 Live from San Francisco, California, it's theCUBE at VMworld 2014 brought to you by VMWare, Cisco, EMC, HP, and Nutanix. Now here are your hosts, John Furrier and Stu Miniman. Welcome back to SiliconANGLE TV's live continuous coverage from VMworld 2014 here at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. I'm Stu Miniman and joining me for this segment is Scott MacIsaac who's the CTO of Secure 24. Scott, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me on. So we always love talking to the practitioners, the end users, and service providers are a great one for us to dig into because not only are you a user of technology but you're also a channel for a lot of the technologies out there, always going through refreshes and everything. Last time we caught up with Secure 24 was one of your guys two years ago here at the show so can you give us just a quick, a quick thumbnail, your role at the company and set some of the basic speeds and feeds of Secure 24. So been at the company about ten years, you know, we've seen it from a couple small two owners to, we're almost 500 employees now within the company, you know, we heavily leveraged VMWare technology, Cisco technologies, you know, we're part of their vCloud air network which is an interesting announcement for this event. You know, we're focused mostly on business critical applications so a lot in the Oracle stack meaning PeopleSoft, JDE, Hyperion, we do a lot of SAP hosting today and then your typical Microsoft stack and then the other part of our business is full IT outsourcing kind of lift and shift migrations where we manage all the infrastructure for customers up to and through the application. We typically don't handle a lot of the functional support but we do up to kind of the basis and down. Okay, but so there's mission critical applications you were talking about. This is not, you're not a test dev, try out any kind of things, you've been in the business for a while, you started out as a hosting company then and kind of move into some of the services, can you talk a little bit about that progression? Yeah, so we've never really been in the infrastructure as a service business. It's been more around the managed services, you know, I started off, you know, years ago where we're just physical servers in our data center where we put applications around and we help customers, you know, manage those critical applications. We're managing things that are, you know, if they're down, they're, you know, they're losing, you know, millions of dollars potentially, you know, can't ship, they can't manufacture what they're built, you know, whatever they make. So it's extremely critical that we have the infrastructure in place to support them and, you know, we've, you know, over the years it's just been kind of how do we scale that up, how do we scale out to support, you know, larger and larger clients. Again, not in the infrastructure as a service business so we don't really compete against Rackspace or Amazon in that area, more in the managed services, but, you know, it's just, it's how can we, how can we build a service offering around our application management? Okay, now my understanding, you've got two data centers, how big are you? How fast are you growing? Yeah, so we have two data centers in Michigan, one in Las Vegas, within SwitchNAP, you know, over the year I'd say last year was about, we grew about 30 percent this year, for next year we're going to, we're targeting to grow a lot faster than that, it's kind of a, you know, this year we focused on our business and kind of how can we, how can we scale ourselves for the future, but yeah, we're hosting the two data centers within Michigan and Arizona, one is production for West Coast clients and then DR to Michigan and then Michigan is production for East Coast, DR to Las Vegas. Okay, and, you know, you got the SuperNAP guys, you have some government clients there, what, who do you focus on, kind of enterprise, mid-range SMB, government, you know? We're kind of all over the board, I mean, we have, today we do some of the health exchanges for, for government, so we're in the government space, we host a lot of financial institutions, we host manufacturing, so it's kind of all over the board, you know, our thing is, you know, the government stuff is interesting for us because it's high-compliancy and that's what we do very well, so, I mean, we have dedicated infrastructure for these types of clients that allow us to, you know, meet, you know, FTI compliance, federal tax information or, you know, whatever, whatever requirement they may have, we can help them with that. Okay, great, so let's talk a little bit about what technology you're using. So you said you work with VMware, you work with Cisco, what's your gear look like? Yeah, so we're all Cisco UCS, from the top down, VMware is our hypervisor of choice, we're using NetApp as the storage back in, also EMC is in there as well, so it's not, we have a two-vendor strategy on the storage side just to help us, depending on the use case for what we're doing. So have you done any of the, you know, FlexPod, VSpecs, VBlock, any of that kind of stuff? Yeah, we are FlexPod, we're certified as a FlexPod so that we get that one throat to choke with the NetApp and Cisco, it's nice. We are not doing any of the VBlock today, mainly because we've just built it ourselves traditionally over the time and doing the engineered system just didn't make sense. Now, going forward, it may, but right now we're just kind of, we're focusing on the Cisco UCS, we use 1KV as the virtual switch, all tied back into both Juniper Firewalls and then Cisco on the core edge to run our MPLS back phone across the data centers. Okay, and kind of your virtual switching and how are you doing kind of the physical to virtual networking? So today it's pretty traditional, on the virtual side we're just using the Nexus 1KV, and on the physical side we're using 5Ks, plumb back into 7Ks, and then we use 6509s on the edges to run our MPLS back phone. Okay, and you know, how fast is your network growing? I mean, what are your guys doing? What keeps them busy? Just trying to keep up with the technology, to be honest with you, it's keeping them busy right now. We're growing pretty, the way we build out today is within compute pods or universes is what we coin them as, which essentially just a pair of core 5K switches plumb back into our core 7Ks, right? But looking through that, how do we move forward? How do we take it to the next level? What's our virtual networking director, SDN? And today we just haven't really made a decision on which way we're going to go. The fighting between VMware and Cisco is causing us to really not make that decision right now, so we don't know which one's going to live out. Okay, so the fighting's end up freezing the market for you. But is there a need, does the value prop sound good to you? What's your take on the whole SDN discussion? Yeah, I mean, I think it's definitely something we need, but again, right now until we can really figure out which direction the industry is going, we're not willing to make that decision yet. So we're moving, we're taking a subtle step forward, we're moving into more virtual firewalls, as opposed to your monolithic big firewalls that everything plungs back into, we're going to take a different approach and do firewalls per tenant that allows us to be more scalable, we can replicate that across between data centers, we can do easy failover between our facilities, so it makes a nice model and it'll kind of bridge the gap between the, to when SDN really becomes something that's real for us. Okay, so you're the CTO of the group, what technology are you looking at, either here at the show, what are the things that are kind of peaking your interest, or also with Cisco, what are you looking at? Sure, so today we're trying to, the big thing we're focusing on is around the application and what can we drive, virtualized SAP HANA is huge for us. We have customers that want it today, we've had customers that brought us the IBM appliances or different models that kind of plug in a physical appliance and this just doesn't make sense the cost point's too high for them. Sure, so I mean, VHANA only got rolled out earlier this year, so are you deploying it yet or are you planning stages? We're in the planning stages today, so we're actually, we're trying to build our TDI infrastructure today with using Cisco as the back end, obviously using VMware as the hypervisor and then using NetApp as our platformer choice there. Again, we'll do some stuff with EMC around it too, but mainly NetApp, but it's, how can we deploy this, how can we leverage it, how can we make sure that we can scale, how can we make sure we can deploy it quick? So it's more of a lab for us right now, we do have some dev environments that we're managing today and like I said, we have the production devices for using IBM or another technology there, so. Okay, Scott, I'm wondering, things like flash and performance, how much is that something that you guys really focus on and your customers are asking for? It's huge, if we can drive better performance, lower latency, better system performance for our clients, it's great. So we are looking at the all flash data center, everyone's calling it these days, right? We've looked at a bunch of different vendors, we have not really solidified our direction there, we've put pure, we've looked at extreme, we're talking Tintry and other vendors, but we just don't, we don't know who we're going to use yet and it's more of a 2015 direction, but we know that we're going to be able to sell it. Our customers have done some testing with some of the vendors out there and the performance gains have been just huge. I mean, it's been awesome. Yeah, I've talked to a number of service fighters that put it in as a tier first and then they try some pieces, of course, Amazon and the like have been really adopting flash, so expect to see that more. Our challenge is that right now, a lot of the flash players aren't the big names, right? And we'd rather deploy something with a bigger name like an EMC or a NetApp just because if there is a problem, if you go to your customers and say, hey, who are you running, why did you have an outage? Well, it's NetApp, it's EMC, it's whoever and they don't look at you and say, well, why are you running it on no name? But in the same sense, some of the smaller companies today are more agile, they're more flexible for us and they're actually, I think, going to be a better offering, but it's just how do we get there? Yeah, so I mean, you're Cisco customer with lots of UCS, if you looked at, I mean, they've got partnerships with Fusion I.O., they have the Invicta piece as part of that. Have you been looking at those technologies? We've looked at Invicta a little bit. More, what's intriguing to us is the whole storage blade that they're talking about where we can put a blade right into our UCS environment, but more for specific use cases with our customers. Like if we have a need for extremely low latency, something that's dedicated to them, the storage blade would be great. Fusion I.O., again, we had those in-house as well. We just, we haven't seen the need for it yet. We have a couple clients today that it may make a lot of sense they're doing some SQL clustering and they need extreme high read performance and from a storage rate, we just can't deliver it, so Fusion I.O. would be how we would, how we would direct ourselves there. Okay, so. Yeah, look at your customers, you know, I'm sure you have many that stayed with you for a while. You know, where's the growth? You know, how much are they, you said you don't compete directly with the Amazon to the world, but are they in the conversations that you're having with your customers? Not necessarily, I mean, our go-to market is more around our touch and feel to our clients and the service level that we can really give them because we're, you know, we're more flexible. We, you know, they're not going to be a big fish in a little fish in a big pond. It's going to be the other way around so we can give them that touch. That's our differentiator in the market today is the customer service aspect of it. I mean, look at us. We're more of a customer service company that does technology as opposed to a technology company. Okay, yeah, it might be, you know, rack spaces, you know, the fanatical support there, so, you know, obviously that's important. When you look at the companies that supply technology to you, you know, you work with Cisco, you work with VMware, EMC, NetApp, looking at others, you know, what's the white space in the technology? Where do you think they need to go to help support your business and your customers' needs better? Flexible, they need to give us the support we need. They need to give us the technical resources that can help us build and be more scalable. That's been a lot of the challenge we've had is a lot of times we have a lot of smart guys that work for Scare24 and getting to the right people within these vendors has been challenging, but when we do, I think we build an awesome product and we can help scale it, we can help, you know, be, you know, more flexible, but it's more about, you know, how do we drive that with them and how do we build the technology that'll take us forward. Yes, so many of the companies out there, they say you should be able to take our product and you know, it's scale out, it's scale up, it's scale infinitely, and it's real simple, so I guess you're saying it's not really there yet. Yeah, not everything. Some of the new stuff that we've seen come out like Pure or even some of the newer NetApp stuff that they've launched with the WFA and some of their workflow tools, it's easy. It makes it a lot easier for our guys to manage, it makes this a lot easier to scale, but then there's, you know, look at your traditional way of how you provision within a VMAX frame, it's been traditionally very difficult, it's time consuming, there's no easy way to automate it, so we need vendors that we can bring in that help us automate the complexity out of our IT. Okay, so Scott, you know, when I look at, you know, I look at VMware, Cisco, NetApp, EMC, they all tell me that the service riders are one of their most important, you know, customers and you know, really turns into a channel for their players, you know, don't want you to call out anybody specifically, but you know, how are the big guys doing that, you know, meeting your needs and, you know, making you feel like, you know, you have a say at the table and helping you deliver for your customers? It's getting better. As we get our name out in the industry, we're getting known within the different vendors and how they can help us, but I mean, the biggest challenge I still see is around vendors really understanding our business and having a sales model that understands our business. If a vendor's going to try to sell something and they're going to push away from the cloud because their reps aren't compensated on it, then that doesn't work, right? They need to have a model in place that'll allow their reps to push business our way and still get compensated on it because that money's driving everybody. And I just, they're starting to get there, but they haven't, I haven't seen it fully yet with all the vendors. All right, well Scott, we always position as a journey to all these technologies, so I really appreciate you helping us unpack, you know, your business and some of the real challenges out in the marketplace. We will be right back with our next segment with Silk and Angle TVs coverage from VMworld 2014 right after this quick break.