 is Dave Vellante and we're live at VMworld 2012. We're here in the hang center, hang space, right across from where the keynotes are. We've got the CEO round table going on. It's a very interesting eclectic mix of CEOs. Pat Gelsinger right now is speaking. We've got Michael Dell up there, Tom Georgins, and I believe Paul Moritz and Joe Tucci are also up there, but we're here in the queue. And this is day one of VMworld 2012. I'm here with Anil Seda, who is with Postmedia. He's involved in the storage side of the business. He supervises the mid-range services and storage, and we're here at VMworld. Welcome. Thank you. Appreciate you coming on the queue. Yeah, so it's quite an event now. Up to 20,000 people. I've been surprised at the crowd. You've got your Vmug button on. That's right. So Vmug ambassador, so that's one of the most robust user groups out there for sure. It's just been an amazing explosion of innovation, both on the supply side and on the consumer side, isn't it? That is correct, and in fact, I'm the manager of a Vmug leader, and that's where I'm wearing this. I was out at the Vmug booth earlier, volunteering at the booth. Vmug's are great events. I've been to several. Our Vexperts, two men a man, goes to all of them in New England. That's where the value is. Yeah, yeah. It's really where the rubber meets the road. You meet all the practitioners, and... That's right. Yeah, so, well, let's talk about, first tell us a little bit about Postmedia and your role there. So Postmedia is the largest newspaper company in Canada by VF Circulation. We own 10 of the top dailies in Canada, and we also have an extensive online and mobile platform environment. So we focus on news and media content generation, but at the same time, we also have an FB and FOMART content manager which actually people can subscribe to for news feeds. Okay, and your role there? I'm the Midrange Services and Storage Supervisor with Postmedia Network. I manage all of our backup recovery, storage, and I have an indirect role into virtualization architecture, and I also manage our UNIX Linux platforms. Okay, so how do you utilize VMware? Take us through your journey from VMware. When did it start, and where are you today, and where are you going? So I joined Postmedia just last year, but before that, a year before that, Postmedia started on to the VMware platform. The initial move was slow because users were a little bit fearful of how virtualization would impact the environment and what kind of impacts it would be on performance and agility. And the traditional sense was always that, okay, you're moving to machine critical database environments, you're moving our web server environments into a virtualization architecture that we have no control over was the fear. And again, we've kind of influenced the users, tried to make them understand how virtualization works, shown them true successes with virtualization, and we've won over the trust of a majority of the organization in that sense. What percent of your apps are virtualized? As of now, we have around 65% virtualization completed. 65% of your apps are virtualized? Our entire IT infrastructure. And we are now branching out and actually virtualizing our remote infrastructure also. So we've got 10 to more sites that we are in the process of virtualizing. So talk about the impact of virtualization on storage. I mean, as Steve Herd was saying today, and the keynotes have done a great job with compute and memory storage with the VAI efforts and the integration has been better. And obviously backup has been better. Is it where you want it to be as a practitioner? Is it fixed, so to speak? In the past with these independent silos that, okay, this is a server group, that's a storage group. And they both worked independently. I don't think there was much of an efficiency from an operational standpoint coming into the IT infrastructure as a whole. Because what was happening was the skill set was being diminished in one way because virtualization architects were not really seeing the underlying benefits of storage. And the same was not applying to the storage environment. So I think with the vStorage APIs that have come out through VMware, there has been a tremendous integration or some kind of a sync to manage or leverage your performance and the IT infrastructure as a whole. We personally have observed that with the use of the VAI API, we've been able to move forward with our virtualization strategy much faster. Specifically when you run RDM disks, I don't know about your raw device mappings. It makes it a lot more easier to control those devices. Your storage emotion becomes a lot more simpler because CPU is offloaded to the storage. The same is applied to your cloning capabilities. So earlier, if you would clone a VM, it would take maybe an hour or two hours depending on the type of VM it was. Now when you offload that work back to the storage array, it finishes off in minutes. So there's a huge plus to it. And now with vSphere 5, VMware has introduced newer capabilities. Also with storage awareness like Vasa. And all of a sudden, you can kind of correlate as to how the disk provisioning works, how the thin pool architecture would work, and they all work together a lot better now. Are you on vSphere 5? Partially. We have our lab environment on vSphere 5. Our backup software was old and that was the only hindrance in moving forward with vSphere 5. What was the hindrance with the backup software? The backup software. It wouldn't work with the newer capabilities of vSphere 5. So we are now in the process of upgrading our backup software and then we'll move forward with vSphere 5. Okay, can you talk about your storage infrastructure in some detail? What does it look like? So we have a couple of VNX 5700s. We also have two Clarion CX4960s. We have three HPEVAs. We have two Sun Storage arrays. So we've got a good amount of storage infrastructure in place. Our focus is always on media and pictures and video type of content because we are a newspaper company. But at the same time, we are getting into real-time analytics. Social media is a huge new demand for newspaper organizations, specifically for the ones that are going digital. So we need high-performance computing. We need sustained computing capabilities and we are looking for environment that is agile in the sense that we can either scale up very quickly or we can provide performance for random IO loads. Okay, so and then your backup infrastructure? Yeah, so we use an HPE Data Protector software in our backup infrastructure. And again, up until now, the focus wasn't as much on the backup infrastructure because it was doing its job but with newer capabilities that are out there, it's time to upgrade it. Okay, so you're moving to another backup software environment? We don't know yet if it will be a brand new software or whether it will be just an update of HPE Data Protector, but right now that's... But you're moving to vSphere 5 and you're moving to backup solution for vSphere 5. So it's either going to be an upgrade to Data Protector or some other solution that supports vSphere 5. That's correct. And so in terms of the storage infrastructure, in terms of its relationship with your VMware infrastructure, what does that look like? Is all the storage integrated? No. We have, as I mentioned, we are only 65% virtualized here. So we still have some test-dev environments and we have some part of our production environment running on old legacy systems. And that is the reason we have to keep the old storage around. And as we move forward with virtualization, we are also moving them into our EMC storage array. The VNX. The VNX is obviously, we just did a survey in Wikibon and VNX scored very high marks for integration. I would fully agree with that. It was number one, actually. In terms of the robustness and the capabilities it provides, like automated tiering through FAST. We didn't have that before we were dying for that in terms of the performance capabilities because what you had to do as a company was always keep your machine critical data on flash, even though it was not always used. So now with automated tiering, we do use flash as a major strategy, but then when we need disk space or we need massive amount of disk space, but not all data is hot, we can move the less used data to a lower NLSAS or SAS kind of for our data disks. Yeah, we evaluated, I think it was probably 80 integration points. And then we talked to users to wait the importance of each of those integration points. So we'd scored the number of integration points as a binary, yes, no. And we waited the value of that integration point and then sort of rated the quality on each. And let's say VNX for second year in a row was number one, which is impressive. That's a lot of work. I mean, you can see this list is just, it's endless. Right, well, one more advantage is like, now you don't need multiple solutions for our remote sites also. We can use a common Unisphere remote manager software. So the look and feel is same across the board. The same kind of software integrates well. Plus it's got all these plugins that work with VMware. So it does a very comprehensive job. So what does that do for you, Anil? What drives your IT productivity? It simplifies your environment. And it reduces the amount of issues that we had in our environment. I can give you an example. Last year we were struggling with storage performance in a major way. In a sense that we were having P1s created multiple times in the week. So after making partial move to VNX, we've started to see significant improvements. Other EMC products that integrate with VNX is like the EMC recovery point appliances. They have been a significant benefit to us. Because data replication is far more simplified. Now VNX offers block and file together. So that's a plus again, because all of a sudden you can consolidate these individual file servers all across the board. So now you have an integrated option. It is all working off the storage array. You can provision far better. So it's giving a significant boost. Excellent. So what's the future hold for you guys? The future is looking very bright. We are looking forward to moving away from the older traditional arrays to VNX. Our workload is moving there. Our newspaper.com infrastructure, which is like a web farm of online websites, is going to move into that. Our mission critical workloads like Oracle Database and other environments, we are working with our application teams to virtualize them. And again, we have successfully worked with VMware SRM to perform a data center failover. Not just once, multiple times. And we are just hoping to utilize all the capabilities that we certify gives. In fact, we're like lapping it up. So yeah. So you're going to virtualize Oracle? Oh yeah. I've virtualized Oracle before. You're going to use OVM for that? Always. Yeah. No, OVM, Oracle virtual machine? No, definitely not. That's not the plan for sure. I'll tell you Oracle. I'm so surprised to hear that. Well, it's not too surprising for me, but I know where you're coming from, I know. Okay, so how does Oracle react when they find out that you're going to go in that direction? Do they say, great, we'll help? Oh no, yeah. You must have heard from different sources how Oracle is opposing it. But in my opinion, Oracle needs to come forward as a partner and not as an opposer. Yes, they've got their own product, but their own product has certain benefits. VMware is an industry leader in virtualization today. So customers have their own unique requirements instead of opposing their customer requirements and hindering their business. It is always better to work with the customer. At the end of the day, Oracle wants to make money on Oracle licensing, of course. And there are always good ways of doing it, is my opinion on that. Okay, so what you've chosen, you said you've done virtualized Oracle applications in the past using non-Oracle virtualization or non-Oracle hypervisors. And there's certain implied risks of doing that from the standpoint of Oracle supporting it or not supporting that, but the business benefits you've decided outweigh, the potential risk. Actually, even the risks are not that high. Many people don't understand that Oracle tells you that they don't support VMware explicitly. That's fine. They don't support your storage array. They don't support your hardware server. So that's nothing new. Plus, anytime they come back to you and say that, okay, you need to demonstrate this particular function in a physical machine, today's technology has significantly improved. You can actually quickly run a backup software, perform granular recovery to physical hardware using the same image from a VM and the bare metal recovery works great. You can actually work with them on that. So there's a lot of tongue-in-cheek because we've done a lot of work on this. We've talked to a number of customers and our advice is damn the torpedoes, you absolutely should virtualize Oracle. The benefits are significant unless there's a really strong business reason not to do it. Well, we had like $600,000 of savings in the past when I virtualized Oracle every year. Yeah. Where do savings come from? Primarily, you know, relieving the old infrastructure and of course, consolidating your Oracle license. Ah, that's why. That's over a five year period of $600,000 savings. It's just significant. That drops right to the bottom line and makes the CFO happy, that's outstanding. All right, Anil, well listen, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your story with us. Thank you very much for the opportunity. Good luck with everything and good luck with the Vmugs. Thank you very much. All right, keep it right here. This is Dave Vellante and we'll be right back with our next guest who is BJ Jenkins from EMC's BRS division right after this.