 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Pure Accelerate 2017, brought to you by Pure Storage. Welcome back to Pure 70 in San Francisco, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host, Stu Miniman, Ray Smith is here. He is the assistant director for technology at the Mississippi Community College Board. Ray, thanks for coming to theCUBE. It's good to see you. Glad to be here. Glad to be here. We were having a good conversation off camera, but tell us a little bit about the college board. Well, the Mississippi Community College Board is we're the board that coordinates with the 15 community colleges in the state of Mississippi. And part of our job is to make sure that enrollment figures are taken care of. We look at budgets, we work with the legislature, and more importantly, we work with the community colleges in helping develop good outcomes for our students. Okay, so it's obviously a public institution, public funded, so you got a responsibility report to the public. Absolutely. Do you also have responsibility for, well, what services do you have responsibility for? You said enrollment, but. I am, for instance, I'm responsible for a statewide network. The community colleges are a little different than some entities in that. We have a shared network in which all 15 community colleges, they are connected back to a board office. We act as the ISP for the colleges. The colleges submit data to us. We also have in place a longitudinal data system in the state of Mississippi, in which we collect information and we report that information up the line for our longitudinal data. But more importantly, what we do is we count students and we pay based upon enrollment. Well, I mean, community colleges play such a critical role today in the education, we all know, anybody who has kids knows how expensive it is to educate. And the colleges are way more open these days about accepting community college student transfers, allowing students to take summer classes at Community My Son, for instance, goes to GW. He's taking some math classes at Community College. Really helps address the cost. It helps people who aren't ready to go to college. I mean, talk a little bit about the mission and the role that your college plays. Our system or the board office, what we do is, again, we coordinate each community college as a separate entity amongst themselves, governed by a local board. But from the state level, we administer the payment based upon students. And one of the things that we do is we're heavily involved in the workforce. That's a real big issue in our system right now to train more people for the jobs that we're trying to bring in to Mississippi. And in addition to that, we have strong academics in which our students take two-year academic courses that transfer to our universities. But more than anything, our purpose is to try to make a better Mississippi in providing services, education, and training to the people of Mississippi. Oh, it's great. You're a feeder system. I mean, in that sense, it's a fast turnover. It's a two-year cycle. Absolutely. So your job of enrollment has a lot of pressure on it. Now, what kind of pressure does that put on the technology infrastructure? Well, couple of things. Number one, community colleges are education-based institutions. At the same time, people come there because of the lifestyle. Because as coming out of high school, a lot of students aren't quite ready for the big university. So they come to the community colleges looking for a lot of the things that they have at home. You know, internet, fast internet, for instance. And also, the ability, that's the big one. And the ability to have online classes where they don't have to come on campus or so forth. But our students want everything that the major universities have. And they want everything that they were used to at home, as well as coming out of K through 12. Okay, so let's get into the relationship with Pure Accelerates. Let's talk about it. What led you to them? Talk about your journey, the previous, the before, and after. Sure. Well, first of all, I have a real small staff at our agency. And we have a lot of big things to do. What's small, Ray? Small, three people, including myself. Oh, wow. Okay. For 15 colleges? 15 colleges, statewide network, et cetera, et cetera. What we were looking for was a system that would allow us to bring all of our technical resources into a smaller unit. We looked at the converge systems of some other competitors to Pure early on. And what we were really wanting to see on what we needed help was more of a technical infrastructure more than anything. But what we found, it was way too complex. And it actually required all of the additional services that you received in terms of technical support. When we moved to Pure, we looked at the Pure storage, for instance, and one of the main reasons we did that was our current system was coming up for a renewal. And the renewal itself was triple what it was a year before. The maintenance renewal. Maintenance renewal. And it was a traditional forklift, okay? We weren't ready to forklift. So in looking at Pure, what we were looking for was number one, simplicity. We were looking for more speed. We were looking for all of those things that would make life easier for us. What we ended up getting was a situation where we were able to purchase a Pure array for the cost of maintenance of what we were looking at before. The cost of maintenance. We got a Pure array with three year maintenance on it. So it was a no brainer from our standpoint. Yeah, and let me just put a point on that. You know, when you say simplicity, a lot of people would say, oh, well, you know, give you more time to work, but you're going to pay for it more upfront. But you're saying that from a capital expense standpoint, this was now a savings for you compared to keeping your old keep. Understand this. The Pure array is the first piece of technology equipment I've ever purchased that will not be classified as an expense. It's an investment. Simple as that. Because what we purchase, we will not have to throw it out when we upgrade. We simply, as we saw today in the presentation, we upgrade our software. We get with same pieces and parts in place. It is, it's an investment. Can you walk us through that a little bit? Because you've got the full, you know, converged infrastructure solution. Were you using Cisco before, or was that something you added? I was using Cisco from a UCS standpoint. I was using another manufacturer storage. We actually, we moved to the flash stack. On our first conversion, we kept our UCS, but we removed the storage and converted it all to a flash stack. And then we subsequently purchased an additional flash stack. But what it has bought us is exactly what you mentioned earlier. We now have time to do things as opposed to just being a technology person. Yeah, Ray, one thing, when you talk about upgrades, so, you know, you've got your compute, your storage, and your network. Storage sounds like you can upgrade it and move there with converged, you can upgrade it. Your network too, because network tends to be, install it and then don't breathe on it because I don't want to mess it up. So does the full solution get upgraded or how do you manage, do you manage it as a stack or do you manage the individual components? We manage our stack itself. Now, from the infrastructure standpoint of what we do with internet service and so forth, that is, that's handled with another piece of equipment. But we were able to, number one, shut down two full racks of storage equipment down to four U, roughly. And it's changed our whole costing structure inside of our data center. Data center is much cooler. And of course, the whole support piece of it is just unbelievable because there's no one coming in to replace blades every other week. Well, I was going to say too, it had to have an IT labor impact. So what would you have done? You had small stuff, it's yourself plus three individuals, correct? That's correct. What would you have done if you didn't get there? Would you just have to work more nights and weekends or what? That's what we would have done. We would have continued to do that as a matter of fact. And so you were doing that. That's what we were doing. Is it fair to say you got a lot of your nights and weekends back? Absolutely. So presumably people more productive during the day. Absolutely. They're happier, spend more time with their families. Absolutely. And access to our data is a lot quicker than it was before. So working less, you get more done. Correct. That's a good do more with less story. Absolutely. Because usually do more with less means you figure out how to work nights and weekends. I mean, you remember that cycle of, you know, the 20, 10, 15 years of hell after the dot-com burst, it was like do more with less, do more with less, do more with less. And all it meant is more hours for IT people. And I guess we hit the breaking point. And now technology has got us into this problem. Is technology finally getting us out of this problem? From our standpoint, it has solved at least 50% of man hours that we have been using just to keep our systems up and running. Now, I work it all from one pane of glass or from my cell phone. And here's the thing is, what value did that really provide, that extra nights and weekends to the organization? I guess the value was, if it didn't get done, IT would fail, it was the value. But it wasn't incremental value, right? Well, what we've been able to do is to move more into the job responsibilities that are actually there along with the technical side. Some more strategic stuff. Absolutely, I have a developer now that can spend his whole time developing as opposed to responding to some error message on a hard drive or whatever. So I'll make a prediction. So, I think it was one of the, it might have been Greenspan, but he said during the 80s, we all went to PCs, they said you see the productivity numbers aren't upticking. But we're spending all this money on technology, but you don't see it in the productivity numbers. And then, of course, in the 90s, we had this productivity boom. You kind of, he's seeing some flatness in productivity, but the stories that we get like this, I think we're going to have another boom. Do you feel that way as a technology practitioner? Absolutely, even myself, who I deal more with the infrastructure piece so far as our servers and so forth, I have time to do a whole bunch of things. We're redesigning, for instance, our websites. We're doing a lot of other things now that we honestly didn't have time to do. And I think that's a big factor in the flash. It's not just speed. Yeah, and I mean, David, it's something we've been talking about for years, especially with some of the MIT guys, is as automation and tools and platforms are actually going to free us up to be able to do more. I mean, it's the stories like your developer wasn't developing and now they are. Absolutely. So yeah, you know, what are you seeing that's going to enable you to do even more? Is there anything you're asking for from the community that, either some announcements you've seen this week or other things you're looking forward to? Believe it or not, the announcement that I just heard today about the active-active scenario, that's it. I have two days to see. The multi-site replication? Absolutely, absolutely. Well, so you used to work at EMC in the heyday and they referenced it today. I mean, SRDF was kind of the gold standard, expensive, complicated, but- 1994. But it changed the business. And what I heard, maybe you, Alpha Geeks can help me, you know, squint through it, but what I heard is we're going to dramatically simplify that whole process. So that's what you heard, but add some color to that. What does that mean for you? What that means for me is now my two sites are where operators one and that I actually have a real active-active configuration that I'm not afraid if something goes down that the other one is not going to be there. I don't have to go through the process of rebuilding on the other side because it's all automatic. There are a number of things that were said that if you understood what we have gone through over the past couple of years in working, trying to get together an active-active environment, it was just like the creation of fire as far as I'm concerned. And something we've had in storage forever is the reason we over-provision and get such low utilization is because if I have a failure or something goes wrong, if something's a little slow, I have trouble if I go down, I'm out of a job. Absolutely, absolutely. Okay, but the traditional vendors weren't able to solve this problem for you. I mean, they've been trying for a while, right? I mean, sure, but you didn't see anything from those guys. If you attempted to do that using hardware-based and even software-based, it's more than just a notion. I have reasonable assurances based on what I've seen with Pure that it is going to be as straightforward and as simple as they have described it. That's great. All right, Ray, we'll give you the last word, Pure Accelerate. Is this your, were you here last year? I was not here last year, it was first for us here. And it's great, it's wonderful. I mean, things you're seeing that are interesting to you? Oh, absolutely, everything. Yeah, like, why do you come to these shows? Well, number one, I come to learn something new. I like to hear about the announcements, number one, and I like to be able to have the opportunity to meet some of the people who are actually building, designing, writing the source code for this stuff, and it's amazing. And I got to ask you a personal question, so you shared with the, you like to funkify, you're a bass player, you're an active bass player, you play in a band? My band has gotten back together for kind of a short reunion here. We have some roots that go back to hip hop, and it'd be interesting seeing Snoop here tomorrow night. Yeah, fantastic. Well, Ray, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. Really a first pleasure meeting you. All right, keep it right there, buddy, we'll be back with our next guest. Right after this short break, this is theCUBE, we're live from Pure Accelerate 2017 in San Francisco. We'll be right back.