heaven forbid, you know, we have to go to restore. We're not losing those transactions from in the meantime. So you're up here. It's down to the sub day. Yeah, and that was really the goal. So you are a big EMC shop. I mean, why EMC backup? Was it sort of just a natural extension of your existing environment? Did you look at other players? Talk about that a little bit. It was. We've had EMC equipment since before my time at the organization and it's been a good relationship. And so it was a nice natural fit. Of course, once we started to virtualize with VMware and Cisco for our switching in the middle and now Cisco for even our processor and with UCS, Chassis, it's the nice fit that the three work so well together. And the other thing, you know, because I think you have to, as a customer, look at different opportunities and what other technologies are out there. And we've looked at a few other things either in the backup space or storage space, but what we would lose is that connected component of it from just everything works well together. So, you know, to go to the sub recovery manager and the Vplex and some of the other things that we can do, having all those technologies blend together has worked really well for us. Okay, so now where are you in terms of getting to, you know, your internal cloud, IT as a service, service catalog, where does that all stand? You know, I guess I get confused sometimes. I should have told you early on, I'm probably the dumbest guy you're going to talk to this week because I'm not an engineer, but I just understand what our business is and what we're trying to achieve. But I guess we were an early cloud, private cloud kind of a person. And I think that's really where we are. And I don't really have the qualms. I know a lot of people in healthcare are worried about public cloud and what that means from a security perspective, but smart guys, you got, people figure that out. You know, the technology is really there. It's just understanding and using it the right way. Okay, so you guys are, from a backup standpoint, are you able to sort of provide different levels of service for different applications? I mean, you sort of did it with the Avomar and the data domain for the different major apps, but do you have a business requirement to get more granular? To be able to dial up about that application and put more as well? Yeah, I mean, it's part of our disaster recovery plan, at least as a prioritizes things. And we want to back everything up. Anything that's got any clinical information, we have to have it so we can restore. You know, we got some regulations around that. From a business perspective, we want everything protected. And I think where we've made some of the, I guess cost-benefit decisions, maybe is more around recovery point and having that real-time backup, we don't have everything going to our replicated CM, but it's definitely our priority applications and data. Yeah, okay. So it sounds like you've integrated the backup, the DR, you've taken a holistic approach to that, which a lot of companies haven't. So what's next on the roadmap? Or what's, let me ask you differently, what's on EMC's to-do list from your standpoint? You know, one of the things that intrigued me is, I think I mentioned, one of the ways I get measured every year, just from an evaluation perspective, is, and it surprises people, it's about the adoption rate of our physicians to use our software applications, because we're trying to deliver software applications that can help them provide better care, make better clinical decisions at the point of care. And so to me, anything I can do to enhance that experience, and one of the things that I think I've always wanted to work on some more is, how do we just drive down the login time to their virtual desktops, you know, because it's an annoyance. And even if it's seven seconds, if we can make it four seconds, and be able to justify the expense to do that. So I love the flash arrays. I mean, I like, yeah, that's something I think makes a ton of sense. So you've got to look at the, when you look at the business value of those high cost professional people, having to log in 10 times a day, 20 times a day. Seconds count, isn't it? Well, and you've got to, you've got to have kind of a imperative to do this with electronic medical records and meaningful use, right? So you actually measured on that. So if I understand it correctly, it's a carrot strategy, at least in part. And there's a stick also. Let's make the experience better, and I'm sure there's a stick there too, but without that carrot, you know, doctors aren't going to... Yeah, the technology shouldn't be a barrier to what they're doing. And I think that's the approach we've tried to take. Excellent. So you heard about the V flash today, and is that helpful for you? I think that makes a lot of sense also. And again, sometimes I don't understand the degree of the technical, but I mean, I get the application and I understand why it makes sense to us. But I think anything that can speed that up, that it's a smart thing to do. So last question is customers out there that maybe haven't made the transformation. You know, they're struggling with backup windows. You know, maybe they're not meeting their backup window. The things are going unprotected or they're not getting their systems online in time. What advice would you give them with regard to, you know, taking on such an initiative? You know, I would definitely say, probably that data is the most valuable asset that we have as an organization. And so other than, I guess, our people that help deliver the care, but that data is extremely important. And you need to spend as much time thinking about that, planning for it, being prepared with it, as you do anything else in the environment. And I know it's probably the least sexy thing to talk about. And there's so many other things that are going on that are very interactive with your users. But to me, protecting that data is one of the things that helps me sleep in on it a little bit. Awesome. All right, Edward, listen, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you, David, or co-hosting with me. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. This is the Virtualization Spotlight. We're here live at VMworld. We're unpacking data protection. Data protection is a service. Keep it right there. This is Dave Vellante. We're right back.