 from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE covering .next conference brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back to Nutanix next concert, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, and we're here and just outside of Washington D.C., John Walton is here as the CIO of San Mateo County, CUBE alum, good to see you again. Thanks for coming back on. Great to be here, thanks for having me. You're very welcome, so it's a good show. You've been to next conference before? This is my second one. Second one, okay. It's good little meetups, they're kind of intimate, but they're growing. Good buzz, what's your sense so far? I think it's good, I really like to see, I like to see the partners here. I've been wandering around talking to some of them by fellow CIOs on the floor. It seems like, you know, people are really starting to understand better where Nutanix is going. I think there was a little bit of, you know, concern in the CIO community when they went public, what that would mean, were they going to get bought out? And I think people are just happy to see, you know, sort of status quo, heading in the right direction, being stable, you know, we all feel like our money's well invested and they're going to be around for the long run. I wonder if we could talk about sort of the CIO role specifically at the county. And, you know, CIO, a lot of jokes, career is over and keeping the lights on, that's all you do and, you know, kind of thankless jobs, et cetera, but times are changing. We're talking, everybody's talking about digital disruption, everybody's talking about being data driven, the whole big data thing is, it's actually starting to feel real. And a lot of CIOs tell us that, in fact, the last guest was saying, we were able to sort of shift our attention from doing just nitty-gritty infrastructure management to doing fun stuff. Is that what you're seeing in your environment? What are some of the drivers and what's the environment like for you? Yeah, it is that way in San Mateo County. I mean, San Mateo County is interesting because we're kind of the forgotten county between San Jose and San Francisco, right? Everybody commutes through San Mateo on to one place to the other, but it's an exciting county to work in because you have so many of the thought leaders who actually live in the county that run the companies and things. So you have a community that's very embracing of technology and as the CIO for the county, I have the opportunity to play multiple number of roles. I think what you alluded to, sort of the traditional view of the CIO role was keep the lights on, make sure everybody's got a new PC, don't let anything go down. And in our county, certainly there was an aspect of that when I first joined them and that's how we met Nutanix was really refreshing our infrastructure, getting our uptime up, getting compute up, but that's all invisible now. I mean, I think that is a thing that technologies like Nutanix have afforded a CIO like myself is after you go through that initial sort of big lift of getting up into the 21st century, getting your infrastructure modernized in government, then you're able to be that chief innovation officer, chief disruption person and really say, what can I do for the community? What can I do on a regional scale? What can I do through partnership? So, you know, I really feel like infrastructure eventually has to become invisible. Nobody cares what switches, transmitting their data. Nobody cares what WAP they're connecting to. I mean, the end users really don't care what hyperconverged solution we use to provide the solution. I care because I'm a geek and I care about the budget and I care that my staff are happy, but really at the end of the day, the people who I'm really most worried about are, you know, the departments I provide services to, the public I'm trying to show relevance to, the elected officials who want to see us heading in the right direction, really adding value as government to the public that pays a lot of taxes, frankly, they want to see benefits. So, I'm really excited about the coming, we just got out of our budget cycle and really sort of setting that vision for what do we want to do in the coming years. Nutanix empowers that, but I don't have to worry about it anymore. John, what are some of those drivers that are helping you to innovate for provide more services? What are some of the big things that you can share? Well, I think you have to look at it, you know, from a, when you have infrastructure that's robust and it's up and it's cost affordable, then you don't spend 80% of your time worrying about it. That's not what's not keeping you awake at night. I get asked that a lot. What keeps you awake at night? It's no longer is that old hard work on a crash or fail or become the thing that delays all of my projects. So now the value adds we look for is connectivity. You know, we talk about SMC connect, San Mateo County connect. It's now that we've created the infrastructure, put all the services online, how do we get people better to connect to those? Do we need to market them more? Do we need to help understand the value they add to the community more? Do we need more wireless connectivity? Do we need more fiber connectivity? It's more connecting the public to the backend solution that's important. Whether they live in my data center or the cloud, what I care about are the applications and data relevant to the public. Are they making their lives better than do they have the tools to connect to those? Because in a county like San Mateo, it's very diverse. You know, you have very sort of a high tech corridor down the 101 corridor. We have a lot of high tech things. And then you have a very rural area out towards the coast and very different population you have to serve. It sounds like you're a service provider. Yes, absolutely. Talk about this notion of invisibility. How has it changed the way in which your team works? Well, I think, you know, everyone wants to feel valued, right? I mean, I think if you're a network engineer or a server engineer, you want to feel like you add value. The one thing I think we do well in San Mateo County is, you know, we have performance metrics that we publish that we're trying to achieve, whether it's uptime or customer satisfaction, those trickle down to every group. So invisibility, meaning you don't have to worry about it anymore, but we do try to keep some visibility on how every staff person contributes to the ultimate outcome we're trying to achieve. So if people can see how their individual efforts add value to the end result, I think they feel valued and they feel important. The invisibility is important because when I go to board meetings now, I'm not talking about, oh, I need millions of dollars for this server. Oh, we need to do this big network refresh. That's too visible. That's making the infrastructure sort of the cornerstone of all your conversations. It takes about two seconds before, you know, the board members or the elected officials eyes plays over, they don't want to hear that. They want to hear about what are the visible aspects? How are we helping youth and community centers better connect to educational opportunities or job or internships? So I think, you know, there are always going to be a spend on technology to make things better. But I think when we get as CIOs, when we get entrapped in that talking about specific technologies or how important infrastructure is, that makes it too visible. It makes it seem like that's all we care about. And I think the biggest compliment I ever got in a budget meeting was somebody saying, you know, what I appreciate is we spent 30 minutes talking about IT and you never use one technical term. You know, and I think that's the invisibility piece of it is, I think as a CIO, you know, you've done your job when you never have to talk about the technology, right? The people that we serve in the community and the elected officials, they need to assume that we're making good technical decision to make those solutions happen. And so I think in a sense the technology should be invisible, it should be affordable, it should be simple, it should enable the end results. But the nuances of the technology we use should probably in large be invisible to the public because that's not really their concern. So you've suppressed a lot of the mundane, complex infrastructure, kind of low value ad discussions, it sounds like with the board. I would imagine one area that you still talk about a lot is security. Is that a topic that is a regular topic at board meetings? Absolutely. And I mean, I think all the ransomware and virus attacks and hacker attacks we've seen recently and I tweet about those a lot and we talk about those a lot because we've had real impacts in our organization about things like that, phishing attacks. And this again is back to the value ad. I think the message I try to bring to the board is our weakest point in security isn't necessarily always the technology, it's the complexity of the technology, right? So the more complex we make our systems, the more complex and difficult to manage our infrastructure is there are more opportunities for weakness there are. So we've gone from talking about security sort of in an ivory tower aspect to I think the two areas where we can focus on it more is simplifying our infrastructure so it's easier to manage and easier to secure from our staff standpoint. And that really adds value. So we're able to I think rapidly react to and address security issues as they come up because we have simplified our infrastructure. The board doesn't really need to worry about how we've done that, but the staff feel more confident that they're able to react to and manage those things. And then we can do value add things like train the users to be more aware of how phishing attacks happen when there's threats, communicate better. We spent most of our time in the back rooms patching servers, now with the Nutanix infrastructure it's the easy button upgrade to patch servers and to get things addressed and we can spend more of our time communicating with the end users about threats that are out there, how they should react, how they should respond to it. So John, you've kind of an early adopter of this whole concept of convergence. When we first met at VMworld a couple of years ago I think we were talking about traditional converged infrastructure if I can use that term. Are you still using that type of infrastructure? How does it compare with so-called hyper-converged infrastructure? Do you see differences? Is HCI a buzzword or is it substantive in your view? I think it's substantive. You know I was doubtful at first too. I came from, like you said, a few years ago I think every CIO faces this, especially in the public sector it's what I call sort of project where, right? You do a project, you do an RFP, you get three or four racks of equipment in of the lowest bidder and then that becomes a little island and then you do the next RFP and you kind of grow your data center like that. We had tried early on when some of the new sort of converged infrastructures were coming out and I spent a lot of time going to EBCs and talking about reference architectures and one throat to choke when it came to when there's a problem, is it a compute problem or is it a storage problem? And I think the industry is recognized for a while now since we had those first conversations about, again, simplifying and collapsing the complexity of those infrastructures is important. I was doubtful when we first did the pilot with Nutanix. We first did the pilot around just VDI. We just saw Nutanix three years ago as a point solution sort of like a project where this was going to be our VDI platform. We would still maintain these other infrastructures for really important projects that needed the more traditional architectures. And it's really credit to my staff and the engineers that it only took about six months before we had old failing infrastructure that were saying, hey, we can use Nutanix as hyperconverge, HDI for other things for compute. And now we're 100% virtualized. We have 1,200 servers now all running on the Nutanix. There hasn't been a time in two years where my staff came to me and said, the hyperconverged infrastructure we've selected isn't going to work for this. We have to buy something else. And so, I mean, to me, that's when it goes from the theoretical, it might work. It might just be a, to a reality. If I'm going to go all in and my staff are going to go all in on something, they have to be pretty confident that that's going to work for them. Are you using Acropolis hypervisor? We are in some things. We don't use it for everything, but I think it goes back, we still have a very good relationship with VMware. We still think, in some cases, the VMware tools are still slightly more mature than the Acropolis tools. We think Acropolis has been catching up. We've actually been pushing really hard on Nutanix to make it mature. And that's one of the reasons we went with this platform is we'd like to see that competition. We'd like to think that the Acropolis product will continue to mature and challenge VMware to either continue to evolve ahead of it or bring their prices down to compete with it. Yeah, John, what's still on your to-do list for Nutanix and its ecosystem in your mind? You know, we're looking at really now around our disaster recovery strategy. We're doing local replication between two data centers about six miles apart, which from a local building failure standpoint is useful. But, you know, my county is on the San Andreas fault. So the likelihood that, you know, a large earthquake is going to take both local data centers down is pretty high. So we're really looking with Commvault and Nutanix and Amazon Web Services now. Sort of about, you know, we have over 200 applications we support for both public safety, healthcare, really mission critical things that we can have zero downtime on. And in a disaster situation, you know, healthcare and public safety applications are probably going to be the most needed applications out there. So we're really pushing to try to see what that future looks like in the next 12 months around the Nutanix infrastructure. I don't say we have everything solved locally, but we're very confident in what we've implemented locally for a local compute. But really that next question, what is the right balance between cloud compute, local compute, and how does that fit into the DR conversations important? And back to your question about security, we still have real concerns about how secure is the public cloud? You know, it's not, is it going to get hacked, but can the public cloud be infrastructure to be compromised to the point where in a disaster, if that's not available, how are we still going to get the data and applications up and running we need? So we really see that there needs to be a balance between those two things. It's a response issue for you. It is, it's a response. We don't believe it's less secure, but we believe there's an RTO we need to meet in a disaster. And having lived through the Japan earthquake when I was in Tokyo when they head to 9.0, response time is critical. You know, you can't say, well, we'll have the internet connection back up by then and be relying on your partners to do that. You need access to that data right now. So you've got a synchronous connection today between your two data centers. Is that right? Between the two data centers, but not to an out of area data center yet. And that's what we need to accomplish next. Okay, yeah, good. All right, listen, John, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me. Give you the last word here on kind of Nutanix, your future with them or other things that you want to share. Well, we're excited about it and I'd recommend to any CIO who's watching this or thinking about it. You know, really consider it and see how it fits into your ecosystem. Great, always good having you on. Thanks very much. My pleasure, thank you gentlemen. You're welcome. Thanks everybody. Stu and I went back with our next guest. This is theCUBE. We're live from Nutanix. Next conf, right back.