 Live from Anaheim, California. It's theCUBE, covering Nutanix.next 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.next here in Anaheim, California. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, John Furrier. We have two guests for this next segment. We have Stephanie Skiraldi. She is the Director of IT Operations and Support for Electra. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, Stephanie. And we have James Illari, Director, IT Innovation and Governance at Electra. Thank you, James. Thanks for having us. So I want to start with you, James. Tell our viewers a little bit about Electra, it's Ontario-based. For our viewers who are not familiar, what do you do? What are you about? So we are a energy solutions provider in Ontario, Canada. Basically, we are an LDC, a local distribution company. But we're trying to transition from the poles and wires into a really energy solutions provider. We're about a million customers or approaching a million customers right now. And we are actually four utility companies that came together to form Electra. And we just recently merged with a fifth now. So we're rapidly growing in Ontario. And we have very much more growth to come. So all those mergers, how does IT all fit together? Different systems, they're all kind of legacy. Mishmash, what's the environment like? So the environment right now, there is a tremendous amount of data centers. Stephanie is actually leading our data center consolidation project. There are a tremendous amount of data centers across a fast geographical location. And we're using Nutanix actually to consolidate everything onto a single platform right now. So there's a lot of work to be done. Definitely a lot of integration to be done. But we're confident that we'll get it all done and we want to move to the Nutanix platform. Yeah, so right now we have about, I think it's about 11 data centers and we've been mandated to get down to two. So we're utilizing technologies like Nutanix to kind of get down and scale abilities. So yeah. We hear from a lot of customers from Nutanix around how it's been a great system for manageability. And also getting rid of some older gear, whether it's old EMC, some Dell stuff. So we're seeing a lot of, going from 24 racks to six. This is kind of the ratios. Pushing stuff from eight weeks to two hours. New operational benefits. How close are you guys to that now? Because you get all this stuff you're consolidating down for the mergers. Makes a lot of sense. What's some of the operational benefits you're seeing with Nutanix that you can share? I think it's a perfect example that you just gave. We're working on a front office consolidation project and we're doubling our VDI environment. And we actually just got three new nodes in a few weeks ago. And it took a matter of two hours to get everything spun up and ready. So traditionally it would take us weeks of planning and getting someone in and specialized technicians and now make a phone call a few hours and it's done. So you see already the benefits of growing our infrastructure and it's enabling us to merge faster with different utilities. I want to actually back up now and talk about the journey to Nutanix and talk about life before Nutanix and now life after it. What were sort of the problems that you were trying to solve and why was Nutanix the answer? So I can speak to that. If way back in 2015 we were looking at VDI and we were implementing it across our organization. And we were running into issues on three tiered architecture where whenever there was a performance issue we would talk to the sand guy and we would talk to the server guy and we'd talk to the networking guy and although everyone's trying to help everyone's sort of looking at each other saying okay where does this problem really land? And the issue with that is as you guys know with VDI I mean user performance and user experience is key, right? That's king. So when you're trying to take away someone's physical desktop and give them a virtual desktop they want the same or better performance. And anytime we had an issue we had to resolve it rapidly. So when we looked at everything we said okay this is okay but it's not sustainable for the scalability and the growth that we have. Especially because with a VDI environment it scales very rapidly. And if the application scales rapidly you need the infrastructure to scale as rapidly as your application. And perform just as good. So what happened was we looked at Nutanix and we said you know what? If we can look at a single pane of glass to figure out where any performance issues lie that makes operations of management and administration much easier for us. And that's really where we started our journey with Nutanix. We went from a three node cluster to start and we're up to 14 nodes now. Just in our VDI cluster alone. And what about the future? What does the future hold in terms of this partnership? I think for us we're really hoping to go to fully AHV in the next six to 12 months. I know James we're really pushing it and trying to get that in because you know we want to simplify our technologies and I think by moving to AHV I think you know we'll save some money. Yeah. So what we're looking to do with Nutanix there's been a lot of wins for us moving to Nutanix especially with regards to support. Support's been fantastic. I mean you know although we don't like to call support because that means something's probably wrong we love calling you guys because every time we call support it's you know everyone's always there to help and not only the support from the support team but also through our. Vendors. Through our vendor our accounts you know IVOR who we love. Is that our camera? Yeah. You know we love the whole team because they're there for you to help. I mean we've run into some pretty significant issues one of the things that happened to us was we had some changing workloads in our VDI environment. Through no fault of Nutanix is you know when we introduced some additional workloads we didn't anticipate some of the challenges that would come along with introducing those workloads and what happened was we filled up our hot storage rather rapidly. Nutanix came in right away because we called them up and said you know we're having big performance issues we need some help and they brought in POC nodes to help us get over the hump. They were there for us. I mean within a week they got us right back up and running and fully operational and even better performance than we had before. So until we can get our own nodes procured and in-house which was fantastic. I've never seen that level of support from another organization. So we love the support from Nutanix and since then we've grown. So we've actually looked at Nutanix for our general server compute platform as well. And we're doing cross hypervisor support or cross hypervisor replication sorry from production to DR. So we're actually running Acropolis in DR running VMware in production but as Stephanie alluded to we were trying to get off VMware completely. You know everyone talks about the V-tax. We don't like the V-tax. We don't want to pay VMware for something that's commodity. And we're looking to repurpose that money so we can look at other things such as Nutanix XI. We very much want to move to the cloud for DR and that's sort of our direction. Okay so you guys have VMware now not you're not yet off VMware but you plan to be? Yes. You plan to be yes. Okay so what's that going to look like? How long is that going to take or what is that? We're really hoping the next six to 12 months. So I think we're really going to push hard. We've been talking to some people and it seems like it's going to be a pretty smooth transition so we're looking forward to it and I think our team is really looking forward to it as well. That's one of the challenges right? The team is really is one of the challenges because we've merged and there's a lot of change going on in our organization. It's difficult to throw more change at people right? There's a whole human component to everything that we do. So you know well that's why we moved HV into DR to start because we said you know what give the operations folks time to look at it, time to play with it, time to get familiar with it and then we'll make the change in production but like we said you know moving over to HV is going to save us a ton of money. Like a ton of money that we can repurpose elsewhere to really start moving the business forward. So you talk about IT operations for a second because one of the things you were talking about earlier is that the consolidation you're leading that project to get the VDI thing with new workloads there's always going to be problems always speed bumps and hot spots as they say in IT but what IT ops has changed with the advent of software and DevOps and automation starts to come into it. How do you see that playing out because Nutanix is a software company. So you guys knew them when they were five years ago to now but this is the trend in IT operations to have clean programmability for the infrastructure. What's your view on that? What's your reaction to that? And are you guys getting there? Is that the goal? So that is like a part of our roadmap and we're going to be working with our Nutanix partners to build a roadmap actually in the next coming few weeks. So because we are merging all these utilities we'd love to get to automation and orchestration and we actually have it in a budget in three years. So it is on our roadmap. We want to get there, right? Because we want to have our staff work on business strategy. We don't want their fingers to keyboards. We want them actually working with the business and solutioning and not changing tapes or working on supporting a system when we don't have to do that anymore because now it's so much simpler running a Nutanix environment. I know James was saying a lot of change for employees are used to VMware and Nutanix is new to a lot of them. I think they're quickly seeing the benefit of managing it because now they get to do things that are a little bit more fun than just managing an environment. Yeah, and there's this point about cost too. You can repurpose what you're paying for a commodity to get that for free. And if you can repurpose and automate a way that manual labor that's boring and repetitive move people to higher value activities. Exactly. And we love the message we heard today about being invisible. Yeah, I love that. We love it. I mean, that's essentially what we want to do. The business doesn't really care what you're doing behind the scenes, right? They just want their applications to work. They want everything to work seamlessly. So that's what we want to get to. We want to get to that invisibility where we're moving the business forward and enabling them through technology, but they don't need to worry about the backend and what's actually going on. Stephanie, I want to ask you about both a personal and professional passion of yours. And that is about bringing more women into technology. You are a senior woman in technology and we know the numbers. There is a dearth of female leaders. There is a dearth of underrepresented minorities, particularly in high level management roles. So I want to hear from you, both from a personal standpoint in terms of what your thoughts are on this problem and why we have this problem. And then also what you and Electra are doing to remedy it. Yeah, I think, you know, I'm really lucky to work at Electra because we actually have a diversity and inclusion committee that I'm part of. We're with a lot of STEM organizations, but I think, you know, there's all these great programs going on and but I still don't see enough women in this industry and I think a lot of it stems from, you walk into a room and if you're the only one of you, it's really intimidating. So I think we really need to work on making people feel more welcome, you know, getting more women in senior leadership positions and kind of bringing them to events like this, getting them on the internet, going to the universities, going to the schools and talking to education and talking to, you know, CIOs and CEOs that don't have C-level women executives and saying, you know, there's a business benefit to having diversity of all kinds in an organization, you know, you know, strength lies in differences, not in similarities. And I think we can really grow businesses and have that value if we have different types of opinions. And I think there's, you know, statistics shows when you have more diversity, your business is more successful. So I think senior leaders should pay attention and, you know, purposely try to hire more, a more diverse workforce. And do you have anything to add to that? I mean, I know that it's maybe tougher for a man to weigh in on this issue, but at the same time, it is one that affects all of us. Absolutely. And I think Stephanie said it best, right? When you bring in, you know, multiple people from different ethnicities, from different genders, I mean, it's that wealth of knowledge that everyone brings from the different experiences they have in life. And I think that's what you need. You don't want, you know, the collective all thinking the same way. You want the collective that brings the diversity into your organization. And I think, you know, when I was in school, we had one woman in my entire computer engineering class. And, you know, that, you wanted to see that change, right? I'd love to see more ethnicities, more women being in the workforce, especially within technology. I think that's, it's fantastic for technology. Stephanie, what's your advice for young girls out there, maybe in high school and college, who are, have a gravitating towards either computer science or some sort of STEM related field that might be intimidated? I think one important thing you can do is like really rely on your family and friends for encouragement, because I think sometimes it is going to be intimidating. You know, for me, I'd walk into a course and I was the only female in my computer networking class, but I had like my father always encouraged me to push me to say, like, don't ever be intimidated, don't ever be scared. You need a little bit of a thick skin because for a little bit, it is going to be just you in a room. But I think the more you speak up and the more you just kind of push yourself, I think it is going to get better. And I think it's almost kind of cool when you're the only female, because you feel that pride to, I want to do better. I want to do better for all of us to say like we can be not just as good, even better. Great, so. Great advice. Yeah. Stephanie, James, thank you both so much for coming on. Thanks for having us. Pleasure talking to you. Thanks. Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. We will have so much more of Nutanix.next coming up in just a little bit.