 From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back. This is theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2018. Three days of live coverage kicking off day two on the right set. Michael Dell himself is talking, but I'm even more excited because when we get to talk to the users here, that's what we love doing. Peers talking to their peers. I'm Stu Miniman. My guest host for this segment is you, Piskar, who's actually a user himself and joining me first time on the program is PJ Romero, who's the principal IT engineer at Turnitin, out of Oakland. Out of Oakland? Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me, Stu. All right, so PJ, first of all, your fourth year at VMworld. Give us kind of your initial impressions and what brings you back to VMworld? VMworld, just getting re-upped in my education. So I'm learning more stuff, seeing what's new on the horizon so as to get implemented in my situation. All right, talk about learning more stuff. Tell us about Turnitin. So explain what this is and I think it'll resonate with a lot of our audience. Right, Turnitin is plagiarism detection software. So we're probably in most major universities throughout the world, really big in Europe and here in major universities. And we are also in high school, high school down. Okay, yeah, I was wondering about it. My daughter actually starts high school tomorrow, so make sure she understands that serious stuff. I mean, talk about education. I mean, heck, in this community, when you talk about certification, people are always worried about tests getting out and things like that. So we take education seriously. Exactly. As a community as we should. And your role at the company? My role, I'm the principal IT engineer. So basically I architect the corporate infrastructure aside from the Turnitin papers. So I manage global infrastructure. Before we get into kind of the infrastructure itself, the business itself, how long has it been around? How long have you been in there? And what is the kind of mobile web digital transformation impact your business? Oh, so everything's mobile now. Everything's on the web. We've migrated out there. We've moved out to the cloud and how it's migrated us. So Turnitin's been around for about 20 years. We just uploaded our billions paper a few weeks ago. So we have about nine petabytes with the data to pull from. Oh, wow. And so you can imagine how we're getting that from our data centers into the cloud with nine petabytes has been the challenge. So recently we virtualized on VMware and to make that transition, we had rows and rows of servers and moved them out, virtualized. So nine terabytes, that's a lot of data. Petabytes. Petabytes even. So tell me, how does that work from a tech perspective? What are you running? What's that tech stack look like? Well, Turnitin's actually a homegrown infrastructure from the ground for the storage. So it's highly available. It's highly redundant. We have multiple data centers and new with the GDPR requirements. Now we have data centers in Europe and we're moving all over the country. We're looking at EMA, APAC, and then South America. We'll get it out there somewhere. So you're running your own data centers? I presume. Yes, we're running our own data centers. What's that mean for your hybrid cloud strategy? How much is in your data center? What are you considering to move to the cloud? How does that impact your business? So right now we're probably 75%, 25% and with that cloud being elastic as it is, as term papers come up, we're spinning them up. So we're moving. Great, okay. So your virtualized, do you know what percentage of your applications are virtualized and maybe walk us through a little bit about the stacks that you have both on-premises as well as who you use for a public cloud. Oh, so we're using AWS and we're also, I think we use some Google stuff and Azure for some of the development. So we're using all of them basically to make sure we're fluid that way. We're also doing all the applications, all the web servers are virtualized and put up in the cloud but the main guts of it is still on-premise. Okay, and what's that stack look like on-premises? Who are you using today? As far as... Like your whole infrastructure stack? Oh, the infrastructure has been super micro. Okay. Yeah, so... But you're using like an HCI solution? The corporate is. Okay. The corporate, yeah. I manage the corporate infrastructure. Right. Yeah, we use HCI solution. So who are you using? Yeah, so I'm using Nutanix. Okay. Yeah, I vote... Great, so why don't you tell us a little bit about how you got to Nutanix, what apps you use that for, what apps you don't use that for, maybe I'll tease that out a little bit. Yeah, yeah, of course. So I have... The corporate infrastructure started out when I got there three years ago. I had server sprawl. I had all physical servers. They weren't virtualizing yet and I got in there and was like, why not? So I did a small POC with a couple of servers and a NAS that I built, homemade, and put VMware on it and said, look, this stuff works great. I can move stuff back. I can kill this box and they were like, wow, that's pretty cool. And then I got a business intelligence project for the financial services. So they were doing some really high-end modeling based on Oracle database and needed something redundant, powerful, and fast to deploy. Well, that was the problem. It was going to take six weeks to get servers in, get them configured, stacked. I got Nutanix in within two weeks. So got Nutanix in there. I think I spent more time convincing them that this is really, it's a two-U box. I'm going to stick all our stuff in there. We started out with the three-node unit and got VMware on there to show them what I was doing. And then we deployed our Oracle stack in no time. So tell a little about the cost model behind it. Has it changed the way, using HCI, has it changed the way you do business? Has it made it easier, cheaper, faster? It's made it cheaper and faster for me. And I don't say the easy part too much because then they wonder what I'm doing. But it's really easy. Yeah, that's interesting. When you talk about you had homegrown stuff before versus now, I've talked to some Nutanix customers. They say, like, oh, hey, I got my nice and weekends back. I don't have to worry about so many of the other pieces. Maybe talk a little bit about that dynamic. Did you have any change in personnel or who manages what after or is it you? Yeah, so I'm it, but with the ability of putting Nutanix in there and ease of use, I give them access to the dashboards and show them how things work. It's been really simple, especially for some of my newer guys and younger cis admins who don't understand virtualization and still kind of magic for everybody. But now it's, they got one dashboard, green heart means good, everything else, look at it. So you're saying you're the wizard now? I'm the wizard. Pay no attention behind the curtain. It got really easy, but I'll just keep that behind so I can do more stuff and I'll just, you know, be the superhero, right? Exactly, exactly. Made my monitoring easy for them and my guys love it. They really love it. Tell a little bit about how you're using Nutanix, right? So Nutanix started out as a virtualization, pure HCI company, what they've brought in their portfolio, right? So tell us a little bit about how are you using the Nutanix solution inside of your data centers? Right, so originally, what did Nutanix with the virtualization product or the financial product? I was able to get a fourth node. So I was able to use their analytics in there and say, hey, we're going to run out of space. So I'm running 47 machines on four nodes and I still have high redundancy, but I had no backups. So like, what do we do? So I got a second box, I put in one of my other data centers and I used that for replication in the back. And now with the XI coming out, I'm going to start pushing that up to the cloud and start moving my single data center toothpick as it were, it's going to be in the cloud and click it. Yeah, and you mentioned Oracle's, I think the application that catalyzed this, all certified, didn't have any issues, things like that. That's awesome. It was great. Those of us in the virtualization community, I mean, how many years did we spend with just virtualizing Oracle, let alone every new platform? You know, it's challenging. So your peers, all clear, they don't have to worry about. Yep, they love it. They love it. They can't believe that I got it all in the two you box. I like to take the big show and say, here's your stuff. I don't need this big stack, I just need the little box. So basically your whole operational model changed, I'm guessing you're not spending as much time anymore on operational issues. No, it's more of architecture now. This is a start moving, like I said, we'll start moving the cloud. I'm getting away from virtualizing more the applications that we use. We just use basic Active Directory and DNS and that stuff, that's all fine. But I'm going to start moving it, so it'll push to the button, it'll be in the cloud and I can literally lose my data center, so. Yeah, talk a little bit about, you know, XI, you know, we've heard a lot, the vision, so what's the roadmap for you to kind of embrace, adopt that, what's interesting to you about it? For me, I'm going to take the financial stack and really moving it right now in the tip, it's REE IP and it's REE, it's a lot of back end work. With XI, it should be a click. And I mean, I've seen the database that we're talking right now to get that done and it should be a click of the button and it's going to spin me up an AWS. So that's where I'm going next with my next project. That looks pretty cool. Okay, the rest of your applications, will you expand your Nutanix environment or is this something to help you deal with that hybrid cloud environment? Yeah, it is. What's the future look like? If I have my way, as I age out in my remote sites, we'll be putting more Nutanix out there and then I can do more three to one backups. And that frees up even more time to be spending on, you know, future architecture and exactly. Instead of just the operational stuff. Yep, I'm making it so we can lose any leg and we're going to be fine. Yeah, so one of the things everybody's poking at at this show is that whole multi-cloud environment. We said, I can make my data center kind of simple today, but multi-cloud, most people at least I talk to, it's not simple. Cloud's a little bit complex. It's not just swipe a credit card anymore. Managing between multiple environments depending on how many clouds you have. What are you seeing today? What would you like to see get even better over time? I like to see where Nutanix is going really with the single environment. I want it to be, I want to go one spot. And right now I'm going to one spot for my virtualization and all my on-prem stuff. But as I move up to the cloud and spin stuff off, I want to go to the same spot. I don't want to have to think about it so much and that's simple as good for me. I'm big in the KISS system. Absolutely, keep it simple. That's right. I'm fine, absolutely. Yeah, so I imagine your role is changing as well, right? It is becoming simpler. You get to spend more time on new projects. How is your role changing as an IT engineer? I'm getting to think more. I'm not reactive anymore at all. When I got there, it was very reactive environment and now it's more on design and how we can make sure we can tighten up securities. We went through a whole bunch of new SOC audits and it's made it simple. So it's made it simple for me. So we're all in compliance now with the physical hardware and security and now some of the other touches I'm able to think about and get those implemented. So outside of the Nutanix stuff, at VMworld, what kind of things are you digging into, learning? Anything excite you that you either heard from your peers or announcements or sessions? You've been in? VDI is still exciting to me. So I'm still looking at those projects and I have just enough space to do a POC on my stuff. So I'm trying, I'm talking to management about that. As soon as I can show them they can do anything from a web browser, I'd like to give them Chromebooks and say, how can I stay, you know? It's funny you say that because most people think of the HCI space and like, oh, well, you start with VDI and now you're like, oh, well, now I've got some fair capacity, I'm guessing, or I can put environment, manage it. So yeah, just some of the dynamics inside the company sounds like are some of the bigger challenges to that. Always for VDI has been a challenge. Yeah, it's always a challenge. But, you know, so far everything I've said has worked for them, so I've got a good trust base. Peter Romero, really appreciate you talking about Turn It In, no plagiarism at this show, right? That's right. We'll check. All right, well, Peter Romero, Turn It In, really appreciate you joining us. For you, Piskar, I'm Stu Miniman, lots more coverage, wall to wall, here at VMworld 2018. Thanks so much for watching theCUBE.