 We have Wikibon, and we're here with Laz Vecuretis from Dell and Equalogic, and Rich Rayther, who is with a law firm, Quarles and Brady, and is a Dell customer, and we're going to talk a little bit about virtualization, how you guys are deploying, your iSCSI arrays, what you're doing with VMware, so welcome gentlemen, Laz. Welcome back, I saw you in June, a CUBE alum. That's right. Rich first time on, so welcome. Thank you. How's the show going for you guys? So it's really been exciting for us. Dell, we have a whole bunch of really interesting things going on, so first of all, the relaunch of the Equalogic arrays, we have a brand new platform that's showcasing our booth, lots of big improvements on the hardware side there, so we've basically gone to the next gen, really good stuff, and it seems to be generating a lot of excitement. So we are also rolling out the first show with Compellent integrated in, so the booth has been super-sized. So tell us folks out there, what's going on, because we were at the Dell Storage Forum, SiliconANGLE and the CUBE, Dave was there, I couldn't make it, I was stuck there in Vegas, but with Dell, I always had a presence in hardware and software, I had the Equalogic, Compellent comes in, what is the current situation? Just really summarize quickly, where's Dell at? You guys are got a lot going on, a lot of cool products, good technology, just quickly give us an overview of where you guys are at. Well, so we're in the process of really integrating the Compellent technology into the overall product portfolio, one of the things that everyone should remember that it's only been about six months since we closed that deal, I know everyone is really impatient, but we've made a lot of progress. We don't want to hear any complainant from you guys. So, scar tissue. But, you know, we are basically aligning Compellent for the fiber channel market and for more of the super high-end storage capabilities that they can provide and the mid-market and low-end continues to be the Equalogic, and we are rolling out a number of other complementary technologies which are more horizontal, things like file services, things like deduplication, they're going to basically cover the entire base storage platform, whether it's Equalogic or Compellent. Common services across that platform. Yeah, exactly. Now, Rich, you're a VMware practitioner, an IT practitioner, why don't we start with the VMware piece, we're at VMworld. First of all, where are you at with VMware, tie it into what you're seeing at the show, give us an update and paint a picture for us of what you guys are doing with VMware. Sure, sure. From a customer perspective, you know, the show has been amazing so far, the topic, the content, new vSphere 5 features coming out, really looking forward to all that. We've been a VMware customer for about seven years, we started with GSX, so we've been in the family a long time, and currently today we're almost 80% virtualized, so we have a large virtual deployment. We've got about 350 servers, about 280 of those are virtual, and we run everything on VMware, all of our core business applications, exchange, SQL, our document management system, which in a law firm is our lifeblood, and we also have a VDI deployment as well, about 450 desktops. How about your applications, what percent of your apps are virtualized? We have over 500 apps in a law firm, law firms are generally application heavy, and almost all of those, with the exception of the core office suite, all of them are virtualized. It's exchanged as well. Correct. Yeah, so, pretty sizable shop, for a small company. Yeah, we are, we're a AMLAW 200 law firm, which in the legal vertical is kind of like our Fortune 500, so we have 1,000 employees, we've got seven offices, we are international, so pretty good footprint, and from an IT perspective, it's a decent side shop. You mentioned vSphere 5, are you gonna be moving to vSphere 5? Pardon me? You mentioned vSphere 5, are you gonna be moving? Right, absolutely, yeah. I'm really looking forward to some of the features, especially some of the storage features, really looking forward to storage DRS, and some of the impact that's gonna have in our environment. Can you talk a little bit more about what's exciting in the storage area to you about the recent announcements? Wow, you know, storage, it's really interesting how virtualization across the board has changed technology, and storage is no different. The impact that virtualization has had in the storage market, and from a customer perspective, all of the features that are out there today allow us to take storage and look at it in the view of being modular. You know, it gives us the ability to grow our storage infrastructure, just like our switching infrastructure and our server infrastructure, and build it the way that our business needs it, and so it's really been a cool place, you know, just interesting to work with over the course of the last couple of years, and I'm really looking forward to the next year with some of the announcements coming out, especially from Dell, with some of the recent acquisitions with Ocarina. Are you 100% Ice Guzzi shop? We are. Yeah, so, I don't wanna get into a big religious debate, but, you know, a lot of people say, oh, I can't really take it too far. What's your experience been with that whole platform, the ecologic platform, Ice Guzzi? It's really been fantastic, and we were a fiber channel shop, so we had fiber. Oh, you went from fiber? We had fiber channel in place. Got a legacy infrastructure. Correct, yep. And rather than investing more into fiber channel, which is expensive, we started basically playing with the Ice Guzzi platforms, and, you know, we were skeptics like everybody else. We had our doubts on whether or not it would work, and performance has actually been fantastic in our environment, and moving now to 10 gig over Ice Guzzi, you know, the playing field is level now, and with 40 gig on the horizon, in my opinion, it's gonna surpass fiber channel. So you've got your pretty much 10 gig-y, you're in the process of migrating? Correct, actually our VDI deployments today, and portions of our SQL environments are 10 gig today. How are you using VDI? We use VDI, we originally implemented VDI as a replacement solution for remote access, and over the course of the last, you know, 18 months ago I would have said, or six months ago I would have said, we're probably 18 months from really deploying VDI mainstream. We're actually here today, and we have about 50 users in our environment that use VDI on a day-to-day basis, and these are power users, you know, these aren't help desks, this isn't a call center, these are secretaries and attorneys that, you know, we have secretaries that type 130 words a minute, and so with a VDI deployment in thin clients, they would always out-type the interface. With the recent technologies and advancements in VM where, you know, it has come full circle and we're here, we're deploying a mainstream. Was it a real pain going to VDI? Was storage a big issue? Initially, boot storms, I always hear these nightmare sizing, you know, IO activity. Absolutely, and one of the things that we dealt with was a boot storm, you know, we had that issue where a lot of our users come in between eight and nine in the morning, and we experienced boot storms. One of the things that helped us combat that was one of the offerings from Ecologic, which was a 6,000 XPS, it's a hybrid array, with solid state and SAS drives within the same box, and that really alleviated our boot storms. Not only that, but it really improved our performance as well, so. Excellent. Last, we talked a lot about this week about integration, and we talked at the Dell Storage Forum about integration as well. Now, we've done some work, as you know, at Wikibon, and Ecologic actually scored very, very high. And I suspect, like a lot of the other companies that had highly virtualized system 3-par would be an example. The year ability to integrate with VMware APIs was accelerated. And I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit, because Compellent, on the other hand, smaller company, you guys were part of Dell, so you had that advantage. Compellent wasn't, so they got sort of pushed to the back of the line, so you could see Ecologic is substantially ahead of Compellent in terms of that integration. Will that change now, as it was, first of all, talk about that integration and why your platform, why you're able to accelerate that, and will the Compellent side be able to catch up? Okay, so let's start with the first question. A little bit about the integration. So, as you know, virtualization in general is sort of the fine art of lying from one perspective of another, so vSphere is lying to us and telling us as an array that there's only one host there, where in fact there's a number of virtual hosts, and on the other side, we're sitting there lying to them and telling them that we look like one disk, when in fact that's just not the case. And so, we spend a lot of time trying to make sure that we're not caught in the lie, so to speak. And so, you basically have these two curtains, veils of virtualization, and sometimes it helps to know what's going on on the other side of the curtain. That's really the mandate for integration, right? For example, it would be really nice to know which virtual machines have really demanding workloads, even though we actually have no idea what's going on. We'd like to know the block ranges or maybe some description of the VMDKs that define those virtual machines so that we could do something about it. You know, when a customer wants to create a snapshot, it'd be really great that instead of having the host go off and do something in order to do the snapshot, the array, which is highly virtualized and also highly optimized for these types of storage operations can do that work for the end user and offload the ESX host. So, you know, this is sort of the integration mandate. And we've been talking about this with VMware for a very long time, back in the early days of Equalogic, I think middle of the last decade. And we've actually created this relationship with a lot of the key players inside VMware, just by chance, and just like us, everyone's grown up, everyone's in big positions now, but we sort of have the ends. And, you know, we've been invited back many, many times. When VAI was being rolled out, we were one of the first partners and we actually were one of the design partners. We were in there helping to design the way this thing should work. Vasa, which was just released this week. It's a very important technology and it's going to grow into something very big over the next few years. That is something that we co-developed with them. How does that work? Are you like in there side by side with EMC and NetApp co-developing this stuff or do they sort of silo it out? Well, we silo, you know, it's siloed out. So they come to each company individually. It's not like a big round table where you're sitting across from the guys from EMC and NetApp and you're pointing fingers at each other. It's not a SNEA committee meeting. No, no, it's not at all. And actually, that's actually a fundamental difference between the way integration is done at this level versus how it's done in standards committees. Somebody has the final say and can just go. Exactly, exactly. It's, you know, someone is basically going to tell all the children to stop messing around and get things done and you'll notice things get done more quickly in those environments. So let me answer your second question. Compellent, as I mentioned before, has only been around for six months, but we are already in the process of getting them more and more involved and ramped up in this kind of development. And just last week, we had a big meeting in Palo Alto with all our counterparts in engineering at VMware and it was actually the first time that Compellent was participating there. And, you know, frankly, for me, it was actually a lot of fun. Back in the old days with Equalogic, when we were just a small company, our QTRs were kind of a ruckus. We'd be sitting there having really lively discussions about various things. And it was actually a lot of fun to have my Compellent colleagues in the room because we actually created another ruckus. Yeah, I don't know if you know this, John. Equalogic was a New Hampshire-based startup. Very cool company. Awesome. Well, I mean, this has been coming up on theCUBE this week is the idea that co-engineering has been a negative for some of the other late-comers with VMware. So the co-engineering that you guys are doing, that's a great advantage for you guys. So the question is, has it translated to product value? So let's talk about how it renders itself. So my final question is to the customer saying, you know, is it transparent? Like, it's all invisible to you, but are you seeing the benefits there? Absolutely. I think, you know, as I said earlier with some of these acquisitions that Dell has made, they do an exceptional job, especially on the Equalogics platform. Let me ask it differently. Because you guys do bake-offs when you, so you look at everybody, you look at other people, and Dell's, you know, supplier yours. Talk about the difference when you do the bake-offs and what Dell's come out with. Well, I'll give you the example of why we chose Equalogics in the first place. We did a bake-off between a lot of the major vendors, you know, of some of the ones mentioned here already. And we started looking at these products and really the choice was easy for us. And it was simple. It really came down to two major factors, but there were many others. The first one was ease of management. I mean, the interfaces for the Equalogics platform, it's just simply to manage. You can dish up a volume in two to three minutes versus provisioning lawns, keeping an Excel spreadsheet, you know, tracking all your disks. And it takes you 45 minutes to serve up a volume to a server. The second was really cost. And that is where, again, Equalogics does a really good job of this. You know, we looked at these other products and we said, okay, we want to replicate that storage array from one site to another. A lot of the other vendors said, whoa, time out. You know, this is an extra license. It's going to cost you a little bit more to do that. Well, we want to replace our backup systems and we just want to do snapshotting. Whoa, time out, that's another license. That's going to cost you a little bit. And Equalogics, it's one-stop shopping. You have two line items. You have the cost for the array and then you've got support and maintenance. And everything, when they come out with something and release it, it's all baked into that support and maintenance, which is, you know, from a customer standpoint, it's nice. Okay, we're here inside theCUBE. Dell's got a lot of action going on. Changing, growing, new technology deep with VMware. Dave, good story there, let's wrap this up. Yeah, Lads and Rich, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. We appreciate you guys making the time. Thank you. Thanks for your time.