 It's theCUBE, covering VeeamON 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. Welcome back to VeeamON 2018, everybody watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise, my name is Dave Vellante and I'm with my co-host, Stu Miniman. Mike Conjoice is here. He's a solutions architect at Boopa Dental. Mike, over from the pond? Yeah, absolutely. Over the pond, rather to America. Welcome from Bristol, England. Great to have you on theCUBE, thank you. Thanks very much. Boopa Dental, tell us about this 90,000 person organization. Yeah, so Boopa is a global organization. They're primarily known for their healthcare insurance. Boopa Dental is a market unit that provides dental, NHS and private. So we're one of the largest private providers in the UK. We've got around 460 practices at the moment across the UK and Ireland. Boopa itself, 90,000 staff, 8,000 of that is dental. So that's clinicians and support staff. We're acquiring new practices, about three practices a week, so. Massive scale. Yeah, absolutely, it's huge. I got to ask you before we get into it, so healthcare in England, NHS, you mentioned NHS and private. A lot of us in the United States have I think misconceptions, but what's your take on the quality of healthcare in England, in the UK? A lot of people I talk to love it, they say it's really high quality, what's your take? It's certainly a different way of doing things, but then it's a good model, I feel, because we all pay in, everyone can get that healthcare they need. They don't have to worry about being ill. Being ill shouldn't bankrupt you. So we do the NHS and private sort of things. It's usually a lot of the same clinicians that run those models, but the privates, you tend to cut the line a lot quicker, things like that. It's you're paying for the speed of the access to the clinicians, things like that. Okay, so it's a hybrid model, so if you can afford it, then you can compliment it, and it allows you to accelerate things. Absolutely. Okay, so there's still that level of quality that you can pay for. But everybody's got healthcare, 100% of the citizens are covered. Yeah. Mike, what's the kind of the stresses and the changes happening in healthcare, regulation like that impact from the technology side? So at the moment, GDPR is obviously the big buzzword. I'm sure it's not the first time you've heard that this week. Yeah, it's May 2018. It's got a countdown going, yeah. So a lot of our data is patient data, so it's critical healthcare data. So we're very lucky in Boopa to have a large information governance team that manage a lot of the compliance and regulatory factors for us. So we need to be very aware of what we're doing with that data. We have the GDPR compliance side of things where we've got the right to forget and anonymization, but also the healthcare side of things can overrule that, that we are obliged to keep records for certain amounts of time, depending on ages and things like that. And what kind of solutions are you architecting? So we, as I said, we acquire heavily. We acquire about two to three practices a week. So we are growing. So everything we look at is scale. Not where we are now, but where we're going to be. You know, we've got plans to be at a thousand practices in no time at all. So a lot of the legacy frameworks that we followed, a lot of the legacy operational models we went with, they worked, but they don't scale well. So we need to put things, so automation and intelligence, like Danny's been talking about on the keynote, it's things we really need to look at. We've started leveraging our data a lot more. So we pulled back a lot of this data. We've got so much data, but we weren't really doing a lot with it. We've started running a lot of business intelligence, you know, MIS data across that, to kind of learn how our patients use, I mean, nobody likes going to the dentist. It's not a luxury treat that people go for. So trying to make that journey easier for the patients is kind of our end goal. We want to make it as painless as possible, apart from the dental bit, making an appointment to kind of feeding back afterwards and keeping that loop going. It's not just a one-time end-to-end project. Yeah, so that whole experience, take us inside the pieces that your patients don't see. Paint a picture of your infrastructure, I mean, what's there, what does it look like, and ultimately what applications are you supporting? You know, the top ones. Yeah, so dental practice management software isn't as advanced as probably as most people would think. Each practice has got a virtualization host in each, so we've got 500 servers, remote branches, on an MPLS link, so they're all coming back to a central data center, where we keep all our off-site backups. Those are 500 physical servers? Yes, well, so they're running Hyper-V, so they've got, but they're quite low capacity, so there might be one or two VMs on each one. So although the scale is huge, the kind of the density is quite minimal. So we're bringing all that back across MPLS links that we're still not in a amazing place with network links in the UK. So some of our practices, they're not the best links, they're slow, bringing back a lot of that data every night can be massive issues, especially with the legacy software we were using previously. It's, we need an off-site copy. We can't just cope with a local copy. We've had issues where practices have failed, practices have flooded, and without an off-site copy, that backup drive floating in the water made no difference. And how does that local copy get made? That's done in an automated way from your remote location. It's not some gal at the desk doing the backups, like it used to be, right? Each practice has got a USB or a NAS, depending on the size of the practice, and obviously we centrally manage that through the Veeam console in our data center. So each practice does a local backup job to that storage every night, and then a backup copy job to our off-site data center to keep two copies of the data. And the office is closed, right? So that's not like you're dealing with like high volume transactions that you're having to capture. You've got a long enough window to get the stuff off-site, is that true? Yeah, so our bottleneck is always network. It's never source or target, it's always network. You know, some of our links, we might get 200K uploads. So if you're transferring a few gig of data, it's never good. A lot of our data is digital imaging as well, which is really taking off. So, you know, you used to go get an X-ray. Now it's all 3D models of a scan of your mouth. So those files are- A lot of data. Yeah, absolutely. Well, we've done cube gigs in the UK still. We know sometimes those pipes are pretty small. Absolutely. And the primary applications that you're supporting is this dental workflow software. There's a couple of big players in the practice management software space. So we're kind of a split across those. They are moving towards cloud software, but it's a slow process. It's, these are the same softwares that you'd find in a single person dental practice to these massive scales that we've got. So there's, they're very well known across the industry. So changes is quite hard for those. So you're a Microsoft shop, who's the server vendor? Dell. So Dell, you've got Dell servers and Dell storage as well? Yes, so we've got Dell storage in the core. Just equal logic. Yeah, equal logic. And then, but Veeam is your primary data protection provider, right? Yeah, absolutely. And how long have you had Veeam in there? Probably two and a half years now. Great, so let's go back to three years ago. The good times. And then what was life like then? And why'd you bring in Veeam and what changed? Let's take us through that whole case. So like I said, we're highly acquisitive. So that came with a certain cadence and expectation that we basically got what was given to us when we bought the practice. There was a lot of legacy backup providers, all the classic ones. All over the place, no standardization of what was set up, what was backing up, the reporting. There was no central pane of glass to manage that. So it was taking a lot of engineer time to check those backups. So the infrastructure team that look after that, they were having to dedicate possibly two engineers a day to just to check backups, which was an absolute nightmare. It's expensive as well. They're not cheap guys to hire. So you're getting them to do manual admin work. So we needed to change that obviously, especially with the expectations of growth. I'd worked with Veeam previously at an MSV. So I knew the product, I knew how it works. I kind of put it forward. I think it would be the best idea for us to go with it. So we kind of went through a partner to kick off the initiation. And then straight away they said, look, this is a big project. You want to get Veeam directly involved. So we had a lot of help from Veeam, the Assis, the sales guys, everyone we wanted, we had access to just because of the size of it. And it was something Veeam hadn't really done before, the whole remote office scheme because of the licensing. It can work at expensive per socket. So they were quite interested in it as well. That was our primary driver was kind of centralizing all that management and the reporting and just freeing up time. Just was the main goal. So did you, was it sort of a wholesale? We're doing Veeam, we're going all in. So across 500 server? There was a big blast of it at the start. So we had a lot of physical 2003 servers. So they needed to be replaced anyway. So that was perfect timing for that. How convenient? Yeah, it was good timing. Sorry, CFO, we got to do it. Yeah, we're very lucky actually, our finance team are very trusting of us. If we say this is the right solution, they kind of, well, that's what it is. They're quite the bullet. Yeah, yeah. So we did probably about 200 in one go, in one go over a period of couple of months. In tranches kind of. Yeah, and it wasn't the slickest process because we were learning at the time, it's the network bandwidth was a big issue. But now moving forward, we're still replacing servers. Any kind of BAU replacements will always go out with this Hyper-V Veeam model. Any new practices we bring on, Hyper-V Veeam, it's just, we've done a lot of PowerShell scripting on the background as well to, because if you think we've got 500 posts, that's a thousand jobs running. It's 500, a local 500 copy. It's a lot to keep track of. Yeah, so Mike, the next acquisition, do you have to change the infrastructure or can you drop Veeam in as a first piece before you rip out some of the gear? We do tend to rip and replace, just to kind of standardize it. So we keep our, we don't want to go to 350 practices and they're one model and then there's 10 that are a different one. So we tend to rip and replace with our MPLS and the server switching, just trying to keep it as standard as possible for management. So how did it work? I mean, what was the result? It was pretty good, actually, yeah. What changed? How did you measure the success? Was it sort of, you saw it? So, reporting before was done by an MSP that looked after us. Reporting was creative, shall we say. So we were getting 98, 100% successes of what they reported on. So they may have been backing up 20 files. That was working. They had their thumb on the scale. Absolutely. So we've got a lot more confidence in what we're backing up now. Even if we get, which we never do, but even if 30% of failures, I'd rather know about 30% actual failures than just be blissfully ignorant. It's saved a lot of the infrastructure team's time. With the scripting and the reporting, we're pulling a lot into Power BI as well so management can see those stats real time. It's just, buzzword, it just works. I was going to ask, does it just work? So, you save time, your staff save time. What happened? They got their weekends and nights back or you were able to not hire as many people? I presume you didn't fire anybody? Not that I know of, no. It's allowed them to concentrate on the work they should be doing, the project work, the forward thinking work. With that kind of block, it was not allowing these guys to innovate and to see where to change. They were doing a lot of reactive work, whereas now they're fully proactive. They're kind of looking about, what's the next thing? How can we get ahead of the curve? Why Veeam? I know we got to go, but you might want to jump in when we're done. But why Veeam relative to the other choices that you had? Well, first of all, it was my experience with Veeam. I never had a bad experience dealing with them. The support is absolutely flawless. Any one I speak to, I always say, hopefully you'll never need them, but the support guys are just out of this world, the help they'll give and what they'll go above and beyond. They'll help with things that aren't necessarily Veeam just to get you up and running. Yeah, Mike, the last question I had for you is Veeam's been expanding beyond just virtualization. You're using Hyper-V, it was big news, Veeam supported that. They're doing a lot with SaaS these days. You're probably not too much in public cloud, but what do you see, what interests you, what might bring you beyond kind of the one product you're using? So 365 is big for us. We're going to be pushing to 365 next year. So the Veeam backup for Office 365 is something we're definitely going to look at. We do leverage Azure very heavily for our development. So things like direct restore to Azure are good for us. We can spin up a practice straight in Azure if their physical area fails. Things like that are a big boost to us. All right, we got to go. Mike, you going to the party tonight? Absolutely. You're fired up. Veeam party, yeah. Absolutely, yeah. Thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. Thank you for having me. All right, actually, sorry. One last question. If you had a Mulligan, what would you do over differently? Probably nothing, really. Oh, that was easy. Yes. All right. Well, thanks again for coming to theCUBE. No, thank you. Appreciate it. All right, keep it right there, buddy. Back with our next guest right after this short break.