 The Cube at EMC World 2014 is brought to you by EMC. Redefine VCE, innovating the world's first converged infrastructure solution for private cloud computing. Brocade, say goodbye to the status quo and hello to Brocade. Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody. This is Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick. Nancy Majors is here. She is with Brown University. I first met Nancy over Skype. We Skype Nancy into the Wikibon Cube and had a great conversation. Brief, but very good conversation about what you guys are doing at Brown and what you're doing with data protection. So welcome to the real live Cube. Thank you. So how's EMC World going for you? It's been great. Very exciting. You come every year or what's the scoop? I try and come every other year, but yes. Yeah, okay. It's hard to make it every year. Do you do IT practitioners like yourself? I mean, how many events do you do a year? I usually do EMC World or BM World, one or the other of them. And then we do a lot of higher ed type events where we get together with other higher ed universities. Yes, specific to your industry. So what's going on at Brown these days? Paint a picture for us of the IT shop and the environment and things are booming in your business. I'm running around with my kids looking at colleges everywhere I go, their buildings are going up and there's growth, isn't there? Yes, there is. There's lots of growth. In my organization in particular, we have a lot of projects around virtualization, virtualization of the desktop. We are reaching out to across our university to gather in huge amounts of unstructured data that are out in our faculty and administrative offices, research offices where lots of unstructured data is just islands and we're trying to bring that all into our central data center and protect it and make sure that we have the right permissions and sharing and capabilities. So paint a picture of what your IT shop looks like, maybe infrastructure, applications, people. Yeah, so we have a SCT banner as our student information systems and that runs on an Oracle platform so we have some pretty big Oracle databases in supporting that. We have a lot of SQL databases supporting all sorts of applications, our medical ref goods for students, things like that. Lots of SQL databases. We have the banner, Oracle, SQL, plethora of other applications. How about the infrastructure itself? I mean you have highly virtualized, we have about 70% of our servers are running on VMware and the other 30% is running on AIX, L-Pars. So I guess you would consider that 100% virtualization if you consider the L-Pars to be virtualized. I would think they are, right? Right, yeah, so then we are 100% virtualized. So we just had a segment on virtualizing Oracle. We remember early on, I say the early on, in the early days of VMware penetrating Oracle, there was a lot of fun in the marketplace, a lot of tension, particularly amongst Oracle sales reps. We love you guys, but they didn't want VMware coming into the Oracle environment. Did you experience that and did you just sort of dam the torpedoes or were you afraid that Oracle wouldn't support it? Talk about you have to go back to physical if there's a problem, do you remember those days? So we haven't put our Oracle is still running. I was running on AIX, but we have a project to actually look at moving that now onto an Intel platform, right, as opposed to, the L-Pars are virtualized, but Oracle has no problem with that running on that type of virtual environment. So we've been doing a women in tech series this week. It's been pretty cool. John Furrier has been running it, and I don't know if your title is not storage admins, Associate Director of Disaster Recovery and Storage Services, you're the storage guy. What's it like being a woman in a storage admins world? Most storage admins, you look around EMC world. There's not a lot of women here. There's a lot of guys. There's no line at the ladies' room at this place. So what's it like? You know, I grew up as a UNIX admin real early on, and I won't tell you when because I'll date myself, but yeah, I've always been like one of the lone women in the IT field here, and it's interesting. It's an interesting dynamic. You have to earn the respect along the way, and it's been great for me. You've embraced it though, yeah? I have, absolutely. So talk a little bit about what you're doing in terms of protecting your data. This is sort of the conversation that we had over the Skype at Wikibon, but take us through that. Yeah, so we have a lot of different levels of protection, so on our high priority applications, we do data replication directly of the databases, and we're using EMC products for that, both Symmetrics Arrays and SRDF, as well as RecoverPoint to VNX Arrays for some of the SQL databases. So that's the real high priority stuff that we actually just replicate the data live as it's happening. We have recently implemented Isilon, and we're doing data replication of our Isilon environment too, because that's just so big I can't back it up anymore. I mean, you know, when you have a petabyte of data, it's... How do you back up a petabyte? You don't. You don't. You replicate it, so we're doing data replication of that. We also have a EMC network environment where for our nightly backup environment, and we use EMC Networker with VMware VADP combined with that to protect our VMware environment, and all of that gets stored to data domains, running DD Boost with Networker. And then additionally, we got a whole lot of data protection. We got a lot of stuff going on. Our databases, in addition to the live replication of the data, we also do nightly RMAN and SQL dumps, and those are done directly to data domain supporting RMAN and SQL. So Nancy, working it around, you get the benefit of being on kind of the cutting edge as the young kids keep coming through and all the changes that they bring and the trends that they're kind of propagating. How, obviously, Facebook was founded out of the school, Dell's founded out of the school, a lot of innovation, a lot of new processing. Are you seeing any, you know, obviously all the kids are on mobile devices, so that's probably changed some of your guys' requirements. What other kind of, either unstructured data or BYOD or other things, you know, are the kids coming through forcing you guys as a technology department to rethink and change the way you deliver services to that constituency? Absolutely, you know, it's constantly changing, that we're constantly trying to meet whatever need, you know, whatever they're, whatever we can to help make their experience at the university more enriched one. It's really engaging the students and getting them involved with us at the Central Computing Department for us to work with them to help them get better services so that we can give them better services and understand how things are evolving for them in education. You know, what about just the literary platform? It's like, is the kids don't use email anymore? Do they use it when they go to school? Yeah, that email is still our official means of communicating, we're a Google shop, though, so we use Google email, but it's good. So Jeff and I were at Service Now Knowledge last week and Frank Slutman, former CEO of Data Domain, gave a talk and he was talking about how the CIO's got to become sort of a business leader and sort of putting forth a prescription that the CIO has to really drive business, maybe come from the business. It's interesting to hear you talk about your CIO. I mean, it's really not the business, but kind of is the business, right? Came from the side of the house that is driving the requirements. So what's that been like? It's very different for us. It's the first time that I can remember us having a CIO that's on the faculty and it's a different energy and it's good. It makes us more focused on the students and their needs. I wonder if we could talk about the organizational issues around DBAs and storage folks, right? Yeah. Well, you know, DBA is a tough bunch, right? Yeah. They don't really trust anybody and they don't want you messing with the data and they want to know what's going on. They want visibility and you say I got a cover that's backed up, they don't accept that necessarily. I wonder if you could talk about that organizational tension. Have you experienced that in your career and how are you addressing that? Yeah, so back when we were implementing the data domain solution for Arman, previous to that, you know, the DBAs would run a backup of, they would still run Arman and they would put it to a local disk that a sand drive. And then it was the storage team's responsibility to take what they put out on that drive and put it into a network or backup catalog. And you know, it was really cumbersome because they didn't like, you know, they would have to go through a two-step process if they ever needed to go and recover data that was older than a couple of days old and they didn't have the visibility into the catalog to do that, so it was a cumbersome thing. When we moved them onto the data domain, they were able to keep their entire catalog of their backups within the Arman and not having to go out to another product to access that. The DBAs, like you said, they're a different bunch. They want to know where their data is. They want to know that they have the right performance going to that data and they want to know that it's protected in the way that they think is appropriate. And that's a reasonable thing for them to want, you know? I mean, that's, you know, if you're the owner of the data, you should have expectations and the storage team should do their best to work with you to meet those expectations. And that's what we really did with the data domain and giving them the visibility into their backups and making sure that they had what they needed. But that really is the key, is visibility and it's been hard historically to give that visibility. So talk specifically about what the data domain infrastructure did that allowed you to provide that visibility and then I got a follow up. So we no longer had to do that two step process where they would do the backup and then we would take it off into another backup system. Which was a black hole. Which was a black hole to them and it didn't, you know, we couldn't do that locally because it was too, way too cost prohibitive to give them enough disk space to hold a six week catalog of backups, you know? But once deduplication came along and once we got good performance on that deduplication, both network speeds and the processing of the dedu it really opened up the gates for a whole new way of looking at. So is it fair to say it didn't necessarily directly affect the DBA productivity but it created a sense of comfort that they maybe didn't have before? Right, yeah, well in some ways it had their productivity too because for our DBAs they now had their full catalog of backups accessible to them from any system. So if they didn't have a snapshot or something of a database and they wanted to bring one up in another environment they could just quickly do an RMAN restore from any place, from any of their servers because they all have access to the backed up data from all of the other ones. So how has it affected your relationship? Did they bake you a cake? I think we had a little data domain party actually. We did, we all had a celebration after that. That's great. So what's next for you guys? What's on the horizon, the roadmap? Icelon's our big thing right now. I'm neck deep in implementing Icelon for our campus. We are happy to be rolling out about a half a petabyte of usable storage to get all of those islands of unstructured data that are under people's desks across campus and get those into a well-managed environment in our data center. And a lot of that is so-called unstructured data, is that right? It's all unstructured data. Are you dabbling in Hadoop at this point? Or Hadoop, an HDFS? Oh, Hadoop, no, well, so we've been walking around the show here in the hall a lot about a Hadoop and I was talking to my guys and we were saying, I'm like, we know that at some point this is going to be, we're going to have the requirement to provide a Hadoop file system and the capabilities of Hadoop. We just don't know what that is. So we're trying to get a good idea of what we would want to do when that requirement comes at us. What would we want to deploy to meet those requirements? Okay, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Ananshi, last question. So you come here every other year, you sort of swap VM, so you won't be at VMworld this year, right? Probably not, no. Okay, so what's the takeaway from you? What's the bumper sticker as the bus is leaving the hotel or the conference center? What's your takeaway of the snapshot? My favorite thing of VMCworld this year, Icelon, I love Icelon. I got to tell you, Icelon's my new number one. Data domain and Icelon. I don't like that. I love that, I love that. I'm so great about it, the simplicity. It's, yeah, scalability, simplicity, deduplication, performance, everything that you want in a file system and that's pretty much it. We watched the ascendancy of Icelon when they were a private company and then became a public company and consistent feedback that they just, that whole notion of a global namespace and simplifying file based storage is a good move by EMC picking those guys up. It's a big part of their business now and growing very rapidly. All right, Nancy, thanks again for coming to theCUBE. It was great to meet you face to face and keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from EMCworld 2014. This is theCUBE.