 The Cube at EMC World 2014 is brought to you by EMC. Redefine VCE, innovating the world's first converged infrastructure solution for private cloud computing. Brocade, say goodbye to the status quo and hello to Brocade. Welcome back everyone, we're here at EMC World 2014 we're at the Sands Convention Center in lovely Las Vegas in the back of the Palacio Hotel we've got a unique situation here we've got actually two cubes running here at EMC World so this is where it all started about five years ago as you know we take the cube out we go to the big events we talk to the people you want to talk to we extract the signal from the noise and we're excited to be back for year five at EMC World here in Las Vegas and I'm here, I'm joined with my special guest host Steve. Thank you Jeff. Great to be back on the Cube very exciting to have two cubes running here today so you know a lot of stuff going on here at the show you got a social media lounge going on having an alumni lounge this year a lot of excitement, a lot of energy we're at the keynotes this morning so I'd like to introduce our first guest here this is Eric Poole from Green Heck, Green Heck. So why don't you help us set the stage a little bit and tell us a little bit about what is Green Heck and then let's dive into the technology a bit. We at Green Heck fan were a private manufacturing company located in the Midwest right in central Wisconsin area that's where our corporate headquarters are we are the premier manufacturer of large air movement equipment so fans, ventilators, different dampers and louvers that you find in non-residential constructed buildings so a lot of buildings like this for example these large convention centers that's kind of our bread and butter so we are number one or number two within each market segment that we manufacture for so in fans we're number one player in there being a privately held company we have a lot of challenges with that and a lot of growth that we've had over the last couple of years that really affects IT and my role at Green Heck is being in charge of the technical services the infrastructure team and group there. So you guys national or international? We are international. We've got facilities in Saltillo, Mexico where we manufacture for the Mexican market we also have a facility in China right outside of Shanghai and we also just recently opened up a facility in India right outside of Delhi in all of our international locations for a manufacturer one of the unique things we do is the products that we manufacture like in China or in Mexico they're not shipped back to the US they're actually meant for the China market or for the Mexico market and now this new India market Excellent, great. Can you give us a little sense of like how big your IT shop is and some of the challenges you're facing you said you're growing, things are getting big. You bet, our IT shop is fairly small when you look at the size of the company we're about a 600 million dollar company as I mentioned privately held we've got three main divisions that we have underneath the same Green Heck group umbrella and for IT we're a shared service so we have to function across all three divisions so like most places instead of having one boss we really have three bosses that have to dictate what IT spends money on Don't we all? Right, the size of our IT department total is around 75 employees within my team we have 13 dedicated to the infrastructure which includes our operations area which is our help desk and our desktop group then also our server team, a network team our data center group that includes servers, storage, backend, networking, things like that that all falls apart underneath our umbrella Can you give us a little guesstimate from capacity under management we're at EMC world talking about storage what are we looking at for capacity? Yeah, good question, good question Well our SAP environment, the production SAP environment we have about 1.5 terabytes of the database itself total online storage that we have as a company is around 60 terabytes that we provide through file shares for other Oracle environments, SAP, SQL environments doing things like that we have about 200 physical servers we have about 300 virtual servers right now and actually those physical servers just like most places with admin virtualization our physical numbers of servers are going down quite dramatically this was actually the second year in a row that our power and cooling usage in our main data center actually went down we're actually pulling out racks that we had in the data center that we're full at one time What do you attribute that to? Some virtualization? Anything to do with storage infrastructure? Mostly virtualization and also with the ability with some of the new storage devices that we have like the VNX platform and some of the tiered storage that we're doing and the flash first type methodology that we're using allows us to do more with less so we have more disk but we can provide it to more sources and clients and servers because it has higher capacity, more performance and what percentage you're running from from your flash infrastructure in your tiered stack what percentage would you say is flash? Right now it's probably 15% and it's really focused on our SAP area we expected when we installed our VNX and started with the tiered storage that we were going to have to add some more flash at some time for performance and actually as we ran in production and we've got some real world numbers on it we actually need a lot less flash than we thought with the performance and is that primarily for your SAP applications? Correct, yeah. We're looking at now rolling out a VDI implementation across the company we're at a pilot right now we've got about 100 users we're looking to roll out about 500 VDI sessions throughout the company that one, as we're sizing that out that might be our first all-flash area that we bought specifically for VDI that's one of the reasons why I'm here is to learn more about some of the new flash technology that EMC has and some of their IO Extreme and some of the different partners that they have or the different hardware they're bringing to the table how it's all going to integrate and influence the future so how are you distinguishing within your infrastructure based on different type of workloads? How are you kind of personal? Good question, right now we really separate out SAP by itself so we built a separate environment for SAP utilizing Cisco UCS for the compute side VM were on the virtualization and then a VNX on the back end the one that we have with the tiered storage in there with the flash cache or fast cache and fast VP for storage that we keep separate now and that's more just an SAP way of doing things we've been running SAP about 10 years now and in the past actually when we first implemented SAP we had a lot of performance issues and it took a while for us to figure out what was going on we had a lot of great partners that came in and helped but it was basically we were IO bound at the system we had in place that was a non-EMC sand when we brought in SAP to come in and help us they looked at our storage subsystem and how we had it set up and right away they're like you guys should really look at EMC and that's really what brought EMC in the door for us so EMC came in and because of the past history habits more of a political thing had to company honestly we have a separate array just for SAP then we have another array similar setup of VNX as well for the green hack what we call our non-SAP environment so we have a separate virtual infrastructure with VMware ESX on there that runs the majority of our non-SAP applications tuning that's a lot is a little more difficult that when we really look at a lot of the performance tools that EMC gives us and the performance tools that are built into Windows to help us size and look at different things how we need to partition drives and the data load around so Jeff you talk about separating the signal for the noise I get really excited when I hear conversations like this because this is really industry practitioner stuff that you guys are doing every single day that I think a lot of our constituency a lot of folks that want to hear about what's going on so you brought up VDI implementation how far down the road are you with that implementation I know a lot of our listeners are looking at VDI thinking about it kind of what are some of the decision making processes you went through to why you want to do it and now kind of the next steps so to speak Oh great question One of the things that really VDI brings to the table for us that we're very impressed with and looking forward for in the future is because we're running SAP and we have a very sophisticated manufacturing floor environment we're a very lean organization so it's one piece flow we don't have a lot of inventory what that means in SAP land is we have lots of terminals on the shop floor running our SAP system so our manufacturing employees can go in and key in what they need they know exactly what's going on they can scan, barcode scan in do confirmations, look at work orders look at what's coming down the road down the pipe that they can prepare for that said we have about 500 shop floor terminals on our manufacturing in our scope field facility and across our company we have about one and a half million square feet of manufacturing so those 500 PCs are all over the place as we implemented SAP over the last 10 years we looked at it and went well the SAP GUI client is a very thin client it's perfect for VDI and our shop environments are very dirty, dusty there's welding, grinding that kind of takes place and we have a pretty high mean time between I'm sorry pretty low mean time between failures on a lot of our hardware because of the environment they're in so we're looking at thin clients and the ruggedness of them and VDI in the back end and we knew that we were gonna have to roll out 500 PCs replacements in the next year because we are a lean staff we don't have the people for it so we spent the last eight to nine months testing out VDI to really see if it was worth it we kind of in our opinion we're kind of behind the bubble on a lot of this we're kind of waiting for the bleeding edge people to take over and to really look at the VDI environment as a whole and hopefully let out someone else to worry about the bugs it's actually worked out much better than you ever thought of performance has been very good we're buying thin client devices that are ruggedized that go on the shop floor so now we're gonna be able to roll out VDI with these silly little boxes and just plug them in we can have anybody deploy them you're not using a AI on desktop person to run around and plug things in we can hand them all to anybody and just color code everything and plug them in and we're good to go then some of the other benefits we get in VDI is keeping all of our data in our data center keeping it all in our cloud and then at the time if we're looking at higher workloads or different things we'll have the ability to burst to the cloud and utilize that hybrid technology to partner with different cloud providers to kind of help offset some of that compute power if we need it that's really what we looked at and the nice thing is that was what we tested out with the procedure or the project itself and then some of the intangibles that came along with it for our mobility clients having a single VDI session that they can access from their phones from their iPads whatever it might be was a real plus for us as well and that's what we get a lot of momentum of and we kind of use it as a two-stage approach that's a great use case I've met with a lot of clients having worked for a number of different storage vendors and you hear a lot of people talk about VDI but a manufacturing floor, what a great I don't know that I ever would have thought of that but what a great place because you do have all those issues that you have to deal with fantastic, thanks for sharing that with us Yeah, we could dig in I wanted to dig in on Flash a little bit data centers, cloud, we can go forever and ever but unfortunately we're getting the hook there's just not enough cube here at the even two cubes is not enough we'll have to get three cubes next year so thanks for coming by so we'll look forward to following up the conversation so this is Jeff Frick with Steve Kinston at EMC World 2014 you're on the cube we'll be right back with our next guest after this short break