 From San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2015. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. Now your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, and welcome back. This is theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2015 here from Moscone North. I'm Stu Miniman with wikibond.com. Real excited for the next segment here. When we put together the director set, we want to do some panels. And of course, from wikibond's core, we love talking to the practitioners out there. We feel there's no better way for practitioners to learn about new technology than learning from their peers. So, we've got two end users and a channel partner here of VMware. Talk about the virtual SAN, or what most people call VSAN product. So, I'll go through a quick introduction here. We've got Todd Huber, who's the director of information technology at MasterLot Company. Kenny Wilder, who's the director of infrastructure with the Fulton County Schools. And Chris Scaling, who's the regional practice manager for Fulton Storm. Gentlemen, thank you so much. Your first time on theCUBE. Thank you for joining me. Thank you. Thank you. All right. So guys, I think the two of you, at least you're new to VMworld, the people that have watched our show, we've done hundreds of interviews at these. We really try to help extract the signal from the noise. So, here at the show, VMware, last year, hyperconvergence and VSAN and the whole Marvin EVO stuff was like the top topic we talked about. And after a year, I mean, I went to VMware and I said, you better give me some customers or everybody is going to say, like, what have you been doing the last year? So, I really want to talk about your business, what you're doing, why you're looking at some of these technologies and Chris will be your surrogate for many of the companies that he talks to. So, before we dig into it, Todd, maybe you can give us a little bit about your organization and your role inside the company. Sure. Director of information technology for MasterLot. We have a global presence, 21 offices in seven different countries. We run, we actually run VSAN today in five clusters spread out throughout the world, three node clusters. And we've been using it for about, probably nine months. We just implemented our last cluster in July. All right, so we'll get into the VSAN stuff just for your organizations at 21 sites. How big is the IT staff? What roles do you cover? Sure, IT staff right now is at more or less 13, spread globally with a home office is the bulk of the IT users or administrators, engineers, et cetera, as in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. Excellent. All right, so great. Kenny, if we can go to you, obviously a school system, talk a little bit about the scope of the IT role there and your responsibilities. Okay, well, I'm the IT infrastructure director. I've been working with the school system for 21 years and we service 96,000 students and 14,000 employees. We've got about 40,000 endpoints of computers and 10 to 20,000 more iPads and growing. And I support a couple of data centers that are running VSAN. And we have about 30 engineers that support the infrastructure, additional IT staff for other areas. But we have a very large task, very dynamic, fast-paced environment where we're entering into a one-to-one initiative where we're putting tablets in every student's hand. Oh yeah, so my kids are going back to school this week. I've been getting a lot to emails about security settings. My daughter just got a Chromebook, so boy, we understand how much mobility and boy, there's a lot of stuff going on that really beefed up, gosh, when I went back to school, there wasn't much IT, maybe a couple of computers off on the side, but it's changed a whole lot. It has changed a lot in the 21 years I've worked there. Yeah, I have to imagine. So yeah, education is super important. Chris, let's bring you into the conversation. Tell us a little bit about FusionStorm and your role there. So FusionStorm is a national VAR. We're a large, large VMware partner. We're very VMware focused. I represent the Southern California region. We represent, from the biggest customers in the world to some of the smaller ones and all in between, so customers come to us with all the challenges that they have and it's really our job to kind of figure out and present them with a solution that works and VMware's one that generally fits quite nicely. All right, so when people think about, you know, there's this term hyperconvergence and it's very polarizing sometimes. We've done it with a lot of research, tried to help educate the market on it and sometimes it's like, well, is this an evolution of what we're doing with storage? Is this a complete way of just changing my infrastructure? You know, I guess I want to get to, you know, what led you to start looking at this type of solution? What problems were you facing? And, you know, before we get into kind of the B-SAN specifics, we'll start. So what led us into the project was we were moving towards a hub and spoke strategy for our locations and so we had servers in every location and that just isn't feasible with the amount of staff that I have to support that. So hub and spoke technology, we also needed something that was available, scalable and we had limited support at locations so it needed to be something that could be easily managed. Okay, was there a specific use case where you're rolling on a new project that was just kind of that centralizing IT role? Yep, just those three reasons. We had some legacy technology that was out, out-installed at sites that need to be replaced, so. All right, great. So Kenny, 21 years, you've seen, I mean, storage industry, you know, heck, there barely was a storage industry 21 years ago, I mean, you know, I actually, yeah, but so, you know, what led up to this looking at B-SAN and what was kind of the before picture? Well, I've been a VMware customer since 2005. Okay, great. Version two or 2.5 or something like that. And we have a virtualization policy that everything's got to be virtualized. And about a year ago, back last June, we were faced with replacing the hardware on our student information system and it was already performing kind of poorly on hardware. And the vendor and the department, our student information department were kind of resistant to let me virtualize it. So I put my reputation on the line, my 20 years of reputation on the line and I went ahead and purchased a three node cluster, a very large cluster, scaled on the server because the SQL server and that virtualization was gonna be 40 CPUs and 386 giga RAM. And I ran some tests against the current environment and I proved to them that it would run fast enough and finally convinced the vendor to let me virtualize it. And it took some of the processing, some of the things they were doing from 45 minutes down to about five minutes on their back end jobs that they were running. All right. Chris, I guess for yourself, were you guys a VMware shop that were expanding what you're doing? Is this complimenting, replacing some of the storage stuff you're doing? How does your company fit into the VCAN discussion? Yeah, I mean, a lot of our customers, what's happening is we have a lot of customers that are kind of coming out of stealth mode. They're growing rapidly and so a lot of them don't have storage expertise or a lot of storage expertise on site. So they come to us with the problem of how do we stay agile? How do we stay nimble and the small staff but yet we need to triple or quadruple our infrastructure to deliver this stuff. We don't necessarily want to hire a storage person so do you have anything you can offer us? And that's where virtual sans coming in nicely. It scales very easily and it's really no storage expertise needed. Yeah, I guess one of the premises we've had is the operational model, the way I'm building it, consuming it, running it, it's quite different from what I did before. I mean, the biggest thing we've talked about storage is no matter what you're doing, storage is growing super fast. So obviously there's cost challenges but from an operational standpoint, I just can't, if I manage a certain number of boxes per person, it's untenable because it's going to keep growing. So yeah, maybe we can, you know, talk, you know, walk us through. You talked about kind of the before picture. I know you said you're running three nodes to start. Walk us through, you know, who ran this project and what were your experiences? Oh, I ran the project with a couple engineers that we have mainly on network side and server side. And so... I'm sorry, Todd, is there a storage team or... No, in the infrastructure group we run pretty light. So it's just basically three of us that we're doing the project from an implementation perspective. And we just kind of scope it and scale it for the sizes of our offices that we have. All right, Kenny, let's talk about your experiences as to, you know, who ran it, you know, organizationally, were there any changes and what is the scope of the vSAN solution that you're using? Well, we started off with a one three node back last July. We now have three clusters, one of them a brand new 6.0 cluster with all SSD five node that we're migrating that same student information system too. And I've led the charge on all the projects. We have two VMware system engineers. I haven't gotten rid of my sand jet. I actually still have three, so I still have a sand engineer. But the benefit of the vSAN is the VMware guy can do it all. I don't need my fiber channel guy or my sand guy. He can provision it, he can set the policies. And so it's allowing me to buy all of this hardware and manage it with the same staff instead of having to hire more. All right, so I guess question for both of you, Kenny, we'll start with you. When you bought the vSAN, did you just buy, you know, were you an ELA customer and you started using vSAN? Did you look at the vSAN ready nodes? Did Evo Rail fit into the discussion? What was the kind of the consumption purchase model? I'm an ELA customer now. Recently, inked a deal with VMware to purchase your services on a contract. When I first bought it, I was not. I just- Their services, you tell me. Yeah, well. VMware service. Yeah. So when I first bought vSAN last year, I was not an ELA customer. I just bought it through my reseller of the servers. And I'm really enjoying that relationship because it's brought a dedicated TAM. I've got an on-site person from VMware. And it's been very beneficial to be in that agreement. Yeah, MasterLock has been a longtime customer of VMware. As a result of moving in and making a decision to go with vSAN, we actually ended up going on to an ELA as of last October. So, expanding our purchase and volume of software quite a bit with VMware. Just to understand, though, both of you, it sounds like the software you got, but the hardware components were something that you followed kind of the hardware compatibility list. You didn't buy something that was put together like the vSAN Ready node or anything like that. Oh, no. It was all from scratch for us. Yeah, that's kind of the way we started as well. At the point in last year, this point last year, there wasn't really, the Ready nodes really weren't really available. So, we ended up scoping out what would be like a series four Ready node today. Same exact thing. Yeah, so Chris, maybe we talk about, what's your experience been in the field? How do you guys put together that package? Do you have a hardware solution that you kind of have ready made? And how many customers do you have run in vSAN today? I mean, we have quite a few. I mean, there's one we did a fairly large, well, about a 70 socket implementation. We basically, that was one of the selling points was the fact that we as Fusion Storm took our engineering effort and we basically custom designed three different sets of nodes that address their problems. So, from like a small, medium, and high compute nodes that were not necessarily in line with what VMware has published for those. This is more directly toward what the customer needed specifically. So, as they ordered new compute, new storage, they could order from kind of a catalog that we designed for them. So, that really helped address their needs, the fact that they could scale at a very specific type of level with a fixed cost. All right, Chris, I'm curious, when you compare out there in the selling, how's vSAN priced? Is it something that you say, it's cheaper than what you have before? Is it something that most customers are saying, oh, I understand the ROI on it. How does cost play in the equation? There's definitely a combination of both. I mean, first, I think the hardware vendor you team up with, getting commodity hardware, it's always going to be cheaper than you're buying your traditional sands. But, it's also explained to the customer how different it is and how much money you're going to save on administration costs. The ROI is almost immediate because you're not having to employ someone to manage that storage, monitor that storage. Your VMware guy already does it and there's very little to do. I mean, vCenter and VMware really handle all that complicated tasks for you. Kenny, it sounds like there was a specific, I mean, use case performance that you were pushing, but how'd you, walk us through a little bit selling to the organization, you know, what are the results you found to help justify what you did? Well, the use case is, the application was running on 21 physical servers and I was either going to have to buy 21 more no servers or a three node cluster. Of course, the individual nodes cost more than one of those 21 servers, but it was a whole lot cheaper. The storage device, the sand was also slated to be replaced. I was going to have to buy a new sand. I was having to make a decision on whether or not to go ice guzzzy or to go fiber channel and then just consolidating it all down in a one box or three boxes in this case. It was an easy sales pitch, is financial wise. I just had to make sure it worked and proved itself on the back end and it came through and turned me into a rock star with my organization anyways. That's great. Todd here, what was your experience? Same kind of experience actually. I kind of painted a picture of what our network server infrastructure looked like before the project and what it was going to look like after the project and it was a fairly easy sell as well. And again, you know, after we implemented it, the management of our infrastructure has become much easier. As you said, you have one person who can manage the storage, the network, all that in one three-node cluster and it's simple. Okay, so I've been watching vSAN, I mean 1.0 a little over a year old. The vSphere 6 version, 6.0 came out early this year. They announced 6.1 this morning. I think it was yesterday actually, but you know, pretty fast pace of change. I want to kind of dig in and say, you know, does vSAN kind of fit everything you need? You know, are you working with VMware on you know, any enhancements that would help make, you know, feature set that would make solution better for you? You know, we'll start down here. Okay, actually someone asked me the same question yesterday and I said, you know, my response was basically it's been a fantastic solution for us as of, you know, a year later, almost a year later after our first implementation, I guess I couldn't ask for anything more. It meant all expectations. So I guess I really didn't have anything else that would go on a wish list for it. All right, so just to poke at that a little bit Todd, you know, through deployment, is there anything that, you know, once you've done it once, you said, oh, you know, lessons learned that the next time I do it or if I was telling somebody to start in the first time that you might recommend to them? Sure, one of the lessons that we learned was we first put our first cluster into Mexico and ended up trying to do a lot of the work onsite in Mexico as opposed to doing some of the work at our corporate office and in shipping. So that was time consuming to be able to do that onsite. A good lesson learned is when you go in and you virtualize an entire office's physical servers, you know, 20 to 30 servers and you virtualize them on onto one three node cluster tends to clean up your data center quite a bit. So that has been a real positive bonus for us. Yeah, it reminds me of, you know, the early discussions we had. I mean, can you take back, you know, you've been with VMware for, you know, since 2005, where, you know, where'd all the servers go, right? You know, VMware helps us to consolidate that. Okay, so same question for you is, you know, lessons learned and, you know, how much of the roadmap are you looking at when it comes to VSAN? Well, lessons learned for me is I have to be very careful on the hardware compatible with HCL. I have to make sure my drivers and my firmware are updated. I do struggle sometimes with the OEM version of say a flash card and they have their own version of the firmware and the drivers. So I have quite a few lessons learned on trying to get all of that tweak just right. And as far as future or enhancements, always looking VMware, every time you come out with a new version, it's got twice the number of CPU capabilities, more RAM capabilities. Well, VSAN does have some limitations. There's seven spindles in a cluster node limitation. It's got memory limitations on the flash, which I'm looking forward to being increased. And I was just in another session I was speaking in where deduplication is beta officially announced today. So I'm looking forward to deduplication. All right, so slightly different question for you, Chris. So I mean, last year, VSAN really had everybody talking about hyperconvergence. So how much do you find when you're out talking to your clients? Are they aware of this technology? Where is it along the education process? And what are some of the kind of big questions that you need to answer? I would say, you know, almost everyone's aware of it. You guys have a big presence. What they're coming to us is saying, can we trust it? You know, is this a solution that can be trusted? You know, it sounds a little bit too good to be true. So, you know, I think, you know, that's where we've come in and shown them our lab, shown them experiences with our customers and our partnership with you to show that it really can be trusted. And all the new features you guys are bringing out, like today announced to stretch clustering for VSAN will absolutely help us grow into some of our biggest customers now. I mean, so, you know, it's an absolutely killer app. So, all right, well, great. Gentlemen, really appreciate the time. You know, last thing I want to ask is, at least for the two of you, it's your first time. What's your experience been so far at VMworld? What are you excited about? What have you learned so far? What would you say to your peers has been the value of you coming to the event? I would say the value of being here, getting some exposure that you may not necessarily get while sitting in the office, obviously. It's much larger than I thought it was going to be. Can be a little bit overwhelming, I guess, but it's a good opportunity to learn about VMworld products, services, et cetera. So, I think it's been a great experience. Yeah, okay, Kenny? Well, to me, an attestament to VMware is the number of partnerships they have. You just look at the floor of the vendors and all the products that integrate in. You got to have a really good product in order for all these different vendors to want to integrate into yours. And so, not just vSAN, but there's some other volume connections to just a regular sand that you guys are integrating in with all the storage resellers. And so, it is overwhelming. There's a lot here. There's a lot bigger than I thought it would be. But that's why, because it's a great product. Yeah, a lot of walking to do. And just wait, next year's going to be in Vegas. They'll be even more. Chris, have you done the partner exchange in the past? Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so VMware partner exchange, VMworld, what's your take on those these days? I mean, it's just like they're saying, it's overwhelming. It's absolutely overwhelming. And I think every year just reinforces the fact that VMware is the leader in this space. So I think you just have to take it in chunks. And my recommendation is just network with people as much as possible, because that is something that you can't get anywhere else other than here. All right, well, Todd, Kenny, and Chris, absolutely, there's so much to cover. We appreciate you sharing a slice of the discussion here at VMworld, and we'll be right back with lots more content here from VMworld 2015. This is theCUBE, thanks for watching. All right.