 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Pure Accelerate 2017, brought to you by Pure Storage. Welcome back to Pure Accelerate. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host, Stu Miniman. This is Pure Accelerate. We're here at Pure 70, Brian McDaniel series and infrastructure architect at the Baylor College of Medicine, not to be confused with Baylor University in Waco, Texas anymore. Brian, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. You're very welcome. Tell us about the Baylor College of Medicine. So Baylor College of Medicine is a, first and foremost, a teaching facility, but also the leader in research and development for healthcare in the Texas Medical Center in Houston, Texas. We currently employ roughly 1500 physicians and so they occupy a multitude of institutions, not only at Baylor, but other facilities and hospitals in and around the Texas Medical Center. So it's kind of healthcare morning here, Stu. We've been talking about electronic medical records, meaningful use, the Affordable Care Act, potential changes there, HIPAA, saving lives. I mean, these are big issues. We're not at the HIMS conference, Dave, is what you're telling me. You should be at HIMS. So these are big issues for any organization in healthcare. It just exacerbates the challenges on IT. So I wonder if you could talk about some of the drivers in your business, compliance and in new tech and maybe share with us some of the things that you're seeing. Absolutely. So first and foremost, we are an epic system shop, right? That's our EMR. So from a enterprise and clinical operation, that is our number one mission critical application. So it provides your electronic medical records to our staff, regardless of where they're physically located at. So that alone is a demanding type of a solution, if you will, the mobility aspect of it. So delivering that in a fast manner and a repeatable manner is the most important to our physicians because they're actually seeing patients and getting to your records and being able to add notes and collaborate with other institutions if necessary. So time to market is very important and accessibility is also up there. Right, so I mean, you mentioned that collaboration and part of that collaboration is so much data now. Being able to harness that data and share it. I mean, data explodes everywhere, but in healthcare, there's so much data. To the extent we start instrumenting things. Right. What are you guys doing with all that data? Yeah, so right now, you know, it lives within the clinical application, right, in Epic. But as you pointed out, that is where the value is, right? That is where your crown jewels, so to speak, are at. So that data is now being looked at as a possible access point outside of the clinical operations. So its environment is going to be even more important going forward when you look to branch out into some of the basic science and more of a research to gain access to that clinical data that historically has been problematic for the research to be done accessing that information. So in the corporate world, we like to think of from an IT perspective, you got to run the business, you got to grow the business, you got to transform the business. It's a little different in healthcare. You kind of got to comply. Right. I mean, a lot of your time is spent on compliance and regulation changes and keeping up with that. And then there's got to be a fair amount that's at least attempting to do transformation and then kind of keeping up with the innovations. Maybe you could talk about that a little bit. Absolutely. So particularly on the innovation side, we work closely with our partners at Epic and we work to decide roadmaps and how that fits into the Baylor world. Okay, some point a year ago, we were set to go to the new version of Epic, which was 2015. And Epic is nice enough to lay out requirements for you and say, here's what your system needs to meet in order to comply with Epic standards. So that they give you a seal of approval, so to speak. And there's monetary implications for not meeting those requirements. So it's actually dollars and cents. It's not just we have to, we want you to meet this. If you do, then there's advantages to meeting it. So they provided that to us and we went through the normal testing phases and evaluations of our current platform, both from compute and storage. And honestly, we struggled to meet the requirements with our legacy systems. So the team was challenged to say, well, what can we do to meet this? We have our historical infrastructure, so if we're going to deviate from that, let's really deviate and look at what's available to the market. So flash comes to mind immediately. And so there's a multitude of vendors that make flash storage products. So we started meeting with all of them, doing our fact finding and our data gathering and meeting with all of them. First and foremost, they have to be Epic certified. That eliminated a couple of contenders right off the bat. You're not certified. I would expect some of the startups especially. It did, some of the smaller flash vendors. For example, one of them came in and we said, well, what do you do with Epic? And they said, what's Epic? And you kind of scratch your head and say, thank you. Here's the door. So, it eliminates people, but then when we meet with Pure and we talk to them and we meet them and you get to really know the family and the culture that they bring with the technology, yes, it's going to be fast, but flash is going to be fast. What else can you do? And that's where you start learning about how it was born on flash, how it was native to flash. And so you get added benefits to the infrastructure by looking at that type of technology, which ultimately led us there where we're at running Epic on our flash arrays. And Brian, you're using the flash stack configuration of Converged Infrastructure. It sounds like it was Pure that led you that way as opposed to Cisco, could you maybe walk us through that? That's very interesting. So, we are UCS shop. We were before Pure. So, when Pure came in, the fact that they had a validated design with the flash stack infrastructure made it all that more easier to implement the Pure solution because it just is modular enough to fit in with our current infrastructure. That made it very appealing that we didn't have to change or alter much. We just looked at the validated design that says, here's your reference architecture, how it applies to the flash stack. You already have UCS. We love it. We're a big fan. And here's how to implement it. And it made the time to market to get production workloads on it very quick. Okay, and the CVD that you got from Cisco, that's Cisco plus Pure, but was it healthcare or Epic specific, or was that the Pure had some knowledge for that? So, that was one of the value ads that we feel Pure brought was the Epic experience. And whether that's scripting, the backups, and if you're familiar with Epic, the environmental refreshes that they have to do, there's seven Epic environments, and they all have to refresh off of each other and play off of each other. So, you have a window that you have to handle. And you do, right? And historically, that window's been quite large. And now not so much, which makes everybody happy. So, you know, their experience with Epic. Absolutely, yeah, our DBA's a test of that, right? So, we would like to think we've made their world and life a little bit more enjoyable because those weekends now, they're not having to babysit the Epic refreshes. But back to the point of Epic experience, that was instrumental in the decision-makings from a support with the Pure Storage Help Desk, awareness of what it takes to run Epic on Pure. And then going forward, knowing that there's a partnership behind Epic and Pure, and certainly Baylor College of Medicine, as we continue to look at the next versions of Epic, whether that's 2018 and onto 2020, whatever that decision is, we know that we have a solid foundation now to grow. Brian, I'm curious, you've been a Cisco shop for a while. Cisco has lots of partnerships, as well as like they've got a hyper-converged offering that they sell themselves. What was your experience working with Cisco and did they just let you choose? And you said, I want Pure and they're like, great, you know, what was that like? So, to your point, there's validated designs for many customers. And Cisco is kind of at the hub of that, that core with the compute and memory of the blade systems, right, the UCS. So, they like the fact that we went with Pure because it does mean a validated design. And they have others with other vendors. The challenge there is how do they really integrate with each other from tools to possibly automation down the road? And how do they truly integrate with each other? Because we did bring in some of the other validated design architecture organizations. And I think we did our due diligence and looked at them to see how they differentiate between each other. And ultimately, we wanted something that was new and different approach to storage. It wasn't just layering your legacy OS on a bunch of flash drives and call it good. That's something that was natively born to take advantage of that technology and that's what ultimately led us to Pure. Well, Pure has a point of view on the so-called hyper-converged space. You heard Scott Deeson talking this morning. What's your perspective? Oh, so hyper-converged is one of those buzzwords that I think gets thrown out of there kind of off the cuff, if you will. People hear and get excited about it. But what type of workloads are you looking to take advantage of it? Is it truly hyper-converged or is it just something that you can say you're doing because it sounds cool? I think to some degree people are led astray on the buzzwords of the technology where they get down to say, what's going to take advantage of it? What kind of application are you putting on it? Because if your application, in our case, can be written by a grad student 20 years ago that a lab is still using, does it make sense to put on a hyper-converged? No, because it can't take advantage of the architecture and the design. So in a lot of ways, we're waiting and seeing. And the reason we didn't go to a hyper-converged platform is a epic support. And B, we were already changing enough to stay comfortable with the environment, knowing that come Monday morning, doctors will be seeing patients and we're already changing enough. That was another layer that we chose not to change. We went with a standard UCS configuration that everyone was already happy with. So that made a significant difference from an operational perspective. Essentially, your processes are tightly tied to Epic and the workflow associated with that. From an infrastructure perspective, it sounds like you just don't want it to be in the way. We don't, and the last thing we want is infrastructure getting in the way. And quite frankly, it was in the way. Whether that was meeting latency requirements or IOPS requirements from the cache database or the clarity database within the Epic system, or if it was just all things are just taking a little bit longer than they expect. We don't want to be that bottleneck, if you will. We want them to be able to see patients faster, run reports faster, gain access to that valuable data in a much faster way to enable them to go about their business and not have to worry about infrastructure. Brian, Pure said that they had, I believe it was like 25 new announcements made this morning, a lot of software features. Pure says, is there anything that jumped out at you that you've been waiting for and anything still on your to-do list that you're hoping for Pure or Pure in its extended ecosystem to deliver for you? Yeah, great question. So at the top of that list is the replication of the arrays, whether that's in an offsite data center or a colo and how that applies to an Epic environment that has to go through this flux of refreshes and from a disaster or business continuity standpoint, we're actively pursuing that and how that's going to fit with Baylor. So we're very excited to see what our current investment, free of charge, by the way, once you do the upgrade to 5.0, is to take advantage of those features, replication being one of them. And then I thought I heard today, third site is a service, right? So you don't have to install your own infrastructure. Right. So I'm not sure exactly what that's all about. I got to peel the onion on that. Yeah, to be determined, right? When we look at things like that, particularly with Epic, and we have to be careful because that is the HIPAA PHI, that's your record, right? Yours, mine, medical records, right? You just don't want that. If I told you, you're just going to be hosted in a public cloud, you're like, wait a minute. No, it's not. No, it's not. We don't want to be on the 10 o'clock news, right? However, there's things like SAP HANA and other enterprise applications that we certainly can look at leveraging that technology. Right. Excellent. Well, listen, thank you very much, Brian, for coming on theCUBE. No problem. We appreciate your perspectives and sort of educating us a little bit on your business and your industry, anyway. And have a great rest of the show. Yeah, thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thank you. All right, keep it right there, buddy, this is theCUBE with Back Live right after this short break from Pure Accelerate 2017. Right back.