 From Austin, Texas, it's theCube, covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2019, brought to you by Pure Storage. How do y'all, how did I do Dave? That was great, really good. You local? Lisa Martin with, yes I am. Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. And can you guess we're in Texas? We are at Pure Accelerate 2019, day one of our coverage here in the Buzzy Expo Hall. Pleased to welcome one of Pure's customers to theCube. We have Jason Thomas, the CIO of Col Scott Cassane, or CSK Legal. Jason, welcome to the program. Thank you, glad to be here. So, talk to us a little bit about CSK Legal. You're based out of Florida. You're CIO. Give us a little bit of a picture of the law firm, your IT environment, and your role as leader of information. So Col Scott Cassane has been around 20 plus years. I joined about three and a half years ago. And we have, now at this point we have 13 offices. We just opened up 13th office. We're the largest law firm in Florida currently. And only in Florida. Interestingly enough, I actually live and work out of Boston. But, you know, these days there's no reason why you can't work remote. I go there often enough to when needed. You can avoid the hurricanes though by living up the eastern seaboard. I'll take a snow storm over a hurricane any day. Good pro sports in Boston. Better college sports in Florida. Yeah, pretty much. No one cares about college sports in Boston. Best of both worlds. All right, so we're here at Pure. You guys have been a Pure customer for a while. But give us this picture of the legal landscape from a data volume perspective. I can imagine tons of documentation. I think you guys have hundreds of attorneys. What were some of the challenges three years ago when you were looking for the ideal long storage service that you were really looking for companies like Pure to help eliminate and allow you to really deliver on the business needs? Yeah, so we're a heavy volume business. Tons and tons of documents. And when I came on board three and a half years ago the infrastructure environment was basically a lot of physical servers, a lot of local storage, which quite frankly scared me. The previous company I was at, I came from a NetApp shop and that was when my first initiatives was bringing in a sand into the firm and centralizing all the storage and also setting up a DR as well along with that. So we started the evaluation process pretty much within a few months of coming on board to the firm. So you knew NetApp, sorry Dave. You knew NetApp, you're a Pure customer. Give us the perspective of what were some of those things that you were looking for that when you found Pure was like checks all the boxes. I can tell you what I wasn't looking for was I wasn't looking to hire a storage admin. So I wanted to find something super simple to manage something that I could manage or any of the guys could manage any of the systems admins could manage. So that was like the starting point of the evaluation. So you had a bunch of, it sounds like discrete DAS, direct access storage. And you said that concerned you presumably because it was hard to manage, hard to get a handle on and so you wanted to consolidate. We had, if we had our SQL box go down, I mean down for a day and you were stored from backups from the previous night, not really a good set up at the time. And are most of your attorneys sentry located in one location or they've distributed? They're spread out all across up and down floors. So we have 13 offices. So between, they're all over the place, but a lot of them work remote now too. So that's becoming a big thing as well. The reason I ask is like it's a pendulum swinging, right? You had all those DAS and then you went to a sand and now this, you got the edge, you got cloud. I don't know if you're taking advantage of cloud, are you? We are. Actually, a lot of our software now that we've slowly started to move a lot of our main main line products to the cloud or a cloud edition of this product. So I would say we're probably 50 to 60% cloud now. Yeah, so you were tied up in the keynotes this morning, but so one of the things we heard in the keynote is you could have the pure management experience, no matter where your data lives. Bring the pure cloud experience to your data on-prem and the public cloud hybrid. Is that something that's appealing to you? Is that resonate? Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. It makes, hey look, I can actually blog in a pure one on my phone if I want to and check the area. Not that I ever do. Quite honestly, I never really need to look at it. Well, you're a CIO, right? I mean, you've got other things to worry about. Still got to get my, still like to be involved, get my little fingers in it. It's interesting, so I mean, a lot of times CIOs, they don't, they let, but you're technical. No, I love the tech. You're a technical CIO, a lot of technical CIOs as well. But also you don't want to hire a storage admin. Correct. So you want generalists to be able to do this stuff. Okay, so your question, why pure? Who'd you look at? So we looked at HB3 Power, big name. We looked at Pure and we looked at Tintry. And pretty much, especially with 3 Power, I knew that would be management heavy. So that one, I tossed that one out pretty quickly. Not that it's not a great product, but it just wasn't for me or what I was looking for. Not the right fit. Yeah, not the right fit for us. So it came down to Pure and Tintry. I had a buddy who worked at another law firm and he was like, look, just don't even waste your time. Just go Pure. And this is a phrase that I use sometimes. I stole from him, but he's like, dude, this is like storage crack. You'll love it. Storage crack, wow. They need a T-shirt to put that on him. First hits free. Okay, so that was the right fit for you. It was your peer. It was a peer. That enticed you, that's obviously take a bit. I presume you take a lot of peer advice. A lot of peer advice. I didn't even do a POC. Really? Wow, this is a good peer that you obviously trust. Oh, I had to see what's the interface, yeah. He showed me the interface on a phone call one time and he's like, this is it. I'm like, that's it? He's like, yeah. What did you actually bring in? What are you using? I'm sorry? What products are you actually using? What, with Pure? What is it? Oh, so I'm sorry. Exchange, SQL. That, our mainline, our bookkeeping, time and billing, all that. That's the main application. So all the legal apps and all the legal apps, yeah. The data store is which product from Pure? Is it, do you know offhand? Is it, it's the all flash array, right? Yeah, I'm sorry, yes, it's the AFF, yep. Yeah, okay. And so, thinking about before and after, you know, kind of the as is and the to be, how would you compare and contrast? To. When you brought it in? Yeah. The pre and the post. Your environment. Oh. What do you do for your business? That's a good question. I felt more comfortable sleeping at night, you know? Why? Just the reliability, the ease of management. You know, if we need to bring up a volume or expand a volume, we can do it very quickly. It doesn't take a rock of science to do it. And from everyone I spoke to, I mean, I can't, I'm not, I can't speak to it, but I can't, I don't believe I've ever talked to anybody that's had an outage or whether your raise gone down. In fact, it seems that they tell me before we even know if there's, you know, an issue and they jump on it right away. So we've never had, never had an outage, never had an issue, never had an issue with an upgrade. It's been fantastic, the support's awesome. So no need for a rocket scientist or a storage admin. Right. Okay. And you're sleeping better. And I'm sleeping better. Very good things so far in this interview. So in terms of the traditional storage model that you're well familiar with, as you said, you know, being very familiar with NetApp at a previous role, the whole every three years of life, so like, we've got to switch things out, disrupting operations. Pure comes along with the evergreen model. And we go, how much of that is marketing and how much of that really actually happens? And I know you're a big proponent. You read my mind. So yeah, I was like, oh, so I'm prepaying for support or you know, but you know, once I understood what it really was and the advantages of it, it made sense and we didn't, I didn't think we would upgrade as much as we have already. We've already gone through two storage upgrades and two controller upgrades. So that's really where it really makes sense is when you're doing storage controller upgrades. So if you want to start small, which we did, we started a little bit small in the beginning. And then our business grew like crazy and our storage needs expanded. So we went through at least two upgrades in three years. So you bring an array, you're paying basically perpetual license up front, boom. And then you're doing the evergreen model and then now you're on a subscription in perpetuity. Is that correct? Yep. Okay, so you essentially go from CapEx to OpEx over the life cycle. And then what, when you add capacity, you're paying for that capacity. And then you just, it's like you return the equipment, you get your money back and then you get new equipment. This is truly non-disruptive. We've gone through two upgrades and two controller upgrades, which are major upgrades. And both of them we did at five PM, just not that the firm closed at five or anything, but just to feel comfortable, I don't know. You do it at five and it's okay. Cause you know, if anything goes down from five to wherever, no one's working, right? So, but here obviously we're always, the attorneys are always on and no, they're really smooth. No problems. I mean, they've got a great strategy and method to the upgrades. And we stayed up the entire time. I mean, it's a big issue for practitioners. We've done some quantification over the years and it was like the minimum to migrate an array was $50,000 when you added all in people's time, the cost of the array, the complexity. And you're saying, first of all, sound reasonable, right? That kind of number, right? I mean, that's probably conservative, right? And has that essentially been eliminated? I mean, you get to do some planning, I guess, or... Pretty much. And as far as the planning goes, you know, these guys take care of all of it. So when we're ready to make the switch, they just log in and do their thing and then it's done. And in terms of training for yourself or your team, when you've done these two upgrades, what's that process been like? I don't know, log in and figure it out. I mean, there's no... So it sounds pretty simple. Yeah, there's not much to it. Yeah. So what's on the CIO's mind these days? I mean, obviously you don't stay awake at night now thinking about storage. Yeah, I stay awake, you know, for security, you know. Talk about that. Yeah, data breach security seems like every week now, it seems, I mean, I'm on my Twitter feed and this is a new breach. And it's almost gone to the point where, you know, it's just another thing that happens. So what's your big challenge there? Is it managing all these tools? Is it knowing what to respond to? Is it the skill sets? All of the above? My biggest thing is I believe in lots of redundancy. So one, I mean, starting with the pure, we have a second array in another data center outside the state. So we replicate the two arrays between each other. That's where we started with that side. We also running, you know, the regular backups, we run rubric for that and we also now have, we just established a cloud strategy for backups, immutable, you know, long, long retention. So we also send our backups up to the cloud as well. So now I'm feeling like I can sleep, probably can sleep, and now I just got to wait for somebody, you know, for something to happen, I guess, and hopefully our strategy is pretty solid here. Okay, so DR and backup are part of that overall data protection and security strategy, and then it extends obviously into whether it's perimeter, device, et cetera, et cetera. So you have a SecOps team, or how do you approach that? We don't have a dedicated team. Are you the CISO? Are you the CISO? No, no CISO. Oh, you're the CISO, right? Yeah, exactly, exactly. So share roles with the small group of us that are also the security team, and we've got a pretty, I think we've got, at this point, a pretty solid security stack. Always room for improvement, always looking at the new stuff, and see what's out there. I mean, there's all kinds of cool tech out there, and sometimes I give a little overboard, and the team gets a little upset at me, because, you know, I want to do another POC, and they're like, we have three running. Yeah. Well, it sounds to me like you guys have a pretty solid foundation running on Pure, that you sound to me like kind of a Pure customer for life, so they should at least give you a T-shirt, at a minimum. They've given me at least a T-shirt. I'll tell you, what really sold me within the first year was we had a VM that wouldn't boot up, and we couldn't figure out what was going on, so we initially thought it was a VMware issue, and so we called support, and they couldn't really figure it out. They said it was a Pure issue, so we called, so decided to call Pure one night, I think it was eight or nine o'clock at night, and decided to give it a shot, and the guy got on the phone, and come to find out there was some issue with the data stores, and VMware had crossed her data stores, and one was deleted. Apparently, maybe me had deleted a small data store that had nothing on it, but apparently it was linked to the data store of this VM for some unknown reason. No and behold, VM were issued, but the guy on the line actually knew of resource within Pure that was a big VMware guy, and he came in, he actually logged in and helped us unlink the two data stores. So, totally not a Pure issue, but he went the extra mile to help us recover that VM, got it back up the same night. Excellent. I know we got to go, but I got to ask you a question. You have a lot of vendors, you've been experiencing, what do vendors do that really tick you off that they should stop doing? How's your chance? I don't like the term road map. Really? Anytime I hear road map, it means, you know. We don't have it yet? You don't have it yet? But we're going to. We'll look into that. So don't do business with people that have. No road map talk. All right, good. Awesome, well Jason, thank you so much for sharing your candor with Dave and me on theCUBE. We appreciate it. Congratulations on all your success. All right, thank you. All right, great to have you. For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE at Pure Accelerate 19. Thanks for watching.