 Okay, we're back. This is the Dell Storage Forum, and we're live. This is theCUBE. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman of Wikibon.org. SiliconANGLE is here. This is our spotlight on the customer. We're here with Bob Plankers, who's with the University of Wisconsin. Interestingly, Bob is a virtualization and cloud architect, which is a new and emerging title. You hear a lot about storage admin, and sysadmin, and VMware admin. And Bob, first of all, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much, Dave. And we're witnessing the transformation of many companies. We're obviously here, seeing Dell transform, but there's a transformation going on within IT in terms of people gaining new skills. And so I'm intrigued by your title of virtualization and cloud architect. What is that all about? That basically means I talk a lot about a lot of different things all the time. I liken it to, I think on Twitter I call myself a hardcore IT generalist. And being a virtualization guy, being a cloud guy, you end up being a little bit of storage, a little bit of networking, a little bit of server, a little bit, and a whole lot of process, a whole lot of policy and procedure, because that's really what I see the cloud as is more about people than technology. So virtualization, technology, cloud, people, and process. So by the way, he's at Plankers on Twitter, so go ahead and follow him, he has great tweets and Bob blogs, he'll tell it like it is. Yes, Dave, so Bob, what I love about these is we have these conversations at the conferences, Dell did a good job of bringing in a lot of the influencers, press, and analysts. And when we talk about things like convergence in cloud, there's technology issues that need to be addressed. Big companies with lots of money and smart people working on that. But it comes down to the people where we really have trouble getting traction. So we know, especially the storage guys are very conservative and they need to be dragged kicking and screaming towards those new technologies. We just had Piedon talking about how even something is, you know, we would look as simple as deploying an equal logic storage array. Great stuff, scales out, easy to use. His users were nervous about it. So what are you seeing in your world? Other things, like you said, it's tough to get some of these folks that are traditionally very risk averse, storage admins being one of them. Everything is built on storage, a virtualization. You've got these giant crystal palaces built on storage. And if something goes wrong, it all comes tumbling down. They don't like being yelled at, nobody likes being yelled at. But they don't like having the finger pointed at them, the blame game where they're at fault. So they're very risk averse. They go for technologies that are stable and proven and straight out of the 1980s, you know? And... That's the old nobody ever got fired for buying from IBM mentality, or you know nobody ever got fired for coming on the Cube either, did you? Oh, really? I certainly hope not. You know, like that would be that music to my ears. But the other thing is that, well, yeah, storage admins are risk averse. A lot of people are risk averse. Network admins feel like they're being left out of the conversation. So the whole people side of cloud, you end up just trying to break down some of those barriers, some of those silos that have formed for years institutionally around the different teams, the networking team, the storage team, the sysadmins, and you need to all just work together. You know, why can't we all be friends? So Bob, an interesting comment. You said the networking guys feel left out. So you know, we've got a bunch of friends that are at Cisco Live this week down in San Diego. You know, there's been a bit of a lack of innovation in networking. I think until recently, there's a lot of buzz going on, but you know, is there hope for the network guys? Oh yeah, absolutely. They're very smart people. But you need them on your team. You need them up with you. They need to be part of the plan. You know, virtualization sort of took them by surprise. No one was telling them about it. Well, in a lot of cases, a lot of organizations had, you know, a couple of servers doing maybe VMWare. They were trying it out. And then somebody's like, let's go whole hog. And nobody told the network guys that all of a sudden the traffic isn't going to be north-south. It's going to be all this crazy east-west stuff. And they didn't build their network to be like that. And so they've got to redesign things. You know, storage admins, network admins, sometimes sys admins are like bears in the woods. They don't like to be surprised. And bad things happen when you surprise a bear in the woods. You surprise a network admin and force them to change what they need to do, force them to change their whole setup. They're not going to be super happy about it. So it's about communication. It's about that sort of thing. So Bob, you work for the University of Wisconsin. I do. Can you give us just a little bit of flavor as to what does your environment look like and what are the biggest challenges that you guys are facing with your infrastructure? Our infrastructure, we're on the path of virtualization, you know. And we're just starting to look at the cloud side of things. So can you quantify it from virtualization? Are you at 30%, 70%? I'd say maybe about 50%. We've got a lot of apps. And that's one of the things that we're looking at is, you know, the move to a private cloud is centralization, standardization. And that's something that the organization is doing right now, is taking a look at all of the stuff that's been built campus-wide. All the departmental file servers where we could, you know, we've got central file servers but, you know, somebody invented a file server because it better or more closely met their needs at one point, you know, 10 years ago, 15 years ago. You know, can we bring that in-house now, you know, to ensure that things get backed up, data retention policies, antivirus and stuff like that. We're doing a lot of work in that regard. But, you know, it's a process. It's a long process. It's a slow process. Unwinding a lot of the stuff. There are unwritten requirements, you know, unwritten performance requirements, you know, that you move something into a centralized service and all of a sudden it's slow, you know. The VM is slow. That's one of my favorite comments. The VM is slow. How? You know, is it quantifiable? Can we, you know, can we quantify exactly, can you give me a number in a repeatable sense? So, you know, there's a lot of unwinding that, a lot of putting metrics on things, figuring out what people don't like about stuff so they're not subverting you. And yeah, we're like many other companies, many other large corporations, we're on that path, you know. So you've adopted server virtualization quite a bit. On the network side, have you gone into or tested any of these fabric technologies that are out there? Yes, our network engineers are always looking at that stuff. And right now they're kind of positioning themselves for, to redesign the network in the next couple of years to accommodate new things. They're trying to decide how they want to do, how they want to do that, how they can be flexible in the future to, and rebuild the network. You know, not just speeds and feeds style, you know, not just bump everything up from one gig to ten gig and ten gig to forty gig, but also sort of redesign things that make better sense given, you know, all the new technologies that are coming out. Okay, does Converge Infrastructure play into your environment at all? It does. It does. We've traditionally been a big fiber channel chop, we're starting to look at ice guzzies. Oh my goodness, you know, like scary ice guzzies, you know. It's been around for what, 15 years or longer than that? The standards were done in 2002, but the technology was, you know, late 90s. It's a pretty well-known thing, so ten years, 2002. Yeah, I mean, as we've talked, as a networking person, you know how it works. Yes. And from a storage standpoint, there was more of that political friction once again. But you know, again, the data, the networking guys, their network has never really been used for storage. So the way they handle the network, the way they do maintenance, the way they treat everything has to change just a little bit. In order to just give them their own network for storage and they can have the quality of service and that's what they need. Yes, yes, but somebody's still going to maintain it, keep the switches up to date and that'll probably be the networking guys. Can you give us a little, what's the size of the staff and how many guys do you have working on storage and networking? So storage? Do they just throw stones at each other? No, no, no. We've moved on to more advanced weapons and stones. But the, I joke, the guys I work with are wonderful. The storage guys, the way we're set up is that there isn't a true storage guy. There's, you know, there's a lead storage guy. I'm the lead virtualization guy, you know, and then we have teams that work with us, but these teams are maybe half time people. Most of my team is like a half windows guy, half virtualization guy, that sort of thing. So we probably have four full-time employees total working on storage for full-time employees, worth of time, I mean, working on virtualization and stuff like that. I'm the only guy that's full-time virtualization. And like I said before, full-time talking about clouds and, you know, what is the cloud and all that stuff. So all the other guys are actually doing all the work. So you're predominantly a Dell shop, is that right? We're predominantly a Dell shop. Running a lot of Windows apps. A lot of Windows apps, a lot of Linux and stuff like that. Educational environments tend to be more Linux friendly and things like that. So in our virtualization environments, our main ones, we're about 50-50 Windows Linux and the storage is what? Storage is all over the place. We've got EMC. We've got NetApp. We've got Dell Compellent. We've got Dell Equalogic. We've got, well, I suppose they're EMC Isilon storage. So some of it's coming, some of it's going, the Dell stuff is coming. The, and that growing in popularity and it's been pretty cool in that regard. But yeah, we're mixed all over the place. We've got Windows. We've got Linux. We've got AIX. We've got, well, and storage side, we've also got tier one stuff with Hitachi as well. So yeah, we're all over the place. So what do you make of the messaging that we're hearing from Dell today? It basically, which essentially, if I could boil it down, is legacy bad. Dell, new and good. Okay. And that's the traditional vendor, right? Okay. Message, yeah. But legacy is a euphemism for that old clarion stuff that we use to sell. And of course, the giant monolithic, by a giant monolithic, inflexible, expensive. And of course, you got, you know, EMC doing things like coming out with VNXE targeted toward generalists. And so my observation is, you know, technology sort of proceeded at a similar pace. And, and, you know, the vendors out there, they're all well funded. They're, they all do a good job. They've all basically got, you know, very similar technologies. What, what differentiates them in your mind? Well, Dell, the whole no forklift upgrade thing is a big differentiator for me for Dell. The idea that the first compelling to raise or first rather, equal logic arrays that are out there are compatible with all the new stuff. That's really cool, you know, because, you know, an array might have a five year lifespan, the warranty on it, the hardware warranty is five years or whatever. But you can just plop another one in next to it, let it migrate everything. This is the same thing I do with virtualization. You know, I plop a new server in there, let the cluster figure itself out. And then I just decommission an old one, you know, and it's pretty seamless. The doing that same thing with storage is really nice. The auto tiering stuff that they've got going on. That's, that's a key thing to manage performance, but also to save money. You know, these traditional, if you will, the legacy vendors will just take SSDs and just sort of tack them on the top of everything and charge you a whole bunch of money for it. You know, what if you could be intelligent about what we're storing there? And it's hard to tell. You know, I might know that, you know, I've got a database that's one terabyte in size, but only a little part of that is probably hot. You know, I don't want to buy a terabyte of SSD and pay all the licensing and all the costs for that when I can just buy, you know, 100 gigs of SSD and just put the stuff that really needs that performance right on there. And so, you know, the compelence block level tiering and things like that. That's pretty cool. Yeah. So I mean, you mentioned, you know, sort of what I would call future proofing, right? I know forklift upgrades that that is a differentiator. I think it may not be unique to Dell, but it's certainly unique relative to many storage vendors. I mean, everybody's got tiering. Everybody's doing something with SSD. Are you are you saying that there's unique value that Dell is bringing to your organization in those areas? For example, yeah, just the way they're approaching the whole thing. The attitude that they have towards it, you know, you're right. They're not the first people to have SSD. They're not the first people to do auto tiering and that. But I think there's actually compelling was the first. Oh, yeah, you know, my other than I'd be a mainframe. But yeah, well, main framers smug. Here's a quarter go buy a real OS Phil Soren's an old mainframer. Come on. Yeah. The but being being able to sit back a little bit and look at the way other vendors are doing things and do them in a way that that's more elegant. If you will, I think that's the word I'm looking for. I was just in a conversation about some of the kluji natures of of the new technology, how SSD is being bolted on to things and that. And it seems like Dell is always searching for a more elegant solution and where things just sort of work. Right. Defined by its simplicity. And they really treat staff time as a prized resource, you know, trying to make things easy for easy for customers, the people that the people that are working on these things, you know, what if I could, what if I didn't have to hire a new storage admin to run all this new storage? What if I could actually get a whole bunch of my storage admins time back to do more important things? What if you could automate a lot of the scutwork, if you will, you know, of doing all this storage administration and so that the storage guys could actually spend their time on more interesting problems. Do you feel like some companies, some vendors purposefully keep things complicated so they can sell more services? Is that something that historical? I mean, obviously that can't continue indefinitely, but do you feel like that was a strategy of some suppliers? What's the quote, never ascribe to malice what can be explained by stupidity or something like that? I don't think it's intentional. I don't think it's intentional. It might have been. But there was a disincentive to simplify, was really the point. So maybe it's Machiavellian, but maybe it's, hey, we're making a lot of money and let's solve some other problems first. You know, where you've got not to, engineers are wonderful at solving problems. They're not so great at people stuff, you know. Typically, you know, I'm just, I'm generalizing here. There's a lot of great people oriented engineers. But when it comes to user interfaces and stuff like that to make my life easier, the work that Dell is doing, the work, you know, people talk about Apple and easy to use and that, you know, Dell is doing some of that same work thinking about, you know, how do we preserve the time of the people that are working on it? How do we make it less error prone? How do we build better interfaces that are more helpful to the people that are working on these things? That sort of thing. And that's the attitude I really like, you know, and that you don't see everywhere. I'm pushing because you are a mix shop. And a lot of times, we'll get a customer and they'll be, you know, vendor A shop and that's all they know and they love it. Okay, that's cool. But you've got experience with a lot of different, what about services? How important are services to you as a buyer and what do you look for in services? Services like professional services. Professional services? Well, I'm in an organization that's fairly unique. We've got some really, really highly technical folks. We don't rely on services all that much. Cause we figured that we're going to be the guys day in, day out, three AM, responding to emergencies. Hopefully there are none. But we're going to be the guys that get the call at three AM, not a professional services guy that went home at five, that sort of thing. And so we really take it upon ourselves to know the technology very well, get really deep into it, you know, and become experts at it. And in fact, that's one of the reasons I started blogging was to share a lot of that, the stuff that I was finding on that path and probably also to complain about it too, like most bloggers do. But the- It's cathartic. Yeah, yeah, it's dangerous too. You need to really watch what you're saying. Sometimes keep it positive. But the, the, so yeah, from my point of view, professional services are nice up front as a knowledge transfer. But beyond that, my folks and I, we tend to just get into it ourselves. So I had two last questions. First one for me is what's the one thing that drives you crazy that vendors do that you would tell them? Just stop doing that. Yeah, Bob, if I was reading your blog, some of your recent updates, and you use the phrases we can all stop using. So it's marketing people. If there's like one or two things that they could just shut up about or give you the truth on, what would it be? Everyone, that's a hard question. And it's loaded, thank you. But more transparency is always nice. There's this fine line for marketing people especially between telling people what they need to know and tipping their hand to the competition and stuff like that. So I'm always in favor of more transparency, more information, because that's kind of guy I am. I want to know dates, I want to know speeds, I want to know capacities, I want to know all that stuff. And so not having that, announcements, especially announcements that have vague release dates, those drive me nuts. Fall, you know, not to pick on Dell, but some of the recent announcements have been in the fall, you know, when is that? All companies do that though, you know? And quarter three, and then they clarify, quarter three. Well, okay. That's fiscal year, calendar year, sorted out, slide in a little bit. So I know Dave's got one question, but before he does, you know, hot topic that I know we've been at least talking about on the blogosphere and Twitter and everything. SDN, you know, what's your take on it? It's the future of networking and the, taking a lot of the logic, basically making the switches themselves sort of dominant, taking a lot of the logic back out to a central place. There's a lot of powerful stuff you can do with that. And I think it's so early, it remains to be seen exactly how it'll be used. Indiana University is doing a lot of cool work with that. Their labs there and the, converting their campus over to using OpenFlow. And it'll be interesting to see the lessons that they learn there. Everyone's looking at it. My network guys are really looking at it too. We've got some small deployments of it, nothing serious. But yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Seeing it in the university, seeing the service providers talking about it, I think the advice to customers be, it'll be ready by the fall of some year. Yeah, it'll be ready in the fall. You know, just don't say a year, you know? Yeah, exactly. And in fact, that's one of our jokes at work is, yeah, what year are you talking about? I mean, how do you freeze the market if you have to be that specific, Bob? Yeah, you know. Yeah, you know. All right, Bob Plankers, really appreciate you coming on the queue. Thank you Dave. He's at Plankers, follow him on Twitter and keep it right there. We'll be right back with SiliconANGLE.tv's continuous coverage live from Dell Storage Forum in Boston.