 Live from Austin, Texas. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering Dell World 2015. Brought to you by Dell. Now your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone, live here at Dell World. This is Silicon Angles theCUBE, our flagship program. Where we go out to the events and extract the signal noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon A. I'm joined by my co-host Dave Vellante, co-founder of Wikibon.com and the chief analyst at Wikibon.com. Our next guest is Bryce Tuck, AVP of Network Services of Southwest Bank. Welcome to theCUBE. Oh thanks, thanks for having me. Thanks for stopping by, got chicken in early, great to see you. So we love getting down and dirty with the customers. And because that's really what the action is from our standpoint, Wikibon's community of practitioners. Always pinging us, using the research. We hear a lot of different things. And I want to ask you, what are your top frequently asked questions when you look at the mega merger of Dell and EMC? Are you scratching your head? Are a few top questions that come to mind for you? Well, the big question is, well, we just bought some storage from Dell, Nutanix. So we just want to know how that's going to play into the future, you know. Hopefully they're not going to come back and ask us to go ahead and replace all that with EMC gear. The other question is, how is this going to integrate, you know, is VMware going to integrate more with the Dell servers? And, you know, how does that fit in? And then what other products and services are we going to get now that are being replaced by stuff that Dell currently sells? You guys have VMware? So VMware, so Nutanix talked to D. Raj, the CEO last night. They're excited. I think Dell is playing it, you know, straight with Nutanix. We love the solution, but also they got their other stuff. So it's going to be a question when all kind of comes together. What are the key things that you're worried about? Replacement of Nutanix or the end of life or relationship or? I would say the end of life. I think, I talked to my Nutanix sales rep last night and he assured us that, you know, whether or not this goes, I mean, they're confident that Dell's going to stick with them and everything, but however it goes, that Nutanix will always be there to support us. So I'm not worried about that. I'm worried about Dell just going in a different direction. And was that your first sort of relationship with Dell or are you a longtime Dell customer? Maybe describe that. So for this company, I've been with this with Southwest Bank for three years and the previous company has been with 10 years and Dell customers with both of them. And so I went through the Dell EMC break up the first time and now they're back together and I think it's good. Why do you think it's good? Is it, it puts more tools in the tool bag, you know, for the, for my Dell sales team. So they're not just limited to only selling these, these products anymore now that can offer so wider range of tools. And when you brought in the Dell Nutanix solution, what were you trying to address? So we were building out a new Colo facility and at the time we're just going to go ahead and redo our ESX infrastructure, you know, instead of having to put it in now and then rip it out, you know, remove the old stuff and then rip it out. And we weren't just going to go ahead and buy Dell servers in Ecologic, but our Dell sales team came in and said, you don't need that anymore. Let's introduce you to this Converge solution you with Nutanix. And they did some demos, let us talk to some other customers that were doing the same thing. And we fell in love with it and went and purchased it about three months ago. As you guys go forward looking at the future, how do you envision your consumption of IT? I mean, obviously there's a lot of stuff going on as management software, you got deployment, size of IT staff, all these things kind of factor into, actually the operational aspects of IT relative to the business. I mean, online banking, that must be a big part of it. Real time, big data. This is all on the horizon. So what's your envisioning the consumption of how you get supplied by Dell and the marketplace? That's a big question. Yeah, I mean, obviously it's never going to stop. It's just going to, like you said, it's going to just keep getting big here. Now we're more focused on the security aspects of things. You know, being with a bank, that's something that we're always trying to fight with the bad guys every day. We're not so much into the big data right now. And you know, some of this stuff is outsourced like online banking is outsourced right now, so. So, I want to come back to sort of the solution that you guys put in. I'm trying to understand the difference that you see between sort of a, what's generally called a hyperscale solution Dell Nutanix versus say the converged infrastructure versus of course doing it yourself, I get that. What led you down the path of a hyperconverged solution? Well, we've always been interested in it and you've seen the examples of, you know, building yourself or we'll just come in and we'll just put our data center in a box. And that's always intrigued me even, you know, for four or five years ago, but it was just never affordable for a company of my size. The other thing that helped out was we went from almost a half a rack of equipment down to three years. And so then you're talking about the power savings that we get onto that, not only with the space savings and the cooling savings. And with everything just being right there in one, I don't have to have extra space or go and purchase extra, you know, iSCSI switches just all right there. And being a local storage, it is a tad bit faster than we were having with having to go over the iSCSI channel to go to the ecologic from the Dell servers. And relative to, say, a conventional converged solution, whether it's from Dell or, you know, anybody else, what's the difference in your mind? When I say converged solutions, you know, Vblock or, you know, a NetApp FlexPod, you know, et cetera, et cetera. Oh, no, I understand. So the things that I've looked at the Vblock in the past, they were just priced too high for what we could do. And then the other thing that, from my understanding, that's may have changed, it's been a few years, but once you've got that system, you're locked in, there was no expanding. If I got the wrong hard drives, then that's it. I can't expand out anymore without buying another show. The Nutanix offers the opportunity that if we do need to add more memory or add more hard drive space, that I could just go ahead and crack open the boxes and take care of that. And you're a VMware shop, right? Yes, sir. As well as other, you're a Hyper-V as well? No, not Hyper-V, just you, yes sir. Okay, because, you know, there's a lot of talk about people sort of inter-clouding, John calls it. But that was not a motivation or an interest. It's reducing your reliance on VMware, the V-tax. You know, you're always just hearing stuff about that. You happy with the license fees? No, good man. What about DR? How do you protect the data? So we have a Nutanix plus for both the production and our DR sites, and then we just use the built-in replication technology between the two. And in the event of a failure, we would just switch over to use SRM from VMware to actually fail all our servers over. And you've got a number of remote locations, is that right, or branches, or how's that all? We have 18 branches in the Dallas Port Worth area and one branch down here in Austin, mortgage office down here, and then we have our COLO locations also in Dallas. So what kind of IT infrastructure do you have in those branches? Is there yet, you know? Ah, I have one desktop technician that travels. Okay. So as we get phone calls from our end users, they'll go out there and replace computers or PCs. And with remote technology now, it's a little bit easier for us to remote into somebody's computer of course. So you don't have bank tellers doing hot swaps and stuff like that? No, sir. What kind of infrastructure do you have in the branches? Well, we just recently switched it up. We used to have a branch server at every location, but we recently went ahead and pulled those out. We have an MPLS network set up with everybody. So pretty much everybody just has their desktops and the phone systems, and then we have a PBX, a small PBX at every location. But other than that, it's just all straight back to our corporate office. Okay, so you've got a highly centralized corporate office. Yes, sir. A bunch of terminals connected in. Yes. All right, well, you talked about some physical infrastructure that you saved. Did you quantify that? I mean, do you even have to quantify that because you're a relatively small company or is it even more of a pressure to quantify that? It is more of a pressure because it's one of those things I have to get it right because if I get it wrong, then we're stuck with it. We can't just throw it away like a bigger company and you may be able to make a purchase for let's say $100,000 if it's the wrong one. They can, oops. Good experiment. Right. We learned a lot. We'll try it again. My company isn't so. We have to get it right the first time, of course. So yes, I mean the price was and we ended up getting the Nutanix, ended up turning out to be for two for both our production and our DR turned out to be the same price as if we had just got the Ecologic for production. So I mean, we had to just straight up before we even put anything in, we had a cost savings to begin with. Right, okay. And then you've obviously seen that at the back end. Yes sir. So what other kind of cool projects are you working on? Well, we just finished this one up. So I think we're waiting for the next one to come along. We are looking at voiceover IP system and contracts comes up here in the next six months. So I don't know how cool our phones are but that's the next big project on Horizon. Bryce, final question for you. I want to get your take for the folks that aren't here at Dell World. Obviously they've seen all the smashing news, obviously a lot of conversations. What's the hallway conversation here? What are you hearing? What's the buzz in the show here? What's the vibe? And what are some of the specific things that you're hearing, concerns, positive, neutral, negative? What's the concern? What's the sentiment in general? Well, I think everybody I talked to is the same way this conversation started off with how does the EMC purchase going to affect everything like that? I think a lot of people are focused on both the storage side and the VMware side. I don't know if that's where it needs to be because EMC has a lot more to offer than just the storage and VMware. But that seems to be the pretty, yeah, what does it impact me kind of thing? Right. That's really the number one concern. What does it all mean? Right, is my sales person going to come out and tell me to rip everything out and replace it with this gear or that gear. There's a lot of little in-between-the-toes details that go on on something like this that trickles right down into the belly of IT and infrastructure that are pretty impactful, right? I mean, impacts deployments, architecture, right? I mean, oh, absolutely. And you get to the question are have we installed the right stuff? Now that there's more things available to us, because we're primarily a Dell shop and everything we buy is pretty much through Dell. And some of these products weren't being offered two days ago. And now all of a sudden there's a whole another breadth of products that we can go out and look at. It's sure going to put the pressure on the Dell integration team, really kind of keep connecting with the customers. Thanks for coming on. Really appreciate you sharing your insight here on theCUBE. Bryce, appreciate it. Thanks for stopping by. All right, thanks for having me guys. This is theCUBE live at Dell World. Getting the data from the customers. Share that with you. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back after this short break.