 from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Dell EMC World here in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, John Walls. Today we are talking to Chandamoy Mandal. He is the senior consultant product marketing here at Dell EMC, as well as Pat Harkins, who is the CTO Informatics and Technology Services at Royal Victoria Health Center. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having us. Glad to be here. So Pat, I want to start with you. Tell us a little bit about Royal Health. Sure, what's at Royal Victoria Regional Health Center in Bury, Ontario. We're about an hour north of Toronto, Ontario. It's a regional health center, variety of services provided on oncology, cardiac, child and youth mental health. And what we're doing up there is providing a regional role, regional services for Meditech. We're host Meditech for a number of other hospitals in our area. And we're currently looking to expand that and increase our volume, but also change platforms as well. So tell us about some of the biggest challenges that you see. Some of the biggest challenges that we're seeing right now is with in Ontario is the actual funding model, of course. Everything's a little bit tighter, of course, but from a technology perspective, is actually staying with technology, you know, with limited budgets and so forth, and staying with the latest greatest, providing the best service to our customers, our physicians, our clinicians, which in turn is the best patient care. You know, John, you look at a client like Pat, who has very specific needs, right, in healthcare. You've got time issues, you've got privacy issues. How do you deal or what do you see as far as healthcare IT fitting in to what you're doing and services you're providing somebody like Pat, specifically knowing that these are very unique challenges and critically important challenges? Sure, we at Dell EMC look at what the problem is holistically. As Pat was mentioning, in the healthcare IT, one of the challenges we see is providing consistent high performance with low latency so that the clinicians, physicians can access the patient data in a timely way quickly. They do not spend more time, you know, entering the data or accessing the data rather spending more time with the patients. Then there is another problem that Pat kind of alluded to for any EHR, electronic health record systems. It is actually a consolidation of many workloads. You have the EHR workload itself, then you have analytics that needs to be run on it. There are other virtualized applications and then there is desktop virtualization because all the physicians, nurses, they need to access the patient data. So effectively, we need to have platforms and in this particular case, essentially all flash platforms that can offer very high performance, consistently low latency, high storage efficiency in terms of reduced footprint so that Pat and other health providers can consume less rack space, less space in the data center, reduced power and cooling, all those things. And at the end of the day, ensuring the copy data that they have between all the databases, those are efficiently managed and kind of like transforming the healthcare IT business workflow. That's what we at Dell EMC come with our all flash portfolio for health providers like Royal Victoria Health. So Pat, on your side of the fence then, from your perspective, limited resources, right? You've got to be very, very protective of what you have. And obviously you have your own challenges. I mean, how do you balance all that out in today's environment where speed matters, right? Efficiency matters now more than ever. And that's, efficiency matters big time with our physicians. And what's happening is we look for partners like Dell EMC to help us with that. One thing that was happening in our experience with efficiency and with timely presentation of data, we weren't getting that with our previous vendor. And when we went to Dell EMC, we worked with them as a partner and said, how can we improve on that? What can we look for? And we looked at flash as being that solution, not only providing the performance that we were looking for, but also providing security, built-in security that we're looking for, but also providing even more efficiency. So like, when the physicians, the clinicians were getting that data, they get it in a timely manner. And that means that they're actually spending more time with the patient. They're not searching for the data. They're not searching for reports and so forth. Are you hearing any feedback from the patients themselves about how things have changed at the health center? Well, for me, I'm still stuck in the dungeon in IT. So we're in the basement, right? So I don't necessarily... I think you can get out for the wait. Exactly, that's right. We grow in mushrooms in that area. So what's happening with that? I don't necessarily talk with the patient, but we're getting the positive feedback from our clinicians and physicians who are then, if they're happy, that means they're providing usually, providing better patient care. And so that means the patient are happy. And actually we do a lot of survey and a lot of results of our patient experience. And they are, we have seen an uptick, whether that's tech technology, but we're hoping that we have a little piece in that. Realizing digital transformation in an industry like healthcare, it just has such profound implications for the future of human progress. Can you look out a little bit into the future and just say what you see five years from now, 10 years from now, in terms of how care will change, in terms of how technology will change the patient experience? Exactly, what's happening is that we're really looking, one of the things that we're really looking at is population health. Is understanding the true, the point of patient health care from the point they're born to the point that they're their life ends. And what we're understanding is how getting that data and be able to provide that information to clinicians, see trends, be able to treat, be more proactive, instead of a reactive in healthcare. That's the goal. And with technology and the storage and collecting the data and analytics, we'll actually be able to provide that in the future. Chandra Moy from your perspective here. What is it about Extreme IO? Do you think that makes this a good match? And now you've got X2, right? And sorry, Pat, but you just deployed what, six months ago you said? Yes. So, but now you've got an X2 version to consider perhaps for your next deployment. I mean, what's the fit? Why does it work? So you mentioned Dell EMC Extreme IO, right? So the core premise of Extreme IO is we will be able to provide high performance consistently in low latency, no matter what workload you are running, no matter how many workloads you are consolidating on the same array. It is the same high performance, low latency. And we have inline all the time data reduction technologies that are all working on in-memory metadata, which essentially boils down to, we are doing all those storage operations at the control plane level without touching the data plan where the data actually leaves our SSDs. So that in turn helps us to consolidate a lot of the copies you mentioned analytics, right? You have your production database for your patient data. Then you need to load those data in an ETL system for running the analytics. Then you possibly have your test and development copies, copies for backup. Now with Extreme IO, all the copies, we do not store anything that's not unique to that entire cluster. And all the metadata is stored in memory. So for us, we can create copies that do not take any extra space and you can run workloads on the copies themselves with the same performance as in production volume and with all those data reduction and all those technologies, all those data services run. So what that in turn makes Pat's life easier is he can reduce the footprint, he can reduce or consolidate all the workloads on the array itself and his application developers can bring the medical applications online much more faster. He can run his analytics and reports faster, being proactive about the care and in a nutshell, pretty much taking the storage maintenance, storage planning, storage operations out of the picture so that they can innovate in, they can spend time innovating in IT, helping our patient care as opposed to doing routine maintenance and planning. So let's him focus on what he wants to do, right? You're not spending a majority of your time on mundane tasks. You're actually improving your operations. Give me a real life example, if you can. We talk about more efficiency and better speed and these are all good things and great terms to talk about, but in terms of actually improving patient care or providing enhanced patient care, what does it mean? How does it translate? Well, how it translates is in a lot of cases with the physicians and what we've seen already with them, just with them they're able to, because we actually improve performance, we're actually able to get more data and analytics as we say, then we're able to produce those reports and turn it around in a lot of cases a lot quicker than what we've been able to do before. An example was once we moved to Extreme I.O. and our decision support team used to take 14 hours to run some of the reports that what they were getting. They would start them at four o'clock in the evening, they would run to six a.m. in the morning, roughly. When we put the Extreme I.O. in and they ran the same reports, they started at four o'clock. By six p.m. that night, they were completed. They actually called me because they thought they had something wrong. It's never been that quick. Boss, this is too good. Yeah, exactly. I messed up. And so they actually ran the report three times and then QA'd against the report to understand that, yeah, it is that efficient now. Now that we've turned that around, we actually provide that to the clinicians. We're getting better patient care and they're able to get their information and react quicker to it as well. Talking about the massive amounts of data that's being generated that now needs to be analyzed in order to optimize performance. How much do your developers know about data and are we doing more, are you doing more training for them so that they know what they're doing? Well, we always provide training. We're always working on that. But what the thing is with that, we are providing more training and we're providing it to the point that they actually have to be able to be, to mine that data. There's so much data. It's how to manage the data, mine the data. Our analysts at RVH is that we look together to Meditech or EHR vendor as well to help us on that. But at the same time, we're looking to, you know, we're increasing our data warehouses, we're increasing our repositories and registries so that when we do have that data, we can get at it. I'm wondering too, if using this kind of cutting-edge technology has had an impact on your recruitment. Michael Dell in his keynote mentioned how increasingly employees are saying the kinds of technologies that's being used is having an impact. No, absolutely. I know our vendors, our staff are very excited about the technology. Where we were going before, they weren't, not that they weren't happy, but we're always dealing with mundane tasks. We had some issues, there were always repetitive issues that we couldn't seem to get through. Now that we've actually upgraded to the flash storage, we're moving through that, they're excited. They love the management, the ease of use. They have a lot of great ideas. Now it's actually, they're becoming innovative in their thoughts because they know they have the performance and the technology in the back end to do the job for them. I hate to ask you what's next because you're six months into your deployment. But this is a constantly evolving landscape, right? Constantly improving. Obviously the pressures at Dell EMC are responding really well. Competitive pressures. I mean, what is your roadmap? If you looked two, three years down the road in terms of the kinds of improvements you want to get, the kinds of efficiencies that you can get gains in. And realistically from a budgetary standpoint, how do you balance all that to go? Budgetary, there's always the constant discussion with our CFO and so he's been very supportive. But what we see it going is that we want to be able to be able to actually, maybe not even necessarily go to the cloud but become a private cloud for our partners and be able to provide a lot of these regional services that we couldn't before with the technology that we had and be able to expand the services. In Ontario we're seeing some budget constraints as I mentioned. A lot of these smaller sites, the patients, the customers as we would say are expecting the service. But with technology and the dollars, they might not be able to do it on their budget. But as we bring stuff back into our data center and be able to provide the technology, we'll be able to spread that out not only from storage but compute site as well as virtualization, VDI desktops and so forth. That's where I see we're going over the next little while. How much learning goes on between your colleagues at CTOs at other health centers and even health centers and hospitals in the States? Are you, do you talk a lot about? You know what, we do talk a lot. We share stories, some good, some bad. But we try to keep, we all have the same problems and why recreate the wheel when you can actually learn from other people. So a lot of the CTOs we do get together informally and formally and understand where we're going and then we also reach out through our vendors and through some of our user groups and so forth to the U.S. and to some of our cohort CTOs and so forth down there to understand what they're doing because they look at it from a different lens at times. So speaking of a different lens, from the other side of the Chom-De-Boy, if you would, where do you see this headed in terms of your assistance in healthcare IT? What X2 might be able to do? The, you know, what kinds of realizations you think are on the horizon here and what's possible for a healthcare provider like RVH? So all the organizations, if you look across the industry, they are in the digital transformation journey. Healthcare providers are no exception. And what we are enabling is the IT transformation part, right? And Dellium's Xtremio and with the Xtremio X2 that we just announced, we are enabling that IT transformation for all of our customers, including healthcare providers like Royal Victoria Health. Now, with X2 specifically, we continue to improve upon the high performance, the unmatched storage efficiencies that we offer. Effectively, again, bringing down the cost of hosting different types of workloads, managing it on a single platform with a much lower total cost of ownership for the healthcare providers like Pat, so that at the end of the day, they will be able to provide better care for their patients, be it like a doctor or clinician, trying to access the data from their endpoints or the finance or billing department trying to turn over the bills in a much shorter span, as opposed to the typical 45 days turnover that we see, right? So that's where we see not only just Xtremio X2, but Dell EMC, the all flash storage portfolio, helping the customers in their digital transformation journey in healthcare and with the IT department going into the IT transformation journey to help with it. Chandamoy Pat, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight. For John Walls, we will have more from theCUBE's coverage of Dell EMC World after this.