 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada. It's theCUBE, covering EMC World 2015. Brought to you by EMC, Brocade, and VCE. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live in Las Vegas for EMC World 2015. This is theCUBE SiliconANGLE's special broadcast of EMC World 2015. We go out to the events and we extract a signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm my co-host Dave Vellante with wukibond.com. Our next guest is Chris Waw, Enterprise Technical and Architect at St. Charles Health System from Bend, Oregon. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, nice to be here. So first, tell us a little bit about Bend, Oregon. I mean, I love that place. It is beautiful. I've heard great things that go in there for the first time. St. Charles Health System. So tell us about your opportunity there. Yeah, so at St. Charles Health System, we have four hospitals, about 15 different clinics. We do everything from inpatient outpatient surgery all the way down to basically sleep center stuff, heart center, cancer treatment center. So really, it's a true health system from top to bottom. How many locations? Four hospitals. So there's one in Bend. There's one in Redmond. One in Madras and one in Primeville. What's it like in Bend, Oregon? Never been. It's beautiful. It's sunny most of the year. It's kind of a dry climate actually, kind of like Las Vegas. And there is plenty of breweries. There's plenty of restaurants. The craft brewery up there is pretty good, isn't it? Very much so, yeah, there's lots of them. We should get it. We need to get it sponsored from there. I think so, that's cute. We had Stone Brewery on theCUBE. We love craft beer here on theCUBE. Anyway, tell us about what you're talking about here at EMC. What's the top conversation you're involved in? With being here at EMC? Yeah. Lots of things actually. So we actually just signed an ELA with EMC and we actually have brand new VMAX3s coming in some V-Plex systems to augment our current VMAX system. We have Icelon. We have RecoverPoint. We have Data Domain. Avamart, really the full suite. We have just, me and my coworkers just taking in all these sessions, taking lots of notes. What's the state of the data protection situation for you guys? You guys actively involved in automating. What do you have from EMC? What have they done for you guys that if you didn't have EMC, you'd be in trouble with? Can you explain? Absolutely. So not that long ago, we actually had just tape-based backups. That obviously has its own set of issues. So as time went on, EMC, a number of years ago, actually presented us with an EDL. And that was amazing. It got rid of the tapes. We've progressed even further now. So now we have Avamart and Data Domain as the backend storage. And we don't worry about it anymore. We do snapshot-level image backups of all of our VMs. We do SQL backups from the file level of that. All of it gets de-duped on the backend with Data Domain. We replicate all of that data back over to the DR site. And it's- Did it help with the multiple locations? What was the life before EMC? So before EMC, it was one giant tape library in one location. In the event that you needed something restored, it was run down to the basement, open up, try to find the tape, get the tape in there, wait for that to load, wait for that to recover. Now it's not that way at all. It's two locations. We have our primary data center where everything gets backed up to. That gets completely replicated to our DR site and we can restore from either location. No tape. No tape, not at all. Completely limited tape by our shop. There is no tapes at all in our shop, yeah. Okay, so tell us a little bit more about your infrastructure. Actually, you know what? Tell us about the apps that you're supporting and then let's work back into the infrastructure. Okay, so the primary apps that we would consider tier one would be our electronic medical records. So those are primarily Microsoft with SQL as the backend. Going through that, we have interface systems that tie all of that together. We have our ambulatory EMR systems, things that support the hospital, like a nurse call and different things like that. And then we go down to the basic infrastructure of exchange and file shares and department shares and really the whole gamut of. Okay, and then the physical infrastructure. We've got a lot of EMC stuff, but take us through sort of what the infrastructure looks like. Sure, so we're primarily blade chassis for all of our servers. It's about 98% virtualized, so it's pretty much all VMs. The only thing that's not a VM is pretty much appliances and different stuff that have to stay physical. That's completely at our primary site. All of that then, with the EMC storage on the backend, we have basically a VMAX, which is our tier one. That's where all the stuff goes that no matter what 24-7 has to stay up. What we would consider our tier two, which still stays up all the time anyway as well, but that's our VNX. That all gets replicated to a VNX at the DR side with recover point that we're rolling out. The VMAX is replicated with SRDF, and then again, the backup side is Avamar data domain. Then for the file level system, we have our ICELON, and so we have two of those as well. One of those is the Pride production site. That one gets completely replicated to the DR site. Snapshots on both ends, and... What challenges do you have in managing this infrastructure? I mean, some of it was bought in. ICELON was an acquisition. The data domain acquisition, so different sort of products. How are you integrating those? How is EMC helping you integrate those? What are some of the challenges that you face there? Well, one of the big challenges we had for a long time was everything was just kind of disparate systems. We had individual rack mount servers. We had DAZ systems. We had attached storage that was either archival stuff. It could be file shares, department shares. We had individual Microsoft file systems. Basically, we took all of that from the file level side and wrapped it right into the ICELON. So we do so much with just one, literally one file system. We went from three guys that were running the server storage side and we were literally about one-eighth of the infrastructure we are now. We're eight times that now in the last five to six years. We only have four people. So although we've complexity-wise have grown quite a bit, management-wise, thanks to EMC and that technology, we have barely any more people. Why? Why is that? Can you help us understand? Absolutely. So one of the things, again with the ICELON, which has been a huge hit for us, we don't have to manage all these different pieces of hardware. We don't have to manage all these different applications looking at different systems, all these different management interfaces. If it's file level, if it's archive, we go to the one-FS file system, manage that from there, which is really easy. As far as the VMAX and the VNX, just two portals for everything. Giant data stores were able to basically manage it with very few people. EMC was very instrumental in coming in basically helping us consolidate that down and just make it easier to use. So you've got an all EMC storage shop? Pretty much. The only thing that's not at this point is VDI, but eventually with their ELA, that just might happen. So, I remember the old stories, you're too young to remember, but back in the mainframe days, the way that somebody used to negotiate with IBM is they'd say, well, you've just got to put an Amdahl coffee cup on. Mm-hmm, right, yes. IBM will cut the price. So I've got other customers telling me, it's just way easier to work with one vendor. Help us think through the sourcing argument. Single throat to choke, or better to have a little competitive knockoff going on. Well, I'd say competition's always good, but the single throat actually has helped us a great deal. So for example, back to the backup idea, we used to have, obviously it wasn't EMC storage many, many years ago, but we'd have one application that was running backups. Eventually it became EMC storage because it was the EDL, but then if there was issues with backups, to your point, who do you call at first? Will you call one vendor, and then they're going to show you, well, maybe it's this, if you try the other vendor. So with Avamar and Data Domain, along with those backends, we love it. That also makes our complexity far less. If there's ever issues with backups or something like that, we call EMC. We open a ticket with PowerLink. Top to bottom support, the application right down to the hardware level, it's all the same, and that has helped us tremendously. Okay, that's interesting. So, talk about the roadmap. You mentioned, actually again, take it back to the business. Electronic medical records, Obamacare, meaningful use, doctors that are increasingly more, I guess they're more receptive to technology these days than they used to be. Mobile, data, HIPAA, got a lot of challenges in your business. Where is that going, and where is your technology going? So, right now, again, we're not too complex. We try to keep that small, but roadmap-wise, what we're doing is we're really trying to beef up our DR strategy. So, we're building a brand new hospital in Pineville, Oregon, and in doing that, the IT department partnered with the business and said, hey, we want a full DR space. We want something that's just as nice as our production data center, all the bells and whistles. And so, in doing that, we've partnered with EMC as well, and we're basically going in, and we're going to put all of our EMC gear replicated there. We have some new V-Plexes coming in, so really heavily at EMC World, we're looking at some V-Plex stuff and how we're going to make some active, active data centers. And one of the biggest things that the doctors and the nurses and all that want is 24 by seven uptime of that application. That's going to buy us that. We're going to be able to basically fail over to the DR site live if we need to, do whatever kind of maintenance we need, be preemptive about that, and keep them happy. As a technologist, what are you excited about? I mean, people have been saying here at this conference, we're living in the most disruptive times that we can ever remember. Probably true. Yeah. Five mobile social big data, platform three, blah, blah, blah. What excites you as a technologist? Oh, lots of things. Again, I'd have to say honestly, the ice line has been one of the biggest things just because of the challenge of just images everywhere, pack stuff, sleep studies, all that kind of stuff. So that's just been phenomenal. That excites me. The VMAX three, honestly very excited about that. We're going to roll out vSphere six here at some point soon to be able to use that with VVOLs. The whole hypermax thing and be able to actually future proof ourselves. That's exciting. The active, active data center is exciting. All this kind of stuff that forever you could do, but it was kind of a little bit harder. It's becoming so much easier with as little resources we have. So yeah, me and the guys who work with, every day we go to work, it's really exciting. It's really fortunate to be in the business. So you can stand up stuff pretty quickly and integrate it? We can, and that's honestly the nice thing with all the stores, especially with the Ice Lawn or even the VNX. Anytime we partner with the EMC, they help us forecast our storage. We're able to really get storage in the door relatively quickly, provision it out and just keep on moving. Because virtualization, we honestly went from maybe a couple hundred servers a few years ago, three or four years ago, and now we're over 1,500 and growing with VDI. And it just doesn't slow down and we haven't had any bottlenecks with storage because we just keep expanding it ahead of time and planning. That's great. Chris, thank you so much for coming on the queue. I wanted to get to a final word for you. Share the folks out there who are watching that are looking at the same journey you've been. What have you learned? What would you share for advice for them? Well, it can be overwhelming, obviously, with all the different types of technology. The biggest thing that helped us was partnering with the EMC, as we said, and basically saying, here's our problem, here's the solutions we need, because there's so many different things that overlap, but which is a good thing, because when you look at that, you can really get the niche of exactly what you need. And so what we did was just say, hey, here's what we need, here's how we need to achieve that, and then they basically hid, here's the different options, here's the solutions you can make, and we've tailor-made it from top to bottom with one vendor. Final, final question. Everyone's dying to know is, what is your favorite beer? Wow. Being from Ben, with all that craft beer up there, what's your favorite? The guys are going to hate me here. I'm not much of a beer drinker. They have a really good distillery there, so Crater Lake vodka, there you go, from Central Oregon. Oh, your favorite spirit. Yes, Crater Lake vodka, absolutely. All right, Chris, let's get on the queue. We know that in IT, beer is the most popular drink out there, but sentiment's changing. We're craft beer-oriented, IPA's always. This is a cube. Great beer-friendly here at EMC World. We'll be right back after this short break.