 Live from Miami Beach, Florida, extracting the signal from the noise, it's the CUBE. Covering .NEXT conference, brought to you by Nutanix. Now your host, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. Welcome back to SiliconANGLE Wikibon's theCUBE, our live production of .NEXT Nutanix user conference. The first user conference ever, almost a thousand people here, very successful. David Quinney is here, he's a Kiwi from Swedbank, which is based now, or he's based now of course in Sweden, he's an infrastructure architect. Welcome to the CUBE, thanks for coming on. Thank you for having me. So, very good to be here. The infrastructure architect is a role that is emerging, it used to be a little fuzzy, but now with web scale architecture really coming to the enterprise, it's significantly changed that role. I wonder if you could talk about your role, the world of silos is now entering a new world of web scale in the enterprise, so how has that affected your life and talk about your role at Swedbank? Yeah, the roles are definitely converging now, so I think to be an infrastructure architect now, you need to know network, you need to know storage, you need to know compute. You need to have a really good design methodology that's going to go towards the goals that you have in your infrastructure. So I think it has really, really changed. So where did you cut your teeth? I mean, how did you get the expertise in those three disciplines? Just go out and get it or were you in those silos in previous careers or how did that all come about? I think the way that it started was actually working with VMware in a big way. If you want to be good at VMware, you need to know storage and you need to know networking. So to be working with VMware, it really, really gives you exposure to all those different kinds of silos. So the role can kind of come naturally as technology develops, you know. So tell us a little bit more about Swedbank. So Swedbank is a Nordic bank based in Sweden, so we have around eight million customers and yeah, we've been a Nutanix customer for about a year and a half, running our infrastructure workloads on Nutanix. And how long have you been there? I've been at Swedbank for around three and a half years. Okay, so you saw the transition from whatever it was before to bringing in Nutanix. Can you... Well, first of all, describe your infrastructure. What's it look like, you know, kind of applications that you're running? Okay. VMware shop, obviously. Yeah. Give us a paint a picture for us. Okay. So our infrastructure, we are very, very highly virtualized. So we have a 98.5% virtualization ratio and that is all running on top of VMware. So we have a legacy free tier. So we had our storage, our compute, our storage area network. And the way we really saw it like hyperconvergence is going to be the next step for us, you know, because we want to eliminate silos. We want to reduce our lead times to provision servers and application stacks to the business. Okay. So what you brought in Nutanix, you said a year and a half ago, what was life like before that? What was the infrastructure? I mean, typical silos. Yeah. Typical silos. So talk about that sort of transformation, that project, essentially, what do you have to do to prepare for it? What were some of the gotchas? What were some of the concerns that you have? Was it for a specific project or, you know, broad infrastructure? Okay. The way we actually started out was we have a sweat bank HQ and we needed to put a small amount of infrastructure in there. And we didn't have much space in there. As you can imagine, it's not a data center, it's just a headquarter office. So we started looking at the NX1000 series. We put in some of them. And then when I actually saw how it worked, I realized that we could actually do this in our data centers as well. And as Nutanix developed, with all the new functionality and everything coming up, we really, really saw that we can put some nodes in our data center, start small and then scale incrementally. So the way we do it is when our existing legacy infrastructure life cycles, we start looking at adding new blocks and, you know, it's a very, very easy process for us to grow our infrastructure in an organic way. So what did you do with your existing infrastructure? Still there? It's still there. We will add blocks as our legacy infrastructure life cycles. So when, say, we're running a C7000 blade chassis, when those blades life cycle, we will take them out, replace them with a Nutanix block. All right. How many Nutanix boxes do you have? What size clusters do you run? Okay. We're quite small at the moment. We only have seven blocks, but we're looking to expand. All right. And you said that the scaling of that's really easy. Why is that important for you? And how easy is it to scale? It's very easy to scale, you know, because that was one of the reasons we chose it. We can add nodes in minutes. You just plug them in, rack them in, add to the cluster. And it's made it really, really easy for us because in our traditional infrastructure, there will be huge lead times, you know, because you need to get your storage guys on board. You need to get your network guys on board. And for us to have a single team able to add nodes like that and grow the clusters is fantastic. All right. So what workloads do you have sitting on Nutanix today? At the moment, they're mainly Windows and Linux service. Yeah. It's just general infrastructure workloads. Okay. So you've been here at the show this week. There's been big announcement around Acropolis. Some of the different hypervisor options, including Acropolis, how Microsoft fits in your Microsoft certified. I'm curious. You know, your personal and your company's take on, you know, your VMware shop today, you know, what do you expect to see yourself in the next year or so? What I see from most companies and also from our company is everyone wants to do multi-hypervisor, but it's very, very complex to do that. You need a lot of operational time to test another hypervisor, to implement it. So for us to be able to switch out hypervisors like they did at the keynote yesterday, that would be, it'll make it a lot, lot easier to transition to another hypervisor, say Hyper-V or KVM. Yeah. Can you walk through, what's the challenge there? Because I've talked to plenty of customers that were VMware before and if it's mostly Microsoft apps, they're moving to Hyper-V is pretty easy when you spit up new or you're talking about actually changing on, you know, my complete configuration or the management of the two. You know, what's the challenge? Because we have talked to customers that are doing, you know, multiple hypervisors. So, yeah, it's mainly operational challenges. So it's getting your operational teams on board and having them skilled in multiple hypervisors. If that can become abstracted like with Acropolis does, it will make it a lot better transition for us. Just our virtualization silo. Yeah, absolutely. We don't want that. Yeah. And what's the motivation for using multiple hypervisors? The motivation for us will be lowering cost. So can you be more specific about lowering licensing costs? Lowering licensing costs. So VMware licensing costs are specific. Yeah, absolutely. Yes. And also, if it's easier to manage VMs with Acropolis, that will also lower our operational costs as well. Do you expect it will be? From talking to people internally at Nutanix, I asked them, how hard is it to manage Acropolis versus VMware? They said the operational hours are a lot less on Acropolis. Really? I mean, VMware is pretty easy to operate, right? Yeah, absolutely. But you think there's plenty of room for improvement? Yeah, I really do. So hopefully we get to see that transition. What do you, when you migrate from, you know, through attrition, some of your old infrastructure, you know, get sunset, how do you migrate the data to Nutanix? Just VMotion. So normal storage VMotion. Okay. And have you, if you had to do it over again, I mean, what were the, you know, planning gotchas, things you would think about differently, things you maybe would advise your brother if you were doing it? I think it is better communication. So getting the application people on board, showing them what Nutanix can do, and really, really getting those guys on board to say that you can lower your application maintenance costs as well on Nutanix. So, yeah, it's really getting the right people, the right decision makers on board early in the start. Getting project managers on board early would be a big advantage. All right. So, David, you're, in addition to being here and being a customer, you're part of the Nutanix Technology Champion, you know, program there. Can you tell us how you got into that? A little surprising if you're not, you haven't been a Nutanix customer for, you know, since the beginning. You don't have, you know, huge environment. What pulled you into it? What was the value to you as participating in the program? Yeah, so the Nutanix Technical Champions is a very new thing. There's only 20 of us, actually. And it started, I think it was earlier this year or late last year. And to get into the technical champions, you have to be a customer advocate. So they want people that are blogging. They want people that are on Twitter and who are talking a lot about Nutanix. And then when you apply for that, they review the applications. If you know people internally at Nutanix, that helps as well. And I really, really hope there's going to be a lot more NTCs next year. Yeah, so tell us a little bit about the experience that you've been part of it, you know, interacting with some of your peers. I mean, we love, when Wikibon was founded, it was, you know, in our charter to allow IT practitioners to share with their peers. You know, love when you can come on the Cuban talk. So, you know, what's your experience been so far? It's been fantastic, actually, because we do meetings about actually once a month. So we all get on, like, conference calls. We look at the Nutanix roadmap. There's been very, very good communication in the NTC program. So to be a member of that has been great. What's next for you, David? Where do you see taking your infrastructure, your, you know, IT organization? Where do you want it to go? I think next for us. And this should be the same for other companies as well. It'll be public cloud. So we need to start building a hybrid cloud internally so we can put the power back into the business to have them create their own application stacks and create their own VMs. And I really, really want that to become transparent. You know, I want to be able to have the business provision their own virtual application stacks and have those application stacks either placed on-prem or in the cloud, according to policies. That's the way I see IT is going to look in future. In the public cloud. Yeah. So what are you looking at? I mean, AWS, Microsoft, Azure, others? We're not sure yet. Local public cloud? We're still investigating that because as we're in financial services, it's hard to put customer data in the cloud, you know. But for stuff that needs to scale fast and for test-dev kind of workloads, I really think it's going to be the future. Yeah, without naming names, maybe we could talk about the attributes that you're looking for in the public cloud. So, you know, simplicity, speed, good cost. But also, are there local regulations, compliance? I mean, do you trust us at European? Do you trust U.S. companies? How's your data? Isn't that a question that you would ask given all the Snowden stuff that went on? Yeah. I mean, do you trust the U.S. company? How's your data? It's very difficult, actually. So one of the ways we have to do public cloud in some companies in Europe is they need to be a European-based cloud provider. So we're actually, as a start, looking at cloud providers that are actually based in Sweden. So all our data will be in Sweden. It just will not be in our own data centers. Okay, so hypothetically, if Amazon had a facility in Europe, let's say in Ireland, that's not something that you would look at, at least initially. But if they put a data center, let's say one of their zones in Sweden, that might change? It could change. Yeah. And I hope it does change in the future because I think that's going to be one of the main barriers to cloud adoption, you know, as privacy laws. Or, for instance, an IBM trying to build out more data centers as an example and others. But it sounds like leaving that data in Sweden is compulsory. Is that right? Yeah, that's, yeah, yeah. Interesting. All right, David, listen, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE and I appreciate you sharing your insights. Yeah, thank you. All right, keep right there. Everybody, Stu and I will be back with our next guest. Right after this is theCUBE. We're live from .NEXT.