 Live from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference, brought to you by Nutanix. We're back at Nutanix.NEXT. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my longtime co-host Stu Miniman. Don Mims is here as the Director of Infrastructure and Virtualization at Baylor Scott and White Health. Don, great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it being here. It's very nice. Yeah, so Baylor Scott and White Health, we weren't familiar with that before we met you. Tell us a little bit about the organization. Sure, so Baylor Scott and White Health is based in Dallas, Texas. We've recently had over the last couple of years in a merger opportunity. We merged with Scott and White that is down in Temple, Texas, which is a little farther east or west and south of Dallas. And we've grown our organization to around 40 hospitals, over 500 clinics, and we're continuing to grow and make strides in the healthcare space. The Dallas booming. I mean, obviously, world-class city, but the world-class healthcare. Talk about some of the things that are happening in healthcare that are sort of driving your strategy, the challenges that you guys are having. I mean, obviously, there's EMR, there's meaningful use, there's changes in the Affordable Care Act, all that stuff, that and or other things that are really driving strategy and creating challenges for you. One of the biggest things that we're doing right now is moving into the digital space. So the patient-centered focus being in a traditional brick and mortar facility is shifting. Patients want quicker access to data, quicker access to physicians. So being able to create solutions that can deliver a physician and patient experience possibly from a mobile device, a phone, a tablet, a PC, is what we're moving the market towards. So some of the solutions that we're building and delivering are enabling a faster delivery of technology for healthcare. You know, sort of, when you think about last decade, docs were sort of averse somewhat to technology. Mobile really changed that, hasn't it? It has. How has that affected your, the back-end infrastructures? So it definitely has to be more robust as you're delivering content now, video, web chats, things like that that have to be reliable because now patient outcomes depend on that type of data delivery. The back-end has to be available more than ever at this time. So it's kind of, you actually kind of have an IoT use case in hospitals, right? And then when you start pushing video around, that's right. It's got to be very challenging. Now you're also doing some projects around DNA sequencing, is that right? We are, it's a very exciting space. We recently delivered a solution on Nutanix to create a DNA sequencing platform that hasn't been done before. As we know it, the vendor, this was the first time for the vendor, the first time for Baylor, and it has been very successful implementation and it's a very robust system today. Can you bring us inside a little bit? What were the requirements you were looking for? What led you down the path to Nutanix? Had you been using them before? It was just the first use case. It's actually not the first use case. The project actually started out as a, it was a migration, the customer was using a hosted solution. It was slow, their sequencing data was taking a long time, their results were being held up because of the way their architecture was set up. So we decided to bring it in-house and put it on a platform that was kind of new to us and try to deliver it with better speed and it definitely has done that. And does that trickle down to, what does that mean to the cost of solutions? I mean I think we all know it, DNA sequencing used to take a long time to get a lot of money and it's now, kind of do a swab type things and it's done a lot more. Yeah, so with this platform, the customer, the physician, is now not only going to use this platform to get results quicker, we're also going to start potentially offering this as a service to others and help other physicians and other clinics also get their results quicker as well. So it's going to grow over time to just an in-house solution to maybe something more broad-scale. So you saw the keynotes this morning. They're pushing a lot of information at us. Obviously, Stu and I talked about it on our open. Nutanix, a couple of years ago, sort of pivoted beyond hyper-converged infrastructure, trying to position his cloud, even though they still sell a lot of hyper-converged infrastructure, let's face it, but as a consumer, as a practitioner, how does that message relate to you? You have a lot of vendors trying to sell to you, you got cloud, different cloud strategies, cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud, dev ops, containers. So what do you want to see from a company like Nutanix? Do you want them to stick to their knitting? Hey, just give me hyper-converged infrastructure, or do you want them to take you on a journey? I wonder if you could add some color to that. Sure, and where you're going with that question is exactly the reason we chose this solution because it's way bigger than just a hyper-converged solution, that was, for me, that was kind of the first thing, that's what got us hooked. And then the innovation that's come since then and things that we've learned about the product and where they're going with automation, migration strategies of current workloads, the ease of management, the cloud strategy, the partnerships that they're making now with other partners, that's really what I like to see and that continued growth is why we chose this product because they have that vision and it's really appealing. And so are you using public cloud today? We are, in a very limited manner, as you can imagine, health care and personal health information in the cloud can be kind of scary to some people. So we have started that roadmap and we continue to try to expand that as we go. Is it fair to say that as an infrastructure professional that you're, can I summarize your infrastructure strategy as you would like to substantially mimic the attributes of a public cloud where it makes sense on-prem? Is that fair? That's exactly what we're trying to do. Speed of delivery, server provisioning, resiliency of the infrastructure, invisible infrastructure, you might have heard that term today or the past few days. That's what we're trying to accomplish. Self-service or no? Self-service internally right now, so my own staff are going to use the automation internally to deliver quicker and then eventually as we perfect that, we'll let our customers self-service. So be as cloud-like as possible but not too cloud-like too soon. Exactly. So do you feel as though, as an IT pro, that you are on the path to achieving that vision? I do, we are at Baylor, we're breaking new grounds with what we've done recently and I think the long-term vision to where we want to be is going to be big over the next few years. So we get into a lot of discussions with folks in our community that are kind of cloud bigots, I'll call them, and they say, hey, the vendors like Nutanix and even more so, vendors like IBM and HPE and EMC and their customers will never be able to achieve what Amazon achieves. My question to you is, and you probably agree with that, I mean, Amazon's ahead of you, I bet. But I would hope. But how do you feel about that? Is that okay? Do you lose sleep over that? Or do you feel as though, hey, we've made so much progress? I wonder if you could comment on that as an IT pro. Yeah, sure. So briefly on that topic, Amazon's business model is a little different than the industry that we're in. And we're not really in the technology delivery business. We're in healthcare and patient servicing. But what we do behind the scenes to enable that the patient satisfaction and patient outcomes using this web scale technology, this Amazon-like infrastructure, is something that we're going to continue to build and grow on. We'll never be in that position like Amazon is, but behind the scenes with automation and the infrastructure resiliency, using that same technology is what we're going to help accomplish. So a big part of that, because you mentioned some of the digital transformations you're doing up front, a big part of that cloud-like on-prem is making your people more productive and not focused on provisioning LUNs and servers. That's right. Plugging in cables, it's really automating as much as possible. So have you seen the effect on non-differentiated IT labor in your shop? We have. So just within our team, the amount of time the engineers have to spend on just this specific infrastructure has been greatly reduced. So we get to spend more time doing things like protecting our environment. A lot of these viruses have been coming out lately, these exploits. So we've been able to patch more diligently, remediate issues, and then we've seen other reduction in time for other teams, storage teams. They don't have to deal with our stuff anymore, they can focus in other areas. So it's really been a shift in the way we do business. So just one more follow-up, and then Stu wants to jump in. So, and this is a hard question to be precise on, but in rough terms, if you think in rough percentage terms, how much sort of the labor effort you've been able to shift to more interesting, the fun stuff, as Stu calls it, is it a 5% factor, a 20%, 50%, 100% factor? I wonder if you could just give us some. Right now the impact has been pretty small. If you look at our Nutanix infrastructure today, it's a very small portion of our overall infrastructure since it's fairly new. But I can tell you the time that we spend on that right now is very minimal, and I have one engineer that oversees the entire infrastructure at this point, freeing up multiple other resources to do other things. So it's been an improvement. And so pre-hyper-converged, if you didn't go that direction, you'd have more than one engineer? Oh, I'd probably have at least three times as many. So three X factor, wow. Just because there's so many other components that you have to manage that aren't just specific to that one stack. Right, yeah. You've got virtualization in your title. How do you look at virtualization today? Where are you in that journey? We've been hearing in a lot of these shows that we've been at. Virtualization feels like it's played out for the most part. We know where it is. Cloud has been the big discussion. Where is it in your top? So kind of two paths in my infrastructure. We have server virtualization, which is traditional virtualizing the compute workload. And then also on application virtualization, so app delivery. And I think there's still a lot of room for growth in both of those aspects. Application delivery is going to continue to morph and it can be delivered from multiple different platforms and I can see it doing that over time. Server virtualization is a way to go. What we're doing there is trying to continue to deliver the capacity that we're at or continue to grow it, but at the same time shrinking that hardware footprint and relieving some of the stress in the data center. And on server virtualization, what are you using today? For server virtualization, we use VMware, ESX. Have you looked at the HV stuff at all? We have, and I'm very excited about that. And it's kind of one of those things where you can't jump in with two feet right off the bat just because it is a little new and you feel like you need to really look at it really closely. But at the same time, I'm pretty confident that it's going to be a good long-term replacement as we continue to look at it. One of the, Nutanix has really been looking out for their future plans. One share, what resonates with you and what about yourself? What kind of future strategy do you have? What are you looking for from the vendor community to help you do even more with your resources? So the vendor community definitely, this is kind of a new area for them. A lot of the application vendors we talk to aren't really familiar with this platform. So I think as this product grows and as this space grows, I think more vendor awareness is going to come about and they're going to be more comfortable with this as a solution. Yeah, especially healthcare. It's all those ISVs that need to integrate and support and say, yes, I'm okay with it. We saw that with virtualization at first. And healthcare is always traditionally a little bit behind because it's a little more conservative space. So I think it'll take a little bit of time for them to feel comfortable there as well. So what are the big problems you're trying to solve today from an infrastructure standpoint? Well, financial issues are always a topic, right? So what we're trying to do is deliver infrastructure to support our patients at a cost-effective way. So being as frugal with the money that we do have and buying the right technology and not spending a lot of money on a diverse stack and wasting financial. I mean, you just basically reduced your IT labor in that little part of the world by a factor of three X as we talked about. Is there a gain-sharing philosophy where some of that reduction comes back to you for innovation or is it just to go back to other parts of the hospital? It will go back probably just to the bigger team. I mean, there are benefits to us, specifically that we're going to achieve, but overall that time saving goes back and allows different teams to do other things which overall will help improve our whole environment. So the keynote today, I was talking to you off camera about one-click migration. There was a database migration and I think it was one-click DR as well, but I'm interested in the database stuff. You've got some experience with databases. Actually, let me ask you, is that part of the infrastructure definition as database on down? It is, yep. Okay, so what was your reaction to the sort of one-click database migration? It's very exciting. I think that's going to help in the aspect of migrating workloads from legacy or traditional to this new platform. I think there's still some components that you have to consider. The migration is very nice, but validation, testing, all those kind of components also have to be part of that whole plan. So if I looked at the, I mean, database migrations can sometimes be real hair balls. So if I look at the cycle, the anatomy of a migration, let's say it takes an amount of time. What is that amount of time? On average, I know it's a hard, it's one of those stupid average questions. It can vary based on size. Yeah, I know it's a big, it depends. But what percent of that value chain, if you will, that sequence chain is Nutanix attacking with what you saw today in your view? So what you do is reduce the execution part of that migration and you probably reduce a lot of the planning phase of that because in any kind of a database migration, there are so many factors that go into that. And a lot of the discussion is around how we're going to move this workload to this new space. And Nutanix has solved that by taking care of the how, and then you just need to figure out how you're going to validate, test it, and confirm that once it's there, everything continues to work as expected. So I think you've reduced the time of planning and execution both. I mean, the planning piece has actually got to be a huge portion. Huge. Is it half of the total? It's probably at least half. Yeah, I would think so. It's the better you plan the better you're going to execute, right? Yeah, right, right. Okay, good. Well, Don, I'll give you a last word on futures. What kinds of things are you working on that you share with us? So for us, the future is going to be to continue to converge the stack. We're going to continue to move forward with automation, try to reduce the delivery time for applications and servers and infrastructure, and eventually simplify our management layer and spend more time doing other things, doing more fun stuff, and that's what we're looking to do. Love it. As I would say, love having the practitioner zombie at the pepper questions and get the real story. So, Don, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. You're very welcome. All right, keep it right there, everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break.