 from the Mascone Center in San Francisco. This is Silicon Angles Continuous Coverage of VMworld 2010, now inside the queue. Good morning everybody, good afternoon. This is Dave Vellante, we're back live with Silicon Angles Continuous Coverage of VMworld. Believe it or not, it's day four. It just flew by folks, didn't it? And my name is Dave Vellante and I'm your host this morning from wikibond.org. And we've got a great program again today. We're gonna start this off with a customer panel. And today joining us, we have Jack Ronner, down all the way down to my left, who's the VP of IT at Alpha Staff. Hello Jack, great to have you here. And to Jack's right is Jason Somer, who is the president of Atheon Systems. So thanks very much for joining us. And to my left is Jason Glau, who is a senior storage architect at Compellant. So gentlemen, thanks very much for taking time out of your schedule to join us this morning. So Jack, I wonder if we could start for you. So with you please. So tell us a little bit about Alpha Staff. Why don't you start there and a little bit about your role. Sure. Alpha Staff is one of the leading payroll companies in the U.S. So we are the fourth largest. We cut and manufacture payroll checks as our bread and butter, but everything from benefits to 401k, taxes, workman's comp, that type of thing. Vice President of Technology for Alpha Staff. So as a VP of technology, what's your role there? Somewhere around technology. Yeah, so you run the whole shop or you touch the storage? My role is more around the infrastructure, so the storage, everything from help desk to storage to networking. All right, so Jason, tell us a little bit about Atheon Systems. Sure, Atheon Systems is a company I founded about 10 years ago. We're a systems integrator and outsourced provider for firms here in San Francisco, primarily financial firms like hedge funds, et cetera. My role as president is one of consulting and infrastructure design. And we've built an IT team and small firms buy into that as their solution for IT support internally. And we're kind of in a unique position in the sense that we're also a reseller of compelling. So we kind of see it from both perspectives of selling it and also using it with our client base. And you were telling me before we went on that you were actually pretty hands-on and technical, probably more technical than most people with the title of president. Well, I keep my company small so that we can provide a really high level of service and a very close relationship with my customers. And so not only that, I just really like the technical aspects. So as much as I enjoy running a company and managing people, I like to stay very much in touch with the technology. And I think that's very valuable to my customers. Great. So in Jason Glau, we had Phil Soren on yesterday. So we know what Compellent does and how long you've been with Compellent? I've been with Compellent now for a little over three years. And prior to that, I was a two-time customer. So I actually been involved with Compellent for going on seven years now. Were you a customer, two other firms? Two other firms in San Diego County. So it was Kiosera, Kiosera America. They're a large global company. And then following that, I was hired by Viejas Casino, Indian Casino in California to design and build a new data center. So you were an early Compellent customer. Is that right? Or are you just jumping jobs like I do in six months? I was one of the early adopters. Yeah, one of the first systems in San Diego. Ah, cool. So, Jason S., I wonder if you could give us your perspectives of VMworld. How was the show for you? You know, I thought the exhibitors were really interesting. I had a couple of things that I was looking for. In particular, ways to accelerate VDI, improved management tools for VMware and that sort of thing. So that was very interesting. How about you, Jack? I'm sorry we have to make you reach over to that mic, but what did you see that was of interest to you? How was the show for you? Well, the show, first of all, it was an, you guys had amazing weather here. San Francisco is absolutely gorgeous. So great place to have a show. You know, it's amazing, as you said, day fours. It's here. It's okay. Okay. And, you know, I think we had a record turnout compared to last year, which was the record turnout from the year before. And it's obviously, this whole virtualization thing might actually work, I think. Yeah, right. We had Todd Nielsen on. He told us that the number was 17,000, which is pretty incredible. I think it's one of the best shows of the year, if not the best. Lot of diversity and really interesting. I would think from a customer standpoint, you get a really good perspective across the ecosystem as opposed to a lot of shows, it's just sort of one really vendor centric. You find that here? Everything is, of course, dealing with virtualization VMware, but as you said, every manufacturer has a foothold in VMware now. Every single partner has something to do with VMware and it's a central focus. I was trying to explain to our tax cad driver what VMware was, and I was like, where do I start? Yeah. All right, here's what's not. It's not Hyper-V, but besides that. Yeah. So, Jack, tell us a little bit more about your operation. I mean, roughly the size, you know, servers, virtual servers, terabytes, things like that. Just paint a picture for our audience. Yeah, a quick picture is, you know, we're a pretty small company. We started out with two refurbed Delsovers seven years ago. Company's around 12 years old, but now we have roughly 200 virtualized servers, mostly on-compellant, and like most people with them, when you get to tiered architecture and virtualization, it's pretty easy to get to 100 servers overnight. So, and how many physical servers? Wow, I have no idea. I wish I was more technical, but I have to imagine that we're pretty lean. We're typically at a seven to one ratio. Yeah, okay. All right, and I'm sorry, how much storage did you say you had? I think we'd lost count somewhere around 500 terabytes. Okay, decent size for... Yeah, small company, but the virtualization's already allowed us to increase the quality of our product. And by that, I mean, we have dev environments everywhere now, QA staging, and being able to quickly roll and provision hosts by a compelent or by, you know, in addition with VMware, allows us to do those at quality level. And do you know how much your application portfolio is virtualized? Yeah, we are roughly about 99% virtualized, and everything that can be virtualized, we've done. It's the only things that require certain smart cards or otherwise that can be virtualized. So, configuration nuances are the only things... Yes, right. So far, we found there's really no reason if not to virtualize, if you can. Okay, now Jason Somer, you're coming at this from a little wider perspective, both as a consumer of storage and systems, particularly compelent storage, and also an integrator and seller of those. Is that right? Yeah, that's right. You know, to be a reseller of compelent was an easy decision. We started off as a customer, basically, representing one of my customers, Passport Capital, Hedge Fund, that at the time needed a very high performance sand. We had already made a commitment to VMware and needed virtualized storage to go along with virtualized servers. And so, you know, compelent was impressive enough that I'm not a reseller. It's not a really core focus of my business in a broad sense, but I decided to, you know, partner with compelent because just very impressive the product. I think they, you know, compelent leads in pretty much every category, and in particular, they're strong in areas that are really important to us, particularly in finance. You know, I was saying to, I've been in and out of the storage business for a while now as an analyst and executive and did some other things. I was saying to Phil Soren yesterday that when I first heard about compelent, I think they called me up and said, hey, let's do a briefing. And they were describing the architecture, the automated storage, all this stuff that I used to associate back in the day with mainframes. And I was just shocked. And then, you know, when I saw a picture of it, I said, this can't be. And of course, so compelent, and of course some others, real pioneers in the industry, and you guys are sort of at the forefront of adopting those technologies. And what does that meant to your business? Yeah, well, you're correct. There is, it's kind of come full circle where we're coming back to some concepts that were prevalent in mainframe, right? But for all the right reasons, right? If you take a look at computing in the last 20 years, you know, client server began as kind of an alternative to mainframe computing. It empowered organizations to do a lot more with their server infrastructure. And, but now coming to virtualization, it's kind of the best of both worlds where you can take advantage of, you can really take control of your computing environment and do what you want with it, right? But also benefit from storage, tiering and things. I think, you know, specifically compelent, the data progression feature is really important for us. It works quite well and it means that we're not wasting expensive disks at fast spindle speeds on data that doesn't need to be there. And that's, you know, an important factor in, you know, designing our environment and making sure that we're spending money where it needs to be spent. And so compelent really leads there. So one of the things in Wikibon that we've talked about a lot and my colleague David Fleurer has written about a lot and we've been following this virtualization for a number of years, and one of the things he said early on was if you're going to virtualize your servers you better think about the storage as well. And in fact, most customers at the time were not virtualizing the backend storage unless they were buying, you know, companies like compelent. So we know that virtualization really taxes storage. Some people say it breaks storage. So, so Jason Cloud, tell us a little bit about why that is and maybe how you guys are sort of addressing that problem, both from the standpoint of, you know, traditional VMware implementations and also VDI, let's talk a little bit about VDI. Yeah, I think the challenge with virtualized storage environments is that they need to be able to scale, right? So we were talking about how development environments, QA environments just spring up out of nowhere once you have this flexibility to build new virtual machines and provision new storage instantly. So you have this server sprawl situation. It's contained within a virtualized environment but they're still sprawl nevertheless. So designing an infrastructure that can endlessly grow in scale to give you that endless performance and capacity capability is real important. So in terms of breaking storage, absolutely, the traditional storage model is, is a set defined pool of resources, right? The new storage model is a pool of resources that can endlessly expand as you grow, right? So I think with loads like VDI, you start to tread into this very unpredictable world, right? Whereas your server environments, your SQL servers, your mail servers, they're all very predictable. We know what those loads are going to be on a day-to-day basis but no one can predict what an end user is going to do, right? With a VDI session using sharing your back-end storage, again, you've got to make sure that not only you can scale but you can isolate unpredictable workloads at the same time. Meaning if one user is going to suck up a bunch of whatever it is, IO or capacity, you've got to make sure it doesn't domino effect the rest of the user base. Right, individual users have been known to do that. Okay, so are you guys using a VDI jack when we start with you? No, okay, so how about you, Jason? Do you and your customers, I mean? Yeah, we're looking into it, implementing it where we can. For us, it comes into play from a disaster recovery and business continuity standpoint. We need a way to be able to allow traders and portfolio managers, et cetera, to be able to access trading systems, order management systems, remotely in the event of a disaster recovery or business continuity situation. I think VDI honestly has a little bit of ways to go in terms of being able to provide a day-to-day desktop solution for really high-end users. And so I'm speaking of traders and I think there's other industries as well where software development, et cetera, where it still has a little bit of ways to go. But it's a very important piece and we're looking at ways to make the best of it. And you definitely need a high-performance virtual storage in order to maximize the potential. And so. You know, my personal take, I wonder if you guys could comment on this, is that VDI just isn't a great fit today as it stands for a lot of especially small and mid-sized organizations. People don't want to give up their beefy laptops and there's issues around graphics and the economics thus far haven't been that great. Unless it's a very specific use case, like a call center or maybe a claims desk or things like that. Do you guys, would you agree with that? Yeah, I would. That's why I think it's evolving. I think it's getting better. But you're exactly right. We've identified a particular use that works for us. I think it's indispensable with respect to DR and so we're still looking to see the industry evolve a little bit where we're hoping to see products come out that will allow us to synchronize virtual desktops to physical traditional desktops to help with mobility and business continuity. Yeah, it's definitely becoming more common now. We're seeing a lot of larger enterprise and even in the high end of the mid-range space we're seeing more VDI. You know, component being involved at the very low end all the way up to the very large enterprise. We get to see the entire spectrum and I think that VDI, obviously the ROI is there when you've got a larger number of clients, right? Larger number of client desktops that can be virtualized, centralized. But then there's still that issue of control so I don't think the politics of VDI will ever go away. It'll just be a new and better way to handle it. When I first purchased it, it wasn't an option for me especially at Kyocera. We had AutoCAD developers where 3D graphics and the intensive CPU resources on their desktops were a big part of our business, right? So I think even now today, that's still a challenge but many companies are getting there. I'm sensing a real change from the messaging that we're hearing from VMware around the desktop in general. In fact, it's almost like they're avoiding the term desktop and starting to use the term end user and make the user the focal point of that innovation where you've got iPhones and blackberries and iPads and of course desktops and laptops and to maybe give data access to all those devices and a consistent experience seems to be where their messaging is headed. In my sense is that this management team, we had Todd Nielsen on earlier this week. We had Richard McEnif who runs development for VMware and a number of other executives. They seemed very passionate and the other common thread, Rod Johnson from Spring Source, they really seemed to want to disrupt the current state of the industry. And IT has broken in many ways and they've got to fix it for a variety of reasons, help customers and obviously make a profit and grow a company. And it seems to me that that next wave of end user access is really where they're trying to focus now and that might be the tipping point for that whole desktop virtualization space. You guys have any comments on that or disagree with that, agree with that? Anything? I think as we were talking earlier that we've been trying to do a thin client. We've been trying to do Citrix with thin clients and get this whole ROI for virtual desktop for some time now. And I think for a while it did fit only certain applications such as you were mentioning call centers or you couldn't use it because you were doing AutoCAD. But now I think it fits more into the common space to where it's 80% now it fits 80% of everything it's only 20% that it's not working for quite yet. I mean with the advent of the PCI over IP some of these great new thin clients you're seeing with the use of the protocol, the accelerators they have, the built-in monitors now. I think we use it for, I said we didn't use it, we use it for DR and that's a great, great use case. But now you're seeing it more and more and I think obviously view and obviously some of the hardware changes, the protocol changes have been obvious in this exhibition. Yeah, so I think I agree with that. That's gonna make VDI benefit, we had some customers on that were saying that with Windows 7, you know, 90 plus percent of the functionality of a laptop or a desktop is there. Very high, you know, 99% and they seem to be very happy. I still think my sense is that Microsoft is gonna be able to play very strongly in that game. They'll play pricing games, they'll put out new products, et cetera, VMware in my view has gotta change the game in order to have a major impact or otherwise it'll be more of a niche as is Citrix right now. So that's sort of what I'm looking for and what we've been talking about in SiliconANGLE and the Wikibon community but, you know, it's fun to pontificate about this stuff. Let's go ahead. Yeah, I was gonna say, I think we're gonna see a hybrid environment for a long time, right? As a mobile user, I'm an architect, I meet with customers all day long. I've gotta have my 100% of my compute resources with me all the time and mobile, unconnected. But then I have a virtual machine back in Eden Prairie, Minnesota at headquarters that I log into for various tasks that I'd like to be able to do at the corporate headquarters. So I'll pull up that desktop when I need it, shut it down when I don't. So I think you're gonna see that across the board. Just folks are gonna want their private place and we've seen it with the phones too. Even on my mobile device now, I can connect to that virtual machine. So like you're saying, we're gonna find there is that in user experience, you're gonna want that common experience wherever you are, but then again, I think you're still gonna need that resource that's disconnected. Yeah, that's right. It's fun to riff on these things and pontificate. You guys, if you want to be an analyst or a reporter, you get bored with what you're doing, let me know, can you write? Do you like to write? Let's talk about integrated data management. Jason, what does integrated data management mean to a compelling? What are we talking about when we talk about integrated data management? All right, so we're talking about managing the data rather than just storing it, right? A lot of systems where you're just given a place to dump your data and then nothing intelligent happens behind the scenes, right? So integrated data management is about understanding how you're using the data, making appropriate decisions, making cost-effective decisions, right? Maybe even not essentially making the decision for you, but alerting you that a potential for savings is there, right? I think the reporting suite that virtualization solutions provide today gives customers that wealth of information to make good decisions around what they do with their data. You'd be surprised at how many times we meet with customers that have a false impression of their actual workloads. They get the data on the system and they realize 95% of that data moved down to say to drives and during the design phase, we might have been aggressive with a 70-30 split sort of suggestion to the customer and when we find out over 95% moves down, that's usually a surprise to folks that didn't realize that so little of their data was really busy each day. So it's really all about more intelligently understanding how the data is being used. If a human ever attempted this, we'd fail miserably, right? Only a block controller that understands how blocks are being used could achieve that successfully. So, Jack and the other Jason, so for years we've just sort of stove piped our infrastructure and that's the way in which people manage it, whether it's files and block or even high end and low end. Do you feel a need to unify those or are you comfortable sort of leaving things separate and managing them separately? What's your philosophy on that, Jason? Or your customer's philosophies. Maybe you can share what you're seeing in your base. Well, you mean with respect to reporting? No, specifically taking say a block infrastructure, like a traditional block infrastructure and separating that from a file based, NAS based architecture. Do you want to keep those separate and why or your customers and you want to bring them together and or why? I mean, I think it ranges, but personally I like to see things integrated. I think, you know, I like to see, you can go out and kind of procure various parts of your infrastructure and just buy best of breeding certain particular areas, but from a storage standpoint, I like to see it pretty tightly integrated. It's just easy to manage. And then if certain types of data might make sense on NAS and you might want to move it to SAN, it's much easier to do it if it's all within an inclusive product set rather than on disparate products, that sort of thing. Yeah, so as long as it's predictable. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I mean, it doesn't have to be the very best, highest end performance as long as it's consistent. Sometimes you do. Sometimes you do in certain applications need absolute, you know, performance. Would you isolate those types of applications? Yeah, absolutely. Virtualization allows that, right? That's one of the greatest benefits of virtualization is you can identify applications that need to have resources focused very, very sharply on them and do it. And you're not limited. Jack, is this an issue for an organization of your size? You know, as you said, everything used to be separate, right? And virtualization does allow you to have tighter control over those separate entities. On the other hand, it's all about making your data easier now too. You know, I'm fairly evangelical around compelent and I always say I made two mistakes with compelent. One is they tried to talk me out of buying a bus 15K SAS disk, you know, you don't need this. Your SATAs are going to work for you. You know, our algorithm does work. And we're like, no, no, no, let me just go ahead and make sure I got enough spindles and enough speed. So my first mistake was buying too many drives. I really didn't need them. Not as a mistake, but they were right. My second mistake was not listening to the first mistake, right, but you know, their fluid data, their fluid data progression really works well. And I would say, you know, for 99% of my data, whether it's my ERP system or file data, this compelent does what it's supposed to do without my interaction with it. So combining all those resources, I happen to use SSDs as well. Yeah, and so by having that smaller, it's a much smaller tier as far as capacity, but by having that option for extremely low latency, extremely high IOPS, and allowing the algorithm to do its work effectively, I feel comfortable now in migrating everything to compelent, migrating everything to basically the same sand. I have all the IOPS and latency issues kind of resolved at the moment. So Jack, do you envision, and maybe you're moving in this direction already, sort of two tiers, so tier zero, SSD, flash, and then a bit bucket, you know, tier three SATA? You know, it's all about cost, right? If everything was the same price, we'd all do SSDs, right? And so that's the whole point for tier storage. It's cost per megabyte or per gigabyte or per terabyte right now. And so I see, we're still going to stay on the three tiers, but of course as the price of SSD is going down, everybody's been waiting for this for years. For us, it has been a lifesaver moving to SSD. I think we have one of the use cases to where, you know, we don't have extremely high IOPS, but we have extremely high latency due to some of our legacy file applications and ERP applications, and so we were having some pretty critical performance issues in some areas where SSD was the answer at even a high price point. That's been a consistent theme that I've heard from a lot of customers this weekend and elsewhere. Yeah, absolutely. I think we're going to see a consistent trend of more SSD use. We're going to see the two tiered systems move to three tiered as they adopt SSD. We saw a sharp rise this year just with the lower cost of SSD and I think that trend's going to continue. So as the cost of these resources comes down, we'll see more customers deploying and realizing the benefits, right? Like you said, jack lower latency is one of the key reasons, but there's a small minority of data that really needs that highest performance lowest latency. But I think you're going to see the three tiered architecture because there's still going to be a majority of that data that would reside on those 15K spindles. We'd call that the tier two today, right? So I think what we'll find is as the cost goes down, tier two may start to disappear, but over the next year or two, I think we'll still see more of a three tiered architecture. Jason Somer, you mentioned reporting. Actually my colleague, David Floyer is in the audience and he's done a lot of analysis on various systems and subsystems working with like PG&E. We have this service where we provide energy consulting, we're working with PG&E and we have to look at the reporting of the vendors to actually see what the utilization is and other factors so we can calculate how much energy is actually being saved when you move to these types of systems. So he's assessed that a lot. David, we're a couple of the vendors who have the best reporting. Just shout it out, I'll repeat it. They have the best reporting, yeah. Yes, their compelling, would you put them at the top? Are they the best in your opinion? Really the best, the single best. Number one in your view. Now you haven't evaluated everybody, right? Is that, almost all of them? Okay, so that's an expert's opinion, an independent opinion and I mention that because he has often said to me, he's shocked that more vendors don't do a better job with reporting because it helps their customers and it helps the customers to justify the expenditures. Yeah, I agree, I mean a lot of competing products tack on reporting like an afterthought and it very much feels that way and it's less than useful. I mean, the compelence reporting is excellent. At my fingertips, I have everything I need to analyze how my storage is allocated and to kind of also continue the point of data progression. We're in a situation where virtualization is still kind of coming out of its infancy and best practices are still evolving. There's consensus is building on how to best do this. One of the things that can happen very easily as you're architecting a virtualization environment is you can misallocate data. Well, with compelent, we might take a look at a particular database and say that might reside best on 15K RPM SAS drives but perhaps in practice, much of that data is better suited for SSD or something else. Well, we don't have to be exactly accurate the first time we provision it. We can let data progression analyze it automatically, move it around and optimize it and so reporting goes hand in hand with that where we can see where our data is going and then make more better informed decision and as we get used to the system and everybody's data is different. I mean, as Jack was pointing out, he has really particular requirements. Every industry is different, every business is different. Compelent is so flexible that you can make mistakes in provisioning, get it wrong the first time but the stakes aren't so high. It's not a big deal. Yeah, I seriously think it's a great point and I'm freaking out if you didn't get it right, you know, optimizing on day one because eventually you'll get there and the system will learn within days, weeks, months, whatever it is. Usually days or less even sometimes. So, and then- Of course you had to do that manually, forget it. You have an army of people trying to tune the thing. Yeah, on any other sand that could be actually really difficult to have to move the data elsewhere, provision it differently, you know. And with Compelent it's actually, you know and we were the biggest skeptics. I mean, we're very careful about selecting our technology and we took a look at some of the, you know, like data progression and some of the more cutting edge features of Compelent and we're like, yeah, you know, this won't work, right? But then we set it up and actually it works really well and you know, during migrations and P2V migrations and moving from traditional, you know, physical server to virtual, we've had our issues but when the smoke cleared, you know, it wasn't Compelent. Compelent stood alone as the one piece of the architecture that through it all had been totally stable and had performed as advertised. Yeah, and that's why Compelent's doing so well. So the stock price is up, you see three pars going crazy. The reason is that IT today is really driving towards simplicity, right? Jack, get a comment there. We had talked about this at dinner the other night was that there's a lot of products you see out there, you know, VMware, Hyper-V, everything that, do what they say they're gonna do for the most part but there's always a small problems, there's always a few problems. And I can think of two products I use, Riverbed, actually being one and Compelent to actually, or Mays, they actually do exactly what they say and much exceed, and high exceeds our expectations. I think it's a Minnesota thing, you know? I really do. Let's set expectations realistically and try to over deliver, right? Not try to hype it too much. So my last question, let me start with Jack. So what's on Compelent's to-do list? What do you want to see them do to make your life easier? You know, that's a difficult question. You know, obviously I'm drinking the Kool-Aid but to make my life easier, it's already happening. I mean, we looked at all the other our storage vendors out there. We did extensive testing with Compelent. They over delivered on what they promised already. I see new technologies coming in the future, such maybe QOS on traffic, you know, traffic shaping over the network from the sand, but they're delivered on the ROI right away. I'm able to reduce headcount or change my headcount from having full-time sand administrators to now using those highly skilled people to do more projects at the same time. So, you know, at the moment, they're definitely the leaders in the technology. I think they're shaping where it goes. So, Jason, anything you'd add to that? I would just kind of confirm what Jack said in terms of ease of administration. From a business standpoint, you know, I need system, I'm looking for systems that are simple and elegant. I mean, get the job done and they can be quite complex under the hood, but I want an interface that's simple and concise and intuitive at least from the standpoint of a sysad, right? So, I don't want to have to use my senior systems administrative cycles on just day-to-day maintenance. I want them working on projects and designing infrastructure. And, you know, the interface and management of compelling is such that I can have intermediate level people, you know, provisioning loans and things like that if I, it doesn't require such a high level of expertise to use it on a day-to-day basis. That's really important. Right. Okay, folks, we have to wrap, but Jack Ronner, Jason Solmer, Jason Glaup, really appreciate you guys coming on, sharing your perspectives with the SiliconANGLE community. This is SiliconANGLE's continuous coverage of VMworld Live. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on today. All right, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. And we will be back with John Furrier and myself talking a little bit about what we saw this week and maybe some predictions. Be right back.