 From Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts, extracting the signal from the noise, it's the Cube! Covering VTUG's New England Winter Warmer 2016. Now your host, Stu Miniman. Welcome back to the Cube. I'm Stu Miniman with Wikibon, and this is the VTUG 2016 Winter Warmer 10th year of the show, third year of having the Cube here, and no better way to be at a user group than to talk to one of the users themselves. Happy to have on the program for the first time, Neil Reardon, who is the AVP of Information Systems and Technology for Central One Federal Credit Union, local company here in the New England area. Neil, thanks for joining us. No problem, thanks for having me. All right, so Neil, start us out. Tell us a little bit about your background, your role, and for those that don't know, Central One Federal Credit Union, tell us a little bit about the organization. Okay, cool. Yeah, so I've been in technology close to 20 years, I think over 20 years. I don't, you know, if I add my months up right, but basically been doing IT, soup to nuts, help desk, started help desk, and then working my way up to management now. So, you know, I'm 16 years in credit union land, so to speak, so this is my fourth credit union that I've been at, so this is what, you know, we've been around since 1952, started as a New England electric, you know, Massachusetts electric workers, and then we went federal in 1998, I believe, to be a federally chartered credit union, which means we have the Fed that governs us, so we have to make sure that we're up to snuff with most of our offerings to members. Okay, so Neil, how many locations do you guys have? Sketch out for us a little bit what your IT staff looks like. Okay, so we have four brick and mortar branches. Obviously, we're online with online services, mobile services, and we have a very small staff. We actually just hired our second help desk person, so there's, including myself, four of us that handle about 100 end users, probably 150 end points, I guess, as far as desktops go, and you know, there's always a challenge as to how do we secure that for our members, and you know, they expect that of us, so that's why it's, you know, it's always a crazy thing to try to tackle. All right, and what technology domains fall under your purview? Everything, I guess. Anything that runs on a computer or electricity, I guess, falls under me. I think, you know, the phone system, the networking, the storage, the desktops, all that stuff, as well as the other half of me is data operations, so it's all the day-to-day processing, so I know right away when stuff isn't working. Yeah, okay, you talk about, some companies, one of the challenges they have is like, oh, well, I've got this group, we'll talk to that group, you just have to have the two sides of yourself and everybody involved, you know, you don't have some of those organizational issues, I guess. No, it's more of an internal, incredible Hulk-type battle, I guess, that I get into. All right, so can you tell us a little bit about kind of your infrastructure, what do you have, you know, what kind of virtualization, compute, server, network? All right, so a couple years ago, we peer-to-veed everything, 30 physical servers, now we're at 85 virtual servers in just a couple years. We actually, we reduced our footprint by choosing SimpliVity OmniCubes, so we went from two and a half physical racks to four U. So that was actually, you know, from just a massive amount of heat generated out of that one area that we went from 60 plus power supplies to, you know, six, eight, because we needed it, we had like, you know, a physical domain control, that kind of thing, so it wasn't just the two OmniCubes, but for the most part, you know, it's our footprint significantly reduced as well as we were able to do disaster recovery, which is a huge thing for credit unions. Okay, so take us back to kind of some of that decision point. So first of all, going P-to-V is a big change, and then you're going from, you know, physical servers with, you know, storage and moving to a hyper-converge, so I mean, you went full in and jumped in for multiple changes. Can you walk us through a little bit of that process, you know, what you looked at, you know, why you made that decision, and you were pretty early on, especially from a SimpliVity standpoint. Sure, yeah, I believe they went general availability January of 2013, I started at the credit union February of 2013, and by March, April timeframe, we had chosen SimpliVity as the option to help us virtualize, you know, the equipment we were going to use to virtualize. We, you know, we looked at all the different, you know, looked at three different solutions. One was SimpliVity, one was the typical EMC solution so that had hosts and switches and storage Omni and same with the, you know, what I likened more to a hybrid, which was Nimble and regular hosts. Once we, knowing that we went to an Oracle, we had an Oracle database that is our, you know, core system, when we added, when we looked at doing that, everybody else doubled their appliances to their hosts to help us get to that compute that we needed. So we went from two and a half physical racks to three and a half physical racks with the other two solutions, where SimpliVity, we doubled the memory and everything seemed to work out pretty well. I mean, you know, not going wood, so to speak. So VM density was one of the things that really helped you a bunch? Absolutely, I mean, I think, you know, just from, there was a lot of different benefiting factors. One was, you know, cost, just from a licensing standpoint, it was a lot cheaper, and I was able to do DR. That was a big thing, you know, the budget was already set when I walked in the door. So, you know, when they gave me the option when we saw all the stuff, and they were pushing off DR another year, knowing that how important disaster recovery is and, you know, business continuity in our present, we have to be 24-7, and, you know, this allowed us to do that. Yeah, so I'm just curious, you know, what sort of risk was involved there? I mean, were you the one driving this and kind of putting yourself on the line here, because if, you know, moving from, you know, kind of a, you know, solution where, you know, you mentioned some big vendors out there, you know, probably not going to get fired if something, you know, doesn't go as opposed to, you know, buying a startup. Yeah, definitely a leap of faith. We, you know, it was my, ultimately my, there were a group of people that had the ultimate choice. I had to go in front of the board of directors and, you know, kind of, you know, tell them what I was thinking. And for whatever reason, they picked up what I was putting down, and they, I don't know, I felt like I'd sell ice to Eskimos when I walked out of there, because it was just one of those things that, you know, I can't believe that they, you know, this was a leap of faith for not only them, but me, like, throwing myself out there. I mean, I had just come off doing a refresh with the typical solution, and it just, you know, we had to do, I wanted to see something different. And as a nerd, I was like, this is fantastic. Yeah, all right, Neil, so walk us through kind of the experience. So once you've got it installed, you know, were there any issues there? What about, you know, upgrades, expansions, and the like, you know, what's it like on this solution? Just like anything else, it's VMware. So it's, you know, we, you know, that makes it a lot easier to digest. I mean, it's not like we had to learn, you know, something brand new. Some of the staff had to learn it. It's the first time they'd seen it, but, you know, just from a virtual standpoint, it's so much easier to have everything on a single pane of glass as everybody here can attest to, I'm sure. But, you know, basically the upgrades, they're just like anything else. So they get certified in whatever version of VMware we're on, and we actually just did an upgrade to 5.5 vSphere, and, you know, that seemed to go pretty well. We had to do an upgrade with SimpliVity for that. And, you know, it's just like anything else. I think, you know, I think looking longer term, it's okay, how do we refresh this stuff? And it's a easier swap out as well. So we're getting to the, you know, we're in the three year range at this point. So, you know, equipment refresh is kind of in my mind right now at some point. I guess one of the things we look at, traditionally from a storage standpoint, migration is one of the toughest things, because when you bring in something new, you know, getting off the old, getting onto the new, when you're adding new pieces, there's that constant, you know, churn there. And therefore, you know, we look at, you know, most companies will spend at least 30% of the overall cost of a solution in those migration costs. And, you know, the kind of hyper-convergence or what we call server sand, when I've got a pool of resources and it should be able to add nodes and take nodes out. Even if you do a refresh, you add the new piece and you pull the old, it should be a lot more seamless. And therefore, it should, you know, it should work. You know, how true to reality is that? Well, so far, we haven't had to worry about that right now. We did end up adding two more OmniCubes this past year. You know, we found that we wanted to do something like a, you know, I call it a VDI light. So it was RDS servers and we just needed more resources. Went to the board again and said, look, we, you know, we went from 30 physical servers to now we're at 65 virtual servers. I need more resources. So they basically, you know, because it was so successful, they said, yeah, I buy two more. So we use that. So right now I have two clusters. They talk to each other, but they're just separated. And just the performance level is still as good as any and they talk, we can migrate, you know, you can be motion back and forth. So it's not like, you know, I see something, you know, when we have to do updates, for example, for the OmniCubes themselves, we v-motion everything onto one, and then we update it and we v-motion everything back. So we know that everything runs on one or two OmniCubes at the most. You know, you head your bets with the more redundancy you can get. So it sounds like, you know, you must have done a lot of homework trying to go to the board and understand what kind of hero numbers do you have as kind of utilization and efficiency of the solutions you're using? Sure, I think when we converted, it was under six terabytes of data. And because we've added so many servers and have now are able to offer so many different services to the members, you know, we're probably right around, I think total we could, we have like 21 terabytes associated available to us. And we, you know, we're out of the whole cluster. And we are using, we probably still have about eight or nine left, which includes about 11 petabytes of data backup. And that's because I was pretty anal about every two hours backing it up and we keep those forever at scene. And we're not supposed to do that. I mean, it doesn't, it kind of defeats the purpose, but you know, I think with unlimited storage at some level, it was easy to do. So now we're trying to manage that a little bit better. But they, you know, I think, you know, our efficiency numbers are really good. I think we're in the high 80, the 86% to one for what SimpliVity uses for their efficiencies. But our Ddupe rate is between the four in production. We're about, I believe it's 40% to 40.1 to one for Ddupe and compression is 2.1 to one. Okay, and what are kind of the main applications that you're using? That's pretty high, you know, rates of Ddupe. Yeah, we actually have, we run Oracle databases as our core application database. We have ATM databases, we have SQL databases. I mean, we have a lot of transactional information and bombarding these things over, you know, on a daily basis, on an hourly basis. I mean, we, you know, because we're open technically 24-7, we have constant communication between our online banking provider and our core system and our core support. And, you know, everything seems to have been handled efficiently enough with going with the army cubes. I mean, it was nice to see that, you know, it wasn't a bad decision even a couple years later. Yeah, so Neil, I mean, you guys obviously weren't hesitant. You're one of the first customers of First SimpliVity, but what have you seen in the maturation of that solution over the last couple of years? I think they have got more efficient in how they de-dupe and compress. I was, you know, we were able to not have to upgrade our data line to be able to run data backups to our DR location or push across data there, which was a big thing now. The one thing that- That's the Wayne Optimization. Yeah, that's the Wayne Optimization. So that was actually, that worked. We didn't have to upgrade. We had a three meg pipe between VPN tunnel between us and our DR location. So we didn't have to really do anything there. The one things that I like to hear that they're doing and I kind of have said that it's been a downfall is the file level restore. Right now it's available if you're on their latest and greatest version, which now we're going to be upgrading relatively soon. But I think that's one of the things that I would have liked to see earlier on, more like a, you know, I think if you tied it in with Veeam, they're now bringing that in, which, you know, we didn't do. We just kind of, you know, the, it's still better than tape, restoring a backup or somebody lose a file is that kind of thing. But the file of a restore, I think we'll come into play more with exchange. So restoring that one email or something along those lines, that's where it would, that's where it'll help. And then for, from a financial institution, we, you know, data encrypt data at rest encryption is really one of the things that the feds looking at. So they're offering that sometime in one of their new releases this year, which is one of those things that just from a security standpoint, we, you know, our members expect us to be as secure as possible that no breaches are going to happen to their data. And that's what they expect. So, you know, we're trying to give that to them. All right, so Neil, you know, if you, you know, we're talking to some of your peers, you know, what advice would you give them now that you've been through this experience? You know, what would you say to have them, you know, maybe that they wouldn't be prepared for things that they said, okay, we did this good or, you know, maybe we could have done this better. What advice would you give to, you know, your peers? Definitely pick the right person to help you install it. You know, I think that there's so many more people to choose from now that it doesn't, you know, you find the right vendor to work with and as long as you trust them. So are you talking about a channel partner or are you talking about the vendor themselves that makes the technology? No, the channel partner. Yeah, okay. So they use the right channel partner and you know, one of the things that I've done a few calls for the, for SimpliVity that I would like to see is, was all this file level restore and so it looks like that they probably just listened to everything I said and put it into play now. But, you know, that's my God complex kicking in I guess that they're listening to me at all times. But they, you know, I think that I would probably up the RAM, you know, just do it, make sure that the box that you're getting is going to, you know, it's easy, you know, well it's virtual. So everything's easier to just add stuff to it and create the servers and do all that stuff. I think you really need to make sure you scale it out appropriately. Okay, is your company using any public cloud today? You talked about kind of the web services that you have. Do you host everything yourself? Everything's in-house, yeah, minus our website. So that's hosted from our online service provider, which, you know, but everything else is, we host, you know, internally, I think. Yep, I'm just kidding. All right, so Neil, have you been to this event before? I went to the one in Maine over the summer, you know, Gritty McPubs? All right, so what do you find is kind of the value? What brings you to the user groups and you know, what do you get out of it? I think it's cool to see all the new technology. I mean, you can only read so much online and you know, it's kind of nice to see it and even then, if you're interested, there's breakout sessions for you to be able to actually listen to and possibly ask a question or at least approach some of the vendors that, well, they're here. You know, also making contacts with people, you know, you don't really see, you know, I can't go home and talk, geek talk with my wife, she's just like zones out and doesn't listen and there's not too many people that want to do that, but if it's during the day and everything, you know, everybody says it seems to be a good atmosphere to collaborate with people and get to know different people because I mean, I'm definitely the dumbest guy in the room so it helps me to figure out who I can talk to and to help me figure stuff out. All right, so Neil, I've got one really important question for you. So, you know, what do you think about Patriot's chances here for, you know, the rest of the playoffs? I know they're going to win, so they, Are they going to go all the way? I think so, yeah. Trophy number five. Trophy number five. All right, well. Well, the big parade. All right, Neil, we've got this on record, so, you know, when the Patriots, you know, have the parade and, you know, Brady and Belichick, you know, have their fifth trophy, you're going to be able to point back and say, you know, I called it, so. Yeah, I got my style from Bill Belichick, so. Absolutely, just got to cut the sleeves off. Yeah, you got to cut the sleeves, yeah. All right, well, Neil Rudin, really appreciate you joining us. We'll be back wrapping up our coverage of the VTUG 2016 Winter Warmer. Thanks so much for watching. This is theCUBE.