 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Microsoft Ignite, brought to you by Cohesity, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We are joined by Chris Menard. He is the lead storage administrator at Brown University. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, Chris. Thanks for having me. So in your role, you would do storage, backup recovery, and disaster recovery. I mean, I think our viewers, we have a sense of what you would do at a large Fortune 500, but what do you do at an Ivy League University? What kinds of things are you working on? So from disaster recovery, we're doing things to protect all of the data that the university has. So research data, academic data, business data. So we're making sure that if something were to happen in Providence itself, we would be covered and have access to our data, our applications, if our data center were to go away. So this is even, so in a way, your constituencies are a lot larger because you're also thinking, is it student data as well? So student data, research data. So student data, research data, administrative data, faculty data, any kind of data that gets generated by pretty much anybody that either works or attends the university. Chris, I wonder if we step back for a second. We're here at Microsoft Ignite. I know that Microsoft has a strong connection with higher education, but have you been to this show before? What's the relationship between the university and Microsoft that you have interacted with? So this is my first time coming to Ignite with Brown. I've been to Ignite when it used to be called TechEd. So a long time ago. But we do have a pretty good relationship with Microsoft. You know, obviously we have, you know, everything from Windows operating systems all the way up to cloud services with Azure. Something that we just kind of started delving into this year. So we're looking at running things like remote app in the cloud. We have some of our disaster recovery data in the Azure cloud as well. And I'm sure there'll be more to come as we learn more about what we can put there and how that can help us. Microsoft really sits at the center of this multi-cloud discussion. As you said, they've got SaaS offerings, they've got public cloud. They're in your data center. How does Brown look at kind of cloud overall? And you said starting to look at some of the public cloud offerings. So maybe give a little bit of what you can about the strategy today. So we are doing a lot with secondary backup, secondary data for our backups going to the cloud. So for disaster recovery, hopefully in the future we'll be able to use that data for test and dev or maybe moving workloads from one place to another place. We're looking at putting some actual workloads in Azure in the cloud for like bursting capabilities, things like that. Yeah, when you look at data in a multi-cloud world you need to tell us what are you looking for when you talk about how you manage your data in a multi-cloud world. Even we talk about some people when they went to SaaS they're like, oh, I don't need to worry about things like security and data protection. Well, those people might have had to learn faster, they'd be out of a job. So what do you look and who do you use? So security is definitely one of the main concerns. I mean, we have a whole security team that that's all they do is look at these projects and look at what we're trying to do and say, wait a second, what's the security around it? As far as the tools that we're using for security, data protection. Data protection, we're using Cohesity. We just started using them at the beginning of this year. We switched off, we were a long time legacy backup infrastructure. So a lot of moving parts. We decided that we wanted to find something that was more streamlined and was looking to the future with the way that they did data protection and disaster recovery. And where do you use the Cohesity solutions? Is it in your data center, public cloud, which offerings? So we have a Cohesity appliances in our data center. We protect all of our virtual machines and physical machines using Cohesity. We tear that off into Azure cloud as a secondary copy so then we have flexibility on what we can do with that data now that it's been virtualized and sent off to the cloud. Great. And are you realizing any cost savings? I mean, I know it's still early yet. You've only recently gone to Cohesity, but what's the... We have realized a lot of cost savings. Probably about 50% reduction in costs, capex style costs. And we also have reduced some of our year to year maintenance with licensing. All right. Maybe talk about the operational side of things too, is how many people did you have managing these kind of admiring before? What's it look like after? What's that change mean? We have the same amount of people still managing the same environment. The only difference is now we're not spending as much time. So we've had, we kind of manage it across different teams within our environment. So our systems teams will do recoveries of virtual machines or data, whereas my team will actually manage the backups and adding clients and troubleshooting and things like that. Our team probably saves 10 or 15 hours a week and the other teams about the same with not having to troubleshoot things that just weren't working in the old platform compared to the new platform. Yeah, it was actually one of the things in the keynote this morning, Satya Nadella was talking about business productivity and you always say it's nice if I can shave off an hour here, five hours there. There's always fear in IT. It's like, oh wait, they're going to put me out of a job. But the reality is you've always got more project work on and working to do. There's always something else for us to do, we're finding there's plenty of work for everyone to do. So we don't have to spend that time doing things that we shouldn't have been doing. I'm curious about how you stay on the cutting edge. I mean, typically you think about academia in general as being a little slow to adopt the latest and greatest technologies. And yet the academics, this is where the research gets done so much of it at these top universities. So what's the balance in your experience and how do you stay abreast of all the new gizmos? We're pretty lucky because we're more of the central IT for the university, even though we do work with researchers in different departments. So we are always constantly out there looking for how can we do what we're doing now better, more efficiently, maybe cheaper, maybe not. But we're constantly looking for what's the best way we can deliver the service that all of our users need. And it's a pretty broad base of users, like you said, from students to researchers to just regular admins. They're all very different workloads and different users. All right, so Chris, as you've rolled out Cohesity and you're starting to adopt Azure, what learnings have you had? If you're sitting down with one of your peers here that said, I'm looking at this, what was the experience? What could I do to make it a little faster, save the team some heartburn, maybe? I would say the biggest thing is just to do your homework. Go out and look and see what are your pain points today and talk to people like Cohesity and say, honestly, here's my pain points, what can you do to help me? Cohesity sat with us from the very beginning and they were very open to, we can help you with this, this and this, we can't do that, but we can get it into the product down the road. And they've done that with a lot of things that we've asked for to help us with whatever our needs might have been. Yeah, anything particular that you're asking of, Microsoft, Cohesity or others in the ecosystem that would help you do your job better? Not at this exact moment. We have, since we started with Cohesity, we have put in some requests with them over the first couple of months and the product has evolved. Maybe not because of stuff that we only asked for. I mean, it could have been a whole hundred other customers that asked for the same thing, I'm not sure. But they're very quick to put those things into the system and they roll out updates very, very, very quickly and keep it going. Yeah, so we talk about education might be slow to adopt things. You've got a storage group. Storage is not known as the latest and greatest. How do you manage things like upgrades? I was standing in line waiting and joking. It's like, we're at a Microsoft event. Remember Patch Tuesdays? Yeah, we often, how do you look at the kind of cloud on demand, always on the latest generation versus balancing to make sure that things are trusted, secured and tested? You're exactly right. In the storage world, you might only do an upgrade once or twice a year at most. With Microsoft, you're doing them once a month maybe. With Cohesity, if they tell me there's a new upgrade or a patch, I'm ready to install it on a moment's notice. It's non-disruptive and the support team they have is so very good and quick that even if something were to go wrong, I'm very confident they would have it fixed in very short order. So the confidence level with doing upgrades is very high. In terms of, one of the big buzzwords we hear at this conference as well as at other technology conferences is digital transformation. What does that mean to Brown University? Or does it mean anything? Well it does. Our CIO had put out in his last year that we were going to start working on digital transformation as one of our big projects. What that exactly means for my group is just what we have to do to support whatever the other groups are going to do to support moving toward a digital transformation. So if that means buying some new storage or adding more storage to what we have or talking to them about what apps are being added and how can we back that up and how can we perform disaster recovery services for those? That's the kind of things that our group would be worried about more so than what's the actual digital transformation itself? So it is something that is on our plate but it's not the actual transformation itself. Well Chris, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a lot of fun talking to you. Thank you for having me. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more from theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite in just a little bit.