 From Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2019, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE at the VTUG Winter Warmer 2019 at Gillette Stadium, home of the New England Patriots, AFC Champions, week out from going to Super Bowl 53. Joining me is a user from the great state of Maine, Donna Pease, who's the director of Computing Infrastructure and Services for the state of Maine. Thanks so much for joining us. Yes, thank you. All right, so Donna, you've been to a few VTUGs, of course the summer fest, which is, it might not be quite as big as the winter one, but is known even broader. I've known people come from out of the country because there's a giant lobster bake at the end of the day. I've been a few times, but tell us, you've been to VTUGs before. We have. So I have been to many, especially in Maine, and this is probably our fourth or fifth one that I've brought in the team from the state of Maine here. And I feel it's really crucial and important because it allows them to network, to talk with their peers and to look at the technologies of how we can provide services for the constituents of the state of Maine and for our services that we offer within our office. Yeah, so we always love talking to the users. We'd love to be able to help you share with your peers what you've been learning. And actually, I've had lots of great government discussions over the last few years, even attended, I attended a public sector show in the cloud space last year. It's always fascinating because people have a misconception when it comes to what it's like to be IT in government. So let's dig into that a little bit. Tell us a little bit about your role, your group, what's kind of under your purview. Sure. I've been in state government going on 33 years as a public servant, very proud of that. I have a great group and I am the director of computing infrastructure services and it's really directory services, Microsoft Stack. We have VMware environment that we've been probably nine years now and we're just implementing SimpliVity, our hyperconverged and after extensive research on that, we really solidified and selected HP SimpliVity because in state government, we had a lot of agent servers that needed to be replaced as well as our VM environment, which was 44 nodes and it was a huge investment. So not only on the licensing, hardware, storage, the compute part as well. So looking at the hyperconverged, that was just one of many of our technologies that we looked at. So Donna, take us back. How long ago did you start looking at that initiative? Oh, 18 months. Okay. 18 months. A single location, multiple locations, can you give us any, is that how many servers or VMs or locations that this solution was going to span? For me, it was actually spanning and taking on many of our on-prem solutions that we have, like our SQL environment, our application hosting, the one ops, we're bringing into that as well as upgrading our existing VM cluster. So it's really taken on, and more, even more, we have a lot of new asks that want to participate in this environment. So for us, it is literally like a cloud solution, but it's for within our own private cloud solution on that. And these were critical business productivity applications that you're talking about. Absolutely. This wasn't a new project to do, early days of hyperconverged, it was like, oh, I'm doing desktop virtualization, let me roll this out. I mean, you're talking about databases and applications. Absolutely. So we run close to a little over 600 servers for virtual and physical. So when all said and done within our hyperconverged, our goal is to really be under 60 physicals left within state government. And currently today, we have probably over 400 in our virtual environment today. So we're really expanding that more and bringing the services all into one, knowing that we're going to have compute network and everything in our storage will all be in this environment. Plus we have a legacy storage environment. So when you're thinking of your legacy storage environment and you're looking at your refreshment of hardware and all the licenses around that, our return on investment was huge for the state of Maine. So it was literally the wise choice for us to do within state government. First taxpayers saving money, also for the state as a whole. I have to imagine, in addition to kind of the capex piece, if you're saying going from 900 to 400 and looking to get down to 60 operationally, hopefully it makes the jobs of you and your team a little bit easier once things are up and running. And that's one of the promises of hyperconverged is it should be that cloud layer. It should be almost invisible when you talk about it. It's just a pool that my virtualization lives on, but I don't need to touch and rack and stack stuff the way that I might've been in the past. Exactly, exactly. Good point on that. Also on that, we've really taken a broad look at how we can leverage the cloud. So from a disaster recovery aspect and not only having the site resilience between two data centers, but how we can leverage the cloud for that continuity aspect. So we're really broadening that and the team's doing a fabulous excellent job at that. Are you doing the cloud DR today or is that a future plan? That is future. Okay, you're going to leverage a public cloud as that? Are you far enough down the... So we have Azure today and we have a government tenant on that. So we will use that aspect within the government tenant as well. So primarily Microsoft applications, you've moved into hyperconverged and you're leveraged the Azure, government certified cloud pieces. Correct. Okay, awesome. When you started going down this path, did you have in your mind hyperconverged or is that, how did you end up on that type of solution? So no, we didn't. Doing the research on that and looking at all options and really doing the research with that. Hyperconverged was more of making sense from the return on investment and also from a, I want to say the simplified fashion, like you said, it's simple, you want to make it not so complex. It provided everything within that environment. And it was really based on how we were structured today, the investment that we would need to do if we didn't go down this path and take it in. So we did go with the hyperconverged. And your previous environment, we're using HPE for the servers or the storage? So we are an HPE shop. And we have BMC, we have pure storage. We have different aspects of our storage today that exist. So looking at that as well, we had an investment that we either needed to upgrade, replace and or invest. What I was poking at a little bit is, were you HPE before? Was that part of the decision to buy SimpliVity, which is part of the HPE family or was that not a major factor? It was not a major factor. I mean, we have always been an HPE shop. However, we had criteria we were looking at. So after doing the research and we had 15, we were looking at 15 vendors at the time. We narrowed it down to like eight. And out of that, we really narrowed it down to two that were in the quadrant, in the Gartner quadrant. And doing our own research and study and bringing all the vendors in and everything and what we had already invested. What we currently had, it really came out to SimpliVity as the choice. All right, and you're 18 months into this. You've got some cloud DR in the future. How are things going? What have you learned so far? Is there anything you would have done differently or any advice you'd give to your peers if they're starting to go down this path? Do the research. Do the research. Be very thorough in what you're looking at for your requirements. And not only the research, but look at what you've already invested in and take that into consideration and what your return on investment, what you're looking for your return on investment because you need to look just past not only your hosting environment, but it really goes into can your network support that environment? Do you need to upgrade your network, your storage aspects, licensing aspects of that as well? So it's a huge investment. However, look at the money that you're already paying. Yeah, it's licensing, one of those things. When you talk about that great reduction of servers, are you today or do you expect in the future some of those licensing costs from either the database, the virtualization, will those actually be able to be scaled down? Absolutely, and that was part of our ROI as well. By a lot. You know, and that is one of the benefits of the hyperconverge as well. Once you set that up and purchase the proper licenses, I mean like data center licenses, you can put in as many VMs as you need within that environment. And that's important. So you're really just looking at your compute at that, you know, what you need for storage and compute. Yeah, I'm curious, just to poke, because we've worked with clients for years on that and oftentimes I've got a, you know, an ELA or I've got a multi-year contract there and I have to renegotiating it. Has that gone smoothly? Have there been any bumps along the road or is it pretty straightforward that, you know, licensing can be a huge chunk of your budget and like, oh great, I'm two years later and I'm going to save myself a lot of money. So I actually am the administrator of our enterprise agreement with Microsoft, have been for many years. So I know what we have and so I work very closely with that as far as the licensing and what we have. So for the renewals, I will say it gets easier. I found that being consolidated because when the agencies own their IT at the time, we had many enterprise agreements and that was more complex. So if you can actually consolidate and go into one, we have one enterprise agreement or under the three, I would say, it's much more manageable on that. So I don't find that that's a showstopper on that. It's gotten easier over the years. Simplified, it's more simplified. It's great to hear that and actually, Microsoft has made great strides. Microsoft today is not the Microsoft of five years ago or 10 years ago. I would agree. So Donna Pease, pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much for sharing your experiences and be sure to check out thecube.net for all the recordings from the VTUG Winter Warmer 2019 as well as all of the other shows. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.