 I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org, and we're here with Steve Killen, who's the Enterprise Server Manager at James Hardy Building Products, an SAP customer. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much. So, Steve, you know, we've been listening all week, actually, before we do that, tell us about James Hardy Building Products, and then we'll get into it. So James Hardy is a manufacturer of fiber cement building products. You make siding the houses, and you might have heard of Hardyback at the Thailand Lehmann. And we're about a one and a half billion dollar company, predominantly in the U.S., but we have operations in Australia, the Philippines, and Europe. So you've been an SAP customer for a while, I presume? Yeah. I think about seven years now. Okay. So when you think about SAP, today and yesterday, we've been hearing about fast, simple, mobile. Those aren't adjectives that you typically associate with SAP. Now, we love to talk to customers, because we can cut through the marketing and say, okay, where are we here? So, criticisms of SAP are complex, they are expensive, but incredibly robust. Where do you want to see SAP go? I mean, I think, you know, we've made some inroads by virtualizing our entire SAP environment. You know, if we go back to sort of about five years ago, everything was physical. You know, every time we wanted to bring up a QA environment or something like that, we had to bring up sort of 10 physical servers, have the power in the data center to do that. And so now that we've sort of virtualized that, we can, you know, give us more agility. And I think, you know, as things go forward, being able to move that seamlessly to the cloud and back again, you know, as resource requirements, you know, increase, that's sort of what we're looking for. So when did you guys make the decision to virtualize SAP? We did that about three years ago. You know, again, because of, you know, power requirements and things, we just couldn't keep growing the way we were growing with a physical architecture. Disaster recovery was also big for us. Being able to, you know, do any kind of DR in a physical environment was really tricky. So now we just replicate the entire VM and we can bring it up within a few minutes. So Steve, as an infrastructure professional, I'm sure you love the fact that you virtualized SAP. How did the application guys feel about that? Were they sort of a little tense? Yeah, it was interesting at first. I mean, we started off by virtualizing test dev, which I think a lot of people do. That gave those guys, you know, some comfort level. You know, we did that for about a year. They sort of played around with it, realized it was stable and worked. And then, you know, we had an implementation to move to a 64-bit architecture. And that was when we decided that this was the time we were going to virtualize at the same time. OK, so 64-bit Intel, presumably, right? Yeah, we're Windows Oracle and VM. OK, so you're virtualizing Oracle? Virtualizing Oracle on Windows and VM. So that's a whole nother interesting discussion. Oh, yes. I'm sure you've got the full support of Oracle that you're virtualizing with VMware. Yeah, they're obviously, you know... Not OVM? I mean... Yeah, I think there's one person using that, right? You know, we talked with Oracle about it, obviously, you know, three years ago they weren't... I could see the headlock, Mark. Exactly. I think they're a little bit more happy with it these days than they were about three years ago. But at the end of the day, you know, their kind of support model is, if you might have to reproduce it on a hardware platform, nobody ever asked you to do that. I mean, you know, we've been running it now for sort of three-plus years and we've never had an issue just running under VMware. So you're still getting good support from Oracle? Yep. And having any issues? They may threaten it, but the bark is louder than the bark. Yeah, I mean, I guess, fortunately, we haven't had to call them a lot, but yeah. Yeah, that is fortunate. Okay, so talk more about your infrastructure, what else is underneath there? Yeah, so we're an EMC, we had a Clarion CX-4 240. We've just actually, recently in the last two weeks, upgraded to a VNX 5700. So that's nothing quite on that yet. We also use RecoverPoint to replicate between two sites, which is in Irvine and Chicago. We have a 100 meg length and we have about a half a terabyte of data on the ECC that we replicate and we're about maybe if a minute behind. So we can get really, really up to the minute. So pretty tight RPO? Yeah. We don't have our RPO to 15 minutes, but at any one time we're only about a minute behind if not. Okay, so and you don't really have to compress that any further in your environment? No, we have a riverbed system on either side to help with compression, but now it works really well. Okay, so talk about the applications. You've got SAP, obviously, talking about what you're doing there and what other apps that you've virtualized. We're about 99% virtually. Really? There's a couple of systems that have cards in them that just won't virtualize yet. But yeah, so we virtualize Exchange, SharePoint. We have Manugistics for transportation. Yeah. BI, BW, everything on VMware. And what do you do for backup? We use Avama. So we basically have about 28 days of everything backed up on the disk, which we then replicate that as well to our Chicago office. We still right now do quarterly backups of Tape, but you know, because it's not really a great solution yet for long term archival. That's put it on Tape and hopefully you don't have to have to get to it, but it's cheap strategy. Yep, pretty much. That's that scenario and we already keep it around. When you went to Avamar, I mean, obviously, well, not obviously, but was that in conjunction with your decision to virtualize or was that separate? Yeah, it was separate. It was separate. So what were you doing before Avamar? I mean, it was all backup extension. So you kind of fixed it in the play section, but you could have kept your system back for a while and popped into something like that on data. So talk about what's on VMC to do. Oh, let's hear. I've mentioned this many times. The UI needs improvement. Unisphere is a step in the right direction, but I still feel they're paying a bit of catch up with some of the other vendors out there. It's not quite as simple to use as I think it can be, and reporting would be the other one. It's kind of, you know, the reporting's there, but it's not sort of in your face and being able to really quickly get, okay, what's the performance on this disk? So they're the two main things that I've been beating EMC up over the last 12 months, and hopefully they make some changes there. Okay, yeah, reporting, and those are fixable problems. They are fixable problems, and I think it really wouldn't take that much for them to sort of really get a small UI team together and come up with something whizzy and easy to use. What do you think about the SAP messaging around analytics and real-time mostly? What's your experience? Obviously, you've got virtualized environments. That's a fantastic accomplishment. But now you've got the analytics going, and they're talking about all those dashboards. You guys there, I mean, how do you see that, the reality of what they're showing as today's real-time dashboards? You know, you see the keynote presentations and you're like, wow, I love that. That looks really kind of cool. Pass that over this, smoke the crack. I guess my concern is how easy is it to get there, right? It's the demo version. It's the demo version. I mean, you've got your iPad with your widgets that you put up, and I'm like, hey, if someone could do that for me inside 30 days, I'd sign up today. But I get the feeling it's kind of more of the millions of dollars. What's your take from your seat, your chair, you're looking at your landscape, which is your environment, to that dashboard, which is the Nirvana. What's the challenges? How do you get there in your mind? What roadmap do you see from your perspective? I mean, I think some of it is actually sitting down and having the business people spend some time actually defining what they want to see. I mean, I think a lot of times these solutions are kind of get designed by IT in a vacuum and they kind of go, hey, here's a dashboard for you. Well, I didn't really want that. I wanted this, this, and this. Can you change this? It's going to be six months. Exactly. So I think, you know, I really think IT is kind of changing and I mean, I'm an infrastructure guy, right? I went and did my MBA a couple of years back and I think that the way that IT is going is the propeller head kind of guy is going to be moved sort of towards the back and IT, even infrastructure people are going to need to have a bit more business acumen to really understand what's going on. What do you think of the whole DevOps movement? Are you familiar with what's going on there? And is it something that you guys have looked into? I'm not familiar with it. So it's the whole notion of maybe describe it and talk about what it might mean to you guys. So DevOps is the intersection of application development and infrastructure operations. The idea being somebody in application development takes a piece of code, they throw it in the fence to your guys and then you got to put it into your production environment and then you got to sometimes hack away at it. You got to redo the scripts and then you inevitably mess something up and bring it back and say, hey, your code's all messed up. And you say, well, it was fine when I gave it to you and it goes back and forth and back and forth and the project elongates and so there's this notion of cross-training in both disciplines, both application development and infrastructure operations. Maybe it should be better termed ops dev, as John Furrier says. So do you see that kind of culture shift as a sort of beyond agile programming? What are your thoughts on how that might apply in your world? Yeah, I mean, it's one of the main reasons I'm here. I'm an infrastructure guy at an SAP business conference and the reason I'm here is to really kind of start to understand what SAP is trying to do so that I can provide better value to my app dev guys when they come to me and ask for that kind of stuff. So yeah, I think it's absolutely... Yeah, because those guys obviously have a lot of juice in the organization and they're the interface to the business and so good. All right, Steve. Well, listen, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. It was a pleasure meeting you. Pleasure meeting you too. Good to be here. Thanks for coming on. We'd love to hear the customer's perspective. Love the question of what he needs to work on. It comes right out. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. We appreciate it. We'll be right back with our next guest after this break.