 Okay, we're here with Bart Falzerano, who's the Chief Information Security Officer at the Walls Group. First of all, Bart, welcome to the Cube. Oh, thank you. So, this is the Mobile Cube, we're here at AT&T Park, formerly Pack Bell, it's the first time I came here, this is a beautiful park, isn't it? Oh, gorgeous park, yep. You a baseball fan? Slightly, yes, I attend some games, I do enjoy it. Yeah, well a park like this you can't not enjoy, you know, it's just a beautiful venue, great day here. And we're here at VMworld 2012 in San Francisco, we're talking off camera, you had a chance to check out some of the show, some of the action that's going on here. What have you seen, Bart, that's interesting. I've attended the general sessions, both yesterday, today. Common theme, partnership, alliance, transforming business, moving it ahead. Those are some key areas, certain, you know, alliances formed, so that's encouraging to see different technology groups then working together. Working business really lead and navigate them through a data center transformation, cloud transformation, it's a journey, so those are, you know, some key things that we're encouraging to see and then the technology behind it and what each technology partner is doing to, you know, work together towards a common goal. Talk about the walls group a little bit, talk about your business, it's, you know, critical communications, compliance oriented, obviously puts a lot of stringent requirements on your infrastructure, obviously your security, talk about the business a little bit. So walls provides critical document management, fulfillment, regulatory compliance services for companies across multiple industries. They're under, these industries are highly regulated, there are communications between their counterparties, so financial institution to a borrower, right, in the case of a foreclosure or between trustees, legal attorneys, foreclosure, legal and foreclosure firms, so those types of communications. Walls develops technology solutions then that are designed to meet these ever-changing legislative requirements, so that's the, you know, Dodd-Frank provisions around foreclosures, mortgage industry, hemp, harp, tarp initiatives, you know, a lot of the legislative changes there. So how does that constant change affect your IT infrastructure and how do you respond to those? In 2009, with those increased volumes in borrower communications, what we found is IT, using past technology, servers and switches, was impeding our business growth. So in 2009, we started a due diligence of new technologies available in the data center, and this solution was Flexpod, so technology from NetApp, Cisco, VMware. So it was relatively new at the time, right, I mean, so you just, like George Reed, we just said George Reed on, I mean, it was kind of risky, right? You took a chance. Talk about that mindset. We met with each technology partner. We met with Cisco. We met with NetApp. We discussed, you know, some of the new technology. We did a due diligence, as I mentioned, between other technology manufacturers, and we found the support with Cisco, NetApp, VMware to be, you know, outpouring of support, help us with our business challenge, and provide us with a technology solution that would move our business forward. So talk about the deployment. I mean, give us, paint a picture of the before and the after. What was life like before, and how did it change, and I want to probe some of the business metrics? The life before was very difficult. We had a huge, very large IT team of six. Not only did we have to account for, you know, a single data center, but we also have to support business continuity, planning, disaster, recovery. Again, our clients, highly regulated industry, therefore extending that information security compliance requirements to Walls Group. So we have to meet same rigid requirements, disaster recovery. We're under Fortune 100 audits and assessments. They come on site. They visit with us. So we have to, you know, try to scale this out effectively. It was very difficult with past technology servers and switches, not just from the equipment and infrastructure, but even from the team, the IT team, trying to operate, maintain, secure, support the technology footprint. So very support heavy environment. Huge amounts of technology debt associated with managing, operating, securing them, past technology, servers and switches. And your storage infrastructure at the time was very distributed? Or what was that like? Storage. We were leveraging NAS. We would scale out and then we would find we did a new NAS solution. We'd scale that out, but these didn't work together well. We were doing host-based replication. And above a certain terabyte, we found the host-based replication had some problems. So very ineffective management across disparate storage systems. Not reliable? Data quality? Slow? Performance issues? Correct. The solution was very difficult between the different NAS tiers. Daisy chaining above a certain amount. Sometimes we found we could land the data there to the NAS, but trying to pull it off after we daisy chained some of the arrays together, we found this extremely difficult. We couldn't reach. They said we could daisy chain up to seven, and we found once we got above four, performance really slowed down. Okay. So you can take us through the deployment. You conceive this new architecture. How did that come about and then how did the deployment go? So the solution then was FlexPod technology, which I mentioned. The deployment of that, we ordered the equipment. We did some capacity planning and ordered the equipment and stood up the equipment leveraging Cisco UCS Quick Start NetApp four days. Brand new technology brought in stood up provision four days. We're doing redundancy testing on the fourth day. What has been some of the business impacts? Can you share those with us? Sure. Port density reduction. Let's just take key data center performance metrics. So port density reductions, higher virtualization efficiency going from less than four to one to greater than 15 to one. So multipliers of efficiency, rack reduction of greater than 50%, system management efficiency. If you could put a metric on the capabilities through your IT team to manage the technology footprint, right? System management efficiency with past technology was one IT engineer, given the technology data of past technology, one IT engineer per 15 systems, with the FlexPod technology, we're seeing this go above, one IT engineer can manage more than 50 systems. Again, huge multipliers of efficiency with the FlexPod design. Whenever you provision applications, you provision then on FlexPod, if it's a virtual application, you have the ability to quickly switch that virtual application between different physical resource pools, leveraging VMware vMotion. It's in milliseconds. For non-virtual applications, you have a template as well. It's a service profile template. And again, you have the ability to quickly switch that non-virtual application between different physical resource pools, compute, memory, storage, network, and it's minutes in a few minutes. So that's a template for anything you can build on FlexPod. That's very effective management. The team is then managing a, you've templatized your business, the team is managing those templates in a catalog, a production catalog, a QA catalog, an integration, a development for your lower tier environments as well. So you're talking about a three and a half, roughly, to four times impact on IT productivity for the systems management metric, and then a significant improvement in your flexibility and ability to respond? Yes, much easier to manage the technology footprint, operate, and then secure it. Meet the ever-increasing information security requirements, being able to scale out effectively and securely. Now, talk about the relationship between those productivity impacts and security. So why does that have a direct effect on your security improvement? Information security is not an at-risk program. It's always changing. We can turn on the news and we're reading about a data breach or some other company that's impacted by something. So this is very important to technology, information security, compliance, and governance go hand in hand. So it's a very important factor. Look at HIPAA. Look at meaningful use, stage one. And there's federal funds behind that to establish then electronic health care record systems, medical records, set up health care information exchange, look at the financial space. There's OCC Consent Decrees, Department of Justice, looking at Fortune 100 companies. Sending these federal guidelines into banks and further into the third-party vendors. All right, Bart Fowler on a fantastic story. Really appreciate it. Oh, thank you. Great job. Congratulations with all your success. And enjoy the rest of the event. All right. Thank you. Take care. All right, everybody. Keep it right there. We'll be right back with our next guest. We're here at AT&T Park, a phenomenal event. The crowd is pouring in and we'll be right back.