 This is theCUBE, live from the Mastoni Center in San Francisco. This is SiliconANGLE's continuous coverage of VMworld 2010, now inside the CUBE. San Francisco, live, VMworld 2010. This is SiliconANGLE's continuous coverage. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE, with Dave Vellante, co-founder of wikibon.org, research firm covering all the angles here at VMworld and virtualization cloud, the cloud revolution. And you can't talk about a revolution without talking about universities. So we got USC here, Frank, how do you say that? Mutio. Mutio, okay. Good pie's on, John. University of Carnegie Mellon on here, a little bit of East Coast, Geek. You got West Coast Geek, stuff going on, USC, of course, big sports school. So welcome to theCUBE where we're acquiring a lot of knowledge here on the ground, on the ground floor here at VMworld. So thanks for joining. Oh, thank you. So tell us about, USC is known, I was in the Pac-10 school, technology that you use with virtualization. Talk about that because here we're looking for proof points, customers talking about the technologies that they're buying, deploying. Talk about what you're doing at USC, specifically about how virtualization's playing that role. Okay, we started out about a little over a year ago with the EMC NS120 as our sands. And when we went to that, we also virtualized the VMware. And that was our first phase, was to get our tier one applications onto our NS120, so then that way we also could replicate it to our DR site, which was in Pennsylvania. One of the goals was to be up and running if we had a major disaster, was to be up and running within seven days. So the EMC had a good solution for us to get our data sinking across, and if there's a disaster, we could just fail over into a pen. And we made an agreement with our sister school at the University of Pennsylvania, where they give us space on their data center, and we give them space in our data center. So the costs, basically we pick up each other's costs, and it worked pretty good. So physical footprint? Yeah. For some servers, and then you use that to virtualize back and forth the DR, it has a recovery? Yes, and we used, we're leveraging the internet, we put a VPN tunnel between the two sites, and we haven't done like a lot of people do dedicated connections. Our solution was leveraging the internet, because at the universities you have the high bandwidth, so we're able to save all the money on a monthly recurring cost, we didn't have to deal with that. So we're basically going out to the internet, and through the VPN tunnel we're able to sink it. We get about a T1 connection between the two schools. Did you ever put on the table or consider doing a DR to the cloud? No, we haven't thought about that. No, that wasn't an option. Not that time. So it didn't even come up in the discussions? No. And do you think, now when was this? A year ago. A year ago, okay, so a year later? It's about a year and a half that we start talking about it. So if you had to do it today, you think it would come up in the discussions or still no? I think some of it would, and a lot of the stuff that we heard yesterday at the main session, is actually all the stuff now that we're getting hit with, single login, with all these devices. Being at a university, you have a lot of people with iPads, a lot of people with iPhones, androids. They want to get to their data. That's all becoming, for us, that's real life every day we have to deal with that. So you're living in the consumerization of IT, I mean. And every semester, students come in, you know, after they graduate, the parents buy them. Bring your own PC to school. Yeah, they're buying them all that stuff and we have to deal with that as they come on to campus. So... Do you guys standardize on equipment at the age? I mean, a lot of schools back on the range, back on the PCs where we talk about being bloated, you know, standardize on configurations. Do you guys do that, or do you just say bring your own, no problem? On the students, we recommend that they bring, because again, we're a journalism school too and we do a lot of editing, film editing. So the final cut, and we try to push the Apple solution because it works better with Final Cut and also the editing. And it's easier to tell them to buy one machine, you know, the Apple, because they have less options compared to, when you start getting on the windows side, there's more, it opens up tons of situations. Yeah, it's hard. How do you back all this stuff up? We use Alvamar. And prior to that, our solution, I won't mention the company unless you want to hear them. Yeah, why not? Why not? I mean, we don't have to trash them, but I mean, everybody, we're, where were you beforehand? I mean, we don't, Yeah, we're using Symantec backup in Zach. Yeah, okay. And we're, A lot of companies do, right? Yeah. Big install base, you know, good product. We're running a lot of problems. And I, network administrator is probably spending easily two days of just making sure the backups are working and the county fixing problems. And we threw a lot of hardware at it. We had multiple tape units to make sure we could back up within our time period. We also bought a lot of NAS to also speed it up where we go to the NAS and then later in day we back up to tape. So we were trying to get in. It took us a long, and we spent a lot of time. Kind of brute forcing it. Yeah. So it wasn't really working. And when we went to Alvamar, we actually cut down our backup times by, basically it's a 78% cut in backup time. So now it leads, for us, it opens up a huge amount of window now. We could back up stuff. And as we expand our servers, virtual servers, we don't have to worry about the windows. We're going to do this, how are we going to make all this work? And also it's a great solution for us with our DR site because way Alvamar works, it's source based. So it does everything at the server then it just brings across in the bandwidth you're using is just the changes that you do compared to other ones if you send the whole stuff over, all your data over to the pen, that might become a problem for us because we're already... So... How big is the data? I mean, journals, we're actually doing film stuff, right? So you've got big files and we're downloading. Here we've been programming all day with video and on demand. We ran out of storage at EMC World. Yeah. Yeah. That was pretty ironic. EMC Drive, we didn't have them. But yeah, we haven't gotten to the point where we're throwing tons of video on it yet. So the amount of data right now at this time isn't huge, but we have our units is 16 terabyte. The NS120 is 16 terabytes of this space. I think we have probably about 30% of that full, but going forward, what we're looking at doing it, we've seen that really scaling, really big and one of the things with Alvamar we liked about it was it's a very easy solution to scale. You just add more notes. We didn't have to worry about all the other stuff. You just add the notes so you can just buy the licenses and keep going. Plus the other good thing about Alvamar too, we liked was the agents. You had all the agents there. You didn't have to go and buy agents every time you bought something up. If it's a different server, you had to go buy a different agent. With that, when you get the Alvamar unit and the licenses, you get all the agents with it. So as they say, backup is one thing, recovery is everything. Have you had to do recovery? Not so far, we haven't done it, but we do tests all the time and it's very quick and easy to do. Restores are very, very simple. So that part of it, so far, knock on wood, we didn't have to use it. So it's interesting. So for folks who don't know, Alvamar does data deduplication at the source. And so in an IO intensive environment like virtualization, it really helps a lot. Helps you meet your backup windows. It's a great product. It's almost perfectly tailored to virtualization. But you had to do a rip and replace of your Symantec to get there, right? And it sounds like it was worth it for you. Yes, definitely. And what we do too is, the other thing too is one of our solutions as we go look at each IT solution, we're trying to be green. So it was really good that we're able to go tape-less. By going to Alvamar, you go tape-less. So we don't have to keep tapes. And what it does basically, we keep four weeks, then we keep a month, then we do three months, and then yearly, and we keep the yearly for eight years. Eight years? Yes. And all that's done on the hard drive. So we don't have to worry about storing tapes and keeping the unit, x-years at the end, it'll read that tape off the tape drives. That's all gone. And also by having the second unit in pen, it allows us even another backup beyond what we have now. So you're actually a big organization with a relatively small implementation that's going to grow like crazy. Yeah. So for our users out there that are maybe smaller in size, what kind of advice would you give them if they're contemplating virtualization and backup? What would you share with them for advice? Well, I think Alvamar is a really good solution, especially if you're trying to back up sites and replicate it to another site or if you have another site like a satellite office, it's a great solution to back up there. In our experience, it's been really no-brainer all the way through. It's really been perfect. We don't have to worry about backups anymore because your backup is really something you wanted to work and be there and not really worry about it. You want to worry about all the other stuff you need to worry about, like what's the next device that you have to support? Great, we're talking about backup and virtualization with USC and a great case study. Frank, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate it. Fight on? Yeah. Right, thanks. But any comment on the whole Pac-10 football thing? Any predictions? What's the vibe down there? It's got to be bummed out. What we are seeing is the program. We start our first game, it's tomorrow, against Hawaii. And I think you're going to see a lot of exciting stuff at the game and then going forward. And I predict we're going to be in actually the top five. All right. All right. Thanks, man. Good luck. Thank you. Thanks very much. Thanks a lot. We'll be right back. We'll get another panel coming up shortly. We'll take a short break and we'll just reset and come right back. Two minutes.