 Live from New Orleans, Louisiana at theCUBE. Covering .NEXT Conference 2018 brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back. We're here in New Orleans in the state of Louisiana and to help Keith Townsend and myself, Stu Miniman, wrap up, we're glad to have one more customer. We have the great state of Louisiana here with us. We have Michael Allison, who's the Chief Technology Officer. We also have Derek Williams, who's the Director of Data Center Operations. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. Thanks for having us. All right, so I think we all know what the state of Louisiana is. Hopefully most people can find it on the map. It's a nice, easy shape to remember for my kids and the like. But Michael, what do we start with you? Talk for us first about kind of the purview of your group, your organization and some of the kind of biggest challenges you've been facing in recent times. Sure, we're part of the Office of Technology Services which is a consolidated IT organization for the state of Louisiana. We were organized about four years ago, this actually four years ago this July, and that brought in the 16 federated IT groups into one large organization. And we have the purview of the executive branch, which includes those typical agencies like children and family services, motor vehicles, public safety, health and hospitals, labor, et cetera. Derek, you've got the data center operation, so give us a little bit of the scope. We've heard how many organizations in there, but what do you all have to get your arms around? Sure, so we had, there's often a joke that we make that if they've ever made it, we own one of each. So we had a little bit of every type of technology. So what we've really been getting our arms around is trying to standardize technologies, get a standard stack going, an enterprise level thing, and really what we're trying to do is become a service provider to those customers where we have standard lines of service and set enterprise level platforms that we migrate everybody onto. Do you actually have your own data centers or you're hosting facilities? What's kind of the real estate look like? Absolutely, so we have the state has two primary data centers that we utilize and then we also use a number of cloud services as well as some third party providers for offsite services. So obviously, just like every other state in the union, you guys have plenty of money, way too many employees, and just no challenges. Let's talk about what are the challenges? You know, coming together, bringing that many organizations together, there's challenges right off the bat. What are some of the challenges that you guys look to provide services to the great people of Louisiana? Well, as Derek kind of alluded to, our technology debt is deep. We have services that are aging at about 40 years old that are tier one services. And they were built in silos many, many years ago. So being able to do application rationalization, being able to identify those services, then we actually shift to the cultural side as you bring in 16 different IT organizations into one, having all those individuals now work together instead of apart and not in silos. That was probably one of the biggest challenges that we had over the last few years is really breaking down those cultural barriers and really coming together as one organization. Yeah, I totally agree with that. The cultural aspect has been the biggest piece for us. Really getting in there and saying, a lot of small and medium sized IT shops could get away without necessarily having the proper governance structures in place. And a lot of people wore a lot of hats. So now we're about 800 strong in the Office of Technology Services and that means people are very aligned to what they do operationally. And so that's been a big shift and kind of that cultural shift has really been where we've had to focus on to make that align properly to the business needs. That's right. Mike, what was the reason that led you down the path towards Nutanix? Maybe set us up with a little bit of the problem statement. We heard some of the heterogeneous nature and standardization which seems to fit into a theme. We've heard lots of times with Nutanix, but was there a specific use case or what led you towards that path? About four years ago, the Department of Health and Hospitals now really had a case where they needed to modernize their Medicaid services, eligibility and enrollment. CMS really challenged them to build a infrastructure that was in line with their MIDA standards. It was modular, COTS, configuration over customization. The federal government no longer was a bid to build monolithic systems that don't integrate in just big silos. So what we did was we gravitated to that project, went to CMS and said, hey, why don't we take what you're asking us to build and build it in a way that we can expand throughout the enterprise to not only affect the Department of Health, but also children and family services and be able to expand it to Department of Corrections, et cetera. That was our use case and having an anchor tenant with the Department of Health that has a partner with CMS really became the linchpin in this journey. That was our first real big one. Okay, how did you hurt first about Nutanix? Was there a bake-off you went through? It was, yes, very similar. It was, the RFP process took a year or so and we were actually going down the road of procuring some V-blocks and right before the Christmas vacations, our deputy CIO says, hey, why don't you go look to see if there's other solutions that are out there, challenged there myself and some others to really expand the horizon, say, if we're going to kind of do this green field, what else is out there? And right before he got on his Christmas cruise, he dropped out on our lap and about a month later, we were going down the Dell Nutanix route. And to be honest, it was very contentious and it actually took a call from Michael Dell, you know, who I sent to voicemail twice before I realized who it was. But those are the kind of decisions and the buy-in from Dell executives that really allowed us to comfortably make this decision and move forward. So technology doesn't exactly move fast in any government because, you know, people process technology and especially in the government, people in process, as you guys have deployed Nutanix throughout your environment, what are some of the wins and what are some of the challenges? So that's a funny point because we talk about this a lot, that the fact that our choice was really between something like VBlock, which was an established player that had been for a long time and, you know, something a little more bleeding edge. And part of the hesitancy to move to something like Nutanix was the idea that, hey, we have a lot of restricted data, CGIS, HIPAA, all those kind of things across the board, IRS 1075 comes into play. And there was hesitancy to move to something new. But one of the things that we said exactly was we are not as agile as, you know, private sector. The procurement process, all the things that we have to do put us a little further out. So it did come into play that when we look at that timeline, the stuff that's bleeding edge now by the time we have it out there in production, it's probably going to be mainstream. So we had to hedge our bets a little. And, you know, we really had to do our homework. Nutanix was, you know, kind of head and shoulders above a lot of what we looked at. And, you know, I had resiliency to it at first. So credit to the deputy CIO, he made the right call. We came around on it. It's been awesome ever since. You know, one of the driving things for us too was getting out there and really looking at the business case and talking to the customers. One of the huge things we kept hearing over and over was the HA aspect of it. You know, we need the high availability. We need the high availability. The other interesting thing that we have from the cost perspective is we are a cost recovery agency now that we're consolidated. So what you use, you get charged for, you get a bill every month, just like a commercial provider. You know, use this many servers, this much storage, you get that invoice for it. So we needed a way that we could have an environment that's scaled kind of at a linear cost that we could just, you know, kind of add these nodes to without having to go buy a new environment and have this huge kind of CapEx expenditure. And so, you know, at the end of the day, it was, it lived up to the hype and we went with Nutanix and we haven't regretted it, so. How are the vendors doing overall helping you move to that really OpEx model? You said, I'd love to hear what you're doing with cloud overall. Nutanix is talking about it. Dell's obviously talking about that. How are the vendors doing in general and we'd love to hear specifically about Nutanix? We've had the luxury of having, you know, exceptionally good business partners. The example I'd like to give is about four months into this project, we realized that we were treating Nutanix as a traditional three tier architecture. We were sending a lot of traffic north-south. When we did the analysis, we asked a question, you know, little cattywampus, it was, how do we straighten this out? And so we posed a question on a Tuesday about how do we fix this? How do we drive the network back into the fabric? By Thursday, we were on a phone call with VMware. By the following Monday, we had two engineers on site with a local partner with NSX Ninja and we spent the next two months with about four different iterations of how to re-engineer the solution and really look at the full software-defined data center. Not just software-defined storage and compute, is really how do we then evolve this entire solution building upon Nutanix and then layering upon, on top of that, the VMware solutions that kind of took us to that next level? Yeah, and I think the key term in there is business partner. You know, it sounds a little corny to say, but we don't look at them as just vendors anymore. When we choose a technology or direction or an architecture, that is the direction we go for the entire state, for that consolidated IT model. So, we don't just need a vendor. We need someone that has a vested interest in seeing us succeed with that technology and that's what we've gotten out of Nutanix out of Dell and they've been willing to, you know, if there's an issue, they put the experts on site, it's not just, we'll get some people on a call, they're going to be there next week, we're going to work with you guys and make it work. And that's, it's been absolutely key in making this whole thing go. And as a CTO, one of the challenges that we have is, you know, as Derek has executed his cloud vision, is how do we take that and use it as an enabler and an accelerant to how we look at our service design, service architecture, how do we cloud optimize this? So, as we're talking about, you know, CICD and all these little buzzwords that are out there, how can we use this infrastructure to be that platform that kind of drives that from a, kind of a grassroots, you know, foundation up, whereas sometimes it's more of a top-down approach, we're taking somewhat of an opposite. Now we're in that position where we can now answer the question of now, what do we do with it now? So it sounds like you guys are mixed VMware, Nutanix hardware, when you use software, Dale Hartware shop, foundation, you built the software-defined data center foundation, something that we've looked at for the past 10 years in IT to try and achieve, which is a precursor or the foundation to cloud. Nutanix has made a lot of cloud announcements. How does Nutanix's cloud announcements, your partnership with Dale, match what you guys plan when it comes to cloud? So, as a perfect lead-in for us, so you're absolutely right, we have had an active, you know, thought in our head that we need to move toward SDDC, software-defined data centers is what we wanted to be at. Now that we've achieved it, the next step for us is to say, hey, whether it's an AWS or whomever, an Azure type thing, they are essentially in SDDC as well, how do we move workloads seamlessly up and down in a secure fashion? So, the way we architect the things in our SDDC, we have a lot of customers, we can't have lateral movement, so everything's micro-segmentation across the board. What we've been pursuing is a way to move VM workloads, essentially seamlessly up to the cloud and back down and have those micro-segmentation rules follow, you know, whether it goes up or back down. That's kind of the Zen state for us. It's been an interesting conference for us because we've seen some competitors to that model, some of the things Nutanix is rolling out, that we're going to have to go back and take a very serious look at on that roadmap to see how it plays out. But, you know, suddenly multi-cloud, if we can get to that state, we don't care what cloud it's in, we don't have to learn separate stacks for different providers. That is a huge gap for us right now. We have a highly available environment between two data centers where we run two setups active-active that are load balanced. So the piece we're missing now is really an off-site DR that has that complete integration. So the idea that we could see a hurricane out in the Gulf and 36, 48 hours away, know that we might be having some issues, being able to shift workloads up to the cloud, that's perfect for us. And, you know, then cost comes into play, all that kind of stuff that we might have savings, economy of scale, all plays in perfectly for us. So we are super excited about where that's going and some of the technologies coming up are going to be things, we'll be evaluating very carefully over the next year. At the end of the day, it's all about our constituents. We have to take data, turn it into information that they can consume at the pace that they want to, whether it be traditional compute on a desktop or mobile or anywhere in between. It is our job to make sure that these services are available and usable when they need it, especially in the time of the disaster or just in day-to-day life. So that's the challenge that we have when delivering services to our citizens and constituents. Mike and Derek, really appreciate you sharing us, the journey you've been on, how you're helping the citizens here in the great state of Louisiana. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks so much for watching our program. It's been a great two days here. Be sure to check out thecube.net for all of our programming. Thanks to Nutanix and the whole crew here. And thank you for watching theCUBE. Thank you.