 Data, we're here with Link Alander, who's the CIO of Lone Star College System, Link. Welcome to theCUBE. Oh, welcome, thank you. Good to see you here. You know, were you at EMC World last year? No, I wasn't. I didn't have that opportunity last year. So the big theme last year, Link, was the journey to the private cloud starts here. And having spoken to a number of folks like yourself last year, I definitely got the impression that that had meaning to some, didn't have meaning to others. You know, a lot of people was like, ah, I don't really know what that means to me. Dial back a year ago to EMC World 2010, the journey to the private cloud. Did that have meaning to you? Were you on the journey at that point already? Where were you then and where are you now? It had a lot of meaning to us. Actually, I was at the VM World side, so I got an opportunity to really see where you take IT as a service. The biggest difference though was, is we had already ventured down this path. We went through a major rebuild in 2008, and as we addressed our needs, as the college system grew so fast, that we turned around and we looked at, how can we get into a private cloud model, a virtualization model, that can provide the high availability, the resources to our students, have the capabilities for instructors to enable innovation. So that was our goal. I've often said it is, we stumbled into the cloud. We were just a little bit ahead of ourselves there. So a lot of the challenges we faced along the way, were unexpected. Things that were being revealed this last year about the challenges of the data management, and how fast it's going to grow, exponential numbers, were items that we picked up along the way. So we've very been down this path. Yeah, so I want to talk about that and talk about some of those challenges, but let's start with Lone Star. It's kind of an interesting system. I mean, it's community college system, big, almost 100,000 students. Tell us a little bit about Lone Star and specifically your role there. Okay, the Lone Star College system is the largest community college system in the Houston area, and it is the second largest in Texas. So currently right now, we have 70,000 regular students, and then the remainder are what I call our continuing education and credit students that pushes up at 90,000. So it's a unique challenge. We also cover 1,400 square miles. So that provides even more of a challenge. We have two main data centers that are completely interlinked. They run hot, hot, so we can provide a five, nine, high availability design for our core applications. But then also each campus has an instructional data center that provides those localized apps that are needed there. So we have to manage all of these data centers, 18 locations now by the end of this year with our growth, and we have to be able to manage that data to provide that reliability and service to the students that are using those applications. The students are pretty cutting edge. I mean, they're always got the latest and greatest equipment. I mean, I'm sure you're dealing with all that. It's been going on for years and getting preconfigured. But with the cloud now, has that changed at all? I mean, are you still seeing that early adopter kind of consumer feel for the students and the services you need to deliver? Absolutely, and this is an exciting time for that because we've just moved heavily into application virtualization also. So now we're able to have a student that's taken a class and we'll be able to deliver that application via the cloud through our internal cloud to them at their home. So they'll be able to use an application that they normally couldn't afford to go ahead and go buy a version of AutoCAD. To pull that across. When you did your cloud stuff, I mean, last year at EMC was journey to the private cloud. At VMworld, Dave and I were talking about that our theme was proof points. Cause a lot of hype around cloud, but now almost a full half a year later, there's some real stuff going on. So, you know, Dave and I were talking about the sizzle of the EMC world was Hadoop, data science and big data, that's kind of the sizzle, right? But the stake is the deployments. Real, real clouds are being deployed, real virtualization. Can you elaborate on your efforts and how you got to where you are with the virtualization? Absolutely, the journey started early for us. Like I said, in 2008, we had a change in our organization and we centralized IT as a whole. Before that it was decentralized. So we had an opportunity. We had to look at a 5% virtualization and that was the test of the normal garbage. You know, oh yeah, I'm doing virtualization. In one year, I made it to 87% virtualized and included a brand new rollout of our PeopleSoft ERP. So 87% of your applications? Yes, virtualized. Yes, of our servers, everything. Core down. So 80% of the servers or 80% of the applications are both? Both, okay. So now we've made it to 93%. I've got a remaining little chunk as I call it. The next 2% are hard to get to. Each little percentage from here on out is a challenge but we went there for a reason. We wanted to provide high availability. We needed something that could provide the flexibility, the agility and the environment. The best case I can say for this that really helps us and fits our model perfectly is our ERP. We have a co-located ERP, half in one data center, half in the other data center and I can expand capacity and on demand. So I have the elasticity I didn't have before. When you have this many students register, it puts a huge drain on a system. So when students go to hit the register, you're looking at capacity and performance problems. Well now we're just spinning up more web, more application, more capacity and we're shrinking other capacity like business services side. We're shrinking those down. So by utilizing these two main configurations, we're able to address the needs of the students and they don't see anything. The cloud's putting a ton of change on the services delivery and we're seeing a ton of activity around Dave and I call the services angle where CIOs and folks are talking about how do I deploy, what's the process and then once they have the cloud deploy there's some economic and real business model advantages. People are making money and lowering costs, et cetera. What can you share with the folks out there around the services side of it? When you were deploying from a services perspective and then the services that you're delivering on the cloud because those two types of services, a ton of consulting firms out there, redoing new processes, what can you share that you've learned that was successful? Well there's two sides to it. One of course is, have you been able to benefit from the cloud financially and in our case absolutely. I had a major problem with outdated hardware, storage and I needed to consolidate our efforts. So during that process we very quickly looked at as we built this infrastructure was the flexibility and the dynamics of it. On top of our purchases of sand equipment, our server equipment and our storage I still saved 600,000 in CapEx savings. Now the next part came in which was the best which was the agility side. It used to be that when a customer came to us and said we want to be able to roll this type of solution out. And I'll give our foundation as an example. They wanted a better donor management system. So as we looked at, we worked with them very quickly on the product line and said okay so this really meets your needs, this can address it. But the difference was instead of the old process of okay now I go through procurement, I get a server for them, I do the build, I go through all these processes. Now it was pretty straightforward. We have an automated change process, we have a gold state image, we rolled the server out in a couple of days, we loaded the application on and they're up and running. So we went from a lead time of sometimes three to four months to deploy a new service down to a week. And our customers just love it. So two dimensions, there you have CapEx and the agility. So 600,000 savings in CapEx despite the new. Despite the large investment, the very large investment. How did that come about? It's pretty easy. What's the magic? People want to know. It's pretty straightforward. When you're looking at this and you're looking at the cost of that infrastructure is gigantic but I had aged infrastructure. I had all of these servers that were out into life that we couldn't support really anymore and the time to manage that the staff wise. So it was actually very easy when we finished off by the time we got into all of the infrastructure build to save that kind of money versus deploying, you know I have campuses that have 100 servers. You replace 100 servers, compare that to replacing a small set of nodes, sand nodes and a simple blade center that's beefed up for VM. We're here with Link Elander of Lone Star Community College System. Very successful case study of real life, savings, CapEx, innovation around cloud. That's phenomenal, great success. In fact, Dave and I had Accenture on, CSC, you know these big monstrous consulting firms and we're seeing a lot of the high end firms like Accenture and CSC and then boutique cloud architects with consultancies growing like crazy. What's your advice to those folks out there who are in that solutions world that are trying to figure out the formula for effectively deploying the kind of value chains to get these clouds deployed? Well I think the real spot that hasn't been hit yet is we can talk about private cloud all we want. That's an easy one to roll out. When we start talking about getting into the hybrids where a business unit can turn around and save money on that infrastructure, that makes a big difference. And right now there's a lot of discomfort in the field as far as how do I get in this hybrid arrangement? How do I bring that data across? Do I really trust that provider? And I think a lot of the larger firms can look at it from that aspect is how do I guarantee that security? How can I come to a customer and say we can get you into this model, we can save you this kind of money versus your infrastructure, your power, your cooling. Here's what we can do for you for availability but make it in that hybrid or dangerous enough maybe go into more public side of it in the public cloud. So John's right, we've had a lot of service providers on and there seems to be a real tension in a lot of particularly commercial organizations where the CEO just wants to outsource everything. Get rid of it. Make it like Google, make it like Facebook. And the CIO rightly says what you just said is well, it's got to be secure. We can't just do this, it's my job to make sure that we protect the organization. Do you think they're thinking that though Dave? Do you think the CIOs are actually saying I want to outsource or is that more of a mindset? No, I think the CEO is saying we want to outsource it. Get rid of a lot and I'll get, just make it as simple as possible. I see that a lot actually. I think a lot of public companies, you know, commercial entities are pushing there and the CIOs say okay, calm down. And so the answer is virtualization, private cloud, exactly what you've done. And now it's, now really the rubber meets the road on the whole public cloud thing. So, and security's not there, right? I mean, we had Pat Gelsinger on the other day and he said in a way security is a do-over and the cloud gives us an opportunity to do it over. So from your standpoint, you got to be cautious about what you put into the public cloud and you got to make sure that you've got the ecosystem, the processes to get data out and bring it back and make it secure. And that's another journey, isn't it? I think that one of the biggest concerns also when you're talking about the hybrid or the public clouds is like I said, getting the data back. Okay, so let's say I do finally settle on the security and I'm happy with what I'm seeing. Well, what happens down the road when I need to move away from them and I need to move to another provider? How do I guarantee I get that security back or that application back and all my data and is it really there? On the public side, I mean, it's unique. Okay, right now we have 360,000 student email accounts of Microsoft live.edu. So that is a public cloud. But that's just a student email, student file storage, although it does interlink back into our Active Directory for authentication processes. So you can see the risks that we're talking here. And it does get scary because it is IT's job to protect the organization. You don't want to be in the headlines for any reason and in the cloud that could get you there pretty quick. So are you predominantly an EMC shop or do you have a lot of diversity still in the organization? We, well, we're pretty well mixed, but we are on the sand storage, on the enterprise storage. Yes, we're primarily EMC for our sand and for our backup and recovery side of the house. We do have other solutions in play, but for core services, yes, EMC. The reason for my question is a lot of people have observed that the public cloud guys, the guys who are making it so simple like Amazon, there's a great deal of homogeneity there and that makes it easier to manage, of course. At the same time, a lot of the CIOs we are concerned about lock in. How do you balance that sort of need for standardization with the fear of lock in? Well, when you're talking about moving out into the cloud, though, does it really matter what that providers have behind the scenes? I'm buying capacity, I'm buying storage, I'm buying processing power, I'm buying bandwidth. I'm really not focused on what hardware is behind that. So that really doesn't have as much of an effect. The critical part comes back to is getting it back out. Yeah, the data. Because you're going to put it out there and let's say we come to that security, it's just getting it back out. It could really kill the business. It could hurt the business significantly. What's the budget situation like at Lone Star? It's constantly, well, 50, 60% a year increasing. So when you save the 600,000, do you like not tell them in like, use your budget? I don't know. No, no, we tell them, we let them know and it is tough times. I mean, business had their tough times, now we're also facing that. We're usually a little different cycle than on the business side. So we started off with the challenge of, we were in 2008 rebuilding an infrastructure. Our community supported us to actually build new facilities to meet the demand we're having. I mean, going from 63,000 students into the 90,000 student realm in under two years, that's phenomenal growth. We had to have new infrastructure to do that IT-wise, but also new buildings and capacity in our campuses. But when you turn around and you look at this and the budget picture nowadays is, okay, we had our opportunity, we built our infrastructure to be flexible, to be dynamic. We have to continue to maintain it and still have the innovation available. Faculty need that innovation, but it's tight. It's very tight now. When you look at your application portfolio, we said 2008, you really started the journey in earnest and you've gone from zero to 93% virtualized. Does the value to your organization of virtualization change as you go from sort of low single digits up to the low 90s? Or is it really predominantly the cost savings and flexibility? You know, the value of the organization is always there. It's just a matter of how IT communicates it to the business side. We're a lot different in our college system because we treat IT as a business. We have strict KPIs. We're always looking at what are we doing, how are we doing it? We don't want to be out there in the bleeding edge, but we also want to make sure that we're in a position to protect the organization, to enable innovation for the students and the faculty, provide them a high caliber of service. But for the organization to know that we are at 93% virtualized, they need to know that. They need to understand that because along with that comes maintenance contracts and all the other pieces that have to stay there. You don't want to road the infrastructure because you're not communicating what we're doing and how we're doing it. You need that aligned to take advantage of that. Absolutely. In any ways it's possible. And that's where I'll come back to the VM world when I kind of felt things pieced together last year. And that's really where it did for me. I'm sitting in a presentation going, we're there. Not really realizing how far we had gone, we're there. And so they're talking about IT as a service as the next journey. And I'm sitting there with a PeopleSoft ERP rolled out that's 100% virtualized other than of course the core databases, Oracle has an issue with that right now. And I'm designed in high availability. I have that agility. We're aligned with the business. We come to the table and we talk, where do you want to be? How can we do what we're supposed to do? It's not, we're a stepchild in the organization. We're providing a service to the organization and we're meeting what the organization wants. So of those 7% that aren't virtualized, I'm inferring from your last comment that Oracle is the holdout. And we know why Oracle, we love Oracle because it's great fodder for our editorial. John has said Oracle is like, and I have too, like a telco extracting rent from the customers. Now they of course want you to use Oracle VM, you want to use VMware, you're a VMware shop. Do you want to use Oracle VM or? Well, we evaluated it. We use VMware. All right, that's it. No, I think that was easy. Well, our David Floyer, our CTO has come right out and said, look, it's simply not as robust and he has this laundry list of things that it doesn't do. And so, what do you do about that? I mean, do you dam the torpedoes and eventually virtualize your Oracle apps which a lot of customers do and then sort of, if you pay through the nose, you can get great support from Oracle. Well, we did, we virtualized all of our Oracle apps except for the database servers. That was the only thing we could do. So the apps are virtualized, but the database stuff is not. The core database is not. Yeah, that is correct. All of our financial, campus services, everything is virtualized. It's in a high availability design for flexibility. So it gives me that dynamics, it gives me everything I'm looking for. But we came to the database, we said, well, okay, that was the end all be all, they would not allow. Now we have to- Not allowed in terms of- Support. Well, you know, they'll support it. They just might do a lousy job or they won't certify it necessarily. Yeah, I think that's a better way to put it. Yeah, certify it. It's the certification that you're looking for. So as a CIO, this is what I want to get to. You want to see that the application vendor and the database vendor certify the configuration of VMware for their applications before you'll jump in, you know, with four feet. Absolutely, I mean, and that's the interesting challenge we have right now because what we have in that last holdout, that last 7% is a lot of vendors that won't support a VMware installation. A lot of that is the building automation systems and different items like this. So that leaves me with physical infrastructure. And we're so used to our virtual infrastructure that is so flexible that anytime a vendor wants to lock me into a physical infrastructure, I'll question whether I need to go down that product line. So if we're looking at a new solution and they tell me they're not going to support me on VMware, they've just lost a lot of notches. The cost to deploy on physical hardware is significantly higher and the flexibility is not there. Yeah, that's hard for you though, because you can't just say, okay, I'm not going to use Oracle anymore. You can't just migrate off of Oracle overnight. If you were to do something like that, you'd have to freeze the code for some period of time. And that's just, or worse yet, you try to do it without freezing the code and that could be a business disaster, right? So they kind of got you there, you know? And it's a tough, tough problem that a lot of the CIOs that we talk to in the Wikibon community are facing. And so basically, so what do you do? Over time, you just sort of try to pick your spots and migrate or just work harder. Well, when we did the Oracle, like I said, all we were left with was four database servers that are physical. So now we do have a situation. You can live with that, basically, right? Yeah, and I can live with that. I mean, and to be honest with you, when you're talking about a high transactional database, I mean, we're doing SQL in VM without issues, but when we're talking about our core ERP, they're not going to give me full certification on that. I'm okay with just those four servers. There's four out of a thousand that are physical. This is one of those deals where you celebrate the success of 93%, and you don't really sweat the last seven, you sort of watch what's happening in the marketplace. I don't think I can ever get to 100%. I don't think it's possible. There'll always be certain things that I just can't do. Now, I'm going to keep trying. We're going to keep looking at everything we have, but I don't know. Because the benefits are just so compelling. Oh, yes, absolutely, especially for recovery. Link, I want to ask you, you know, with all that innovation and success you've had, how has the impact been on your staff? I mean, obviously when you have that kind of savings, you know, that's great savings and good business model, but you've got the end of life of your equipment, you've got the new cloud. I mean, tell us about what's going on with the people side of the business, because obviously this affects the people, and there's always the fear of the cloud gets rid of jobs or maybe shifts jobs. What can you talk about that from that angle? Yeah, that's a really good one, but like I said, we talked about budget challenges. Well, I'm also staff challenged. So this gave me an opportunity really to realign staff accordingly. It energized IT. It really did, because now all of a sudden they're looking at these technologies and this flexibility and a very, very small team. I mean, our core infrastructure is managed by 17 server admins and five network admins. So that's my entire team to support this large organization. And the virtualization makes that easier. The gold state imaging, all these other things make it simpler. When it came down to the changes we were making, everybody was involved and engaged in it. So they were pretty psyched up. They were like pretty pumped. Oh yeah, I mean, you know, it is. You put a technology in front of them that is the latest and the greatest and they're looking at what they can do. And they're like, oh, this is just perfect for us. Old machines in the data center, boring. Oh yeah. Yeah, slow moving to virtualization, cloud, new gear. And just the changes in the storage, the way you're managing the environment better. You know, I mean, it's critical to monitor and manage this environment. It just happened for you. So they've all been rejuvenated, I would say, in the process. And Dave and I have been talking about this whole people side of the business where, you know, IT was boring for 10 years. I mean, it's been, you know, do more with less, almost like, you know, nose to the grindstone. People getting grinded down. And virtualization, Dave, is we've been talking about a VM world, even last year at EMC world, is totally re-energized because, you know, it's really like candy to a baby. It's like, you know, and the costs are reduction. So the business side gets hit, the retraining. And so we're seeing a huge resurgence of education certification. And, you know, some of the videos we've been doing have been pretty much along the lines of, hey, give me more of that Hadoop cluster spin up. How do I do more with virtualization? And so this is pretty cool. You know, I've been watching this for a while now. And in my observation, I used to have a CIO consultancy and we would work with CIOs on the application portfolio. And one of the things we did with them is we would categorize applications as sort of run the business, grow the business, transform the business. And you see that some of the messaging here, the 70-30 problem, right? And you know that well. And as long as I've been in the business, that 70-30 mix hasn't changed if anything has gotten worse, right? And I'm sure you've experienced the same thing. But I feel like virtualization is one, you know, potential opportunity here to change that mix somewhat. Are you seeing that? I mean, somebody who's so virtualized, are you able to innovate more in your budget spend and your application portfolio? Absolutely. I mean, when you're addressing these types of problems that the business comes you with now, you have that agility and flexibility to do this. So you are able to innovate very quickly. Financially, like I said, the staff, staff's been recharged. So you don't see, I don't see turnover. I have them coming to work happy, per se. You know, everybody's have a rough day every day, but let's be realistic here. They're working in an environment that is what IT is going to be. And they know where it's going and they have a say in that process. So that makes a big difference. So for the organization, they finally get this highly sophisticated IT organization that can meet their needs quickly. So now when they bring something to us, we can look at it, address it, and provide a service to them. So that does provide that innovation level. So we're here, Link Alander, who's the CIO of the Lone Star College System out of Houston, and we're talking about a number of areas. His journey to the private cloud. The theme this year, Link, of course, is cloud meets big data. We talked about, okay, where were you last year? Yeah, I have to say, John, EMC does a pretty good job. We get a lot of conferences, as you can imagine. We have theCUBE, we bring it with us. A lot of the events, and John, I'm sure you can second this, is a lot of the events that just have a single theme that vaporizes. A year later, it's a different theme. I have to say, I'm impressed with the continuity of EMC's themes. We went from private cloud, now we're talking cloud. We were just talking about hybrid cloud, so you're thinking about that. So EMC's marketing clearly is a head of reality, but they're not that far ahead. They seem to be real leaders. They're messaging, and their marketing has a good arc to it. It's got trajectory. It's not like a reinvention every year. It's got a nice trajectory that builds on from last year. So they're sticking their necks out here on this big data thing, I think, a little bit. And there's a lot going on. There's big Icelon file stuff. There's Hadoop that we're talking about. There's analytics, traditional analytics. That's sort of the fallback. Well, I'm doing analytics, so let me ask you. So what are you doing in analytics? Are you doing anything with Hadoop? What does all this big data mean to you? Oh, that means a challenge, because in the process of this change, we went from, I would not consider really a sand environment. We had a very, very small sand that was running just the ERP to a sand that supports everything we do. And it's replicated for high availability. So all of a sudden, now I have this pile of big data that I have to deal with all the time. Backup recovery, hitting those windows, everything else that comes in. Probably in the best sense I'm looking at, it will be from the backup recovery side, which was critical, and the deduping into target, and being able to extract that and bring it across the wire, finally. And being able to manage that window and guarantee that that data was available at all times. That's been critical. As we go further down this road, Gardner says, what was it? Expect 8x growth in your storage area as you go into virtualization. I think they underdid it a little bit. Because as you're bringing that storage off of those server farms into the sand, really, is what you're doing. And that presents more challenge on management. The IT analytics side is critical. You've got to know what your capacity is. You've got to know where that dead data is at, where you can archive it out and extract it. If you don't, you're just going to continually grow more sand and more sand storage space, which I'm sure they would appreciate. But the reality is there has to be a cap. There has to be data management now that is effective. And IT analytics will give it you that point. So it's very useful for our community when a CIO who manages practitioners, practitioner himself, comes on theCUBE and helps peers understand what's happening, best practice, advice, and so forth. So my last question for you is, as you think about the journey that you took from 2008 to now, advice for peers, if you had to do it over again, what would you have done differently? What should people be focused on that maybe aren't as far ahead as you are? Well, I don't think I'd change anything we did. We did it, we did it fast. We basically ripped a band-aid off, fixed it wound and we were in better shape. So that part is pretty straightforward. I think the path we went down was exactly where we need to be. And I think that's where anybody needs to look at as they move forward. The big caution, of course, is on the data side, truly, because when you're talking about replication of data and you're spending more data across the organization, that is something you do have to watch closely. We missed it the first time around and we had to grow it into it. Like I said, we were a year ahead of this curve. So as Gardner reports this 8x growth in storage and I'm thinking, yeah, I did that last year. That was 2009 for me. I had that huge growth in storage as we moved into this arena. So now there's a lot of supporting material that helps out as any organization moves to this. Do the research, follow it up, look at it closely, and the path is pretty clear. Excellent. Link Alander, outstanding, really great interview. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate you sharing your knowledge with our audience. A great audience here out there. We've got over 1,600 people watching live, so thank you very much. And if you have any questions, please shoot them into the chat board there or email or Twitter at Furrier or at D-Velante. So Link Alander, thanks very much for coming on. Thank you. Appreciate having you. Thanks for coming on, appreciate it.