 Live from the Mendeley Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2016. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. Welcome back to theCUBE here at VMworld 2016. I'm Stu Miniman joined by Mark Farley and happy to welcome to the program got a returning guest Brian Carmody who's the CTO of Infinidat and always happy to have a user on. It's Matt Radomacher who's with DSW, so welcome to the program. Thank you. All right, so Matt, DSW, we all are familiar with DSW. I know I shopped there, some of my wife's there taking the kids back to school this week. So they've all got new shoes. You know, it tells us a little bit about your role and kind of the purview of IT that you cover there. So I'm currently the infrastructure architect at DSW. Kind of overall looking at the architectural vision as we continue to expand and grow the business, I'm making sure that our technology stays up with it. All right, so do you have, is it the corporate team? Do you have to deal with all of the locations? You know, what's under what you cover? Yeah, I'm focused with anything infrastructure related. So yeah, corporate and stores. Yeah, so that's a big deal. So, you know, maybe you can just tell us a little bit about how much staff you have there and maybe some of the kind of business drivers that was leading you to, you know, look at some new ways of doing things. We have about 200 in IT. We are heavily focused on merging our dot com environments with our store and, you know, digital mesh is a big piece right now. So Brian, you know, you've worked with DSW here, a big global, you know, company, often they are a little bit risk averse to tell us what's getting Infinidat into companies like DSW and kind of the customer profile for this thing. So I mean, Mado's were delighted to have DSW Inc. as part of the Infinidat community. And, you know, I think what kind of drove the work that's been done recently with storage is just the phenomenal growth of their business. Sustained, rapid growth of the online and the retail presence. And, you know, Matt's job and his team is kind of to make sure that the IT infrastructure is scaling to meet those business requirements. And, you know, as they've been working to scale their compute and networking layers, they kind of got to the point where the storage layer became the bottleneck. Now even though they were using flagship technology from a market leading company, they were seeing response times in latency is 300 milliseconds and stuff like this. So Matt led an effort to take a look at what was going out there in the field and figure out how to make a super scalable storage layer. And I think those driving business demands is what drove that evaluation, how to look and see what's the state of the art and can we do better from where we are today. We were delighted to be part of the process and we're delighted to have you as part of the community now. Yeah. We were very focused on looking at something that was gonna differentiate us. Looking at some of the other competitors, I didn't see a lot of differentiation between them and that was one of the things that really attracted us to Infinidat. They separated themselves from others in their design and architecture. Well, Matt, we always love to hear an IT department that's looking to deliver for the business and be differentiated because for so long IT, we've kind of said they've done the undifferentiated heavy lifting but wouldn't it just be easy to just buy some flash solution? I mean, that's what everybody's been telling you, I'm sure. Yes. Yeah. It was a challenge getting buy off on that. Yeah, we did a lot of research, talked to a lot of people. I talked to all my co-workers around town, like fellow storage admins, storage engineers, who were working with other products. I did a ton of research before we moved forward with pulling in Infinidat. So I understand it was a competitive environment. You were looking at other vendors who won't talk about them. But what were the workloads or what was the test bed that you used that led you to the decision? So with Infinidat, we actually bought them in in-house. We ran a POC and we actually put real world load on it. So I moved all of our Dev and QA, a bunch of our Dev and QA environments over and then ran our regular testing that the Dev and QA teams run anyway. They just ran them on the new box and they were amazed at the difference. And they didn't even know I'd switched. They just wondered why their numbers all of a sudden improved. And of course, the Infinidat box is known for its fantastic reliability. Did you do any testing with that? Did you do any chaos, monkey type things to the system? We pulled about everything. Yeah, in fact, we got called up. What are you guys doing to this box? Yes. And it kept ticking. Yes, we didn't have a single problem with any of the tests we did. Very interesting. Brian, is this kind of a typical deployment your customers, they actually bring in a POC, run real workloads, not some kind of test, make-believe workload? Yeah, absolutely. The best way to reduce risk when you make a change in your IT environment is to have a very accurate model of what that workload is gonna look like when you start diverting workload over to new technology. And we partnered and we used a very rigorous approach. And I mean, Matt, if you'd like to elaborate on some of the differentials and give any details off the top of your head, that'd be awesome. There are some significant changes. So some of our build processes we tested on, we went from four hours for some processes to work through to seven minutes. We went through another, some of our batch processing that we ran on the environment, went from six hours down to 40 minutes. It was just incredible improvement that was business-facing, that it was easy for the business to understand. It's not just a cool storage technology that we just are really excited about. This will actually make a big difference to the company. It's gotta be the whole DevOps world, right? I mean, if people aren't thinking about it, one of your biggest competitors is here in Las Vegas, Zappos, and it's the big online part of Amazon. I think everybody understands it's a big DevOps shop. And so to compete with them, you've got to have an environment that allows you to play the same game that they do. So Matt, how was, I mean, traditionally when you do any type of migration, especially data migration, the buy-in from the business lines and the application owners, sometimes they're reluctant to, and I think the experience with you guys was a little different. Yeah, yeah, so exact opposite. Once we started migrating people over, every business segment came to me, please move us tomorrow. Because as everybody got migrated, their performance improved so dramatically from the app side that everybody else wanted on. So it was a fantastic experience migrating. So one of the big challenges in storage is not just kind of the day one, but day two, scaling, expanding, migration. What's your experience been so far? So far it's been extremely smooth. We had it up in four hours. Within 72 hours, we had 800 of RVMs migrated over within the first week, we had the entire VMware environment migrated and we saw, what is it, 700% improvement? So you're peaking at 300 milliseconds, and I think you were at 700 microseconds after that. And we were running at 20,000 IOPS, now we're spiking to 177,000 IOPS. So it's been phenomenal. That's a lot of clicks on phones and tablets and whatnot. And it's a very important point. What Matt's talking about is the baseline IOPS went from 30,000, and as they started moving workload over their baseline, started creeping up to 60, to 70, and I think it's averaging around 77. The last time we looked in our support cloud, they're hitting around 77,000. So that means that that was latent demand that was not being serviced because of latency limitations. So this is driving up utilization of CPU resources. It means doing more work with less CPU cores, which impacts your licensing. I mean, it basically just lifts the entire business up when you remove a bottleneck. I think as an infrastructure architect, that's kind of the game is just finding new bottlenecks and making them go away. And I'm really, really happy to be able to help you. Yeah, that's a great bottom line right there. Yes, indeed. Amazing bottom line. Yeah, literally our entire stack from the app side improved, like everywhere. Sorry, so Matt, does this take over your entire storage footprint inside your environment? What do you see going forward? Going forward, it's a phased approach, but eventually, yes. All right, so we see. What I want to ask you beyond, because kind of the product today, Infinidat's been out for a little over a year, I believe it is, what do you see from them? What are you asking from them and the rest of your partners going forward to make your job easier? More integration, more like we're asking for more advanced cloning features. One of the tools we really make use of right now, we take snaps of our production environment and then you take clones of those and roll them all the way down the stack. So we have 12 other environments that all get refreshed right from the clone. We couldn't do that with our previous technology. We can now, cost effectively. Having more functionality around that and then having more integration with VMware, yeah. That's great. So Brian, over the last year, a lot of updates in the products. Why don't you give us kind of today, respond to what Matt's saying. Give us a little bit of where things are going. Sure, so there's always a lot of marketing and hand waving and selling that, but at the end of the day, I think what architects and CIOs and CTOs care about are the completeness of the features head. Do you have all the checkboxes to meet our technical requirements? And then ultimately it's about reliability and TCO. So over the past year, we finally brought our NAS function within the box has gone GA. So now you can do mainframe, carrier grade, petabyte scale, NAS right alongside the block storm. And that's a lot of cool stuff. And we have a lot of game changing features coming a little bit later in this year. That we're gonna be announcing at the beginning of the fourth quarter where the purpose is to even further radically reduce the TCL of the system. And basically what we're gonna be doing is we're gonna be announcing support for inline compression which gives customers a guarantee of a 2x increase in usable capacity on the box, brings scalability even further and improves the TCO equation. We have a brand new analytics platform that's coming which allows you to do multi-dimensional operational analysis of the performance of your storage fabric. We have major updates to our ice guzzly work. And all the stuff we're doing is designed to support mission critical enterprise computing like the work that DSW Inc is doing and the large managed service providers and cloud providers that are trying to bring those service levels but do it at multi-petabyte scale. So there's a lot of cool stuff in there right now. There's a lot of cool stuff coming later this year. And we're super, super excited to make it happen. Great, Matt, I believe it's your second year at VMworld, getting close to the end of show. What kind of things are exciting you? What are you gonna be bringing back to your team is to get your experience here? The IoT is the most interesting, compelling thing to me right now. Internet of things, the impact to what it can have for retail, that's what I'm most interested in right now. And where that's gonna go. Yeah, IoT is gonna be in all of our shoes. It's gonna be all our wearables. It's gonna be everywhere. So absolutely, I think from technology standpoint, all of your suppliers are there. Boy, that's an exciting piece. Brian, how about your CTO hat on? Outside of, I know the awesome stuff you guys have been doing. With my CTO fedora on. Yeah, yeah, but just, you know, what kind of gets you excited that you've seen at the show? Sure, so I mean, I definitely agree with Matt. I mean, the industrial internet of things and the instrumentation of supply chains is something that touches every industry from retail, manufacturing. We have trucking customers who 10 years ago, their IT applications were all just simple crud apps and now these guys are streaming data off the can buses on their trucks and streaming that into their data centers where they can analyze and optimize the fuel burn on their vehicles and stuff like that. When you look at next generation advertising and stuff like that in retail locations, there's amazing stuff there. But VMworld is always an infrastructure focused event. And there's so much cool innovation. One of the places right next to us on the floor was Commvault which is a awesome partner of ours. It is a combination of a solution with us that's half the price of data domain triple the performance. So if anybody still has time, definitely go check out the Commvault booth because they have really, really cool software. But I think for storage people, the most interesting paradigm shift that's going on right now is the transition away from media centric designs. You know, in 1996, it was put all your data on 15,000 RPM drives. Now the same folks are telling customers, put all your data on NAND flash or 3D cross-point or whatever. But we think that the state of the art in storage is moving away from dependence on physical media and moving toward software defined where we're actually competing with each other on the strengths of our computer algorithms, of our data placement, on our machine learning systems for data classification. And we think that that going forward really is the final frontier. And storage is becoming even more sexy but media is starting to kind of get a little boring. So Brian, I'm not sure if I can say that Brian, that storage is quite sexy yet but absolutely we get a little bit too excited about the new shiny, shiny individual tool. It's the waves, it's the applications, it's new ways of doing things, it's helping customers really differentiate and drive their business forward that I know getting us excited in a lot of that discussion here. So, Matt Rademacher, really appreciate you coming here. You're now a CUBE alumni. Welcome you back anytime. Brian Carmody, always great to catch up. Mark, thanks so much for joining me. Thanks very much, guys. We're getting towards the end here of three days of live wall-to-wall coverage, two sets, VMworld 2016. Check out silkenangle.tv for all the coverage and thanks so much for watching the CUBE.