 Okay, we're back, I'm Dave Vellante of wikibond.org, and I'm here with Stu Miniman, my co-host for the week, and this is theCUBE, where we bring you the smartest people that we can find. We're at the Dell Storage Forum here in Boston. We're with Dan Marbs, who's with Associated Bank. He's a CUBE alum. He first came on theCUBE last year. You know, Stu, our first experience with Dell on theCUBE was at VMworld 2010. And I have to say, thinking back to that, Dell was able to provide us with some of the best customer proof points. You might remember, Stu, we had some VDI segments on, and I was always impressed with Dell's ability to provide customers. Now, subsequent to that, the company has acquired companies like Compellent. And of course, Compellent was always really good about providing customers. So anyway, Dan, you're here, you've been a long time customer of Dell and some of, you know, it's companies that it's acquired, so first of all, welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you, it's nice to be back. Yeah, so, we first met last year in Orlando, and my notes tell me that you've been to every single Dell Storage Forum ever, even before it was called the Dell Storage Forum. Yep, back when it was the Compellent C-Drive Conference, and Minneapolis had been to them all. So I never actually made it out to C-Drive, but it was a lot smaller event, but it was intimate and started out as sort of a peer-to-peer, you know, hands-on event for practitioners, right? Correct. Yeah, and so now we've seen it grow. I mean, first of all, what are your thoughts between last year and this year? What are the differences and what are your takeaways? Well, I think for me personally, last year was a chance to see once Dell had acquired Compellent what that meant. You know, there was a little bit of trepidation about, okay, you've gobbled up this intellectual property and now what are you going to do with it. What's really exciting is to come back a year later and see all the integration points. You are now starting to see the fluid file system now covering not only Compellent, but all of their storage family integrating some of the intellectual property that they brought on from Exynet. So you're starting to see now what we had hoped to see when we talked to everyone a year ago. Now it's all starting to come together to build a great family of products. Yeah, so take us back actually. Well, first of all, tell us a little bit about Associated Bank and then we'll sort of get into a little bit of it. Associated Bank is a full-services financial company headquartered in the Midwest. We serve Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota. Our corporate headquarters is in Green Bay, which is where I'm based out of. We have two data centers and about 300 remote sites. So just with that architecture, we've got some interesting challenges. Like you said earlier, we've been a customer of Compellent since 2006 and since our first incarnation of the Compellent product, we've gone from a single array of 3 terabytes to now managing 12 arrays with a total aggregate usable capacity of about 1.5 petabytes. So back in 2006, Compellent was a startup, it was pre-IPO. What made you take the chance on Compellent back then? The fundamental tenet of that product when it was first designed well before we actually were customers was tell us what you want from a storage product and we will design the product that you need. We'll give you the features you want, we'll make it easy to manage and it was looking at that product going, oh, I no longer need to manage tiering, I no longer need to manage spindle count, the system just does what it does and I can just let it be, was fantastic. Even now managing the scale of storage that we manage, I only have four engineers who have access to the system and it's not anybody's full-time position. So you've obviously seen some pretty major storage growth, 3 terabytes to 1.5 petabytes. What's driving that? I think that's a lot of the same trends that you're seeing in the industry, unstructured data growth is crazy. We have a really significantly increased focus on business intelligence and as you continue to bring platforms on and bring platforms on, all of those have massive storage requirements. We have a lot of regulatory concerns about what data we're retaining and how long we're retaining it, so there's just a lot of stuff. So what do you do with the unstructured data, how do you manage that? From a storage back end, we basically let the system do it right now, we're still using pretty traditional block storage approach, traditional file share type things, but I think what we will begin to do is look at more intelligent management of that. Now whether that's using some sort of a roll-up like SharePoint and basing that on Dell's DX platform and looking at object-based storage as a way to track metadata, I don't know whether that's using some of the fluid file system technologies that are now approaching market, that might be another solution. So your storage back end is exclusively compelling or it's predominant? Yes, it is exclusively compelling. So Dan, I'm wondering what you think about some of the recent integrations that they've talked about, so the Exynet, the Appashore, are those pieces that you find of interest, something that you might consider in the future or how do they fit in your environment? I think the Exynet integration, as we're seeing with the FS8600, that's about to be released in the Dell Compound Platform is fantastic. The ability to scale using the Exynet integration, understanding that some of the Ocarina compression is in the pipeline, it's on the road map, I think that's fantastic, it just seems to be a way smarter way to manage that data at scale, great. So what about, what are you guys doing with the cloud? We have clouds outside, we look at them rainstalls. Yeah, so I was going to say, a couple years ago when you asked the IT person what are you talking about, cloud, it's just IT, it's no real difference, but people are starting to embrace at least the term, if not the concept. Well, it's a funny term, I think it's much like the term big data that everyone likes to bandied about and no one really knows what it means. For us in a heavily regulated industry, we still approach data management that we want to keep everything within our four walls, because that way we know we can meet all of the regulator's demands, we don't have concerns about customer data being out in a remote data center somewhere, and we have the staff and the experience to manage that data, so we're not too worried about that. Where I think cloud becomes relevant is as you start to manage servers and storage and network at scale, trying to meet the business requirements need for, we need new systems provisioned and provisioned quickly. The whole idea of private cloud and automating a lot of the manual busy work, I think that's where it becomes really relevant for us, so we're trying to find ways to have software be the glue that binds all of these solutions together. What about your server networking infrastructure? What do you do there? You're an all Dell shop? No, we use, am I allowed to say their vendor's name? Yeah, of course, absolutely. We are primarily using HP as our server infrastructure, we're primarily a Cisco shop for networking. Okay, so this is an interesting discussion now. So you get the entire base of large companies, server companies and storage and networking companies are all going after this converged infrastructure space. You have relationships with different companies. What do you make of this whole converged infrastructure play? There's obviously value in integration and the whole value proposition of speed to deployment and simplicity, etc. There's also the flip side of that, which is pricing power maybe shifts to the seller. So what's your take on that whole integrated systems approach? Well, I think you can look at convergence from both a macro and a micro level. We're very actively looking at the micro level of convergence where with some of the blade technology that we're doing, we have converged uplinks. We're doing converged networking and so we're not managing tons and tons of manual cabling and server tasks where it's the sort of wire once and you can be much faster to market with provisioning hardware that way. So from that we're actively looking at it. From a macro level, I just don't know that to this point, we've seen enough of a value proposition in any one vendor that makes us want to forego the investment that we have in some of our existing relationships. Well, these guys must be selling you hard. I mean, HP and Cisco must have you in headlocks and Dell's going to be right behind them now with all this converged infrastructure stuff. But so essentially you're saying right now the value of the relationships that you have with these suppliers outweighs the pros of any kind of integration. Yeah, we'd rather build our own middleware or pick third party middleware to integrate those systems because fundamentally we want to find the right solution, whether that's a server solution, a storage solution, a networking solution that really meets our needs, allows us to provide the greatest business value that we can provide. And if we have to write some of our own special sauce to do the integrations, so be it. I hope that those things become more agnostic as more and more people try to embrace the cloud. I mean, for a company that's financial services business, that middleware can be a source of competitive advantage. Can it not? I would say yes. Yeah, so that's another attribute that you don't mind doing on your own. My question specifically is as it relates to flash. There's a lot of people who feel that flash can be a source of competitive advantage. And are you driving that in a way that can differentiate you from the competition? I guess I would come back to you with how exactly do you frame that? Application performance, for example. Yeah, I mean, right now in our most recent upgrade with Component, we've made a significant investment in SSDs. We have several terabytes of SSD that we're running to try and get the best performance for the data types that can really take advantage of those performance characteristics. Are you doing anything unique on the application development side to exploit the lack of spinning disk? Or not yet? At this point, no. We're relying on the core SQL server and Oracle to really take advantage of those. What's on Dell's to-do list? You're sitting down with Michael Dell instead of Dave Volante and Stu. What would you tell them? Tell me something that would help you, Jan, make your business better. What would it be? As I would implore all my vendors, we want things to have increasing levels of reliability, increased performance capabilities, increased abilities to do intelligent reporting so that we can see bottlenecks before they actually affect the lines of business. And that's not only a Dell thing. That's every vendor. I think we're really driving all of our vendors to provide the same. At a lower price, of course. Oh, absolutely. What's happening with your budgets? I don't do a lot directly with the budgets. But we find the resources that we need to provision the optimal solutions for our business lines. Excellent. All right, Jan. So I have to take a quick break here. So we are basically doing a simulcast from Boston. And we're also in San Jose at the Hadoop Summit. So we've got, on siliconangle.tv, you can pick your channel. You can watch the Dell Storage Forum, or you can watch the Hadoop Summit. So check that out. John Furrier, my colleague, and Jeff Kelly are at the Hadoop Summit. Big data, Dan, is where all the action is, and all the buzzword action anyway. So keep it on siliconangle.tv. Choose your channel, Dell Storage Forum, Hadoop Summit. We're going to keep it right here, and we're going to continue to broadcast from Dell Storage Forum. As I say, our colleagues out in San Jose are picking up the Hadoop Summit. Go to the blog at siliconangle.com. Check out what's going on at Wikibon. And obviously, what's going on at siliconangle.tv. And if you want to find the replays of these events that we've been doing in our summer tour, go to youtube.com slash siliconangle. And you'll see playlists from all of our events that we've done in the past two years, actually. And of course, Stu, we're on our summer tour. This is winding down. It's not even summer yet. Is this summer yet? No, it's not even summer yet. And so we're here with Dan Marbs from Green Bay, Wisconsin. You're a Packers fan? Yes. Of course, right? You're not allowed to. And a Dancing with the Stars fan now, too. Really? Yes. You aspire to be on the show? Oh, that would be horrible. Yeah. Fantastic. Well, Dan, I really appreciate you coming back on the Cube. Thank you very much. Great to see you again. And we ask you to keep it right there. We're going to be back with more coverage live from the Dell Storage Forum. We have Denny Conner coming up from Storage Strategies now. Keep it right there.