 Okay, welcome back to theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract this from the noise. This is SiliconANGLE's exclusive coverage of EMC World, three days wall-to-wall coverage, we're day two. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm joined with Stu Miniman, a Wikibon, a senior analyst at Wikibon, and we're here with Ben Smith of Epic Systems. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for having me. So, you're an engineer. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so we're going to talk a little bit about tech here. What do you think of this show? Come on, be honest opinion. It's all right. So I think it's just like any other show that's out there, kind of Oracle, Microsoft, all the same deal, but it's a good opportunity to see what new products are out there. It's kind of salesy, but it's a good show. What do you think about the whole notion of suffering the control plane, the data plane from EMC? Do you think it's solid? I think it's getting there. I think it's getting there. I think that's... That's what we need. But I think a lot of it needs to get back to some of the unifying the data center, unifying the management of the data center, and it's really been a lot of cloud and kind of truly unifying all that infrastructure. Talk about your company at Epic Systems. What do you guys do? We are a e-discovery provider, so I don't know if you know what e-discovery is, right? How long is that? We get a large amount of data, and most of it is really unstructured, just documents and forms of just about any type you can imagine. So obviously, you know, legal and CFOs and general counsels love e-discovery because storage, they love storage because they can store everything. Right. And sometimes that could be a double-edged sword. You lost it, where is it? So what are the challenges, I mean, at that? And this kind of points to some of the things we talked about at service mesh on day one. They'll be doing a lot of automations, and they'll be doing a lot of automations because compliance is a huge, huge problem right now. So how do people deal with this? Well, the biggest challenge we face is, you know, lawyers are, they're very paranoid, right? So they're very concerned about this data. So the challenge we have is we have all this data that we have, and they're very afraid of deleting the data or where it's going to go, having it online, having it accessible. So for us, having multiple tiers of storage where we can place that data and still be able to access it without being offline, taking weeks to get to it. So I mean, that's really one of the largest challenges that we have. What is the technical challenge? Is it just software? Is it just gear? Is it facilities? It's scalability and facilities. So to remain competitive, right, your infrastructure, you can't just keep throwing storage at it and taking up space and data center. So for us, it's reducing footprint and having massive scalability and having stability out there, right? So most of the data we get in has a timeline that's tied to it that's been dictated by a court, right? So we've got to split that data out pretty quickly. So Brian, can you give us a little bit of speeds and feeds of your environment? What's your growth look like? How large is your environment? Our environment, it doubles every year, easily doubles every year. So we try to get in terabytes of data overnight and we'll usually try to process two to four terabytes per day is kind of our goal. And it's just massive amounts of data that's, there's really no predictability to the data that we have coming in. Okay, and can you talk to us a little bit about the infrastructure that's enabling your environment and kind of your history with it? Yeah, absolutely. So over about 18 months ago, we started using Icelon. So we were on a Solera, and we kind of had some of the limitation of like a 16 terabyte file system. And so what Icelon has enabled us to do is really have this massive file system. And so we've implemented Icelon with, we've got a lot of VMware and virtualized environment out there with UCS. And then we utilize VMAX and VNX platforms for some of our database stuff. So are you using, I'm sorry, the virtualization with Icelon then? We haven't actually started storing our virtual machines on the Icelon, but a lot of our virtual environments are accessing the data from there. They're writing to it. Nothing cool yet with NFS with VMware. We're definitely looking at that. Okay, have you ever done any of the object storage as part of your environment? We have not with, we've looked at it. There's some interesting things with that, but we've not done that yet. What's attracting about Icelon for you guys? We hear so many success stories, but they're all over the place. There's so many use cases that work and you guys are in the e-discovery. Can you just share some of why there, why you guys work with those guys? The biggest selling point for Icelon for Epic was the scalability. So we can just throw a note in and have that instant 100 terabytes of capacity available right there. And the clustered file system. So the availability is a big perk to us. We can't afford to have our systems going down. So when you look at some of these other solutions that are out there, your limitation is the file system, which is usually around that 16 terabytes. Some of them have some larger limitations now, but we scale well beyond that. That's a size issue. That's a size issue. And if you need more, you got to get another cluster? Yeah, you got to build another silo or get another head. So with Icelon, you've got this, it's not infinite, but you have all this compute. You keep throwing compute, cache, memory, whatever you need at it and still have that same file system accessible. You just keep throwing more performance in front of it. Just less work. Less work, yeah. Building out more stuff. But you can just throw more gear at it when you need it. Right, absolutely. So it's definitely more cost effective as well to use a solution like Icelon because we don't have to go buy an entire new cluster once we've hit this limitation. We just add another node and we've got instant capacity. Talk about the management side of it. What's the manageability like? Is it a lot of automation built in? Is there a lot of heavy lifting on your end? What happens? So when we first got Icelon, one of the first things we said were where's the rest of the interface? Because it's so simplified. It's really just point click, point click. So it was really different from other platforms that you use. But it's extremely simple. There's not a lot of complexity to it. You plug it in, you push a button on another node and it adds it. So when you want to add a user, you click a button. It's super simplified and it integrates with existing solutions like Active Directory, whatever else you might have out there. Talk about your environment. What are some of the challenges in your IT environment? And as other guys look at storage decisions, what are they should be thinking about based on what you guys have done? So first of all, your environment, some of the challenges you have, whether it's the network, the storage applications, what's the key challenges? Well, our biggest challenges we have, our infrastructure has become so large, right? Keeping a converged kind of insight into what's going on in your environment and understanding all the moving parts that are out there, it's pretty challenging. So I think, you know, you've got all this data you're trying to push in a short amount of time. You've got the network that you have to worry about. You have to worry about the bandwidth. Are you exceeding the bandwidth here? Is it somewhere else? Am I replicating? Am I protecting this information? Am I, you don't want to take it too far, but you want to protect your data at the right level. So the challenge is, do we replicate this data? Do we not replicate this data? Do I keep it for six years? Do I keep it for three years? And you guys run policy on that. You have to, right? But eDiscovery, is it all active data? Is it more... It really depends. So every case is different. Every matter is different. So a case could be active for 10, 15 years. You've got to keep that data. What do you do with that data? So the classification active, it really depends on the scenario. Got it. So Brian, your company is around the globe. I believe, can you tell us how you're managing the data challenges of that? So each of our different business units is unique in their own way. And as you operate in different countries, there's different laws regarding David's privacy. Those have their own challenges that they bring to it. We've really tried to standardize and make it into a cookie cutter approach where we just have this factor where we just spit out the same solution over and over again. And that's really... We're getting to that model. We're not there everywhere yet. But as we get to that, I think it really simplifies the management of our environment. And we can really scale and just reuse hardware wherever we need to reuse it at. So we can take one from one location as it scales up or down and move it to another. So that's really... Virtualization has really enabled us to do a lot of that, right? So we can do VDI and just turn it up to the data center or wherever we need to turn it up. So how do you look at kind of the whole cloud wave that's going on? Are you using public cloud and how does cloud play into your environment? We are not using public cloud. We kind of have our own private cloud when you look at it that way. Do the data that we have. We can't really take it out there. And that's just a big challenge. It would be really nice to see a cloud that's out there where you could put certain types of data out there that maybe customers wouldn't be okay with you taking out. There's a lot of sensitive information that you have out there. I think cloud's still kind of a buzzword. And it's a lot of hype that's associated with it, but it's getting there. It's really scalable. It's kind of the data center. Private cloud is just the data center. It's just scalability, right? So you're just outsourcing your success at that point. I mean, it's really scalability and stability. So there's not a lot to cloud that's out there. Brian, my final question we're out tight on time here, but is share with the folks out there what you've learned. I mean, obviously, you know, you're on the cutting edge. Obviously, Iceland's a great product, but storage is a big challenge. There's always going to be a challenge in a year at EMC where it's clear that it's not going away, right? Right. It's going to get more complex, hopefully easier as it interacts with it. What advice would you share with other IT pros out there? Always plan ahead, right? So always build for scalability. So you can add on to that. Don't pigeonhole yourself into just kind of this corner where you can't scale anymore, right? So it's always planning ahead. Brian Smith here at Epic Systems here at theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break. We're at EMC World of SiliconANGLE and Wikibon theCUBE coverage day two. We'll be right back with the next guest.