 From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. Hi everybody, welcome to this CUBE Conversation. We're here again with Jason Thomas, who's the CIO of Cole Scott and Cassane CSK, a law firm in Florida. And we're going to talk tech a little bit, and specifically we're going to focus a little bit on sort of infrastructure, architecture, some of the tools and products that Jason is using, how he's applying technology. Good to see you again, Jason. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. So, we know about your law firm, largest civil defense law firm in Florida, very fast growing, you know, I think you said 400 plus attorneys, right? So growing, what in the last, you said three or four years from about 300 or so, right? So very, very fast growing, dynamic, doing awesome, that's great, congratulations. I want to talk about your infrastructure. So paint us a picture of what your shop looks like, and we'll get into it. Yep, so I'm very big on centralization, so when I first arrived at the firm, we had a lot of data sprawl, is the best way to put it, you know, just kind of servers everywhere, different offices, and I said, first thing we knew to take all this, we knew we knew to get everything in the data center. That's just going to make life much easier, as much as possible, so at this point, all we really see in any given office is a domain controller and a print server, that's it. And other than that, everything else is in the data center, we use pure storage on the back end for our SAN, for our high performance type applications, for document management, where we've moved, we're in the process of moving all that to the cloud, that's much more efficient that way, sitting on an all flash array is not, doesn't make sense as far as PDFs and Word documents go, you're not going to see the compression or data reduction there. And so I've got that there, so we've got a kind of a multi-layer strategy, not to say that I'm paranoid, but I'm kind of paranoid when it comes to data production, data loss. And so we started as simple as our file servers, for example, we have shadow copies enabled, that's as simple as it's free, so someone deletes a random file or something, rather than going to our, even we don't have to go to our backup system, we just take a look, some snapshots, go back and restore that, if it's something simple like that, that way, even if we wanted to let an end user to restore a file, we could, but we handle that. So it's not self-serve. Yeah, it's not self-serve, but we do it for them, but it's a basic tech can do that. You don't have to call the system admin to handle that. Anything further than that? And yeah, we go to the backups and then our next step in our backup strategy, we are a rubric shop, so we have a brick, a brick as they call it, in our backup data center, we have another data center just for backups, so that all gets stored in the rubric, it's completely immutable and it's got decent retention on that, so. Did you bring in rubric? I brought in rubric, yeah. Okay, why'd you bring in rubric? We were using, and you had mentioned it earlier in the second, when we started out, we were much smaller than we were years ago, we were using a product that was probably more geared towards SMB and we needed something a little more enterprise, so we brought in rubric a couple years ago. Okay. And we've done some, we haven't had to use it, thankfully haven't had to use it much. It's there, and we obviously do testing on it on a regular basis. I have spun up a VM on it, which was awesome, that I, my personal, personally ruined a VM myself, I wouldn't boot, but luckily it was a test VM, so I was able to spin one up there, so it works as advertised, it's awesome, very fast. And then we've also got another data center outside the state of Florida where we have another, basically it's basically a replica or a duplicate of what we have at our main data center and we replicate pure to pure, we have another pure storage unit in that data center and we use their replication technology and snapshotting to put everything there as well. Okay, and what about the network? What's that look like? So we have, right now we have 13 offices now and they're all on an MPLS, a private network, and we've got secondary and third internet connections for backup or internet in general. We're looking at some type of SD-WAN strategy, means a lot of things to a lot of folks, but for us we'd like to kind of take advantage of those secondary and third connections and create our own kind of private network if we have an issue with the MPLS. And you're a VMware shop, right? And you also, you put stuff in the cloud, what's your cloud provider? Yeah, so, and then our kind of final layer in that, in that as part of that strategy is I did want to have the option and look in the future too to replicate to the cloud. So I got in touch with the Clumio, they're pretty new on the street, but they're the CEO and I know a few of the folks they're from other industries and other places and I have a lot of trust in what they're doing and basically we are also replicating all our servers to the AWS cloud using Clumio. So it integrates into vCenter and basically sends all the data up to the AWS cloud. And so, and guys get the same type of retention as a rubric, we get seven years retention and it's immutable as well. So that's my kind of my backup of the backup plan. In the future, who knows? We may not even need the DR side anymore. We may just go straight if we need to fail over and we just fail over to AWS vCenter in the cloud. We've got our Clumio backups there and we have the ability to spin up VMs there as well. Okay, so you've got VMware running on AWS and that's what you're using Clumio to protect, correct? And why Clumio and not rubric if you're a rubric shop? The management piece, the simplicity of the interface, it's, I like the fact that they manage everything for you so you don't even have to have agents on the servers. You basically, it's under their account. You simply install a appliance locally in your environment, a virtual appliance and they take care of the rest and you're just presented with an interface, a GUI interface to do whatever, whether it is to do restores or monitor or check up on the indexing of the data. That's all there. It's pretty simple, there's really not much to do. It was the simplicity of the solution that was really attractive and it's, in my mind, it's a no-brainer as far as costs and effectiveness. And it's pure SAS model is my understanding, correct? So you're not installing any hardware? Nope, no hardware, no agents. It's simply, it's an integration into vCenter and you just let it do its thing and that's it. It's interesting, I mean, you look at the history of SAS, it kind of started with CRM. You know, it kind of went from Siebel to Salesforce. You had Exchange, went to Gmail and then eventually Office 365. You saw ServiceNow actually took a while. They sort of disrupted BMC, but that took about a decade. Workday was much faster, right? Workday took, well, it was the PeopleSoft, I guess was the main HR product. So do you feel like backup is next or is it sort of going to be this hybrid world, this mix of sort of on-prem backup folks and traditional backup and SAS? Or do you think like many of these other, and not that these other companies that I just mentioned go away. I mean, you know, Teradata is going to be doing still well. You got Snowflake disrupting them, but do you see the SAS backup as something that's going to have legs? Yeah, because when you talk about cloud, it's still, depending on what you want to do, putting your entire infrastructure in the cloud, I mean, it's expensive. Everyone's preaching cloud, cloud, cloud, but you kind of have to look at it and say, okay, does it really make, from a cost perspective, it doesn't always make sense. It's very expensive to spend up a VM in Azure or AWS, you know, once you put in all the storage and compute costs. But the things like backup, it totally makes sense. I mean, and honestly it's been going on, I mean, at least a decade right between Carbonite and Mosey and all these players in the- The endpoint. You know, so, people who've been doing it, I mean, Clumio, all they've done is just taking it to the enterprise and they're taking advantage of different storage tiers in Amazon. I mean, it's not, there's nothing complex, I would say, or not, you know, they didn't come up with something amazing, they just figured out, they took something and- Don't tell that to the rest of you. Yeah, right. Listen guys, I'm sure there's a lot of complexity to the engineering behind it. Basically all they've done is put a nice interface on top of something, and they've taken all the complexity out of, you know, setting up your own AWS account and managing all your buckets and all that, you know. They're taking care of all that and doing it for you, basically. And how they do it, you know, I don't know, but definitely different storage tiers and mixes of that to make all that happen, but they just make it super simple and super affordable. It's the other piece, it's very affordable in my mind as opposed to other directions I could go with Cloud Backup. Yeah, you mentioned that a couple times. First, it's amazing to me how it's like you're compressing the innovation cycles in Backup. I mean, it was, it just feels like just recently where Cohesity, Rubrik raised, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars and it was all about simplicity. And they, I think each of those companies, I'm sure it does Veritas and Dell EMC and Commvault, they all have cloud plays, right? So I'm still trying to understand what's different about Cloomy. It sounds like it's pure SAS, that's a different. I mean, you've mentioned cost a couple of times, but maybe add some color to that. They've basically done what, they've taken what Rubrik has done. So I'll back up to when I first looked at Rubrik, basically the phone call I got was, hey, man, I'm telling you this is like totally disruptive and it's gonna blow your, I'm like, dude, it's backups. You're not gonna blow my mind. Give me a break. He's like, just give me, just give me a chance. I was like, all right, all right, come on, come on. Coming in, blow my mind. And literally, I was like, man, why didn't I think of this? It blew your mind. It blew my mind. I was like, oh, this is like literally like, you took, you put a web interface on top of the entire thing and you basically have to do nothing. It does all the investing. It's like a search. If I wanna search for a file, I just simply type the name of the file like I would in Google and it just searches across. I don't have to know where it exists. I just need to know that it's there. And basically what Eklumi has done, if they've just taken that and just put it into the cloud. They've done this similar thing. They index all your VMs and then if I need to restore a file or search for something, I just type the name of the file and it says, here's all the hits that I got. What do you wanna restore? Whereas, I remember back in the day, or two years ago, if you need to restore something, you kinda, okay, where was it? What was the location? What was the exact path? And you gotta go, the D drive in this folder, in this folder, there's none of that anymore even. It's just they've even taken the work out of that so you don't even need, the same reason we went with Pure is you don't need a storage admin and you don't really need a backup admin per se. You don't need someone spending a lot of time or devoting a lot of time to the process. It just works. You don't need a babysit, is what it comes in. So whereas, you have one of these legacy type storage arrays or backup systems and you have the babysit it. Nobody has time to babysit that. So they've abstracted all that complexity away and it was gonna be interesting to see how the industry responds. It's like the NFL, this industry's a copycat industry and so at the same time they have a big install base. People generally don't like to migrate, right? Off of something to something else. So what I'll say to that is, and that part stinks, no one likes to migrate off of anything but you're not really migrating off of anything. You don't have to really do much. You just pop something in, you just pop an appliance in and it really takes care of the rest. Like even with Rubrik and Klumio, once you pop that appliance in your environment, through hardware or virtual, it's integrating into your v-center environment and it knows what's in there and it just asks you, hey, which of these you want to back up? What kind of policy you want on? How often do you want to back up? And you just check box, check boxes. So yo, just to clarify, so Klumio's not physical hardware. No, it's virtual. Virtual appliance. I think it does the management on-prem. It's kind of like a data mover of sorts. Today it's just narrow, right? It's VMware on AWS. Correct. I believe there's a roadmap there. I believe there's a roadmap for my understanding. I would have to think so. I'm kind of cloud agnostic as far as who the player is with this AWS, Azure, GCP. But I have colleagues who, they're in an Azure shop and that's what we do and I get that. And so I mean, I would imagine, I understand that they probably have Azure GCP on the road. Well, they raise a bunch of dough, so they're sure they gotta raise it. Because the backup's so simple, so they don't, not a lot of engineering. So okay, so you don't have a dedicated storage admin or backup admin anymore. Did you used to or? Before I got there, there was no SAN actually, so there wasn't a storage. But yes, there was a lot of time spent on the backup piece managing the backups. Just monitoring it, make sure things were, a lot of time devoted to that. Now, there's not a ton of time spent on that. And was it qualified people doing it? Or was it lawyers and paralegals doing that? Definitely lawyers, no. So yeah, I mean, you know, it's just admins. Now they worry about other stuff that's important. What do they worry about? How have you shifted that resource? A lot of our focus now is moving to exchange in the cloud, Office 365. So there's quite a bit of work that goes into that, especially given some integrations that we have with our case management software and all that. So there's a lot of time is being devoted to that right now. So our plan is to move next year. Yeah, okay, so a lot of tactical stuff that you gotta get done. Last question, I always love to ask you. Things that vendors do that drive you crazy that you wanna tell them stop doing this? There is not, everybody has a solution for something and not everybody needs that solution for your one niche. I mean, you go to some of these conferences now and there's billions of vendors, I don't know the billions but you know, there's just dozens and dozens of vendors and it's almost like some of them are just kind of trying to monetize that one little thing that I don't really need. So backups, I need cloud backups. You know, storage, I need storage outside of that. There's just, and the best way I can put it is I've talked to some colleagues and they're just going through, we like to call vendor fatigue. It's just continuous, it's just all the time someone always has a solution for something. So it's not that I don't want anybody to do something about your solutions, it's just not for everybody and it's not, you know, it doesn't work. Well, the thing is you're getting pitched all the time and you're experienced. So CIOs have told me, look it, tell me what it is, what it does, what it costs and I'll give me five minutes and I'll tell you if it fits my business or not, if it does, I'm going to want to know more. If it doesn't, hey, you know, respect my time. Yeah, usually it's for me, I'm approaching them, I'm approaching a vendor for a solution not the other way around. If you're approaching me, I'm probably, yeah, I don't have time to answer every call or email I try to, but usually it's me saying, hey, you know what, we need something for this. And then every once in a while, you'll get a rubric or a clumi or a pure, come around, you know, and you're like, oh, well that looks cool, you know that. No, this is going to blow your mind? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, sure. But you know, then you find out. If it doesn't, I owe you dinner. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Then they blow your mind and it happens. To let me run, I'm not saying that doesn't happen but it's very rare. Well, a big part of this is so much venture capital has poured into the tech business in the last 10 years. And what do they do with that VC? They promote, they hire salespeople, they go to market and so they're under a lot of pressure and they're churning through those guys and so they're calling guys like you, trying to get you in a headlock to buy something and it sounds like sometimes it's counterproductive. Yeah, I get it and that's their job that they have to. I have a policy, I mean, I try and answer every email, at least just say, hey, I can't or not interested, at least not much, I try not to ignore folks but sometimes just work out, you know? Right. Good, well, awesome. Thank you for sharing all that insight, Jason. It's great to have you back on. Yeah, thank you. All right, welcome. All right, thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante from theCUBE. We'll see you next time.