 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada. It's theCUBE, covering EMC World 2015. Brought to you by EMC, Brocade, and VCE. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman with Wikibon.com. Here with my co-host, Steve Chambers, wall-to-wall coverage of EMC World 2015 here in Las Vegas. Always love when we get to talk to the practitioners joining us for this segment. Coming all the way from Melbourne, Australia, first time on theCUBE, Pavel Rojik, senior technical analyst with Skilled Engineering. Pavel, thank you so much for making the trip and for joining us on theCUBE. Thank you. All right, can you tell us, for those that aren't familiar, Skilled Engineering, you're a very large firm, but one that most of us aren't as familiar with, would you tell us a little bit about the company and your role there? So Skilled Group is the largest company in workforce services in Australia. We employ around 50,000 people a year with more than 80 branches across Australia and approximately 20 branches around the globe. Okay, so 20 locations. Can you sketch out a little bit for us, the IT department, how many people they are and your role there? So we have relatively small IT departments, especially the infrastructure one. We have six people in infrastructure. We're doing most of our staff in-house, not using a lot of integrators, not outsourcing any of our jobs. We have quite large development team there. We're developing a lot of stuff. Okay, and when it comes to the infrastructure, it sounds like you've got a big piece of it. Server, storage, network, all of those under you, did I miss something? Yes, security as well. Of course, Steve would keep me honest on the security piece there. So can you talk a little bit about the role of IT and how you helped serve the business? So we need to make sure that our systems are available 24 by seven. We're actually placing people 24 hours a day, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So it's a really big part of the organization and pay calculations. Just imagine some 50,000 people won't get the paychecks on time. I'll ask you, you know what does business critical mean to you? And I think that's the most important way of getting people's paychecks to them, yeah. So in terms of the developers and the IT guys, are you at separate ends of the building? Do you work together? How does that work? No, we actually work close together. We're sitting all together in Melbourne. So all the IT, we have centralized data centers. It's in two locations. One in our main building that we sit and the other one is in Telstra co-location. And it's actually like the operations, IT operations as well, or is that a different group? So you've got developers, you've got the infrastructure guys. Are you running it as well as deploying it? You know, how does? Yes, we are out. So I'm curious, does the term dev ops, does that resonate with what you guys are doing or how do you look at dev ops? Yeah, it is, as I said, we're trying all the time to improve our systems, to give better solutions to our clients and obviously to save costs. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So we heard yesterday at the EMC code day. I don't know if you attended that, but it was a real successful day and dev ops was the main theme. There's an interesting, a gentleman from Puppet Labs. We had someone from Chef, someone from Puppet Labs. Do you use systems like that to manage your infrastructure? Not right now, but we are definitely looking at it and considering. What do you use today? Do you use any kind of enterprise class management suite? No, not right now. Most of it are script based. We have a lot of customized stuff and there's a lot of test environments and a lot of needs to refresh those test environments frequently. They're quite large. We have probably over 40, 50 VMs per test environment, around four, five Oracle databases and multiple SQL databases. And we can have 10, 12 of those test environments. That should be true. I wonder if you could dig in a little bit for the network for us. So you've got a relatively small team, but it's mission critical. As we know, the network needs to keep up and running or somebody's probably out of a job. Can you tell us what your network looked like? What solutions are you using today? So recently we implemented an active-active topology. We're using VMware as our hypervisor and we're basically moving workloads between two sites. The storage is extremile. We're utilizing Vplex for the active-active topology for the disks and VDXs for the networking. That was actually really interesting. And just in case people don't know, the VDX, that's Brocade's Ethernet product that you're using. That's right. Yeah, what's kind of the size of that, the switching infrastructure that you've got? Any abrupt idea on the ports? So it is quite large. It was like that probably four, five years ago. We grew a lot. We're buying a lot of companies and integrating them. Everything is centralized. So you can imagine the size of the two data centers, right? And, you know, is your network mostly 10 gig today or what's the... Yeah, it's end-to-end 10 gig for the server infrastructure. We have 20 gig fibers between the two data centers. And one VCS fabric in a VDX to be able to accommodate all the active-active topology. Any particular reason for using Ethernet storage? You know, was it like the digital design thinking or is it easy to operate? It was quite easy to configure and to operate and as well troubleshoot later on. Because I think you know fiber channel as well, don't you? Yes, we're using a lot of fiber channel as well. So are the same people managing the fiber channel as the Ethernet? Yes. And what's the product mix that you have? I mean, is it 50 or is there a lot more Ethernet, I would think? So it's probably 50-50. It's actually all the servers and all the storages are connected to both. So we have fiber channel and FCOE in case one of them will fail. The second one is a backup and we're using PowerPath to be able to manage. Well, you really don't want to lose any connectivity, do you? No. That's very impressive. So I mean, I'm kind of drawing a mental sketch in my head of the architecture and the kind of the cabling and you know, what's it like to operate something like that? Once it's all connected and up and running, you know, is someone constantly watching some dials moving or is it kind of, what's that famous phrase? Why I want some walk away, right? Is it that kind of easy? Yeah, so basically what we found is with EMC and Brocade solutions, if the design is right and it's configured correctly, you don't need to touch it, it just works and it works for us really well. We're really happy with the performance and the outcome and the stability of the systems. So Pavel, you're using both the fiber channel and the Ethernet. So, you know, I think everybody knows that EMC and Brocade have had a long relationship. I mean, the fiber channel side, it's over 15 years. Can you talk on the Ethernet side though? I mean, I know EMC has made some announcement, Brocade. Was EMC involved at all in that piece of it? And you know, what did you see from the customer standpoint? Yes, so EMC definitely was involved because the last project that we did probably was around six months ago. So EMC was involved in that process. We actually, what the whole lot is one package, include the Brocade. Yeah, excellent, so how do EMC and Brocade together help you with kind of the future growth of the company? That's a hard question. So, I guess to be able to move the workloads between the data centers and especially for us to be able to shut down one data center and run the whole lot in the other data center without downtime, it's a very big step up. Is that something you do? Because that sounds like a big, scary thing to do, right? Not anymore. Really? Yeah. And the other good thing is that we don't have any more DR tests because we're testing our DR every day. Machines are migrating between data centers with DRS every minute and there's no DR testing or good jobs. So, I guess last question I want to ask you is, do you have any advice for your peers is that they're looking at this space, especially kind of the IP storage networking, what advice would you give them? I think a lot of research, talk to the vendors, talk to EMC and Brocade together. Read on the internet as well, there's a lot of smart people out there. All right, yeah, absolutely, all right. Thank you so much for making the trip. Appreciate you coming on the program, sharing with your peers, because as you said, they're also going to find not just the internet, but talking to those that have gone before and done it. So, thanks for sharing your story. We'll be back with lots more here from EMC World after this quick break.