 We've got Jonathan and Jonathan, you are with? So Jonathan Franconi is with Guard Insurance Group. Guard Insurance Group. He actually wears multiple hats. He's a network administration. He does storage administration. All sorts of stuff. So we're going to, he's actually a blogger. Actually you did a big take on the announcement, didn't you? Didn't you just do a write up one? Yes, yes. So what was good? He's getting right to the nitty-gritty there. No, no, no, actually let's talk about your hats. I didn't even wear them today, so. Should have brought props. Yeah, right? So basically my day-to-day job is a network administrator, storage administrator and VMware administrator and environment, a small business environment for Guard Insurance Group. Okay. And on the side, I have my blog, virtualizationbuster.com along with... I think I have it up. Yes, you do. I see it there. Yeah. Along with handsonvirtualization.com, which was launched about three months ago with a partner of mine over in the UK, Barry Coombs. He covers a lot of the material that's occurring over in London. Okay. And I cover some of the stuff that's occurring over here in the United States. It's a little tough for him to get from London over to here. Oh, totally. For these events, but... We've actually been going to all sorts of events here in the US. Yes, I was actually attended the very first Ecologic User Conference back in Dallas, Texas two years ago. And I attended the last conference in San Diego. So it's definitely grown. Yeah. The first conference thing was only about 100. They cut out about 150 users. Okay. So we have definitely grown every single conference that's gotten bigger, and obviously with a combination of a compelling procedure I've been together. Okay. Something's gotten bigger. So... It's good. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So on one of your blogs, you did do a write-up. Sure. Can you kind of give us an overview of that? I mean, we could... Sure. Yeah, sure. We could read it out loud. That's what I was going to say. Sorry. You were going to say that. I didn't want to say that. I decided not to there. I just sat here with my hands crossed and listened to you guys. But basically, the first synopsis was the day one synopsis of yesterday, which was a big day for the hands-on labs. Yeah. So in the previous two conferences, there was tons of talk about, you know, what can we do better? What can we add to the Ecologic User Conference? What can we... You know, from the users and from the attendees, what can we add? And one of the top requests was hand-on labs. And this year, a great Ecologic team, Will Urban and Dave Glenn, just two of the individuals that were part of the setting up the labs. There's many others, but those are the two that popped in my head first. Did a great job setting up a phenomenal lab on the four Ecologic PS6010XV arrays. It just rolls right off his tongue. I know, I know that. This is a phenomenal lab. We have an awesome blade center, chassis operating the lab environment. One and a half terabytes of RAM. This was posted in my blog from last night. Phenomenal. I ran through a couple of labs yesterday, a SQL lab, a data protection lab, an ESM. Okay. So I got to ask you... All kinds of stuff. So what do you do at a hands-on lab? What are you actually doing now? Well, you know, that was one of the things that we all mentioned last time. Ecologic offers all these great features and functions and technologies, but we all don't have the lab environment where we work to try out these new features and break it. So you're pulling disk drives and cables and stuff like that? See what happens? We won't let us test these or touch those arrays like that. All the software functions and features if you purchase a brand new array and you put it up in your environment, what do I do next? How do I use it? So provisioning and things like that. Provisioning your storage, setting up your group, configuring replication, your auto snapshot manager for Microsoft and for VMware. All the integrations and features in the software that are included in your Ecologic array that a lot of people don't know they already have when they purchase one. So we're able to play with all that in the hands-on lab. And we just had Pete, of course, and Travis here talking about embedding scalable file system into Ecologic. So is that in the lab? Yes it is. It is in the lab environment. They didn't have it up and running yesterday obviously because it wasn't announced yet. Have a white sheet on there? Well they did actually. They had it off to site hidden. It's there now so there's a hands-on lab to play with that. Here at the conference they actually do have NDA type sessions and stuff. So I mean that's one thing that people might not know coming in. Are those really useful? Definitely. NDA session was one of the things that started back in the very first Ecologic conference and it's really awesome to be able to sit there and see what it was engineering working on outside everything that they're working on. But some of the key pieces that they're working on some of the things that the customers really want and where they stand with them in the development of the products. So NDA sessions are really awesome. I know when I was on the buying side of IT one of the things you hated was to go buy something and then then the 4D version came out and why don't you tell me about the 4D phones. I know. The version is 2.0, you know, 3.0. Or even 2.3 that should be at 3.0. That's right, definitely. So those are kind of the things that you've been having fun with at the conference. Looking forward to the rest of the conference is there anything specific that you're just gearing up for and getting ready for? Well there's a couple of good sessions coming up that I always look forward to every year. A couple sessions on some of the software integrations that Ecologic offers. Hands-on labs, there's many labs in there. I keep talking about those but they're a really great experience for people that are new in Ecologic platform and others that are even more advanced that haven't had time to really work with all the features in their environment. But I'm looking forward to, you know, finishing off the conference strong and there's all kinds of stuff going on. A party on Wednesday night. I wasn't invited to the party. You work, you need to talk to somebody. I hear it from you. That's not good. So like you said, your focus has been kind of Ecologic and what do you think of how that's been transitioned and how it's moving forward within Dell? As far as Ecologic's concerned I really think that Dell's been doing a phenomenal job even after the compelling purchase and we've seen it continuing integration and development and research into the product and expanding it. So I really feel the support hasn't changed. I haven't had to use it very often but when I have it, it's been very good, thankfully. But I really see that the product is moving forward well and I expect it to continue that way. They have a lot of cool things coming along. Do you think there's anything from your point of view that they learned with Ecologic and then moved into, you know, adjusting with Compellant? I think they've learned how to integrate the product a little bit better into the market into the marketplace itself and I think they're continuing to learn from that. That the customers are expecting. Okay. Now you're a big virtualization user, right? Mostly VMware? Yes, all VMware. All VMware. Not Hyper-V? No, not Hyper-V. Even though it's free. Hyper-V even though it's free. Thank you, VMware. You're trying to rhyme, John. I was trying for a little, I was trying. Well, you did do it. I did rhyme. Well, I mean VMware, you know, there's free SSI, you know, Hyper-Advisory gives you certain limitations, but, you know, technically it's free also. Right. To a point. Okay. I can't say too much more. So you're on the NDA on the V-Serve 5? Of course. Sure. Okay. Come on. How many virtual servers do you have? You can't do that. How many virtual servers do you run? Right now we have, well, we have two separate clusters of about four hosts each. So we're roughly running around 12 hosts right now is where we have, I mean some local store physical hosts. 12 physical hosts. It's around 100 virtual machines. 100 virtual machines. Okay. How did you get into virtualization? What was it that made you go that direction? Well, I think it was just the technology. I was involved in virtualization before like it was even virtualization. Okay. Well, was it? It was virtualization but it was small. It didn't have the title. It didn't have the title that everyone has today. But you were using it for test and dev? Yeah, test and dev. Before that it was test and dev. Before Intel had virtualization technology that went into their chips and you were running one VM on your laptop and you had to stop and it was like, okay, how are we going to ever use this? Where is this use case going to be? Now look at today. If you're not using it you're losing out on it. Right, right. Everything so. But are there some, you know, negative things about virtualization or things that you think need to be fixed in the industry itself? I think licensing could be a little cheaper. Everyone wants things cheaper but I think licensing. You want free? Right, everyone's free. Hyper-V? No. Hyper-V. So licensing is an issue. What about, sometimes I hear from virtualization customers that it starts to get really complex, performance management starts to get complex in a virtualized environment because you get workloads that start running crazy. I haven't had that issue in our environment. We utilize, obviously vCenter, but they utilize Veeam monitor, Veeam products in our environment. Is that having good monitoring from tools at home? Yes, definitely. And they have really helped us prevent any workload capacity issues or virtual host issues. Okay. I swear by their products they're a great company and they have a great product line. Any other tools that you use? I use Veeam backup for our backup in recovery. Okay. I know backup's been talked about a lot in a virtualized environment. Yeah, it's definitely a popular topic. I started off using Veeam right when I started getting into virtualization and their products just continued to take off and it's been phenomenal. So that's what we try to use for most of our products. What about VDI? You're doing VDI? We have approved a concept deployment of VDI going on right now. I've heard that. I've heard POC a lot. POC is a lot. It hasn't gotten to the point yet of a full onslaught of deployment. I think really in our environment one of the challenges that we had was we have every single person in our company is running dual monitors which is pretty nice. My editor has four monitors. My son had three. Yeah, so that was one of our challenges. Back two years ago if you view 4.0 and 4.5 it was, I think, the first version. I think about versions now we're talking about versions all over the place. One of those versions were the first versions that brought in true dual monitor support natively to the thin clients. Now with 4.6 and true PC over IP to the actual thin clients we're able to do true native, smooth, dual screen support. So that's where our proof of concept is. But VDI is more complex than server virtualization it seems. And so why is that? I think just because the sheer number of VMs that you have when you start deploying all those desktops I think it comes down to management a little bit. I think the management tools are getting better as we're moving forward with the view releases. I'm not a Citrix guy so I'm not going to be a Citrix guy. So I won't ask you you're not under NDA with Citrix? No, I'm not. No, I'm not. But the view's gotten better with that and so is vCenter and their product. So I see that getting better has been moved along. Let's go back to the scalable file system for a second. Are there workloads where you weren't deploying the Equalogic where you can deploy them now and how's that going to fit in? Sure. Previously we were usually concentrating most of our deployments on local hosts and now since we're running all Equalogic as our storage we're able to deploy SQL in exchange on Equalogic storage and really scale that performance in an interior workload fashion and gain that performance of the disk across different rate volumes and of course with firmware 5.1 we're looking at a 5% increase in performance and load balancing across our storage pools and across our arrays so it's just going to get better. Now we're talking a lot about unstructured data in the context of scalable file system so is that the area biggest growth for you or where's your biggest growth? Scalable file system is a little bit for us I think our biggest growth is just our day to day file system growth itself and we use a lot of direct attached storage for that. I see. Power vault stuff just because it's a little cheaper and it's a great product line. And they've got Scalable file system in Power Vault. Yes. They also have Power Vault laps that keep you alive. Okay. So you've got your hands on that too. Yes, definitely. All right. Good product line. Excellent. And so one of your partners with your podcasts or your websites Barry Coombs. Yes, Barry Coombs. He's been doing tech camp in London. Yes, starts today. Okay. In London and he'll be covering that event as best he can and he'll be out there and he'll be covering some stuff on our blogs and doing some cross posting on some things going out there. I'm sure some of the stuff that's being announced here is also being announced out there. Okay, okay. It can actually be between both of those. And you guys will be covering all of that. Definitely. What else? Do you... Just mentioned our two podcasts we recorded. Yeah. Our first podcast was with Will Urban from the Ecologic Engineering. Okay. We reviewed the ASM hit kit for Linux and also for VMware and our most recent podcast we did with Veeam from Doug Hazelman from Veeam reviewing some of the release for Hyper-V. Okay. We back up for Hyper-V support so I know you'll be happy about that. I have no agenda on the Hyper-V. I just always want to hear where you're going. You seem to. You seem to. It's like Hyper-V. Hyper-V. Hyper-V. So we got some good information out at Doug about some of his future products from Veeam which will be released at Veeam World. Okay. Continuing. And you'll be so you'll be at Veeam World? Yes. I will be. What other shows do you go to? Mostly the Ecologic Conference and Veeam World. Okay. I've done a couple tech ads but mostly. Well I know the Cube will be at will be at Veeam World so you should definitely swing by it. Absolutely. Talk to Risen about that. Yeah. Excellent. And you know from a standpoint on the blog what how did you get started? You know for anybody watching that is into all of the virtualization stuff into Once to be a blogger. Once to be a podcaster. What's your advice? Yeah exactly. You have to have a topic that your audience wants to listen to and want to know about. And my topic was you know there was I basically was involved with the Veeam World communities very heavily and there was no people were always asking questions about firmware releases about hardware releases about how do I do this and how I do that in equal logic and VMware. And I just found a topic and I started posting and started writing about it and before I knew about it it just started going from there. So it has to be something you're passionate about. It has to be something you're passionate about. Definitely. What VMware group do you belong to and use the group? In Philadelphia. In Philadelphia. I got invites today. I want to come down and my brother lives in Philadelphia. I got to come down to that Veeam. He's from Boston. It's a good Veeam. How many people come to the Veeam? Well we have a large event. Right. And usually the monthly events we have about a hundred people. The big event we had I think last year or this year we had close to 500 people. Wow. Good. Well come on up to New England in this summer you know it's a bed and there's a huge one up in in Maine. So I heard about that. Yeah. Seven or eight hundred people come to that. So all right. Well thank you so much. Thank you. That was John