 And we're back, this is Stu Miniman with Wikibon here with Silicon Angles live continuous coverage from EMC World 2013. Day one, it's Monday, got three days of theCUBE, wall-to-wall coverage from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. watch live on siliconangle.com and see replays on youtube.com slash siliconangle. Here in the Brocade data center network transformation segment. And we've got a customer on here joining me is Tim Stevenson, senior systems engineer with First National Technology Solutions. Tim, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks, it's good to be here. So Wikibon was founded on allowing peers to share with peers. So what we want to do is kind of a mini case study, look at your environment, show what you're doing and what advice you would have for your peers as to what they're doing. So can you tell us a little bit about yourself, what you do in your company? Sure, like you said, I'm a senior architect on the team developing our solutions for our customers and also working with the customers to help develop their customized solutions within our environment. Okay, and the First National Technology Solutions, where are you located? Do you line up business and focus? We're out of Omaha, Nebraska. We originally grew out of First National Bank of Omaha. That's how we got our name. And we provide infrastructures as a service, managed services to our customers and cloud-based solutions. Okay, so you're a service provider then? We are a service provider. Okay, excellent. Across a lot of platforms. How long have you been doing infrastructure as a service then? So we've been doing infrastructure as a service since the late 90s. Wow, okay. So back to the kind of the original XSP days. I thought all those died and came back, you know, 10 years later. Yeah, well, they did. Okay, great. So, and from an architectural standpoint, what's in your domain? So within my domain is primarily storage and virtualization platforms. So, you know, the Brocade products that we use, the EMC storage that we use, our VMware platform, Cisco UCS, all of that. Okay, can you give us a little bit of some speeds and feeds? How big's your data center? How much storage, servers, you know, what are you running? So physically our data center's about 200,000 square feet. Okay, we are running the Brocade DCXs at the moment, but we're getting ready to put in the 16 gig switches. As we're expanding our fabric up onto a new floor for some expansion, we're running about one and a half petabytes of storage at the moment. And you said it was EMC, which is VMAX, VNX? It is VMAX, VNX, Iceland, and in about a week we're going to have the Extreme IO on our floor. Excellent, all flash. All flash. Okay, excellent. Yeah, we'll get back to flash definitely in this and you're running VMware for virtualization? We are. Okay. Yeah, we're on vSphere. Oh, we're sure we are. Well, we've got a mixture of four and five right now. Excellent, and the services that you're providing are most of your customers localized or is it broader? So, no, actually we have customers coast to coast. We have a lot of customers on either coast and in the Gulf that want a location for disaster recovery, as a for instance, where we're not affected by the same things they're affected by. So we typically don't get hurricanes in the middle of the United States and we don't have very many earthquakes. Okay, excellent. And Nebraska, the cost per square foot isn't too bad. It's pretty reasonable, yeah, compared to either coast. So it makes a pretty cost effective solution as well. Okay, great. So tell me how long have you been working with Brocade as a partner? I've been working with Brocade for about, well, off and on for about seven years in total. Okay. So back when I was working for an insurance company we switched over to Brocade, went over to first national bank, we were using something else, switched over to Brocade because the other thing wasn't performing the way we wanted it to and we knew that Brocade would. Okay, so if I think about service providers, one of the challenges usually is growth. How fast are you adding, how many new ports and how do you do that and what's your speed to deployment on these kind of things? All right, so our speed to deployment really is dependent upon our customers but we are growing, adding ports, adding storage. We're growing at about almost 100% a year. Okay. So we're a little bit over industry standard. Okay, and how's your network and does Fiber Channel kind of meet that growth pretty well? Fiber Channel is pretty much the only network that's going to meet that growth requirement that we have and keep the performance at the levels that we need it to or for our customers because our IO, you know, our IO load doesn't match the norms of a standard company because we have literally hundreds of companies that are hosting their most important systems in our facility. So the IO requirements that we have are much, much higher than a standard company would have. So we have to have equipment that performs at a much higher level than you necessarily would have to have within a given enterprise. Okay, it's interesting. I've talked to many service providers that are running Ethernet, even many brocade service provider partners that are running Ethernet. So, you know, explain to me what is Fiber Channel doing for you that Ethernet can't? So at least as it stands right now and I expect that Ethernet's going to change over time and become a more stable platform for it. But really what the Fiber Channel does for us is it gives us that rock solid performance every time, all the time, no matter what we do to it, it is going to perform and it's not going to be the bottleneck. The bottleneck's going to be in the storage platform or it's going to be on the server side or somewhere else, but not in that Fiber Channel network. Yeah, Tim, as we used to say in the storage world, the networking folks that have to deal with storage think that QOS is a four letter word. So it seems like that is what you're saying. So it's not necessarily the speed performance but the reliable, I know what I'm getting, I know always what I'm getting and that's what Fiber Channel delivers for you. It's predictable. And predictability is key when you're providing services for somebody else. Yeah, I wonder if we could talk a little bit about Flash because one of the things our CTO from Wikibon, David Foyer, said, Flash is all about kind of latency in performance but predictability of that latency is even more important than the low latency. So you're bringing Extreme IO in, what's your experience been with Flash so far? We do have Flash in almost every one of our storage arrays as they stand right now. Where we run into problems is when we start to load, we have customers that have requirements for a single application to have between 15 and 25,000 IOs per second of throughput, which is pretty substantial. You put a couple of those on a VMAX and you can potentially overrun it depending on how they're reacting. So bringing Extreme IO in that can handle a million IOs per second and keep the performance where it needs to be because these are critical business intelligence decision-making applications that they're using and they don't have time to wait for an answer to come back which is why we're switching over to some of these technologies. Okay, have you guys tried any of the server-based Flash? No, okay. We have not. Fair enough, moving on then. Pick comment, no? Well, no. Okay, I'm good. Sorry. No worries. Can you talk about just that marrying of storage and network? What's your team make up? How many people? Is the storage people that manage the network or what's that configuration? Actually the storage people do manage the network. The fiber channel network. There's a separate team for Ethernet because those types of people typically don't think the same. Tell me the question again. What's the size of the group there? Oh, it's actually just a handful. There's probably about four or five people that work on it on a regular basis that manage all of the storage which is about, like I said, one and a half petabytes at the moment. It'll be two petabytes in another four months. Okay, and they manage the sand also. And they manage the sand as well. Okay, and how big's the sand? How many ports? All the ports. We've got two Tubercade DCXs that are just about full so I would say there's a good 300 ports. Okay, so maybe let's talk a little bit about the applications. What are people hosting on your environment and what services do you offer? Sure. People are hosting, the easy answer is they're hosting everything in our environment. Their entire production systems, we go across a wide range of platforms. It's not just Windows and Linux in the cloud. We've got AS400 or i-Series in the cloud. We've got AIX in the cloud and we've got our Z-Series or mainframe in the cloud as well. And we provide managed services across all of that and virtualized services across all of that. So that's kind of a broad brush look at what our environment is. It's just about everything. Well, okay, and talk a little bit about what does data center transformation mean to your company? Well, data center transformation, if you look at it, an example, one example that I could probably cite is a customer that we just recently migrated into our cloud environment that has a mixture of a bunch of different platforms is building a new building. They're not putting a data center in it at all because we're their entire data center. Everything is becoming virtualized, it's becoming very small, managed by somebody else, and just purchased as a service. That's where we're seeing the data centers go. Pretty much across all of our clients. So, Tim, I'm wondering, do you have a take on SDN and what that's doing to the networking marketplace? I don't. Well, once again, that's on the ethernet side. So, you're more on the fiber-candle side. It's quite all right. What's been your experience with 16GIG then? We'll come back to that. So, with 16GIG, I mean, we're looking forward to it. We don't have it in our environment right now. We have plans and we have actually, I mean, we're in the process of being quoted for the new equipment and getting the 16GIG in. We're designing for it right now, but I would say as of right now, we don't have a lot of experience with it because we don't have it in-house. Okay, fair enough. I guess you've got experience with kind of the jumps before. Usually, the speed bumps are nice. You might be able to consolidate some boards. But there's new services that you can offer, right? One of the things that we're also going to start putting into place is the v-sanding technology that Rokade provides to help us really shape some of that traffic. Since we're now going to be splitting across multiple floors in the data center and doing some of that, we want to really kind of manage our traffic better. And so some of the technologies that Rokade has built in are going to really help us to do that and manage that traffic proactively and make sure that it's going where it needs to go to maintain those performance levels exactly where we need them. Okay, yeah, could you just, what's that mean to your operators kind of on a day-by-day basis? Well, for our operators, because Rokade is so rock solid, it means that they actually don't have to touch it a lot. They set up, they set things up, and for the most part, let Rokade do what it does, which is to manage that traffic and place it where it needs to be in the timeframe it needs to be there, every day without stop. Okay, great. So Tim, yeah, let me see. We're here, EMC World. This is Stu Miniman with Wikibon. Tim, final word I want to give you is, can you talk a little bit about, as customers decide whether to kind of upgrade their environment in-house or move to a service provider, what kind of benefits do you see for driving to the service provider environment? So, some of the big things that, the big benefits that they get is, obviously not spending the capital, not having to invest in all the additional new technologies. I mean, there's such a wealth of new technologies that are coming out, and skill sets that are required within the data center. That companies are having a hard time keeping up with it. So, really being able to rely on a service provider like ourselves that has a broader depth of skill sets and knowledge and people to absorb those new technologies into is really kind of a, it's a big benefit to the individual companies. To be able to hand that off and know that it's going to be taken care of and that they're not going to have to invest in it, invest in the people, invest in the training and the technologies. All right. Well, let's still get a piece of that really good, that good pie that everybody wants of all the new, all the new technologies that give them the services that they want. All right. Well, Tim Stevenson, First National Technology Solutions, thank you for sharing kind of your journey on network transformation. This is Stu Miniman with Wikibon. We'll be right back after this quick break with our next guest here from EMC World, Las Vegas, 2013.