 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCube. Covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. This is theCube, the leader in live tech coverage. We're covering Veritas Vision 2017. Veritas, the tagline here is truth in information. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with Stu Miniman. And we're very excited to have Tom Schaftal here, the storage network analyst at Exelon Energy Company. And we love Tom having practitioners on because we get the truth. So welcome, good to have you. Thanks, good to be here. So set it up for us. Your role, we'll start with Exelon. Tell us about your interest in energy and what you guys are doing and of course your role at the company. We are a utility company that deals with both wind, solar, natural gas and nuclear generation. We have multiple, Exelon has multiple companies that are providing electricity in Chicago area, in Philadelphia area, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland. So we are a pretty big company, employee-wise. And we have tons and tons of data and I'm in charge of making sure that that stuff gets backed up and stored properly. You saw the Richard Branson keynote this morning, I presume? I enjoyed that, that was very good. It was very good and providing a little tailwind for much of your business, certainly the wind and solar parts of it. So, okay, let's get into it. So you're looking after that portion of the infrastructure, maybe paint a picture for us as to what it looks like in your environment, the applications that you're supporting and actually, you know what, let me check that. Before we get into that, what's happening in your business that is affecting your IT strategy? You hear a lot about digital transformation, obviously cost pressures, what are your priorities from the business and how does it affect IT? Of course there's cost pressures from the management, but we also have, we're moving into the cloud as of the last couple of years, we're also starting to look at data center as a service for our customers, for the businesses. So I'm involved in several different things in regards to the data center as a service, cloud infrastructure and managing and monitoring all that stuff. What is that data center? You can unpack that a little bit for us and the cloud strategy, how's that coming about? It's actually been done very well for us. We've gone through a whole set of stages and proof of concepts, but we've also worked well with Microsoft Azure, because that's where we're putting all our stuff. And we have a production side, we have a development side and we also have now a sandbox, which is pretty interesting for testing. So, and we're putting all those in together with the infrastructure that we already have in regards to making sure things are done properly, the security is done properly, the ownership of the accounts are done properly. That's why everything is done in a real precise manner through our process. So data center as a service is essentially your hybrid cloud strategy? Yes. That encompasses the public piece, which is Azure, your private cloud on-prem and all the associated corporate edicts and security and compliance. So the stuff that goes with that, is that correct? Correct. Okay. And we also have remote sites that we're going to be doing. We have a lot of energy plants around the country that are really small. They don't have real big pipe, so data center as a service really works for them as well. So that's kind of the things we're starting to look into as well. So part of that is a service catalog, getting that house in order. Is that right? Yes. And you do chargebacks or showbacks? Yes, we do. You do chargebacks? Yeah. Okay, so that's all included in that. Have you always done chargebacks? Over the past several years as we've really built it up more and been more precise in our chargebacks. I mean, I always wondered, wonder if you could comment from your experiences and your peers. You know, 10 years ago, we would ask folks if they're doing chargebacks, they say no, it's just too complicated and we just put it out there. Sometimes we'll do showbacks, but as cloud has come into prominence, people seem to be doing more and more chargebacks to be more cloud-like and be more precise. Maybe that's tooling, maybe that's culture. What's your experience been? Yeah, we actually started doing more and more reporting on our physical and virtual environments about two years before we actually started into the Azure Cloud. And I think that was in preparation for that because they saw that that kind of technology was already there in the cloud and we wanted to be prepared for that and make sure that the accounting side of things was a little bit more precise in what we were doing. Okay, so let's get into our business. Yeah, can you maybe sketch out first a little bit, how much data is your engineering team cover, how many sites, what's kind of the purview and how do we kind of give us this thumbnail sketch? We have three main data centers right now in Chicago and in the Baltimore area. Currently we're taking one of those data centers and consolidating into the sister data center, which is about 20 miles away from each other. So we're dwindling it down and our utilities, for instance, are managing their own data centers as well. So we have multiple data centers all over the country. And so, but we're putting most of our corporate stuff into two major data centers. So we're in the process of moving those and we have about nine petabytes of data that we're actually backing up and managing storage wires. So that's just on the corporate side. That's not even on our nuclear side. We have more than that. And the primary sort of applications that you're supporting, I mean, you don't have to do an application portfolio, we only have 15, 20 minutes. But generally speaking, maybe talk about some of the more critical ones from a backup perspective. Backup perspective, we have just in a backup, both on the nuclear side and on the corporate side. We are also using data insight as well on the corporate side and we've just, I believe, got our nuclear guys interested in the data insight stuff. But in terms of the applications that you're, the data that you're protecting, what applications are they supporting, if I could ask it that way? We have HV applications, suites. We have RMAN, we have Oracle databases. We have SQL databases. And I'm at a loss. So a lot of the core database stuff is, so pretty high SLA, tight RPO, RTO requirements on those or they vary? They vary depending on the categorization of the actual database or the actual application. And how do you deal with the variability of those service level agreements? Are you able to provide granular levels of service or is it kind of one size fits all? We go down to the granular level. We don't try to do one size fits all. That just didn't work in the starting of things when I first started in the company. We saw that they were trying to do that and it just didn't work. So you predominantly or exclusively a net backup shop in terms of your data protection, is that right? Yes, yes. We also have snap alting and stuff with our net apps, our shares, so we are backing those up and snapping them off to the other data center and vice versa. So we have that capability as well. So you've been at this position for over a decade and you've sort of seen the end of the client server era, not the end, but the tail end of the curve, internet era, obviously now seeing the cloud, virtualization and sort of cloud. How have those changes affected your data protection strategy over the years? Well, with our virtual side of things, we've actually migrated most of our virtual backups just to VMware. They are actually handling all that within our infrastructure on where we hold all the VMware servers. So that's all done outside of Netbackal altogether. We do take care of the production side of the VMware servers that we have through Netbackup and we treat them as physical servers. But all our test and dev and all that stuff, that's done and held for 14 days and then it's gone. Okay, so, all right, so we talked a little bit off camera and you said you were very happy with Netbackups, you really haven't brought in alternatives. What about the product and the company that was appealing to you? There's been a history with me because in a previous life, if you want to call it, with my, I was in the financial business working in the data center and I had the opportunity to get into the early stages of Veritas Netbackup 4, I think it was. And then I got out of the financial industry and got into the utility industry and it was automatically in Netbackup and I was familiar with it, it's very easy to use. It's just pretty reliable for restores and all that kind of stuff in management. So Tom, one of the things we've been poking at this week is of course Veritas has a lot of Netbackup customers. You're a loyal one. Talking about this digital transformation and software-defined, multi-cloud, hyperscale world. So some of those things, I think, resonating, what are you hearing, what interests you from some of the new products that they're announcing and how do you see the relevance of what Veritas is saying in your world? What has interest to me so far in our sessions and in the keynote sessions and all, I'm looking into possibly talking to our architects about InfoMap, getting that maybe possibly in the house or and or the data resiliency because we've already got most of our stuff in the cloud that we're pushing out there. We don't have to push any extra data out there right now but we may still do that. We may be still migrating some data like for archiving and that kind of thing. That's a possibility. So, but we will probably look to Veritas for that when we go to do those things. So thinking about what you've heard this week, you know, you hear a lot from Veritas about modern data protection, cloud, application mobility, things of that nature. As a practitioner, how do you look at those things, those capabilities, are those things that you're considering actually actively architecting or building a plan around? Maybe you could talk about sort of futures a little bit. With our data, we have to make sure there's accountability somewhere. We have to make sure that we know who the owners of these things are and we have to coordinate with them in regards to moving anything, of course. And with SIP infrastructure and all that kind of stuff for all those regulations, we had to make sure that all our data is held properly. And going into the cloud, we want to make sure that what we're putting out there is going to be put out there and held securely. There's still some trepidation in regards to that. But I believe our company is moving forward and wanting to do more and get less of a footprint in our data centers for hardware and all that kind of stuff. For the governance of this stuff, we have the Data Insight software out there. It's helping us to recognize what kind of files are out there, who's using them, who has access to them. And we are starting to use that more as well. We're currently doing a POC to try and get ownership to that actual data because we really don't, other than what Data Insight already gives it. Because the number of people that I've been using this data, I'm giving you ownership, as the way it was before. But now we're able to actually classify, this is the owner, he's going to be the one that takes care of that. Yeah, Tom, I'm just curious. We talk a lot about, there's the opportunity of data. Is data for your business, is it a challenge to keep up with the growth and manage it and govern it? Or is your business turning that into an opportunity? It's my full-time job. And my boss's full-time job to make sure that we have enough room for all the data that we're doing. We are trying to do some neat things in regards to managing it better and keeping data, especially for us, our upper management decided to ask us the question recently is, are we doing replication between data centers to keep our DRs and all that kind of stuff and viable? And we were like, yeah. And then we started giving into that perspective and actually got it so that we are, can definitely say yes, we have everything here and here, we are DR safe. Do you test that? Yes. In fact, we just recently did a full test of our corporate financial DR data and it went off without a hitch. Excellent. All right, Tom, we'll give you that last word on the conference, Veritas Vision. How do you like it? Why do you come to this shows like this? What kinds of things do you learn? What's of interest to you? I like to get more information as to what Veritas is offering. They're a very good company. We've had a very good rapport with our salespeople and with the engineers, with the help desk people that come in and talk to you and make sure that if we're having issues, we're right on. I've just had a real good experience with Veritas and the whole realm of things. Things at the show, anything interesting that pops out to you? I mean, things that you've learned, the takeaways? We're looking more now into some of the cloud capabilities that you guys have, especially with the resiliency program with the info map and again, more info information with the data insight kind of things. All the capabilities there are just going to start bringing out. And just the beauty of all that stuff actually working together and being more cohesive because before you had data insight, you had info map, you had, and they weren't really communicating properly to really help each other report. So it's really good stuff. It's happening. Tom Schaffzall, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE, appreciate it. Thank you, for having me. All right, you're welcome. Keep it right there, everybody. Stu and I are back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from Veritas Vision 2017. We'll be right back.