 This is our flagship program, we go out to events, distract the ceiling from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Slavette. I'm John Michael, Dave Vellante. Hi everybody, Rodney Perkins is here. He is the director of IT at Farmer's Insurance Group, Federal Credit Union. Rodney, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, David, I appreciate it. How are you doing today? Good, good, doing great. Another VM, you weren't up on stage today, isn't your 10th VM world, is that right, or? Well, you know, normally they put me on stage, but I told them this time I had something to do with CUBE TV, so I said I wanted to downplay, so I said I'll just take my time. So have you been doing a lot of VM worlds in your career? You know, this is my second one, where actually, I really got introduced last year. They just kind of pushed me up front, and I kind of, you know, just started working my way in. But this is my second year, and I'm really enjoying myself, and it's been great. It's been amazing to watch just virtualization, you know, generally, VMware specifically, sort of take the world by storm. How did it affect your world? Well, I'll tell you, when you look at, I mean, even today, when they were speaking, the keynote was speaking, and the different things that they're coming out with the enhancements, when you look back, just when I started with farmers only three years ago, the virtualization was really taking whole consolidating servers and doing different things of that nature. Now you see today where things are trying to go to the cloud, people or businesses are trying to provide what better business continuity strategies, delivering better disaster recovery services, and trying to just keep their end users, which is what we do in IT, providing what better service and support. So, you saw the keynote this morning, and Robin was sort of talking about the journey, and I started with consolidation. Is that pretty much described what you guys went through or are going through? Where are you on that curve? So when you look at the direction in which we're going, you can't help but fall in line with how technology is now embarking and taking a closer look at everything going to the cloud. Us being a federal credit union, we understand there's regulatory compliance things, and we have over 50,000 members, and so we have to be very precautious with just embarking on trying to do a lot of things with the cloud, protecting our members. But when you look at technology and technology driving you, then you have to find ways to go around some of that red tape in order just to provide the best technologies that are out there, like Nutanix and VMware, VMware. Okay, so we were talking about converged infrastructure earlier. What's your take on all that? I mean, is that something that you guys are aggressively going after? You just mentioned Nutanix. Are you deploying Nutanix? I mean, what's your take on, first of all, converged infrastructure and where do you see that going? So that's a great question. Early on when I was looking at virtual desktops, looked at your traditional blade systems, looked at your traditional HP systems of different things of that nature, and so Nutanix was introduced to me on a small scale, so I started to do my research. With my background, my background came from mainframes desktops, through the network systems and through networking, as soon as I saw the engineering behind the technology that Nutanix was running, it was sort of an easy no-brainer. They're taking everything and they're putting it all into this one box. So we talk about convergence and we talk about bringing that all into one, creating this one appliance that now takes up to you where my blade would take up a half a rack, my sand would take up another half a rack or so, depending on how much storage I do want to bring in. So again, we go back to looking at bringing in a sales rep, he's showing me this demo and I'm looking at how the technology of the Nutanix software and the programming and how the system equipment actually works together and it became apparent to me that these guys have caught on to something that no one else has and then it made it an easy decision for me to be able to bring it in, do a proof of concept, through the proof of concept, be able to tell my CTO, hey look, we need to go with this. This is something that's looking pretty good and I'm telling you for the future, they've got an idea, they've got something that's going to be hot. And that was a VDI use case, is that right? That's a virtual desktop infrastructure use case. And so it was sort of a quasi, my corrective was a quasi green field, you didn't have to rip and replace anything so that's a great example. Absolutely, because we had a system in place of course. The system that was in place of course was so antiquated, frustration from your end users, performance problems, problems even trying to troubleshoot problems within your enterprise. Running VDI. Running, not running VDI but running Zen app. Just do your traditional terminal services. Then we said okay well we need to provide a desktop for our environment because of the applications, the legacy applications, different things that we're running. So what we did was we said okay well if we need to have desktops, we need to let's look at doing virtual desktops instead of providing a desktop for each end user and so forth. So then that's when we got into the use case of saying okay let's do VDI and with the virtual desktops I looked at Nutanix and then everything started to come together from there. So how do you protect that data on the apps running on the infrastructure? So today right now basically user citrix it's a one day thing. So you use it for one day, the next day it comes in clean. So at each day everything erases and you have a brand new desktop every day and there's nothing that stays dormant within that environment and within on that desktop because of how we have it set up. So you're providing new image every day. New image every day but we have profile settings that sit in the back that don't accumulate cookies and caches and different things of that nature. We just have your necessary tools that you need for day to day atmosphere. Absolutely. So I got to get word in here about this because honestly I've been sitting and listening but the thing we just talked with Nutanix CEO and they're a very successful startup but one of the things we heard earlier from some other guests in the industry is agile. I mean it's kind of overused, it's kind of played but it really is relevant. So I want to ask you, you're in the trenches what does agile mean to you? And specifically, you got compute, you got cloud available, all those new software. Storage still is the pain point. Storage and networking. What is the, what does agile mean to you? You got sands and dasses out there. What's the deal? So you have all these things right there. So agile for us is making sure that what? You have ease of administration. You have simplicity versus the complexity. Back when Sands first came out if they provided a lot of complexity. Nowadays things are so simple. You got a couple of clicks here and there bringing agile into it. So you say, when you look at agile, you say, well I want my IT support personnel to be able to be working in an agile environment to be able to provide that service and support on a much quicker pace. We look at our end users and they get frustrated when we can't fix things right away. We look at our members when home banking and when they can't see their money, when they can't get into things, you got frustration. We need to bring everything together. Unhappy customers. Unhappy customers. That's not good. That's not good. So we need to bring everything together and have that environment that we call agile and that we are able to mesh around and be able to quickly and efficiently be able to recover and do things. One of the, all the thought leaders talk about automation, blah, blah, blah, scale. But really it is about labor, right? And a lot of mistakes and the security issues around manually doing stuff, having guys provision a new server at the port, provision that, configure, manage it. So that should go away, right? What do you guys look at? Cause that's the natural progression. Exactly. Where are you guys on that path and how do you guys do that? So for us, when I look at just speaking, just talking about Nutanix, I'm talking about virtual desktops. Now that we have that footprint in place, now like we talked about, when it's time to scale out, adding more end users, adding more applications, doing different things to provide what, better resources for both internal and external customers. And so for us, provisioning now becomes what? Adding an extra node to our Nutanix equipment, being able to quickly, efficiently deploy a server, being able to get that software on that server and out to our customers and end users for them to use. And that's what it's all about. Can you quantify the impact of bringing in this converged infrastructure in terms of, a percentage of labor reduction or CAPEX or OPEX? Absolutely, I can give you a little bit on that. A lot of estimated numbers, but I had put some numbers together for at least the CAPEX. So we say over the next five years, it looks like I'm going to be saving about two million, not having to really deploy as much infrastructure, not worried about other assets and softwares that I have to bring in because I have my VMware, I have my Nutanix, and so I'm good over the next five years. Then I say, as far as operating expenses, normally what do you do? You throw another body in, every time you add something or you look to do something or you got to have another project, you throw in bodies. So I'm taking away from that, I'm looking at cutting at least close to a half a million to almost 800,000 a year on operating expenses alone. And so those numbers again, just something that I played around with, but looking, but it was easy enough to help us quantify the future. And then I look at some of the performance with Nutanix that came about using the equipment where we say what? You go from two minutes to log in in your desktop when you first come in in the morning to only under 30 seconds. So that was a wow in itself. Rodney, my last question is you said, it was kind of a no-brainer, but I understand why you're saying that, but in a way you took a chance on a small company. So what's your experience been like, service that you've received? Can we talk about that a little bit? That's awesome. People get nervous. Absolutely. So like you said, I took a risk, but when you look at that risk, you say, well, it's really just a very big desktop. And my background came from the desktop and understanding that as long as the software and the infrastructure held up, then we would be able to move on. So I say, okay, well, that's what I said, let's bring it in. I'm not going to just sit here and listen to the salesman. I need to see it for myself. Let me see how it actually works. Once I brought it in-house and I was able to quantify it, actually it failing, actually the service and support that I was receiving just as a startup, the service and support that they were providing was phenomenal. Working with VMware made it even better. And so then you have two partners versus one partner. Now with Nutanix, I have VMware, both of them together gives me a strong suit. Awesome. All right, Rodney, really appreciate you coming by. It was great to meet you. Thank you, David. Appreciate it. Rodney, good job. Great to hear from the customers. See, we love hearing from folks who actually have to deploy the technology and live with it. As Dave said, you build your own house and you have to live where you make everything happen. Congratulations to your success. This is theCUBE, we'll be right back with more. Wall to Wall covers this day one at VMworld 2013. We're live in San Francisco, Moscone South Lobby, all the actions here. Stay with us all day today, tomorrow and Wednesday and into Thursday morning, we'll be right back. Excellent.