 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE covering EMC World 2015, brought to you by EMC, Brocade and VCE. Hey welcome back everyone, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, we're at VM, excuse me EMC World, we'll be at VM World later this summer, right in the middle of our tour. This is EMC World 2015, our sixth year bringing theCUBE here, that's where theCUBE really got its start six years ago, we've got two cubes, we've got a ton of gas so we're going to jump right into it. I'm joining this next segment, I'm my co-host Steve Chambers, hi Steve. Hi Jeff, how are you doing? I'm not surprised I mentioned VMWare, we've seen a lot of VMWare today, a key part of the Federation and it's Federation Day. Pat Gelsinger will be on soon I believe. We've been sort of stormtroopers this morning, which was really good, but it gives me great pleasure to give a warm welcome to Adam Wood today, he's the director of IT from Heritage Auctions, welcome, could you start by telling us a bit about yourself and Heritage as a business? Sure, so Heritage is the third largest auction house in the world, huge online presence, our website www.ha.com, we have a live bidding platform there that we were one of the first I think to market with that, it's patent pending of course, but we auction all kinds of really cool collectibles from TRX, skeletons, coins, comic books, wine, when you name it, we probably auction it, really high in stuff and a really exciting place to work. It sounds like eBay, is it different from eBay? A little more higher than eBay, we focus on the high end, so a hundred thousand dollar handbags for example, or a TRX skeleton for a million dollars. Wow, a TRX skeleton? A TRX skeleton, that's really cool stuff, but imagine putting that in your foyer, it's pretty sweet, but you know we auction all kinds of stuff, or the number one in coins, currency, comics, always something cool, we get some moon landing stuff, I learned that you can't actually sell a piece of the moon, that all belongs to Uncle Sam there, but anything else like life support straps, sounds kind of boring, but it's got moon dust on it, so that makes it pretty cool. Right, right, it's like 900 billion dollars, right, so you guys are big? Yeah, just under a billion, just last year, yeah, we were so close, but still a huge milestone for us, and we're starting off this year pretty strong. So let's try and find that link then between the business and the IT, and then we'll get into some detail about some of the pain points that you've been through, it's great to show those, because everybody always finds those interesting. We're super fortunate, we've got an owner who's a big believer in IT, we have that live bidding platform that we've had for quite a while, and that's really propelled us, and what's helped us become the third largest auction house in the world, and so with that backing, we're able to get the best in compute, in network, in storage, and all this technology, all of our apps are custom written, we have a huge application development team, and actually that actually ended up being one of the pain points, because we've developed all these apps. We've got 200 plus internal apps, and as time goes on, we're always adding more and more apps, everybody wants new features, all this stuff, and we're wondering how do we improve the performance all that we're using, and we don't have the time or the resources to go back and rewrite 200 apps, you know, that's hundreds and hundreds of hours of our application development time. So we were thinking to ourselves, how can we give all those apps a huge speed boost at once, and everything ties into SQL, you know, it's our bidding platform, our item inventory, our customer management platform, everything's in SQL, so it was really obvious to us, if we upgrade SQL, you know, get rid of that latency, you know, it's spinning disk, go all flash, we can give a huge performance benefit to all those apps all at once, you know, and you're talking about saving, you know, we're a 500 employee company, so we're saving 500 employees maybe 10 minutes a day, or whatever the math works out to, and it comes a really obvious so you made that switch, we did. So we went from a VMAX, which when we got it, I mean, it's a huge upgrade from what we have before, incredibly stable, but you can't compete with all flash. I mean, it's just it knocks it out of the party extreme my oh, it's just an incredible product. So we'll come to the extreme my own a second, but I'm just kind of curious, it's not a business question. I'm picking up is this a high transaction business or is it never fail transaction business, because there's some big sums you just talked about, right? It's a little bit of both. I mean, we have some high pressure options that, you know, we were to go down to be a thing, right? Well, yeah, exactly. We're talking about millions of dollars at a single auction. We were to go down, you know, I'm feeling nervous already, just thinking about that. It's a little nerve wracking, right? You need that reliability and a partner that you can rely on and thankfully, you can see, you know, helps us do that. Yeah, that's cool. There's a thread you hear from from people who are doing well in IT that they're a technology company, even if they're an auction company, they're also a technology company, they do software development. That sounds like, you know, so you're fitting the the mold of that kind of successful, you know, doctor of technology. And it sounds like one of them, and we've heard this a lot this week is extreme my own difference and all flash array makes you tell us a bit about, you know, is it just been the IOPS that you've been interested in? Or has it changed any of the other? I mean, the IOPS are huge. And actually, one of the unexpected benefits, I mean, it makes sense in hindsight, but we had backup windows that were, you know, taking several hours to complete, or maybe not finishing by the time we wanted them to, you know, right before business really kicks off. And one of the side effects we didn't even consider when we moved to all flash was how quickly our backups would complete, you know, those read rates. So the IOPS really helped there, you know, we're getting a lot more throughput. But for us, the driving factor was the latency, you know, like I said, we're highly transactional all of our bids, you know, keeping track all those records and customers and the items and all that stuff. The latency and sequel was, you know, what we're looking to optimize. And, you know, we've got, I think, an average latency of under a millisecond, which it's insane. You know, I mean, it's really awesome. So extreme IOP clearly big benefit for you. But I know you've got the types of storage there and solving different kind of pain. Sure. Yeah. So I mean, that definitely covers our block. But we have huge big data needs. You know, we've got, we keep all of our records forever, including images. So like, those high collectible, a lot of these people are buying our items sight unseen. We're talking $100,000 items, like you need to really, you know, that eBay picture, you know, that's not going to sell it. So we have, you know, high end DSLRs, and we're taking 100 plus made pictures that we keep forever. So you can, for example, buy a coin 10 years ago, and then somebody is listing it for sale, and you can go and look and like, this is what it looked like 10 years ago. Here's where it is today. And, you know, it's zoomed in and it's that incredible fidelity, that high resolution. But that takes a lot of space. So for that, we use Isilon. We've got some other applications, and, you know, things that don't need the transaction speed, but you know, you need capacity. And so we've grown out our Isilon. We've got a five node X 400 series, a little bit over 500 terabytes or so usable after the data protection. And that does all our auction. So you go to our website and all those pan and zoom images and the 3D. Yeah. Yeah. And they add up. And like I said, we keep them forever. So that's just as time goes on, those images get bigger and I got to keep them for longer and longer. I mean, what's capacity fun in light with this thing? You know, you've probably got structured unstructured data and growth. Yeah, it's not too hard. I mean, it's, you know, it's just whenever we upgrade, you know, our photography department, when they get new cameras, it's like, okay, we need to double check a few things, make sure we've got a little bit extra capacity. You know, it's a curve, just like everything else. And it's just painted benefits because I know in early days of flash from the last couple years, right, it had to be a really high value transaction or really, really fast. And if it wasn't in that two in those buckets, maybe you really wasn't worth it economically, but it seems like the adoption of flash is accelerating much faster than anyone anticipated because the benefits are so big across, as you said, in a law of unintended consequences. That's true. And you know, there's another benefit that, you know, like you said, it's fast, right? I think that's what everybody looks at at first. And you know, you've probably gotten a laptop, put a flash drive in it, and that's the biggest performance improvement you've ever seen. But one of the things we didn't consider was just the reliability. You know, you get a much more reliable system when you don't have those spinning discs failing all the time. And so we're, we're planning it out. And you know, if you're asking like, what's the future holds? And I'm like, you know, I don't know, we could, we could be on Xtreme O for, for 10 years. I don't know that flash is going to last forever. Especially, I think the old days it was presented more of a caching of solutions. You got tons of rights just going in and out of it. And so, you know, it wears out a little faster. But when you put your whole data center on it, you're not, you don't have those rights. We're not having to clear it all out over and over. So, you know, maybe you're only 20% right. Something like that. And the longevity of that flash is just incredible. Do you kind of ignore it then? Do you put like the Xtreme O in the corner and just kind of, because you've not got those amber lights all the time. You've not got, you know, losing discs. I mean, it almost is like a set it and forget it. You know, you have like a late night. Exactly. But yeah, I mean, it's so easy to manage. I don't really have to worry about it. You know, I don't have dry spilling. I don't get the call from UNC Supports and, hey, sending the technician, you know, technician outside. Oh my God. I don't have to worry about it. What about consumer cloud storage? Yeah, we have a lot of consumer cloud stuff. So we've got, it actually came from outside the company. It was the driving factor. So we had customers or clients sending us images. You know, they also take these big images and they want to know what their items are worth. So they're at home. They take this picture with their smartphone and they send it to us. Well, when they get, you know, a bigger collection, they zip it up and you can't send it over email. You get that 10 meg attachment limit. So they started using Dropbox and they started sending it to us. And it's so easy, you know, today. Like all these applications are for the end user and they're designed to be easy. So I've got my, you know, our internal employees are getting these Dropbox links from outside the company. And so now they're installing Dropbox and now they're seeing the ease of use to have this always connected, always in sync, you know, file storage mechanism. And now they're starting to put sensitive data on there. So that's, you know, that's a risk for me. We've got customer data and a public cloud that I have no control over. I talked to my EMC account team and they said, hey, why don't you check out Synplicity? It ties into your existing ISO on, you can store it on prem and you get all the same benefits. Like, that's really compelling. So we had a small group in the office, just my network team and we piloted it out, you know, and it was a great replacement for Dropbox and we rolled it out company-wide and we don't have that issue. It's a great story. I think we're running out of time, unfortunately, because I mean, I mean, you're using three important pieces there, right? And they're clearly helping you out, which is good. The pressure of the business with those transactions and the cost. There's enough to worry about, right? You've got new apps. I mean, it sounds like the kind of business you're always trying to be innovative and, you know, you don't want to be destructive. You're not innovating, you're dying. I mean, you've got to stay on top. Brilliant. I'd like to thank you. Jeff, what's your summary of that? Thanks for sharing your story. I guess the last thing I was going to ask you is now that you've had some experience with Flash and you said you were developing 200 applications, you said, how has that now changed your application development strategy going forward now that you've got horsepower that you formally didn't? Or has it really? If anything, it's probably made my application developers, you know, a little less eager to optimize. They might be a little spoiled. All right. Well, Adam, thanks for sharing your story. Director of IT Heritage Auctions, almost a billion dollar auction house. You can buy yourself a T-Rex skeleton. Cool million, you said? Cool million. Cool million. Just go house, you know. Exactly. There you go. I get the head. Who gets the skull, though? All right. Thanks for watching. Jeff Rick here at EMC World 2015. We'll be back with our next guest after this short break.