 Jim, Jim is with the University of Utah. Is that correct? Yes, yes. Nice to meet you, Dave Vellante. Good to meet you. Welcome to the Cube. Thank you. Good to have you. How are you feeling, Dave? Hanging in there? I am hanging in there. All right. So, all right, so we're here live, big day for Hitachi. We're hearing a lot of culture, a lot of virtualization, big themes in the industry. So, Jim, tell us a little bit about your role at the university. OK, I'm the director of IT infrastructure and operations and basically oversee the infrastructure, the data center, network, storage servers, that type of thing for the university, both on the academic side and on the health care side. So, you're obviously a Hitachi customer? You've been a Hitachi customer for a while? About 11 years. Get nice and close to the mic, so everybody's going to hear you. Sorry. So, they talk about this vision of transforming the data center to an information center. Obviously, universities, they live that a lot of information. A lot of students come and go. Yes. You guys have the persistent data needs. Obviously, just because they graduate doesn't mean the data graduates. Or maybe the data graduates to some other place. Or maybe not. Is it Hitachi? So, tell us about that vision. Do you see how that transformation takes place? Well, for us, the transformation has been taking place over the last few years as we've tried to keep up with the university as it grows. And technologies like what Hitachi offers on the virtualization side of things are in support of where we need to go and to meet those growth challenges. And so, when we made the decision, for example, to go to Hitachi on the virtualization side six years ago, seven years ago, that was a very strategic decision for us, knowing that through virtualization, we could shrink the footprint of our storage initially. And really grow that storage more efficiently and effectively over time, knowing that the health care demands and the research demands of the organization were just going to grow exponentially, which they have. That's interesting. You know, we hear a lot about doing more with less. And universities always have to do more with less. Yes, they do. So you guys are innovators. And it's two more with less mantra. Yes, yes, we are. So six years ago, you started down the journey to virtualization. So how about server virtualization? Where does that fit? Are you guys a VMware shop? Yeah, we are a VMware shop. And this has also been a critical piece of our strategy. Four years ago, we were out of space and power in the data center. And so we either had to consolidate our servers or build a new data center at the time. So over that four-year period through virtualization and server consolidation, we're able to get by with our current data center. And we're now just at the point where we're building a new data center. So why HDS? She talked about the virtualization platform a little bit. But why HDS? There's a lot of choices out there. Well, we had. And you were early on. Sorry to interrupt, but you were early on there. It was sort of new. It was really the whole virtualization thing was unproven at the time. It was. It was a little bit of a leap of faith for us. I mean, we went through an extensive search process of trying to find virtualization technology. I mean, we looked at server-based and really didn't feel comfortable with it. We had been using Hitachi equipment for quite a few years and had had 100% uptime with their equipment. And so when we saw that they were doing controller-based virtualization, to us it made all the sense in the world. Where it's integrated within the storage array, it just seemed like a much more reliable and approached virtualization, which in our opinion it has been. So you hear a lot about clouds, private clouds, hybrid clouds. Would you, IT as a service, what does all that mean to you? Are you on some journey to the private cloud? Or are you just trying to do more with less? What's your take on that? Yeah, the cloud has been a challenge for us. We have a lot of folks at the university who have been wanting to jump on board with a public cloud. And the problem with that is we have a lot of sensitive data, that type of thing, that we really don't want leaving the university. And so what we've been trying to do is develop a private cloud that's just as cost-effective as a public cloud so that we can keep our data in-house and meet requirements, such as what HIPAA demands of us, so that we're not putting information out in an environment that's not secure and not protected. So the private cloud is very important and it's a type of service that our customers expect. It's a type of service that will allow us to grow and provision services to the customer very quickly without them really having to make decisions about what it is they need. They just need to tell us, I need this much storage. I need these many compute cycles, that type of thing. How about things like backup and disaster recovery? Do you see the public cloud as a good candidate for those types of use cases? It can be to an extent, but again, even our backup and recovery are still under the same regulatory compliance. We have the same regulatory compliance issues with backup and recovery as we do with direct storage and that type of thing, so... So talk a little bit more about the virtualization. So what percent of your servers are virtualized roughly? Oh gosh, probably... One and a half? Yeah, I'd say about half. Okay, and how about apps? Less than half? Yeah, less than half. The problem with applications is the vendor's ability to support virtualization. Some vendors... You're an Oracle shop? We are an Oracle shop. Ability or willingness is the other piece of that equation. Yeah, I think it's a willingness. Right, so we heard some interesting stories last week at Oracle Open World about Oracle software licensing practices when customers says they want to install VMware. All of a sudden they're charging for virtual machines, so you got to watch out out there. But what's the... So the inhibitor is really the application vendors supporting and any other inhibitors that... Or do you even want to go deeper into virtualization? We want to go as deep as we can. Okay, so you'd like to be as close to 100% as possible? Oh, absolutely. What's stopping you besides the application support? We're still getting a little bit of pushback from some of the system administrators who haven't bought into the concept of virtualization. So we're having to do some pretty strong mandates around that to get people to explore. System admins, really, as opposed to, for instance, the application heads. Yeah. And because oftentimes you hear about the application heads don't want to put a hypervisor in between the raw hardware and their applications. But you're saying the system admins, they want to maintain their stovepipes. Yeah, and also the application owners as well. So it's kind of a combination. But I think over time, they're getting used to the idea. A lot of them understand the benefits that are completely on board, but still some holdouts. So you're a USP customer? Yeah, in fact, we had one of the... We were one of the original USP customers and then we now have a couple of, I think, three USPVs. You don't have a VSP yet, do you? No. No, but so three USPVs. So don't you think that you have a foundational infrastructure for going deeper into virtualization? Do you feel like you're in pretty good shape there? I think we're in good shape. But I think there are some additional things out of this new platform from Atachi that we're looking forward to. And I think the biggest one there is the page-level tiering. Whereas we have database sitting out on tier one storage and this concept of being able to move page-level data off to lower tiers as it's not used is very appealing to us because that would be a huge cost saver. And also from a performance standpoint as well. So the automated tiering, lower your cost, minimize the complexities of having to move that stuff around manually, right? Do you see that whole notion of tuning going away eventually and turning knobs? Or are we still going to have some proportion that has to... We have to roll up your sleeves and get in there and start manually placing data? I think it'll be a long time before it's completely automated. But boy, that should be nice when it hits that day. Yeah. OK, so in thinking about what you've done here with regard to virtualization, both at the server and storage side, what advice would you give your peers that are looking to do a similar thing? The advice I would give is you need to pursue it wholeheartedly. The ROI is phenomenal, whether it's server virtualization, whether it's storage virtualization. We've done several studies around this and the cost savings are just amazing. Plus, there are additional benefits that you get out of this. On the server virtualization side of things, more redundancy and robustness in the environment. On the storage virtualization, it really lowers your cost of management. And I mean, over the last six years, we've grown from just a few terabytes of disk space to almost a petabyte. And we haven't increased the number of staff managing that environment. So my last question, Jim, for you is, if you had a magic, you've been a Hitachi customer now for a while, better part of a decade. And if you had a magic wand and you could wave it and it would change one thing about Hitachi to make your life better, what would it be? Wow, I think, and hopefully this is coming, I think it would be their licensing structure around their software. But I think that from my understanding of what they have announced today, that is changing and they are gonna make licensing easier. And we wanna see these bundled packages of their applications and almost have these tools in the software as a service or a subscription type of thing where we can have access to all the tools and just pay almost an annual maintenance type of fee for that. You want simplified licensing, you want on demand, pay as you go, pay for what you consume. And wow, wouldn't it be nice if Oracle would give us that? Yes, it would. Don't hold our breaths, collective breaths. All right, Jim Livingston, thank you very much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to hear your perspectives and appreciate your time. No, thank you. Great to meet you. Good to meet you.