 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and we're digging in with the VMware cloud on AWS update. Of course, an important solution set we've been talking about for a couple of years. If you see, we've done interviews with some of the VMware and AWS executives. We did a deep dive on some of the technology and now we get to dig in with one of the users of the technology. Of course, the executives talk about the proof of how many customers have been using it. So happy to welcome to the program. I have two guests from PLM Insurance. First sitting right next to me on the screen is BJ Gardner, who's the lead system architect. Next to him is Dave Zigenfuss, who is a senior systems architect. BJ and Dave, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you for having us. Thank you for having us. All right, so BJ, just for audience that does not know Pennsylvania Lumberman's Mutual Insurance Company, give us a little bit about the company, 125 years in history, obviously with the name, it's in the insurance business, but help us understand what your business is and what you and Dave do for the organization. Sure, so Pennsylvania Lumberman's has been around for under 25 years. We just celebrated the under 25th year, this February actually. We are a commercial insurance company, property casualty, and we specialize in the wood niche. So we cover everything from lumber yards to auto fleets that have anything to do with moving wood, selling wood. So we're pretty niche, we're pretty specific in our brand, and we're a mutual insurer. We're one of the few, if not only one left that does lumber insurance on into mutual space. So. All right, BJ, give us a little bit of snapshot from an IT standpoint. Obviously you're using VMware, because you're here that talked to us about, what data centers and cloud usage looks like for PLM? So I've been with Pennsylvania Lumberman's for about 15 years, and we were operating in full on-prem with bare metal servers. By 2007, 2008, we started with the VMware product set. And since then, we've been moving little by little to the cloud, we have many of our core applications are sitting with vendors in the cloud as of right now. We have a small data center in Philadelphia that's an on-prem. And then we have, which we'll talk about, we have cloud data center as a service model with a VMware certified cloud partner called Faction. And then we also now have our disaster recovery as a cloud product. Excellent, since we're talking about the VMware cloud on AWS, bring inside a little bit, that DR use case that you're using, that hybrid model, help tease that out. PJ, we'll start with you and I'm sure, Dave will have some color to give after you share. Sure, I mean, when you're talking about disaster recovery in general, the need to maintain business continuity while keeping a lean IT staff and with no extended downtime and data loss, it's just, it's not an option. You can't afford to be down. You can't afford to lose data. So having a cloud service now for disaster recovery or at least the concept of that helps a small IT shop in the way of resources that we just don't have on hand on staff. So that's pretty much the biggest goal for us is to maintain business continuity and with our lean staff at the same time. And echoing PJ a bit, having an on-prem solution, you know, really to PJ's point about our lean staff, it made things quite cumbersome for us with maintaining backups, replications and such. There was a lot involved. It was very time consuming. So the handoff to utilizing VMware cloud for our disaster purposes really helped benefit our team as a whole. All right, you mentioned your partner on this solution is Faction. Help us understand, you know, how you made the decision to go down this path. So I can give you a quick rundown here how Faction came to be. So we're located, our corporate is in Philadelphia. We occupy two floors in an office building. Our data center was on the one floor. We were consolidating and we moved up to just one single floor. So we basically lost the footprint of the data center. So I went out hunting for a co-location type vendor and hooked up with Faction. And yeah, so we've been with Faction since 2015. We've had their, I'll call it Iconocolo plus data center as a service model, you know, since then, since 2015. And we've been with them doing different initiatives here and there over the years. And disaster recovery as a service is now one of them. Great, Dave, you've maybe supply a little more color on that piece. Yeah, sure. Yeah, the use of VMware cloud with site recovery manager, again, from a technical standpoint, it was second to none as far as the flexibility it gave us to grow our workloads, to maintain them. Recovery point objective was what really sold me. It allowed us to get extremely granular from a business continuity perspective. And yeah, I'm a fan. I just, I really like VMware cloud with SRM. It's proven to be top notch. Yeah, maybe follow up on that. You've been a VMware customer for a number of years. You're familiar with the tooling and everything else like that. So how long did a solution like this take to roll out? So I will guess, absolutely. There was a good portion from when we started. So you have to kind of put in a perspective because we had a data center in Atlanta, Georgia that was our disaster recovery site with faction. So we had a two-fold project. We were going into a contract year, a renewal year and faction pitched the AWS of VMware and AWS service. So we were decommissioning a data center at the same time as we were rolling it out. So I'll just give you the quick timeline. So November of 2018 was basically the contract negotiations. We finalized everything kind of in February of 2019 as far as kicking off the call on how we're gonna actually do the project. The work began around April of 2019. Faction went ahead and set up the AWS as CDC environment in early May. Faction builds out the environment for the rest of May. June, we did some non-disruptive load testing on the environment in AWS. We set up the replication and recovery group build out throughout the summer of 2019. And then we had a full sign off in September, September 17th actually 2019. So I'll just kind of highlight though in that process that it took roughly about four months to do the full build out testing and the Atlanta data center decommissioning. Okay, and PJ, after having done this, we've now got DRR as a service. What are the hero numbers? Is there cost savings along this? How do you report up the success or results of what you've done so far? Yeah, so speaking to that, so when we did the contract negotiations sorry, in November of 2018, one of the things we realized when we were pitching this cloud disaster, sorry, the cloud disaster recovery as a service model, we saw roughly about a 20% annual savings in moving to this cloud service. So a breakdown of what kind of the savings is pretty much in Atlanta we have some resource costs because we were running basically on a solo type environment with action. And then we had a circuitry cost. So we had a point to point line that would run out to actually to New Jersey and then down to Atlanta. So we had that cost as well. So we saved basically where we ripped out the circuit, the point to point circuit and we all floated some resource costs. So like I said, about roughly about a 20% cost savings. All right, so that's some of the hard figures. Dave, bring us inside a little bit operationally. Obviously there's got to be a little bit of change as to how you manage things. Automation has been hot for years but even more so when you talk about cloud environments. So how has this deployment changed what the workers are doing and beyond that? Well, it's simplified things quite a bit just by the partnership with Faction and in conjunction with VMware Cloud for our disaster recovery solution. It's offered many benefits. For one, we had a primary engineer who left the company. We found some benefits to not having to fill that staff resource. So that was also a positive from a money aspect. But as far as a day-to-day functioning way of going about doing things, it really took things off my plate off the rest of the team's plate and just really gave us a peace of mind as it pertains to our infrastructure and our data being secured. All right, well, I want to give you both the final word. What learnings do you have out of this? Any best practices you would share? Or there's also some updates coming taking VMware being able to take advantage of the latest bare metal offering from Amazon. I'll let you choose. Maybe BJ will start with you and wrap with you, Dave, as to those final words that you would share with your peers. Yeah, I'll certainly start it off. I mean, coming from my perspective as kind of the manager of the team here, our goal as a company, our goal as an IT shop, our goal as an operations team is to ensure the company's technology needs will be met after an event of a disaster. And that is the key. You want to protect itself, you want to protect the data, you want to protect the customers. So in the case of the cloud for us is maintaining business continuity while producing physical footprint and keeping the IT operations lean like I had stated before. And one of the most important things, and this is not just about disaster recovery but establishing good partnerships with vendors is absolutely imperative because I don't care how big your shop is. And again, we're on the small side, obviously, but you can't do it alone. So you need really good strong partnerships and good relationships with vendors. And I would say, make sure you identify your critical business workloads. Know your environment, absolutely. It's imperative, yet you have to plan efficiently. And by all means, test, test, test, test. You can't test the solution enough. So that's really about all I have. All right, well, Dave and BJ, thank you so much for joining us. Appreciate you sharing your journey along and wish you the best of luck with the solution going forward. Thank you so much. Thank you for having us here. And thank you for joining us for this update VMware cloud on AWS. Be sure to check out the cube.net for all the rest of the coverage we have both in the VMware and AWS ecosystems. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you as always for watching theCUBE.