 Okay, we're back. This is Dave Vellante from wikibon.org. We're here in Barcelona. It's a great city, and continuous coverage from SiliconAngle.com's coverage of the HP Convert infrastructure event. I'm Dave Vellante from wikibon, and I'm here with Dave Neal who's with the University of Leeds and Welcome, David. Hi. Nice to meet you. Great to have you on the Cube. And we were talking off-camera. You're a networking guy You were here today at the HP Press Conference, and you were talking about AppDV, one of HP's security products, and we're going to talk about that a little bit. But why don't you start by telling us a little bit about the University? Okay, the University of Leeds. It's located in the north of England. We're ranked 85th in the QS World University Rankings, and we have a rather, we have a big ambition to be the world's top 50 for 2015. So we're a large university, I believe, with the second largest in the UK. We've got 32,000 students from over 130 different countries, and we have approximately 8,000 staffs. We're a pretty big organisation. And we're more or less located on across two sides. We have a huge University campus, but we also have our network at St James's Hospital. So we also do the teaching of hospitals as well. Right, so um, and how many data centres do you have? We have two data centres in the campus. One in our central machine rooms, we call it, and one in the homes with data centres. They're approximately one kilometre apart. Okay, so talk about your your network infrastructure. We'll describe, paint a picture for us. Okay, we're predominantly a Cisco network. We have the traditional model of core distribution edge. The core of the network comprises of approximately 15, 6,500, I'll show you for a minute, but in each data centre we have what we refer to as our data centre switches, which again is 6,500, cut-for-by-wall service modules, and we have our server infrastructure directly into those. Our edge infrastructure is the Cisco 37050s. They connect to a variety of different edge switches from 2950s to 2960s. We still predominantly offer only 10, 100 megabits out of the desktop, because that's what most of our users require. But there are some specific applications that we do with our gigabit connectivity. The network can be split into three distinct networks. We have our campus network with 21,000 devices. We have our halls of residence network that comprises of 7,000 bedrooms where students can connect the laptops, PCs and these days the ones that connect other devices such as playstations and Xboxes. And then in the last year, we've really expanded our wireless network. We're providing full wireless coverage in most of our buildings. We have approximately 800 wireless access points in campus. But the border of our network, again, is an institutional firewall, and that's where we also deploy our HHP to component devices as well. So let's talk about tipping point. A lot of people don't know what tipping point is. Why don't we start there? What is tipping point and how do you use it? Tipping point is an intruder prevention system. Several years ago, prior to IPSs, there were IDSs that was an intruder detection system. An intruder detection system would notify you of incidents on the computer network, whether a machine may have been exploited or whether there's misuse of the network occurring, or whether there's an unusual network traveling. The difference between an IDS and an IPS is that, dependent on where the intruder detection system is deployed on the network, that can block traffic in real time. So we did it in IPS because we were seeing high use of bandwidth in the wireless network and the overalls of residents network by students using peer-to-peer file sharing software, and we needed a solution to block that. So they were downloading music and other copyrighted material? Yes, they were downloading music, copyrighted material, software. Some of it will have been legitimate, but we came to find out that most of it was actually copyrighted material. So you were proactive about that, I mean a lot of organizations that we work with said, what are we supposed to do about it, but you really were very proactive about that in protecting the students and of course the university's reputation, right? Well that's very important to me, protecting the students. We have a duty of care to ensure that they have a good student experience. They may say it's not so good, but there's blocking the peer-to-peer applications, but we need to protect them. So when we received a cease and desist notice, this was targeted at a student, agreed upon to our students who had been in a troubled one. But also the university's reputation is very important, so we take IT security very, very seriously. I went to students also visit websites to source this copyrighted material. Those websites can often be affected with malware, spyware, so there was additional benefit there going down as well. Right, so talk about the before and the after. So what would you have to do before the tipping came itself? You would just get a report of what's happening and then you'd have to go, what, reconfigure stuff or was it even doable? We get a report saying that such a time, such an IP address, was downloading Back to the Future 2 or whatever the movie helped us with. At that point we'd be very easily able to identify the user responsible for that activity. And we had a manual plural process of blocking the accounts and then speaking to the student and telling them why the account's been blocked and asking them not to do that again. But over time the number of notices increased and we found that there's a lot of staff time and effort in dealing with these copyright infringements. So we knew we had to be more clever and look at maybe we could use technology to actually prevent this from happening. And so how's it worked? It's worked really well. We were the tipping point customers since 2005 and we deployed initially the IP address just up our halls of residence of wireless networks. We chose to block BitTorrent, eDonkey, I&Y and Nutella, probably about 30 peer-to-peer applications and since that point we've had no copyright infringement notices. So it's been really successful. We anticipated when we first started blocking peer-to-peer that the students would be really upset. Be revolting. And some of them did, but the majority I think had read the IT policy and knew that it was probably to use peer-to-peer software in that way. We did have a few students who wanted to use applications such as World of Warcraft which also relies on peer-to-peer technology and we were able to make exceptions. So you can whitelist through applications. That's correct, yeah. Okay I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about this whole convergence trend. You've heard a lot today from HP about convergent infrastructure but just in general the converging of storage and network and compute infrastructure. Is that something that you guys are thinking about as something you're actually doing? I wonder if from a practitioner's perspective what your angle is on that? I think we've got many opportunities to consolidate or converge some of our existing technologies and we've already made incredible investments in our current infrastructure. So it's a matter of choosing the right time and the right product to make the use of a converged solution. At the moment we have separate infrastructure for the data network in terms of fiber infrastructure and we have separate infrastructure for our SAM for example and I know in future that we'll be opportunities to consolidate that and hopefully make some cost savings. With unified communications where we've not really did tell us what's going on in the water with that one yet, we have a very traditional Siemens PLBX and we have some void on campus where it's been really difficult to extend the traditional telephone cable but we know further down the line there will be some use for unified communications connected into our exchange system providing the presence but it's about getting the business case correct and infusing those kind of an interesting dynamic isn't it? I mean I talked to a lot of CIOs and they say I don't want to keep buying in silos, we have to buy in silos, we have too many vendors and at the same time you have really good relationships with us but who's your service supply? Our service supply is I believe at the most of Gell and Sump. Okay and you get networking from Cisco, you get the tipping point for the HP where you get the storage. The storage is EMC. Okay so it's a whole mix of bad right so I mean converging that sounds good but it's not likely to happen anytime soon is it? It's difficult to say because with the current economic climate you have to have a real good business case okay there might be a large capital out there now but we've got to make sure we get a return on investment in the future. There's an opportunity at the university where we may build a third data center and maybe in building a third data center we have some more converged solutions but with that grows you need to retrain, you need to re-architect a little bit and it's all achievable but it's against the university it's whether we're going to get the benefits out of that. We're also considering that maybe third data center isn't the way forward and maybe we should be outsourcing and using the cloud. There's a lot on the table that you're considering and you got to break some eggs too if you're going to make that. Let's talk a little bit about that the dynamic in networking in particular so I'd like to say Cisco's sort of like the status quo right? The big gorilla in that business and guys like Juniper that are really trying to innovate and scale particularly in the cloud service provider space and you've got HP who's sort of a big disruptor there. Going after Cisco hard and really trying to change the economics, so a big disruptor. What's your take on all that? Networking business for a while, love to hear your perspectives. It's interesting to see at events like this all the different presentations and information comparisons from one vendor to another obviously green issues are very relevant at the moment and HP playing they are 50% less power. So I think each different vendor has their own advantages and disadvantages. We have a good relationship with Cisco, we've spent a long time building that. Great company, yeah sure. And we've nurtured that to actually make our system our network 100% But maybe there are challenges there if HP are claiming that it's 50% greener and 75% of the cost software maintenance is free then maybe there's some attractive So amazing, right so this