 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada. It's theCUBE, covering EMC World 2015. Brought to you by EMC, Brocade, and VCE. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live here in Las Vegas for EMC World 2015. This is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE, and Wikibon's flagship program. We go out to the events and expect the students of the noise. I'm John Furrier, my coach, Dave Vellante. Our next is John Sharp, IT manager of Bullrath. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. So what's your impression of the show so far? It's an eye-opener. I mean, it's a lot to take in in a short amount of time, but you know, a wide variety of topics, very focused in some areas that kind of near and dear to my heart, taking in some extreme IOs and converged infrastructure. Then I also hit some governance and security. So, you know, wide array of topics. What's near and dear to your heart? Which topics? Converged infrastructure. We're a VCE customer. We've got two V-blocks. We're getting ready to replace the first one. We were actually the first customer in the state of Wisconsin to put in the V-block nearly four years ago. And we were the first ones to buy the new V-block with the Extreme IO. So we're pretty committed. And you know, it just makes it easier for my guys to do more with the very limited resources that they have. So you were there when you originally brought in V-block, right? Yes. Can you take us back to that point in time? What was life like? How did it change? So it was shortly after I started at Ball Rat, probably within my first year, I was brought into Ball Rat to kind of think about how we're going to transform the business and be able to adapt. We grow a lot through acquisition and our infrastructure was aging. We weren't able to keep up and they didn't want IT to be the slowdown in acquiring any companies. So, you know, one of the things that we had to do was we had to move off of a lot of individual server stack and move towards more of a converged infrastructure. I was fortunate enough that VCE had just been in Wisconsin right near us. And I got to sit through their presentation on how if you're virtualized or looking to highly virtualize this one converged stack with one throat to choke was going to make life significantly easier. And, you know, everybody's a skeptic and I have to admit it at first I was, but the more I started to talk with them and understand that we could condense down all of the different physical points and single points of failure into a highly redundant box that had one interface for my guys to go into and move us from a Zen app shop into a VMware shop and have a lot of redundancy, it just began to make more and more sense. You know, we're a manufacturing company, so when we first got going with them, you know, price was clearly a concern, but, you know, they really stepped up and they explained all the reasons why this was going to be good for the business. And we went ahead, we signed the deal. They told us that it was going to take us 12 weeks to get the box and I think they delivered somewhere in six. And they said that you'll be up and running, running production inside of your first week there. And we were definitely up and running by the end of that first week. So they made a lot of promises, but they delivered on every one of them and surpassed them. So, you know, that to me cemented some things for us. Fast forward a little bit and the business continued to grow. We continued to acquire and we didn't have to add infrastructure because the V-Block had so much horsepower and so much flexibility that we had to add a little memory to accommodate some of the servers, but, you know, we were able to bring that on and support that workload. And, you know, we're bringing on new sites within a week, you know, get the network up. And that was almost the longest part is getting those network links established, having the communications. From there, platform is solid. We tend to centralize everything in our shop. So again, V-Block was a really great fit for that because with all the redundancy in it, you know, we're not worried as much about the, I got 40 servers and I got 40 different points where my applications can really fail, you know. So for us, it was really an eye opener. So talk about the cost, you mentioned cost, price sensitive, of course, everyone just want to overpay or anything. So they overdelivered on commitment, on shipments and delivery. What was the operational cost that you guys saved or gained from moving over? Because you had a migration here to VMware and other things, virtualized. What was the life like without VC and the V-Block? So let me kind of go back to day number two at Ballrad. It was followed by day number one where I asked my admin, what's your single biggest fear? And he told me the email server, it's not really all that stable you need to go down at any moment. It's smoking. It's smoking. I started on a Friday, figured I'm going to ease into this, right? I get a call Saturday morning from the same system administrator, but email server's down. The raid card has gone bad and I'm not sure we're going to be able to recover this anytime soon. Needless to say, he was managed to perform some voodoo and he got it up, but you know, that same admin used to always tell me I carry around a puke bucket because at any one moment, I don't know what's going to go wrong and I need to have that ready. Life after the V-Block, that puke bucket is a mesh garbage can where it wouldn't help him anyway. He never cries for it anymore and where he couldn't take the time to actually properly maintain his systems. He now has a system that's fully patched. It's got a release matrix so that we know that the patches that we apply aren't going to destroy the system and bring it to our knees versus in the old days, buy that patch and hope it doesn't take the application down and, you know, those days are gone. So stressed out, pins and needles. I mean, really, crap shoot pretty much. I mean, it could happen. It could, and that was all he did is pop fires every day. And that boils down into availability issues because if you're not patching your system and you're bubblegum and bailing wire and then speed when you're acquiring companies. So, you get that. What about, you mentioned cost before I presume you were talking about sticker shock, right, the CapEx, oh no, right, natural, CFO gets you in a headlock and goes, isn't there another way? It's one of my first big purchases at the company and I really wasn't sure how they were going to react to me coming in and telling them that we need to outlay a fairly large sum of money so that we have the agility to do what the business needs and not have to have them ask us to go and do it and then tell them, oh, well that's going to take us four to six weeks to go out and get a server. And, you know, we built a business case is what we did and it was really, we were in a transition at Ball Rat. It's a traditional company in the food service industry. We make a lot of smallwares, kitchen type equipment, everybody's been to a buffet, eating out of the shapers. You know, that's the type of thing we make and we're a typical manufacturer and people like to think that, hey, manufacturers, they'll run it as long as they can, they don't have money for that but in our industry, it's starting to change. It's an older industry and as people retire, the millennials demand electronic digital format whereas we were printing paper catalogs and you could send it out once a year and it's half a million dollars to print out the catalogs and then you got to pay the mailing fees and we pride ourselves on coming out with new products couple times a year. Well, after you've printed the catalog, how do you get that material out to your customers? If it's not digital and you're not marketing in that way, you can't really support driving your product faster to market. So, you know, we certainly had that as a company initiative which eased their pain when we explained that this is going to allow us to adapt to all of these changes. They had a five year strategy and we took time to really lay it out that the groundwork to their success was putting in a solid infrastructure that whether we were going to be on-prem, serving it out to the internet or, you know, co-locate, push it out to the cloud. We needed to have that flexibility and when we think about VMware and VCloud orchestrator and some different things, the VBlock was a perfect platform to help us start moving towards that and do it in a way that a traditional manufacturer that likes to hug their box and our data is secure and inside behind the fortress, we could do that. But we also had the flexibility because it was VMware that hey, if we need to, we can wall things off, expose only parts that need to be out in front of our customers and do that from that VBlock. So, your labor force prior to bringing this system in was doing a lot of, you know, non-productive, I like to call it non-differentiated activities. Post bringing in VBlock, it sounds like they were able to catch up on all the things they had to do. So what happened to the labor force, the IT labor force? Did it essentially stay flat and you're able to do more? Have you grown it less quickly than you would have? And what have you done with that? What else have you done with that freed up resource? So, we've remained fairly flat. We've picked up one or two individuals through some acquisitions, but really the staff has maintained a fairly flat workload. But where I would say 90% of their time was spent fighting fires when I started. I would say that, you know, if they're fighting fires maybe once a month, maybe once every other, that was a huge transformation. And because we got that out of the way, I've been able to shift it to more of a project focused workforce so that we've got planned projects to improve things for the business, to ensure that we take the time to maintain our equipment and they now have the time to do it and they have the time to properly plan and execute. So if you think about that, when you're fighting fires, you hardly ever think about communicating with the organization. These guys, one of their big struggles for them was probably less about the, oh no, what am I going to do as much as, oh, how am I going to tell the business and I feel really uncomfortable because they were always used to, the only communication that came out of IT was more bad news of this system's down and it's not coming available. Now it's, we're going to be delivering this new service. This is the day that we're going to be rolling it out. We're going to run some internal testing and we're looking for everybody to come on and help us load test and see if we can't break the system and we're getting feedback now on things to help improve performance whereas before it was just, how do we keep it running? So people are giving us that feedback and we're able to impact their lives which gives them more time to directly face the customer. Okay, John, we're getting the hook here but I want to ask you one final question. Obviously a lot of goodness going on. You feel good. It's an aspirin, it's a vitamin, it's a steroid. You got a lot of good problem solved with the EMC, VBlock and other solutions. Now that you're at the show, I love the term headroom. What's next? Like, what are you getting excited about here to bring back, to add on to the, to give you more headroom for future-proofing and or new goodness? So, you know, as we look at it, there's different things, ExtremeIO and really trying to boost database performance. You know, that's going to be huge for us. Right now we run a lot of x86 apps and we SQL and we're really positioning ourselves to transition our JD Edwards Enterprise apps over there and further deliver more web-class services out to our customers. And I think there's just a lot of great things coming out of EMC that are just going to help us maintain that solid growth strategy. John, thanks for taking the time. John Sharp here, IT manager inside theCUBE, sharing what's going on back in his world. This is one of the solutions and the goodness of convergent infrastructure and all EMC's products. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back after this short break.