 From San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering Nimble Storage, the power of predictive analytics. Now your host, Jeff Frick and Stu Miniman. Welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are live in downtown San Francisco at the Nimble Storage Predictive Flash launch event. There's a lot of people here, a couple hundred people, press from all over the world. That's all good and dandy, but what we love to do when we go out to events is talk to customers and practitioners, doers as we like to say, they're actually putting this technology to work that are actually solving real problems in and don't do tech as a day jobs, really supports what they do in their core business. So really excited to have Will Alexander, VP Information Systems from Racetrack Petroleum, welcome. Thank you, thank you for having me. So for the folks that don't know Racetrack, give us a quick overview of what's the company. Yeah, sure, so we are a fuel and convenience retailer located in the Southeast. We have about 700 locations. We've been around for a little over 80 years, third generation privately held company, second largest private company in Georgia, one of the top 50 largest private companies in the United States. And we operate on high volumes and thin margins. So Will, high volume, low margins, what's the role of IT in the business? So we have to keep the business going, we have to be an enabler. We're in a commodity business. So, and again, high volume, so any little advantage that we can give them of, when we talk about what a penny to a gallon of gas does, when you talk about the volumes that we do, it can have a huge impact. So giving them timely data and accurate data so they can make better decisions, that's what it's all about for us. So has that evolved over time? I mean, we hear a lot of times where the classic IT where I keep the lights on and now everybody's got a seat at the table. Is it, has it evolved? Have you always had that seat at the table or has kind of your voice or your impact, your influence direction kind of changed? I'd like to think that we've always had that seat at the table. But yes, over time, the business has really come to acknowledge that they need us at the table. So they're welcoming us. It's not us trying to break down the door. It's them saying, hey, we need you. If we're going to be successful, you've got to be successful. So can you sketch out for a little of us, what's the size of your IT organization? How many sites you manage, things like that? Yeah, so again, we have about 700 locations. Our IT staff is just over 100 people and that includes all the application teams, developers, all the infrastructure teams, all the support teams, tech support, store system support, as well as IT security. So we've, I tell you that we've doubled in the last five years. So, and that's a testament to the company growing as well as the company understanding that, hey, IT has to play a predominant role if we're going to be successful. All right, so growth, that's great to hear, because most companies you talk to, headcounts, you're lucky if it's flat, if not negative on there. Talk a little bit about the role of infrastructure, what let you to nimble. Sure, sure, so security is important to everybody. I mean, that's a given. Retailers in general, very important. And we had the opportunity to obtain a security application that was really complimented our existing security portfolio. And as we were talking to the vendor, they said, hey, here's the specs on what you need to run our application on. And we looked at it and we were like, yeah, okay, we can't do that. But it was so important to us that we said, you know what, let's take this as an opportunity to go upgrade our infrastructure. Was it the size, the speed, what were some of the factors where you know, it's taking you to the IOPS? We couldn't handle the IOPS. And I will tell you that if you talk to a very large company or some kind of hosting provider, the IOPS, they may not would have blinked an eye at, but for a shop our size, it was a definite shift in a step up and we couldn't support it. But we said, this security application was so important to us. Let's go obtain some better infrastructure. And that worked great. We have an in-house application that we wrote that helps us optimize the bulk purchase of fuel and then the delivery of that fuel to our stores. And it was having some performance issues. So we put that on the nimble and cleared it up. And once all the other application teams and developers heard about that, they were demanding that their stuff run on nimble. So I think we made our first nimble purchase about 18 months ago. And then our second nimble purchase like five months after. Just because it really caught fire. And has it changed the attitude of your application? Obviously it did and that they wanted their stuff to run on the Cadillac, as we used to say. I guess we don't say as much anymore, still like Cadillacs. But in terms of having that capacity, having that operational horsepower, has it changed their way they come to work every day and the way they think about developing apps, new apps? Well, it really is cut down on the finger pointing. So when there's a bottleneck, it's one less finger to point. And so that's been helpful. I tell you another thing that will probably lead us to adopting more and more as we really push our developers towards continuous improvement in DevOps. And they say, fine, that's great. But a trade-off is, hey, we want every environment to be identical to production, to cut down on variability. So we have tests, dev, UAT environments, running in the nimble environment, just to again, cut down on variability and make it easier for us to get to production. One of the things we've heard from users is, if performance is a challenge and I have to optimize and I need to tier, that takes a lot of work and the newer generations of solutions, they really just take performance off the table. It's really been your experience. Yes, exactly. Said better than I. Again, it's one less thing to point a finger at if there's a bottleneck. So you not only came to this event, you were up on stage. Can you talk a little bit about how InfoSight plays into your environment and the story of predictive analytics? How much does that resonate with you? Definitely, so we certainly look at the CAPEX when we buy our infrastructure or buy anything. But I can kind of rest assured that, hey, our requirements are growing. So maybe I can spend a little more CAPEX because I know I'll grow into it. But what I can afford is to be wasteful on the OPEX. I can't afford to add additional headcount for every new piece of technology that I bring in to our environment. So, you know, I've got to have something that works that's easy to maintain. That I can, we're a 24 seven business. We don't, you know, our stores don't close for the evening. So we have very small maintenance windows. So I've got to be able to perform maintenance related activities, you know, during any time of the day without degrading service. And this is, Nimble has provided that to us. I, one of our engineers talked about how we re-indexed one of our larger SQL databases midday. And that was something that previously prior to Nimble, we would have done crossing our fingers at, you know, two in the morning on a weekend. And so it's just brought a lot of efficiency to our team. Yeah, I guess some companies are worried about automation. It's, you know, if I have processes, I know I can handle it. The Nimble solution, one of their taglines is, you know, automating the intelligence of the system. Yes. So, you know, what do you say to your peers out there that are, you know, looking at Nimble or other solutions like that? You know, again, it's the ease of use for us. We just can't afford to carry 20 senior engineers on our staff. That's not feasible for us. So anything that we can automate, feel good about and no predict, really predict the results. And going back to InfoSight, being able to quickly see maybe a potential bottleneck. Cause once the bottleneck happens, it's too late. You need to see it, you know, way down the road before it actually hits. And that's that visibility that InfoSight gives us really brings a lot of value. It keeps us from getting ourselves in trouble. So last word to bring it back full circle. Sure. Your kind of motivation was this security application. Yeah. Was it a success? Was it a good early win? Yes. Did it work out as you anticipated? It was. It was very good. Security has, when you say security to the board or anybody, they say, okay, you're right. We got to do it. And so that was maybe easy for us playing the security card. Although it was a legit play. Right, right. But it proved to be so much more valuable than just helping us with this one security application. And as I say, had you not had that security app, we're, was there another thing coming? Do you think that to be the catalyst? Yeah, this application that we were starting to see some performance issues with, probably would have driven a change. It let us probably make that change sooner to where the business wasn't affected. So it proved to be a very ideal time and very advantageous for us. Timing is everything. Yes. Well, Alexander, thanks for stopping by. Thank you. We really appreciate your insight. We love hearing from customers. I enjoyed it. Absolutely. Thank you and the safe travels home. Thank you. Stu Miniman, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE. We are live at the Nimble Storage Predictive Flash launch event in downtown San Francisco. We'll be back with our next guest after this short break. Thanks for watching.