 Live from the BuildGram Auditorium in San Francisco. It's theCUBE, covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2018. Brought to you by Pure Storage. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Pure Accelerate 2018. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. We are in San Francisco at the really cool historic BuildGram Civic Auditorium. We've been here all day talking with lots of great folks and we're happy to welcome back another Pure customer, Patrick Welch, the network services manager of the Mississippi Department of Revenue. Welcome, Patrick. Thank you, appreciate it. Tell us a little bit about the Department of Revenue. What do you guys do? What kind of information do you collect? Okay, we bring in all tax revenue for the state of Mississippi. Include vehicle services, so we do all, we register all the car tags in Mississippi. Income tax, corporate tax, any revenue that's generated in Mississippi comes through us. Tax refunds too? Or did you just take? We take and give. I have to do it too. So don't do this about some of the challenges that you had in your environment. I was reading your case study and it's totaling what you guys are taking in. It's totaling $7.8 billion a year, as we just identified. Some of it's being given back, but what was the infrastructure like to support that before you became a Pure Storage customer? Right, so we used an internal Mississippi, they're called ITS, so they handle all internal infrastructure, that kind of thing. They were using a mixture of Dell, EMC, Compellent, that type of thing. And we were, so we use a third party vendor who has an off the shelf software package. And they have about 50 to 60 customers in different states and municipalities and countries around the world. And in that environment of Dell, EMC, Compellent, we were about 47th on their list of productive sites. So we were way far down. We were not performing. Latency across the board was horrible. The user experience was the worst. If you've ever been on a website and clicked a button and you see the spinning wheel, we had that in droves and not just taxpayers, but our internal people that worked at D.O.R. were not able to work efficiently. So we came in and evaluated and I looked at the infrastructure and I said, my team can do it better. And then when they said, we'll do it better, I was like, okay, well now I have to go out and actually do it better. So I started researching other companies and Pure kind of rose to the top of the list. We talked with other customers and partners, kind of how they tackled those types of challenges. And we went through a lot of POC process, talked with a lot of vendors, things like that. We ended up buying Pure. We are now number three. We went from almost 50 to three, out of 50 to three. And the only two sites that are ahead of us are smaller sites. Their transactions aren't nearly as high as ours. Okay, hang on. So how much of that effect that can be attributed to the storage infrastructure? Do you have a sense of that? 99%. Really? Yeah, I mean because before we had, to be fair, Pure is all flash storage, right? And we're compelling and EMC or hybrid arrays. At the end of the day, the latency that we saw was due to read and write input being very low. We implemented Pure through the roof. We don't have, storage is not even something we would ever look at if we had a problem. We know that that is the performing well above capacity. Okay, got another follow-ups. I asked this earlier to another customer. So you're basically comparing an all-flash array to a sort of previous generation hybrid. So it could have been, I don't know, whatever, three, four, five, six years old. It could have been 10 years old. But so, had you, you had the option, obviously, of bringing in an all-flash array from the competition. We did. And you had processes and procedures tied to that. You're a data protection and you know those products well, but you chose to switch vendors. Why? You could have gotten, you know, like you say, comparable all-flash, but you chose Pure. Why did you choose that switch and that disruption? What business benefit did that bring you? There were several things that led to that. One of the things that we really liked was the proactive support. In terms of every three years, they swap out your controller as part of your support and maintenance agreement, which is, you know, huge for us because we don't have a lot of money. We have, budget is very small for IT, so I can't afford to replace equipment, you know, as often as some people can. So, the proactive support model, not just in terms of swapping out equipment, but personnel, our sales team that we deal with, our engineering team that we deal with, we're on a personal basis with these people. I have cell phone numbers, I know who to call, and that is, we found that out through, you know, talking to other customers that had, hey, you call these guys, they're gonna be there for you. And that was coming from not having that before. We knew that the people we had before were not gonna perform that same level of service, even if we went to their all-flash product. We were gonna have the same support that we had had before, which was not good. And you didn't have that previously because, why, you weren't in like a big bank or you just didn't, you know, spend enough. Because you're a number, and in our business, we didn't spend near enough money to be considered, that's a theory of mine. I'm not sure exactly what the actual issue was, but it felt like we were not big enough to get that kind of attention. But you're a little guy, yeah. Yeah, we're a little guy. And Pure makes you feel like you're a big guy. I mean, you know, we think we're doing okay. We have six arrays now, so I mean, we're not tiny, tiny, but we're not, also we're not city bank, you know, so. But I've never felt any different than a city bank type customer with Pure, they treat me the same way. You're in two years, you said, two years? A little over two years, yeah. All right, so you've had enough experience to, you know, when you first buy something, you go on Amazon, you see the reviews, this is great, and then you wonder, you know, if it's still great two years in, you would still give a five-star rating. Oh, absolutely, yeah. I've done several, you know, I've done a case study, I've talked, you know, customers call me, and I'm happy to talk about Pure, you know, to anybody. I'm trying, I have a lot of friends in state government, I try to hit them all for making bad decisions. I'm like, if you like your job, you want to keep your job by this, so it's interesting to me, now one of the things the customers tell us is, is that they love a lot about Pure, but they really like the simplicity. You mentioned Compellent before, Compellent in its day was known for simplicity, you know, compared to the old mainframe storage, so it's interesting to note how technology has changed in, you know, whatever, 10, 12 years, comments. Yeah, Compellent was a great product. Back in the day, when it came time to evaluate products, they had not performed along the same track as a company like Pure, which consistently innovates its products. We, this is again, about feeling like a big guy, even though you're a small guy, they keep us in the loop of what they're bringing down the pipe, and it really makes us feel like we're invested in that, you know, ecosystem, and we know exactly how they're transforming, how they're going to develop their business going forward, and it helps keep us as a, you know, a happy partner. So, from what I'm hearing, Patrick, better experience all around, very happy. Did it save you any time? Are you able to now do things differently, add more value to your organization as a result of bringing in Pure? I wonder if we could talk about that. Oh, absolutely. We spent a good chunk of time troubleshooting issues directly related to storage before, whether it was storage creep, where we had too much data versus the capacity of the array, or the input output problems in terms of IO, latency, those types of issues. We don't see any of that anymore. So that frees our engineers up to work on other problems in the environment. What workloads are you running on Flash Deck? Mostly production SQL, so high SQL workloads, mostly. So from, you mentioned, you know, the dreaded spinning color wheel or whatever kind of computer we're running, and that was affecting not just employees, but also Mississippi citizens. Problem gone? The problem is gone from the aspect of our side of things. Now, there's Mississippi, so you still got a lot of rural customers who are still on some dial-up internet, so we can't solve that problem for them, but in terms of our side of the fence, we know they're not going to see any latency because of us. We're delivering the application as best you can. Like I said, we're number three in the list of their sites, and that is coming, we came 44 spots down. How quickly? In the last couple of years alone? Immediately. Yeah, I mean. We're like a neck brace from the Whiplash. Yeah, well, you know, we put it in, I'm just crossing my fingers because if I told them I could do this, and we're 45th, what did we really solve? We didn't solve the problem, really, but we came from that high up to all the way down to three. It felt like my team had accomplished something really great. And pretty dramatic improvements to your database. I was reading the case study within the context of your IT transformation that you improve database transaction performance by as much as 20x. Big. Also data reduction rates. So I want to get your perspective on your TCO, the impact of TCO, and why that's so important for a public agency. You know, I mean, a lot of things going to TCO, I think user experience is one of those things. Downtime for the state. The biggest cost we had was not really something you could see before, because our system went down all the time due to not being able to meet the requirements of the taxpayers and the people that work at the Department of Revenue. And we don't have that problem anymore. We would spend days of downtime before. That's revenue lost for us. So TCO in that instance is kind of hard to calculate, but I know that the number is big. I know we've saved a lot of time and money. Patrick, why not just forget all this IT stuff and throw everything into the cloud? I know as an IT pro, that might be fighting words, but hey, it's talked about in the industry all the time. Why the decision to stay on-prem and was that discussed? We definitely look at the cloud. We definitely have Azure workloads that are in testing right now. Unfortunately, it's not just as simple as us saying, okay, let's go to the cloud. Because if it was up to me with limited funding and that type of thing, I would love to move workloads into the cloud where it was applicable. The problem for us is IRS. So we have a lot of IRS regulations around the cloud. So the core infrastructure that we have has to remain on-premise. There's some things we can do, but the regulations are a mile long. So we have to make sure that we're always staying in compliance with IRS. That limits our mobility a little bit in the cloud, but we're getting there slowly, but surely. I feel like in the next 60 years we'll be there. But I joke, but I mean, just everything that we do, we have to go through compliance measures and we have to make sure we're checking all the boxes and there's one thing you don't want to have and that's IRS to write you up for non-compliance. And then, you know, because if you're attacked or hit by some vector afterwards, then you're on the hook. You know, you weren't in compliance. That's why you were vulnerable. So we just have to be very careful, but we're definitely interested and we're looking to the future with the cloud. A lot of talk at this show, every show we go to about artificial intelligence, machine intelligence. What do you make of it? How does it apply to your organization? Can you use it? Will you plan on using machine intelligence for whether it's fraud detection or tax evasion, et cetera? What's the state of AI in your world? You know, I'd say infancy, but we know that due to the fact that the state hasn't kept up in terms of pay and that type of thing with private industry, we're gonna have to rely on artificial intelligence and automation and things like that to remain ahead of the curve in terms of compliance, performance, all the metrics we've talked about. You have to have either a very talented and well-paid staff or you're gonna have to leverage these types of technologies to stay ahead of the game. So you have made some big impacts from an IT transformation perspective. We talked about a minute ago. Where are you on this journey of digital transformation? What does that digital transformation mean to the Mississippi Department of Revenue and what stage would you say you're at? We're getting there. Like I said before, Mississippi is still very rural. For the first time ever, we had more online returns processed than mail. Believe it or not, Mississippians still like to mail their returns in. So a lot of that is rural location, internet access, that type of thing. But we're getting there slowly, but surely I feel like in the next five years we'll be probably 75 to 80% online refund based. I hope anyway, I hope we're not still at 50%. But it's a slow crawl, but we're getting there. We do things a little slower than most people. We get there eventually. Well, but you friendly are down in Mississippi. We are. Definitely. You got to have something. You do. So in terms of kind of like next steps, you've solved the performance challenges. You're kind of on this road to digital transformation. How have you improved the efficiency of your IT team? Say that one more time. How have you improved the efficiency within network services? I think most of it comes down to not having to worry about the equipment and the environment. We have more time to focus on each other, the tasks that we have in front of us. Before it was tackling issues that we knew were related to either vendor or product or storage or server. And now we're focused on expanding the skill set of the current staff. It allows us to leverage things like cloud and automation. We didn't have time to look at that stuff before. So when you ask me like, where are we at with automation? Well, we're still in the emergency because before all we did was fight issues related to previous vendors, previous products, that kind of thing. While it's not a magic bullet, and you're always going to have challenges, it frees us up to be able to work on those types of things. I feel like you've done it. As opposed to firefighting and whack-a-mole. That's all we did before. This guy's fighting this problem, he's fighting this one. They don't get time to learn and grow as employees and people. Okay, so automation is a big priority. I mean, what kind of other fun projects you're working on or text that you're researching that get you excited? So right now we've deployed both of our major applications using Pure. So our big projects are kind of done. Now we're leveraging towards disaster recovery, modern-day DR, BCDR, business continuity, that type of thing. How do we recover in the case of a disaster? And that's kind of where my focus lays right now to make sure that the Department of Revenue, if we are affected by some type of disaster, that we're ready for the taxpayers' Mississippi to come up and running in a sister site and be ready to go. Okay, so that's a combination of infrastructure. Probably going to use snapshots, remote replication, but there's also got to be a software component as well. Absolutely. What are you thinking about, whether if you don't have a specific vendor product, but just architecturally, what are you thinking about? So we absolutely right now leverage Zerto with Pure, which is a very good combination. They work very well together and we have a co-low facility that's about 200 miles north of us. We'd like to get more geographically diverse. You know, as budget frees up and that kind of thing, maybe move out into the Colorado's or something like that. But our sister site, all of our data is replicated using Zerto. We're on, I believe, 15, every 15 seconds we're tracking journal history. So in the event of a disaster, and we've done test failovers where we've, you know, because you've got RPO and you've got RTO, real-time objective, recovery point objective. So it's important for us to be under 10 minutes in terms of how quickly we can recover the environment. So real-time objective. And we are, the last time we did a test failover we were about four minutes. So our business has completely transformed. Before, if we had a disaster, we would be lucky to have data available to us number one, and within three to five days. Now we are being able to turn around and operate it in another location within minutes. And your RPO, you said it was 15 minutes? Did I hear that right? Recovery point objective, so that is 15 seconds. 15 seconds? Our recovery points are every 15 seconds. Our recovery time, so the total time it takes us to come back up and running. We hope to be under 10 and we got it around four. Now that depends on a lot of different things. Every situation is not the same, so. Very tight RPO. Oh yeah, absolutely. Because you're moving money, I guess. We're moving money. Yeah, and it's very important that we stay up at all times. Obviously there's going to be a little bit of downtime but you know, we want to minimize that as much as we can. Patrick, last question before we wrap here. This is your first time at Pure Storage Accelerate. Some, a whole bunch of announcements this morning. Anything that you've heard that excites you for expanding this foundation that you have with FlashDac? You know, a lot of the stuff you talked about around automation and that kind of thing. We're definitely interested in how Pure is going to evolve to the cloud because we know y'all will be ahead of us. I say y'all, so y'all will be ahead of us whenever we do get ready and that's another big benefit for us is we know that when we get ready to transition to the cloud, you guys are going to have your ducks in a row and be ready for us to do that. Y'all is in Pure? Yeah, y'all is in Pure. So we all aren't Pure, just right here. Right, right here, you know what I mean. That's those orange guys. Yeah. We're the blue guys. Yeah. Yeah, it's really exciting to hear about automation and where they're going with the cloud and storage as a service and that type of thing is very neat. I love reading about and hearing about that stuff. We can't always be there, like I said, because of compliance issues but as we can, we will, if it makes sense for us. How important is it to you? I was asking a couple of the Pure execs what their thoughts were on staying independent. You see a lot of storage companies get bought, they get consolidated, EMC, 20 plus billion, they got acquired. How important is it to you as a customer to have a company like Pure be an independent storage company? I mean, it's enormous. And I can give you an example that we were a SimpliVity customer. So HPE bought SimpliVity. Our experience before the merger, fantastic. We would give them very high marks in every category. After the merger, not so much. Support dropped off for us after SimpliVity was bought by HPE. So for us, it's huge that Pure is now. That's not to say we know that this is a business and that things may happen but we hope that if they don't stay independent, somebody that has the same level of focus and effort and determination and support, keeps that going. Well, we hope so too. We love the competition on the Cube. We love the growth that drives innovation. And Pure seems to be leading the way. We talked about this earlier, what they're doing with NVMe, a lot of good marketing, but still they're throwing down the gauntlet, what they've done with Evergreen, obviously first with all flash or at least early on with all flash. So they're a leader. That's what you worry about too, the Evergreen type things or the things that you worry about going away. Okay, if they get bought by somebody, is that the first casualty? And that's the kind of thing that happens to companies when they get bought. So we do love the fact that they're independent but we know it's a business at the end of the day but hopefully that remains the same. We'll keep that feedback coming and for they appreciate that. And Patrick, thanks so much for stopping by the Cube and sharing the impact that you guys are making at the Mississippi Department of Revenue. Sure, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. We want to thank you for watching the Cube. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante from Pure Accelerate 2018. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest.