 Live from New Orleans, Louisiana at theCUBE. Covering .NEXT Conference 2018, brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage here of Nutanix .NEXT 2018 here in New Orleans, Louisiana. The brass bands are going, talking to lots of customers. Been a great event so far, and for Keith Townsend and I'm Stu Miniman, we always love to be able to talk to customers. Each one of them has a different story, different analysis, different challenges they're facing. Happy to welcome Alex Walker, who's the Senior Vice President of IT at IBC Bank out of Texas. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. All right, so you've actually been going to all the shows just like I have at this Keith's first one. He's been getting the inaugural visit here, but first of all, tell us about yourself, a little bit of background, what you run at the bank and just give us a quick sketch of the bank. Oh, let's start with the banks. We're in our 51st year, we are based in Laredo, Texas, and it's a community bank, mostly in commercial, right? We are 19, according to the Forbes magazine, best banks in the country, so we went up from 46 to 19 this year. Congrats. So great accomplishments for the bank. It's a great operation. We're in 88 cities in Texas and Oklahoma and about 13 million in assets. Great, and what's under your purview as the SVP of IT? Okay, so you want all IT for the bank? Not the development side of it, but operations, infrastructure, yes. Okay, 51 year old company, finance, going through a lot of changes. Before we get into the tech, just give us one or some of the stresses and strains that you're feeling as a business. Well, regulation is one, right? Over the last several years, the increasing regulation has caused a tremendous growth in our auditing, right, the department and a lot of cost to the bank. I started about three and a half years ago and the bank was looking at how do we prepare for a change, right? Potentially hoping for some change in the regulatory climate and so forth, but we needed to prepare for that and prepare for growth. So we end to take a look at our infrastructure, everything across the board. Yeah, maybe organizationally, where does that pension for change come from? What kind of air cover do you get from this exercise? What's, how's the staff underneath? How do they take change? Well, initially there was a lot of reluctance, right? People were in the status quo, they're comfortable with what they had, not necessarily happy with it, but taking on change is, it's difficult, right? So we looked at operational costs, some of the basic things. We had two data centers at the time, literally 150 yards apart from each other. So we said, we can do more, right? The bank's motto is we do more. And so we said, how do we do more for the bank, for the customers? Improve the quality of the services, the uptime and reduce cost. So, Alex, you're a bank. So change in a bank a lot of times means going from one storage array vendor to another storage array vendor and that's a big deal, big set of conversations. When you're sitting at the 19th best bank and then the 14th, you don't get there by turning over the table, the table. You get there by being steady. What made you guys actually consider something as revolutionary as HCI when it came to change? Well, when we'd looked at the infrastructure that we had and it goes back to Simon Sennig. Start with why, right? Why are we doing this? I asked my department when I first started who are our competitors? And they gave us the names of the local banks and so forth and the usual suspects, the large banks. And I said, no, they're not. That's the bank's customers. Our competitors are AWS, Rackspace, Microsoft Azure, Google, Cloud. These are the hosting companies. We host applications for our customers. We're shared services for our bank. Once we understand who we are, then we have to take a different approach because now if we're competing with them, it's no wonder that the bank is starting to branch out and do their own thing, right? Some getting contracts with the cloud providers or with other service providers because we're too far behind. We're not cost effective. We're not competitive, right? So it doesn't mean that we want to build massive data centers everywhere but we need to have the same level of services that they provide. So from a validation perspective, you started to look at the cost of hyper-converts in general, I'm sorry, how long have you guys been a Nutanix customer? Three years. Okay, so from a cost perspective, as you started to look at hyper-converged, how did you even begin to compare it to your existing environment? Well, I looked at the studies that are out there. In particular, there was an IDC study done in 2015 that said that customers of like size, all different types of customers, were getting these benefits. I said, wow, if I could get those, that'd be really cool, right? So I went to the board, I went to my boss, the CIO, and I said, I think we could get this. This would be really good, but then again, people said, we never heard of Nutanix, what is this? Our applications aren't certified with Nutanix. You know, those type of arguments. And I said, well, let's just do a POC and let's bring this in. And we'll run VMware on it, which is what we were certified at the time, our applications. And I said, let's look at this infrastructure. So we brought in a POC, but what we did is we took Nutanix and had them talk directly to my accounting, the banks accounting department, right? We all know we all work for accountants eventually, right? And so we said, if we can get them to agree that if we can get these, then they're going to be behind us from the ROI and TCO models, right? So we went through it and said, what are we paying for this? What are we paying for that? What's the ongoing rates for this? Let's get some samples of, if we ordered this and replaced it. We had 11 storage frames from seven different vendors, or we couldn't move data around from one storage frame to another because we had, over time, acquired a lot of different frames and like most places, never retired them, right? And so, all that layer of complexity, what we did is we said, on this POC, let's test this out. Okay, cut to the chase. We got the numbers, we were then three to 5% of everything that came out in that study. And so we bought that equipment immediately placed our first order, which was 12 nodes. Still want to keep it constrained, still want to, I put a foot in the water, but I said, this is a technology I'm betting on five years. We'll write it off in five years, we can get rid of it and move on to the next thing. What happened was we were getting such good wins. We actually completed in our five-year model, we completed that in roughly around two years. Because the acceleration based upon the benefits that we got, some of the requirements that we had for change within the organization replace all equipment and so forth, we were able to accelerate that. Not only that, we just finished upgrading our DR site, which was not part of that five-year plan and just completed that. And so within three years, we've now are 97% on Nutanix and we just took delivery of 24 of the Robo nodes, which we're going to put out in our branch operations. That'll leave us with five servers that are not Nutanix other than our core AIX system. Yeah. Alex, can you tell us, what were the key metrics that you were looking at to measure success and you did some PCO studies, you actually presented here at the conference, what do you recommend to your peers as to how they should be able to evaluate rolling out something like this? Well, for one, a big one was licensing, right? It's far more efficient. What we got, for example, we got, we were able to take our fiber channel switches running about a quarter of a million plus each and get rid of those. When we look at it, the bandwidth that's taken on the servers, it's writing data to storage, going through the storage controller, going into the sand and coming back, that delay was substantial. So much so that when we moved all of our databases into Nutanix and eliminated that infrastructure, we're running 66% faster than we did on current technology on a conventional architecture. What was the business response on this? Did it change anything in the business? What did the users say? Well, when the users' jobs ran far faster than they did before, when we went back and said, I don't need as many Microsoft SQL licenses as I did before for our consolidation, fewer cores, tremendous benefits. Our SQL management team, for example, it takes far less time to stand up servers, do migrations, things like that. So what was the delta between the predicted ROI and the realized ROI? You guys realized your savings much quicker. What were the surprises? Well, the surprises were, we were conservative. We didn't include any soft costs. Those are difficult to count for, right? We missed it. Me, Steve Kaplan, our old iGuy, the TCO guy for Nutanix, go back and forth on the soft costs. Don't show me soft costs. Show me where I can get the money back to my account is who we all have to report to. Correct, right? So what we found is the fact that we were conservative, we were getting much better benefits. So again, when we look at the servers, we bought too many cores, right? So now it's a good problem. Now I can migrate more systems I did anticipate based upon that spin. So tying the technology to the financial benefits, the reduction in latency allowed you to stop spending money on more cores that you didn't need. Less latency equals better performance, better performance equals more dense units. More dense units means less money spent. So we actually shut down one of the data centers and migrated into a single data center. And we're running somewhere around a third, a little bit more than a third of that data center. So the electrical spend is down in aggregate, roughly around 40%. So that's real money. Okay, you mentioned that you're also using Nutanix for disaster recovery. Tell us what led to that. That's a newer solution from Nutanix. How'd that experience go? We're using the Nutanix replication for that. And when we, our legacy was that some of them were taped, some of it was migrating data, a typical older DR type of situation. We're in our testing now, and that's a little bit complex because we have to protect that DR site from production. But we're mirroring the systems exactly as they are in production. So when you spin it up, it's live, right? So we have to build a barrier between those systems. So if we take that, even to taking that into account, we can get it up in hours rather than, and when we say hours, like a couple of hours, rather than the 12 to 24 hours that we were before. And it's 10 systems, not four systems. So roughly about 100 servers or so minimally. Great, Alex, look forward a little bit. Tell us what's on your roadmap, what kind of things you're doing and if there's intersections with Nutanix there. We're looking at VDI, for example, something that we, now that we've re-engineered our network as well, that we're looking at doing that for branch operations and security, right? But looking forward into AI and blockchain and which is going to be very disruptive for financial institutions. Okay, you mentioned blockchain, so it definitely need to get your take as to what can you share either personally or from the big standpoint? Cryptocurrency, of course, well I am mining and I do pay taxes on it. But realistically, I'm mining with four video cards. It's really understand from, as a chief technologist, I really need to understand these things. You don't have a Nutanix cluster off on the side running this. No, no, I did ask if I could have the old data center and the, when we're doing, I'm doing that really effectively, better understand it. But I think what we're looking at at blockchain is tremendous opportunities for many improvements in security and loss prevention and other types of things within the financial side. I'm seeing a lot of big financial institutions that are getting filing for patents on blockchains and they're bringing it up in their 10Ks is potentially very disruptive and very expensive and some of them are saying specifically cryptocurrency and blockchain and some of them are saying new competition in the market, right? So we take that to kind of mean that they're thinking about the same things we are. So as you keep an eye on the future, especially when it comes to something like blockchain, this relatively inefficient at processing transactions, how does that impact your data center strategy? You guys just went down from a huge space reduced electrical power by 40%. Any considerations around kind of the blockchain at a commercial level of use within the bank and how it might impact your strategy? We're a conservative bank. So we're having discussions about what does that mean? Where do we think this might come in? And it's very early for us, right? We've been busy with the data center moves and other types of things too. So we're starting to look at that and have a few conversations about what do we think it is? We're talking to some of our business partners and say how might we cooperate with you guys to do, excuse me, to use some of this blockchain technology. It's a different way of doing it. In the past, we might use relational databases like SQL Server or something to do some of this work. Where distributed ledger might be a far easier, better way to do that. So it's another tool. I like to say that video didn't kill the radio star, right? There's more type of radio out there than there ever was. So this is another tool that we have to look and say, how do we utilize this? The right technology for the right job. And we're being very cautious about that. All right, well, Alex Walker, really appreciate you sharing all the updates on IBC Bank. Pleasure to catch up with you and look forward to seeing it. More of the Nutanix shows in the future. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. More coverage here at Nutanix.NEXT, New Orleans. Thanks for watching theCUBE.