 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's the Cube, covering EMC World 2015, brought to you by EMC, Brocade and VCE. Hi, this is Stu Miniman with Wikibon, joined by my co-host, Steve Chambers. This is SiliconANGLE TVs, live coverage from EMC World 2015. We go out to all the big shows and enterprise tech, help extract the signal from the noise. And after what last weekend was probably one of the biggest sports weekends, and at least US history, at least recent history. We had the big fight here in Vegas, we had the derby going on in Kentucky, playoffs going on. We're happy to dig into the sports a little bit here, because we've got Mike Tompkins, who's the CTO of Fox Sports Australia. Michael, thanks so much for joining us. Hey, how's it going? How's it going? As we all know, Australia is a pretty sporty country, right? It is indeed. As long as I've mentioned the cricket with me being English. Well, the cricket, what can I say? The World Cup was good. So it was all good for us. What can I say? All right, so can you tell us a little bit about, I mean, Fox Sports Australia is pretty straightforward, is involved in media and broadcast. I understand a little bit of new media. Tell us about your role there and what the role of IT is there. So Fox Sports Australia is a little bit different to most businesses. So we're the leading subscription sports broadcaster in Australia, which is pretty cool. Australia is different in that we have pretty much about 25 tier one sports or 25 sports that we cover. So we love our sport too much is one of our problems. So we take in a lot of sport. We have seven channels, 14 if you like, with HD and SD. We're live roughly 23 hours a day on average. And really we're built different to another broadcaster in that we're only one third traditional broadcast and we're two thirds new media. So we use a lot of IP, a lot of different technologies to bring things through, really trying to embrace the new technologies and the new ways of working. You sound like a very technological company just from the sounds of that, right? Well, we're a content company, content's really what matters. But what we need to do is get that passion, get that to the actual punter at home. And that's really the role of the technology. It's all about the delivery and speed to screen. How fast can I get that clip that happened with a bit of insight from some sort of stats that says this is the definitive moment and then get it to you. And really I used to always be about like the main screen, HDMI one. Now it's really the best available screen. So I want to hit any device, hence the new media flavor. So we've really embraced digital and it's all about just getting the content to you, but the right content. It seems to focus everyone's mind when they're trying to understand someone else's business. Because everyone's always had a bad day in the office one day, right? When technology's let them down. What's a bad day in the office for you guys? So a bad day in the office for us hasn't happened for a long time. We moved buildings about three and a half years ago. Pre that, we had a bad day where we lost the entire facility. We actually had a triple stack failure whereby we lost our substation, which dropped power. That took us on to UPS and then diesel. Diesel then failed, which then dumped onto the UPS, which then caught fire. So lost three primary systems, that's a bad day. That's black to wear, that's catastrophic. So that wasn't a very good day for us. But since we moved to the new facility, everything's perfect, no dramas at all. But I never want to live that one again. So Michael, one of the discussions we've been having with a lot of the IT practitioners is what do I do myself versus what do I kind of outsource? So can you walk us through, do you own your own data centers? Did you build your data centers? Obviously you're using a VCEV block, so there's a piece of the stack that you help them just take care of it. Can you walk us through kind of your infrastructure in the front for a bottom up? That's very easy. So for us, our volumes basically dictate that everything has to be on-prem. But we're a hybrid operation again. Comes to that one for traditional two-thirds new media. So from the edge, things come in and then we try and get to multicast and we stream to all our systems. So there's 130 racks in the data center. Two of those represent VBlock and that represents really the majority of the control systems that allow us to orchestrate. We also burst out to the cloud, we go out to AWS. And it's that orchestration layer that really makes us different. It sets us apart from everybody else. This is a home-written orchestration layer? It is. We were a very early adopter. We bought one of the first VBlocks. We've got a lot of Iceland wrapped around it and it's really the orchestration layer that lets us flow and let us do things that are different. And it's just an open-source stack. So basically take an elk stack and add a bit of elastic to it and a bit of cabana and basically it gives us an orchestration layer which lets us have a policy-based workflow management. So we can move things around dynamically. The building is moving into a responsive world. So just to describe to me what do you use the VBlock for and the Instalong for in simple terms? So in simple terms, we have about 60 feeds come into the building. They all hit the edge and then the Isolong, we have roughly three petabytes of cache and that holds our basically one year's worth of support. So basically everybody is editing and using that Isolong as the edge. And then as soon as we get past that, we then go off and we archive that to LTO. So we've got LTO four, five and six as we sort of go on. So it's three petabytes of cache then we go to 22 petabytes of our gold storage which is on tape. On top of that we have the VBlock itself. That runs our complete corporate systems and it also runs the orchestration systems which run across the business. So the VBlock arrived in 42 days or sorry in 45 days from order, which was great. Hardest thing was we're in construction. That thing weighs 700 kilos. Getting it into the building was probably harder than commissioning it. But it wasn't a pristine environment when we moved in but at least it was pressurized and it was good. But what about, you know, we hear lots of different reasons for people going to VBlock. Sometimes you hear people are scared of being locked in that's something we heard today and then the customer added up how much effort they were doing to rack start cable, test firmware and it was like it was just too much money let's just buy VBlock. Did you go through the same experience? You know, what got you to the decision? For us it was much more fundamental. So we had two core reasons. One is we wanted to move and I didn't want to build a system. So the old way of working is everybody builds systems, builds hardware. I really, you know, realistically I don't like the screwdriver guys. I try and get rid of them. I believe in a world defined by software. So the VBlock for me was, you know, I know it's something I shouldn't say but it's just tin. So I just go everything is tin and then I want to work on the application layer above. So everything we do is really application and the sooner we can get rid of the VMs and all those sorts of things because they're actually a limitation. You know, you spend all this money putting in VMware, it's a nice thing, I agree. But you put all these systems in and you put in VMware and you have all these machines that you then have to manage but it's there because of the limitation of the software. If I can just have lots of storage followed by compute and then I just lay out my applications on top, that's the bit that makes money. That's the bit that runs my business. That's the bit I need to focus on. Whereas the tins, as I call it, that's, you know, it's an old school way of thinking. So the more time you spend on the tin, the less time you're doing it. It almost sounds, if you look at really kind of a web scale, hyperscale guys out there, you know, Facebook's Yahoo's. Yeah, it's the same principle. It's the same thing with big web companies. That's kind of where you're going. In some ways VCE with a VBlock, it creates that simplification and repeatable processes, which is what the web guys don't think about infrastructure. They build their application and they just play, you know, racks or data centers full of the same stuff. So how's VCE doing on, you know, moving towards that kind of model? I think they're getting there. I've had a few sessions today and yesterday where they're certainly moving in the right direction. The VBlock, the original VBlock that we've got was quite rigid. So we had a fairly rigid plan on what we would do with it. We've managed the use quite well. You know, we use Amazon to help sort of extend the life so that we don't over-commit the VBlock. But the new technologies, the hyper-converge, the way that we can now plug and play with it, I think that's really the way to go. It's taking us to a new technology and they do believe in orchestration where, and I think that's the key where we can basically burst on and off-prem different clouds. I say our VBlock is basically our private cloud on-site and then we burst off where we can. Our volumes and metrics are such that we can't move everything off-site. But certainly the controls and where we can then use that to dynamically change cloud providers and move around, that provides a massive business benefit. So there's cost reduction, there's orchestration. It just makes a lot more sense. So I wonder just to step back a bit and not talk about infrastructure for a second, but with the changing role of media, you talked about some of the kind of digital and non-credible you're doing. Technology can really be a threat to disrupt what you're doing or it could be an opportunity. How do you use the CTO look at the landscape for the broad media world? So the way to look forward, I think, in this broadcast, certainly into media, is if you think of 4K and 8K. So 4K is not big enough for us. Our grounds are too big. So a 4K stitched image with two cameras works really well. But if you come in from the edge with 4K as an 8K stitched image, basically you can reduce cameraman. You can basically move your image around the screen through software. So suddenly, the whole model changes. So from a production point of view, you still have your cameras, but you have less cameraman because you're doing it in software. So in sport, we teach our cameraman to work very, very quickly. They zoom, they move around, they're very, very talented. In a future, we may not need those sorts of skills because you see the cameras are fixed and then you move around the box in software. You have virtual cameras, then they come back into a switcher and then you move out. So the whole back end of the broadcast facility needs to change to adopt to that. And that's really where we're heading. That's the future of broadcast in my mind. Can you ever see, I mean, we've heard a lot about other storage solutions this week, like Extreme Mail seems to be changing the way people do. We need to see self using all flush arrays and things like that. We look at it constantly. So one of our things is just basically turn around speed screen and transcode the two key metrics for us. We get around the transcode issue because we don't have a method format. We keep everything the same, native all the way through. But the Extreme I.O. adds a lot of performance. Our biggest issues are always going to be bandwidth. So storage, we can grow very quickly. Bandwidth is something harder to control and you need to manage a bit more. The Extreme I.O. adds value there. We talk about it a lot. We haven't done anything with it. We tried some, or we've talked about using the SSDs a lot and it's the life of the SSD versus the cost. That's really the pain point for us. And I'm thinking about some public cloud plays like Amazon who've got transcoding, encoding, whatever. It'll go, that's your area of expertise, not mine. And they have content delivery networks. And I'm thinking, why wouldn't I just use them and why would I do on-premise? Because this is constant hybrid cloud idea. Why are some people still on-premise? Because Amazon is an impressive company, right? So what's your thinking about it? Truth is, I think you shouldn't be on-prem. So I think for the traditional that we do now, so a one-third traditional broadcast, two-thirds new media, where it's live and it's real, I need to bring it through. And we built three years ago. So that was the technology at the time. For our DR site, we're definitely looking at a fully IP-based system. The software is now there, it's scalable. And more the point, it lets me do it more cost-effectively, but it gives me a path to digital. So for me to stand up a normal channel is going to take me roughly three months, probably half a million dollars. Whereas if I do that in the cloud, it's going to cost me roughly 50K and I can stand it up straight away. So again, that money that I would normally spend in time, I can put that into content. I can put it into rights. I can put it into better use. But it takes me from a traditional platform of going after the main screen. Again, I'm after all the screens. So it's the best available screen. So as soon as I get to that digital platform, I can hit any screen I want. And I think the over-the-top play is where we should be moving to and very, very quickly. It's fascinating. So Michael, this has been great stuff. I want to give you the last word on this. One of the things we'd love to do is what IT practitioners can share with their peers. If you're talking to some of the other folks, whether it be in Australia or in similar kind of roles as yourself, what have you learned and what advice would you give them specifically around kind of converged infrastructure and some of these changing architectures? So the best way to describe that is the converged infrastructure works. It's a technology that is well-ready, well-tested. For a broadcaster, the big issue is cultural change. You need to culturally change not only the business, but the tech crew, the guys with the screwdrivers, you need to tell them, we need some of you, you definitely have roles, but software is now the answer. So you're moving into full stack development, more DevOps type people, those sorts of software features. And so it's a cultural change for the business to go through and align the business with the new technology. The technology's there. If we ignore it, we'll be left behind. Plenty of industries have seen that, whereas if we adapt now, we can orchestrate onto the IP platforms and then basically change the skillsets and we move forward. And that's really what I tell everybody, but it's the cultural change which is the biggest challenge. It's not actually the technology anymore. So one last quick question for you. I'm curious, what's the most social sport in Australia, the one that drives kind of the most activity on social media? Not sure about social media as a definitive, but cricket. Cricket's the all over sport. So it doesn't matter what it is. So people follow either NRL or AFL, AFL being the largest. And people transition around sports, but cricket, everybody comes back to cricket. It's pretty much a drinking sport really. You know, it goes for a long time. You have a few beers. Every time you get a spot it is, yeah. All right, well Steve's going to help translate for me later, you know, he knows that piece of it, but really appreciate you sharing all your points of view on this, exciting times in the media world definitely. And I always love the sports angle here too on theCUBE. So thanks for joining us. We're going to be back with plenty more coverage here from the EMC world. So stay tuned and watch all the video playlists.