 From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back everyone. It's the live CUBE coverage here in Las Vegas for VMworld 2018. Three days of wall-to-wall coverage. We've got two sets. I'm John Furrier, my co-student and man. Our next guest is Adam Razner, who's the Vice President of Technology Operations AutoNation. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for joining us. So you guys are a customer of all this virtualization stuff. What's going on in your company? Tell us what's happening at AutoNation. What are you guys at now with IT operations? Where you guys going? How are you guys building to the cloud? What's the strategy? Sure, so AutoNation's exploding. We have 280 new car dealerships. We have 80 collision centers. We just launched our own precision parts line. We're also looking at other technologies to automate the car buying experience. So we want to make like an Amazon-like car buying experience online. So that requires a lot new technology and digitalization. Yeah, talk a little bit about that. Cause I know I've looked at cars in the last couple of years and now I do so much of it online. I feel like I could do the whole experience for my phone if I wanted. So how much are you a technology company and how much of that's cloud and what are those dynamics that you've been going through the last couple of years? Yeah, I think the millennials this day, they're willing to go online and do the whole car buying experience end to end from the buying of the car to the financing of the car all online. And we can roll a flat bed up to their house and deliver a car and they sign in an iPad and they're good to go. And I think that's where things are going. So to do all that requires a lot of technology on the back end. So we have a lot of on-prem infrastructure. I'd say we're still 90% on-prem, 10% in an Azure AWS infrastructure. But that's going to change in time as a lot of these new applications are written. As you guys are doing the digital transformation and sounds like there's a lot of action going on, new things happening, you're in the app business. You got to build apps for user experience. So you got to make the infrastructure work for you, right? And make it failover, fault-tolerant, all that good stuff, recovery. How do you look at that? How do you run at the speed you need to run at? What are some of the key things that you guys have to do to keep on that treadmill, but yet not drop the ball in delivering apps to the users that drive the business? I think there's a few things. I think one is we have to be able to keep the lights on with our existing infrastructure, our existing apps while we build these next generation of applications. We have to be able to scale up as needed and scale down, be able to support some of the new mobile platforms that we're going to be working on. So there's a lot of work going on and DR is a big part of this too. Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up because data is at the core here. So can you tell us that role of data? And then you say data protection, you know, how is that changing? What was it like before you went through this transformation? Then we'll of course get into what you're using. Sure, so we actually were using an old Microsoft data protection manager product and just in scale the way we needed to, we were having some performance issues. And so, you know, data protection, while not very sexy, it's something you have to do. It's table stakes and IT. It doesn't innovate. It doesn't make me sell more cars. Doesn't innovate, help the business sell more cars, but it's something we have to do. So we looked out there at the, what I call the legacy players and also the next gen players and went through a full proof of concept with several of them. All right, and what were you looking for? What was kind of the key objectives you said? You know, data protection doesn't make you money or didn't make you money. We've talked to some customers that's like, wait, if I do some cool snapshotting, I can leverage that data. I can do some more things with my developers and everything. So what was the goal of this transformation? And then what was the criteria that you went through to make a decision? Yeah, so the data protection was the initial piece and we just needed a rock solid backup and recovery solution. And we started off with just simple, hey, we wanted an integrated hardware software solution. We wanted something that could scale infinitely. We wanted a predictive cost model. And so a lot of these older legacy players don't play well in that space. They're expensive to support. Eventually you hit a wall on hardware limitations and you have to do this forklift upgrade. So we wanted something that was a little bit more nimble. And then down the road, as we got into it, once the backup and recovery piece was kind of under control, we started using our new solution for other things in secondary storage, which was added bonus. You haven't mentioned what is the solution that you chose and what were the key things that led to that? So after going through several POCs with NetBackup, Rubrik and Cohesity, we ultimately chose Cohesity for performance, cost, ease of implementation, ease of the user interface, ease of management. And what was the comparison, like Rubrik, because on the floor here you see Rubrik and Cohesity next to huge booths. What's the difference between those two? Yeah, so we actually put them side by side in our data center full blown POCs and there were some performance differences. There were some technical challenges that we had with some of the other products. And ultimately our engineering team felt most comfortable with Cohesity after spending six or eight months in a really in depth POC. Big bake off. I love the bake off, it's when they have the answer like that. So when you look at the solutions, are you guys mostly interested in the software side of the business that they had? What was the key piece of it? I think we're interested in the whole thing. I had been at other places where we had done the NetBackup and data domain story and you're having a problem at three o'clock in the morning and you've got the finger pointing, is it a software issue, is it a hardware issue? We wanted the one throat to choke kind of solution. And so that was a requirement right off the bat. Whatever we chose was going to be an integrated hardware software platform. Adam, walk us through from the deployment to the day two action. How did it go? What surprised you? What thrilled you? What challenges? Yeah, we've been a customer for, I think we were a very early customer probably about almost two years now. And so there's a lot we didn't know. There was a lot of things in the product that actually weren't fully mature. We first started the POC and so we went through a full blown bake off and one of the things we noticed it was much easier to implement. We didn't require any professional services to get it up and running and the technical support we were super impressed with. So I think the team after going through the motions really felt like this was the product for us. And again, really mainly around backup and recovery but ultimately decided that we were going to use it for other things too. Yeah, Adam, I was walking through the hallways yesterday, Stu and I were both checking out the booths and I hear a lot of conversations that comes up around the Cohesity, Rubrik, all these different cloud solutions. Some are rinse and repeat old models that just have, I'm not going to say those guys are but the customers are concerned about, I don't want the old way. I want the new way. I want to be cloud native. I want to work with cloud. One show to throw. I need software. I need to have agility. And I need to have auto healing, all these kind of stuff. How do you sort through that? I mean, how have you been through the POC but your peers that are out here at VMworld, they're squinting through the noise going, okay, I got to really dig in here. What's your advice to those guys and gals? I think it's really challenging for the people that are neck deep in some of these other legacy products because it's a little bit hard to move. It's costly, it's expensive and it's a significant effort. I was in a rare position where I was able to start net new and so that made it a little bit easier but I think you start with a slow migration, start setting up your new infrastructure on a next gen platform and then slowly migrate off. These legacy players are very expensive and they don't scale very well. That's probably one of our biggest challenges. One of the things you said, you started with a couple of use cases but you're now doing a bunch more. Talk about that, what more? What are the new things you're doing and what's the roadmap look for at AutoNation? So we had a lot of apps that were probably not needing Tier 1, NetApp, all SSD high performance sand. I call it my Cadillac of storage. It's our highest performance applications and we were having some apps that the hardware was starting to go bad and so the only place I could put it was either on my NetApp or I didn't have any place else. So the story changed over time. Cohesity became not only our backup and recovery data protection appliance, we started landing some of our Tier 2 storage on Cohesity. So moving things that we would normally put on NetApp, putting it on Cohesity for 40% of the cost and it's a win-win. All right, so Adam, I couldn't help noticing you've got the DrivePink pin on. So maybe tell our audience a little bit about the AutoNation DrivePink initiative and do you have relationships with the suppliers here? Pat Gelsinger this morning talked about we need to be as a technology community more doing good. It's foundational to what we're doing so we'd love you to tell us. AutoNation, it's one of our core charities is Cancer Awareness. I think we've donated almost $30 million. Every car that you buy, we try to put the DrivePink license plate. And I think not only for business, I think in IT we also have to have a lens to some of these charities and some of these things that need our help. Mission-driven businesses are doing well now. People expect that not just for profit by the people involved. Anyone can work anywhere these days. Talent, it's also good. I mean, it's one of those things. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. All right, so take away from the show. So far, your impression as a practitioner is in the IT footprint space. We're looking at a cloud on the horizon. We just, any best of science just on has been part of the early days. Cloud's coming fast. Networking's got to get better. You got to have seamless solutions integrating well together. How do you make sense of all this content coming out of VMworld? Yeah, I think what I get out of this and kind of, you know, AWS, all these conferences is that everything we buy has to be extendable to the cloud. You know, we still have a lot of on-premise infrastructure but everything we implement has to be cloudable and has to be able to be used in our future use cases, so. Yeah, I would love, we're talking a lot here a lot in the keynote this morning. It's like, right, this move, we know it's going to take time and Amazon's doing some things, VMware's doing some things. How's the industry doing? How do you see the progression? What would you like to see them do more or better? As you know, we come back in a year if I give you kind of that magic wand. Yeah, you know, I always leave a lot of these conferences and I feel like I'm behind the eight ball in our cloud migration, but companies like us have to have a lot of legacy apps. They're slow to move and so I leave the conference. I feel like I'm behind the eight ball but I get back and I talk to my peers and many of them are in the same situation. I am, they're still maturing. But I think yes, I think that the net new generation apps that we're going to build are going to be in the cloud because of the capabilities to autoscale. And so I think that, again, anything we buy, anything we implement, we have to have a lens to that going forward. Well, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. It sounds like you're happy with Cohesity. No, they've done a great job. We're really happy customers. How long was that bake off, by the way? Did you ran that? We did it about six months. That's pretty good at all. Yeah, we actually had some, again, we were very early to the game, so there were features in the product that we needed that they didn't have yet. And our agreement was, we'll proceed after you can meet these requirements. And they did. And Pat Gelsinger and Andy Jassy on the stage, one of the things that Andy Jassy who's been on theCUBE talks about all the time is listening to customers. Sounds like they're listening to you guys. Absolutely, absolutely. You have to. It's such a competitive environment now. You know, if you can't meet the customers with minimal requirements, there's somebody else that can. You got to be cloud compatible. AutoNation, breaking it down here, here at VMworld, bringing the practitioner perspective, the customer perspective, all these suppliers. Try to bring cloud and on-premises together. It's theCUBE bringing you all the action here at VMworld 2018. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break.