 Okay, this is Dave Vellante and we're here at AT&T Park. It's the NetApp customer event at Oracle OpenWorld. We were here last month for the VMworld NetApp event. We had about 1200 customers, NetApp is expecting about four or five hundred today. We're here with Steven Simpaco and John Tobin of Sharp Healthcare from San Diego. Gentlemen, welcome. How are you doing? Good to see you. Good event. Oracle OpenWorld. Great weather. Fantastic weather. It was a lot colder last month here in San Francisco. How's the rain? No, it was good. It was good. It was just a little cool. So we're here at Oracle OpenWorld. You guys are obviously Oracle customers, you're obviously NetApp customers. John, why don't you tell us a little bit about Sharp. Sharp. We serve in San Diego County. We have seven hospitals. We have two medical groups. We have our own HMO. We are local to San Diego and about 15,000 employees were behind the military where we toggle between Qualcomm for the number of employees for a non-military or a non-government organization. 2,600 physicians. Yeah, it's pretty, we're the largest healthcare organization in San Diego. What's your role? I'm the director of IT. Okay, great. And Steven, tell us what you do. I manage the database team. And we have about 350 databases, both Oracle, SQL Server, Cache, MySQL. And obviously you've got a bunch of fast systems, I understand. Is that right? We do. We have a ton of fast systems, thanks to NetApp. Like dozens, maybe 30 plus, I'm told. Is that true? We have large enterprise databases on there, multiple petabytes of data. We're seeing all of San Diego holding customer information and patient data and personal information. But for a physician, they're never fast enough. Well, you know, I was going to say, so the healthcare industry is funny because physicians have never been the fastest adopters of technology, right? But so is that a challenge that you guys face? Talk about that a little bit. It is. It is a challenge. Because two second delay when they click on a button is a long time for a physician and they're complaining about it. What's interesting is that we're finding that the younger physicians are more adaptive and are willing to embrace the technology and the computer systems than the older physicians. So is the answer to give them all iPads or what do you think? You know, that is where we're going. You know, mobility is coming up. That's our next phase. You know, we're just, we need to have the mobile app so we could do bedside care. We can actually enter the charges right at the bedside. Are you guys building the equivalent of an app store for your enterprise? We have an app store for our patients, for our patient portal system, but we do not have an app store for the physician jet. Is that something that you see forthcoming or? Being in healthcare, you're kind of depending on the vendors, so we're kind of limited by the vendors technology and what they promote and what they deliver to us. And there's always the HIPAA looming, right? I mean, that's always a factor. So what's changed in the DBA world in the, let's say, last five or ten years? Well, you know, it's all about efficiency, performance, and having the database data available. So we're always looking for ways to be flexible for high performance and for redundancy. And with NetApp, you know, we have that agility to provide faster access to the data. So you guys are doing on-tap eight and seven mode. Is that right? Yes. Yeah. Okay. Have you looked at head clustering at all? And what are your thoughts on that? Coming up. That is... 2013. Really? That's a short term initiative for you guys? Yes, it is. Why? What's driving that? This year was storage grid. We partnered with one of our other strategic partners, Fuji, and we implemented storage grid for our dot cam images and stuff so that we can just inject the image into the storage grid and we could put it out in multiple locations so we have redundancy. And like Steve was saying, we need 724, you know, high response time, 724 solutions. We can't afford to be down at all. So that's obviously storage grid object storage, right? What kind of changes did you have to make to adapt to that whole object storage paradigm? You know, the policy driven and abstracting out the metadata. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah. Well, originally we had the Dicom servers at the 7 different hospitals and they were all local to the sites. We had no redundancy. We had no disaster recovery. We had no backup, well we had backups, but not in multiple locations. So with the storage grid we were able to centrally move all those servers centrally into one central location and then send those Dicom images out to multiple disks at two different data centers. Right, okay. So that was 2012, you're saying 2013's clustering, what's driving that? Reliability. That didn't say. HA. HA 724, can't be down. If the head goes down we need to have a couple backup heads. We need to have that over. Right, okay. So now I have to ask you, are you guys, I listened to Dave Hitz at a customer event a while back, maybe a year ago and he was sort of talking about how a lot of the customers don't turn on a lot of these efficiency features that NetApp sort of bundles in. Are you guys doing that, turning them on, I mean they're talking about things like compression or de-jupe or the thin provisioning, is that something that you guys use? We do. With the demands that our physicians and our healthcare needs, we implement those things like direct NFS, you know, access to the storage network faster than going through the OS. So we do a lot of PLCs to implement that stuff and to test it and to make sure it's sufficient for us. We're de-duping also. Are you guys virtualizing your apps? Yes, we are. About 75% virtualized. Is that using OVM or VMware? Okay, so how's that working out for you? Can you talk a little bit about that? Because a lot of customers say, well Oracle's sort of reluctantly supporting but we've found real benefits. Talk about your experiences there. With VMware we're not virtualizing any of our Oracle databases. With Oracle we decided to virtualize and building a rack, a Linux rack on NetApp and we have multiple instances and use resource management to kind of throttle those instances so they don't compete with each other. With VMware that is, we use a lot of that for our SQL Server environments. Our SQL Server databases and our SQL Server applications. The smaller niche applications. What do you like about NetApp and what could they do better? I like the tools that allows us to do snap cloning. We use that quite a bit to replicate databases so that we can create a reporting database to offload some of the reporting during the day so that we have better performance on our production systems, our clinical applications. I think what they could do better is integrate with Oracle in the rack environment so that we can do restores node-independent, instance-independent. That's a recovery capability that you'd like to see more seamless. They could recover but we have to recover to the same node that you did the backup on. You can't be any available node, it has to be the same one. That would allow you to... You need to be flexible enough to be able to restore to a different server name or different IP address. That would give you better asset utilization if you could do that and better recovery performance, is that right? Yes, more flexibility as well. We don't want to recover the node that we lost to instance. We want to be able to recover the database on any node of the rack. Where does NetApp rank in terms of your suppliers? The top tier, the middle of the pack, how would you describe that? I think it's one of our top tier. We started with NetApp in 2006 with a proof of concept and it's proven itself over the years and now we're up to three petabytes. Are they your primary storage supplier? They are our largest. We also use HP EVA for some of our other AIX applications but they are our primary and NetApp is growing and we seem to be moving off of the HP EVA onto NetApp. Okay, last question is what's the future hold for you guys? What's the real vision for your business and what do you need from an infrastructure standpoint to achieve that? We need 724 applications, absolutely zero downtime. Physicians are making patient care decisions, life or death decisions on information that's stored in the computer. We no longer have the paper chart. Those systems have to be available 724. John and Stephen, thanks very much for taking some time out and spending with us. Keep it right there. We'll be back with more interviews from AT&T Park. We'll be right back.