 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. And welcome back to theCUBE. We continue our coverage here live. We are in the sands at Dell Technologies World 2018. Big show, 14,000 plus, they're expecting here. 4,000 just in the Business Partner Summit alone. So a very impressive turn out here in day one, as I said, of three days of coverage on theCUBE. Along with Keith Townsend, I'm John Walls. We're now joined by Lee Caswell as a VP of products at VMware, it's good to see you, sir. Great to be here, yes. Every year we get together like this, right? Well, you know, there's always something new to talk about, right? Absolutely, and we're also joined by Chris Stanley, who's the IT manager at the Celtic Manor Resorts in Newport, Wales. Chris, the first person from Wales I think I've ever met, as a matter of fact. What a privilege, thank you. For being here, we appreciate the time. So, we're talking about your migration, and it really wasn't a migration, it was like your head first dive into the hyper-converged environment. You didn't tiptoe around it, you didn't wade into the water, you guys just dove right in. We were fearless, yes. What was the driver of that decision to be so fearless? And as an organization, we've grown very quickly the last few years, and we've got significant growth in new hotels, and a new conference center coming on board. And we're bursting at the seams in our existing environments. So, we needed a platform that we could grow into this new environment very quickly, and with predictive costs, as best as we could. And so, Leigh, walking them through this. Yeah. I mean, there's not a, there's no convincing to be done here, but you do have to inspire some confidence, right? So, somebody who's making a pretty bold move like this, how did you approach that, and what did you do as far as assigning? You know, our partnership with Dell EMC is just a great testament here, right? I mean, you've taken the latest of 14G servers, for example, as part of VxRail, so you got the best in hardware, combined with VMware underlying VCN software, packaged up together in a single point of support in a way that really makes us able to drop in and get started, right? When you think about this, this is also interesting in that, here's a customer, you know, in this case, you were using converged infrastructure in the past, right? That's very common, right? So, people who are looking for the advantage of, like, how did I get the operational efficiencies? And now what you find is hyper-converged changes the operational model, and so, it's around speed and agility, right? More than cost, right? And so, together, I mean, that's kind of a, our partnership, right, is so powerful for customers looking to go and basically drive that kind of efficiency. Definitely, yeah. So, Chris, talk to us about that decision process. In typical organizations, this is why you're on theCUBE, and it's so special. It's easy to talk about use cases on the edge. VDI, specific non-mission critical applications. But when it comes to stuff that runs the business, if it's down, the CIO, the CFO, is that someone's desk, asking when it's going to be back up, how does this discussion start? Was it from the bottom up, or was it from a top down that executive teams say, you know what, we need more agility, HCI, go. Definitely from a bottom up perspective, but supported from top down when we came for it. So, it was, we could see in our environments, in our growing environments, we're 24-hour business in a resort hotel, and we have a little downtime, or sorry, little time to do any upgrades, et cetera. So, resilience within that environment was key to us for our uptime. So, failing over with VMware, we use, within VX for now, we get DRS in the enterprise version, which it comes with, which we hadn't in our converged. So, there is that automation of balancing your workloads, not having someone there watching it all the time. So, that has freed up a lot of time for my guys. Going forward, there'll be a lot more free time as well, so we've got more time to concentrate on the guests, and how we can make their experience better. So, the story behind converged systems, you know, you have SAP, Oracle Business Weeks, all these mission critical apps, mission critical runs on CI, and then everything else to run on, even from a vendor support, you know, you talk to a lot of the major software vendors, they say, you all, CI is the best opportunity. How did that conversation go with vendors when you said, you know what, we're going to run mission critical on, I'm assuming, VSAN? This is on VSAN in VxRail. So, you said, you know, you came to your tier one software providers, you know what, we're all VSAN, global size and scope, global? What, as an environment? Yeah. Yeah, it's a global environment. We're only over four hotels at the moment, but growing into a bigger environment, we're going to, for an international conference center, so kind of this sort of size, not quite as big as this, but we definitely have that support from the hyper-converged. And all our core systems are running on it. Yes, big Oracle databases, SQL and our exchange servers, and those are split between two clusters now and with VxRail, so we can fail over to a node within VxRail, we can fail over to a cluster as well. So, as an SLA for uptime, as business critical, and the guys at the top at the Celtic manner have seen how that is for business. If we're not serving people or taking money, then we're giving money back in a case for disruptions. All right, so you've been into this for a little bit less than a year now, right? Correct, yes. I know Lee's standing here sitting right next to you, but if, for a moment, I'm sure there has been I'm sure there has been at least a troubling moment of that transition or at least a hiccup somewhere that you had to settle something, you had a problem, right? Something came up. If someone's watching this, okay, I wonder what they got hit with and how they handled it. How did you work around that? How did you adapt that? What would that be? What was maybe the one little hiccup right now that you've successfully done? For, with deployments or? Yeah. Nothing massive, I mean, when we were migrating from our converged infrastructure to hyperconverged, we added on the sands to the hyperconverged so we could see them migrate over. A couple of servers didn't take too well to that one. We'd be motioned over. Nothing, they're critical ones, thankfully. But they, it was either that a window's update or it was once they restarted, once we went and took them over, there's only two of the servers, but we used the recover point then within the X-Rail and it literally could go back five, 10 minutes, which we did. And yeah, up and running again, switched over and we were back up and running. But it was, we had the decision there as how long do we troubleshoot it for? Or would we just, that was our first instance of using recover points. So we hadn't done it in a live environment, so it was kind of, okay, and pray I'm out and you know, but it worked. And yeah, it filled us with a lot of confidence now that we have that resilience going forward in environments. So let's talk about day two. Yeah, I was just going to comment, right? This is part of the partnership that's so powerful for us, right, is I think VMware learned that supporting storage systems, as we know, it's a little different than just compute. You know this, right? I mean, so the idea of like, hey, listen, a purple screen isn't the worst that can happen because you can reboot, right? It's really about like my data, right? And so when you start thinking about that, the ability for us to partner with Dell EMC, who understands what it means to be supporting in a data-centric world, like that element, right, is so powerful for us, right? Because we've got a partner here who really understands the ability and that's part of the powerful concept of VxRail. So we had Tom Burns earlier and we were talking about CI and the importance of CI. And there's still a great, I think, desire and temptation and it's valid that CI gets you on the ground, running quickly, complex systems, easily deployed relative to traditional architectures. Talk to me about the practical of HCI, day two operations, CI, relatively easy to deploy, but you still have some traditional operation concerns. What specifically did you guys see as the advantage day two once you went to HCI? What's saving you all this time? Purely, I think the time saver is the management of the system or the lack of management we now need to do. There's, you've got one pane of glass to see everything, which is very nice. You haven't got something separate for your sands, your ESX hosts, your networking, and that supports that you have, you know, there's one number called you're not fighting between different entities saying it's your fault, it's your fault. There you go, sort it, which, so again, that has freed up a lot of time, you're not knowing who to call or where to call, but you know, one person's going to sort it out and take a hold of that and fix it for you. And the remote support then, ESRS, which is very good, you know, you've got someone else monitoring your systems if you're going to enable it, so you've got Dell support there and they can potentially see something before you do, so I kind of gained like another IT person in this solution, which is very nice. Yeah, we kind of joke, you know, that a lot of people talk about hyperconvergence as if it's about us, right, but hyperconvergence is about you, right? When you think about it, right? It's about hyperconverging the IT staff. If you can hyperconverge the staff, right, that's when hyperconvergence is as well. When we have one team, it's a converge team and people are like, hey listen, I'm going to go to a VM-centric management model. Now I can go and debug things, right, from a single console, which is vCenter. That model works really fast, right? And where he converges still does a good job, right, is where I got storage scaling, a big scale, but separate from compute separate. Hyperconvergence is about the organizational. In fact, right? Bringing it all together, yeah. And it's simplistic and VM-ware being so tightly integrated with the X-Rail was our main call against the other vendors, you know, as well as a big call to, well, you know, it's the best chef or the best ingredients, let's use that and not a desert chef with, you know, the best ingredients. Yeah, we have 500,000 customers who are familiar with vCenter, right? If you know vCenter, you know vCenter, you know big X-Rail, right? You can get it. Yeah, simplistic again, so. Yeah. You already know it. Yeah, right. Well, you know, we could talk about this to a blue in the face. I think we need to go see it in operation, don't you? Yeah, well, we do need to. Yeah. If you don't think man of resource, say you have some golf in there. Great. Now we're talking our game. Be careful, Chris, what you offer. No, you're very welcome. Lee, Chris, good to see you guys. Great to see you. Thanks for being with us. Appreciate you sharing the story. Thank you very much. Back with more here from Dell Technologies World. Live on The Cube in Las Vegas.