 Okay, we're back, this is Dave Vellante and I'm with Stu Miniman, we're with Wikibon.org. This is SiliconAngle.tv's continuous production of Dell Storage Form. We've been here all week, and I have to remind people, check out SiliconAngle.com and SiliconAngle.tv for all the content, the .tv obviously is where the videos are. Check out Services Angle, which is our new site focused on services, cloud services. You've got cloud angle, mobile angle, and also check out Wikibon.org, which is where we do all the research. Everything's there, it's free, it's open source. And we have another customer segment, we've had some great conversations with customers this week at Dell Storage Form. And we're here with Alex Rodriguez, who's with Expedient. He's the vice president of systems engineering and product development for Expedient, a Pittsburgh-based company, we're going to learn more about those guys. But first of all, Alex, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for having me. A-Rod, your namesake slammed a grand slam last night, made Stu very happy. Go Yankees. Oh, wow, Yankees. It's nice to be at Fenway Park and see A-Rod. Did you go to Fenway Park last night? I absolutely did. You know, I'm from the area, and having that namesake, it's kind of a little dicey coming back home, but I love Fenway, love to be back in Boston. Yeah, I was hoping that we'd get a chance to hit a few homers over the monster, but they sent us in the batting cages instead. Yeah, yeah, well, you know, I know you could hit the homers, right over in Boston, right? Maybe in the day. Still fun, got to go stand next to the green monster, which was a nice experience to be on the field. Yeah, it was a beautiful event, great event last night, but basically Dell had all its customers there, opened up the concession stands, tours of the stadium, batting cages. It was really a lot of fun. Wally was there taking pictures, but so anyway, again, welcome. Why don't you start by telling us, Alex, something a little bit about Expedient. Sure. So Expedient is a managed hosting and IT services provider. We're located headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but we actually have data centers throughout the northeast and into the Midwest. Six different markets, eight different data centers, about 200,000 square feet of floor space, and we really have a concentration in the cloud hosting and cloud arena. Yeah, so obviously a lot of action happening there. I mean, we've talked about, you know, the whole cloud service provider market for quite some time now, and there's, there seems in our view, and I wonder if you could comment on this, to be a separation between, you know, you talk to traditional IT folks, and what you hear from them, we've heard a lot from them this week, is we need to do more with less. Our budgets are getting cut, they're flat to down, and, you know, we're trying to innovate by just squeezing more from the stone. When you talk to cloud service providers like yourselves, we hear a different message. We're investing, we're innovating, we're building out new infrastructure, we're, you know, doing leading edge things, and it seems to be the source of innovation for IT these days, so maybe talk about that dynamic and specifically what you guys are seeing within your firm. Yeah, we definitely see that. So one of the things that we see a lot of our customers coming to us is they say, hey, our budgets are flat, our budgets are down, but you know what we're growing by 15, 20 percent, our storage continues to rise, you know, how can we deal with this, and, you know, the business is asking us to do more and interesting things, right? They're asking us to support more with less. I think part of the reason why you see a lot of the specialization in the cloud and, excuse me, a lot of the advancements in the cloud environments are, you know, there's a lot of specialization. We focus on a certain key areas of infrastructure that we want to support, things that we can support across a mass variety of customers and really get some huge economies of scale. There we can invest in, you know, infrastructure technologies, we can invest in new feature sets and provide that as a lower per unit cost to our customers, but then really what our customers are doing is they're turning that back around and they're going through and they're taking the money that they saved on putting their infrastructure in the cloud and they're reinvesting it back into their people so their people can focus on the things that are really important to the business, which is the application, the things that are business strategic. You know, one of the things that we say is that, you know, no one was successful because they always watch their backups or maintain their standard, you know, peak performance, but they were successful because they were able to leverage their IT applications and really use that to benefit the business. Yeah, LUN management is a core competency. It's not going to give you competitive advantage. Yes, so Alex, it sounds like, are you an infrastructure as a service provider? Absolutely. Do you do any co-location or hosting services? Which of the kind of traditional hosting versus service models do you offer? So the business, the way it operates is we actually, if you think of any type of technology platform that is ubiquitous, that any enterprise could use. So we do everything from providing telecommunication services from as small as a T1 line up to 10 gigabits per second to our customer sites. We do data center co-location as small as a rack unit all the way into tens of thousands of square feet for our customers. And then the whole bevy of managed services. So things like cloud computing where you're needing virtual instances or sand storage on demand. We do all of those type of things. So if it's something that an enterprise could use, that all enterprises could use, it's something we probably provide. Okay, so one of the biggest issues there is kind of the density of the solution, the power in the cooling environment. Can you give us a little bit of insight as to what you guys are doing different than what the data center is, how your costs and structures are different? Sure. I mean, a lot of the things that we use from a density perspective and we take a lot of pride in how we build out our facilities. So we've got, we've been continuing to build facilities. We've built, we build a new facility about every 18 months. We do about a 5,000 to 10,000 square foot expansion every 6 to 12 months. So we have a great depth of understanding of how that facility needs built. So we have economies of scale in that in terms of the amount that we're buying because we continue to load on these new facilities as well as a very, very keen understanding and acumen around that facility. And then what we can do is we can build a suit. So we actually have certain facilities that are higher dense facilities for customers that want to bring in highland blade servers and do a great watts per square foot. And then in other facilities we make sure that we manage to an average but then know that we can adjust and modularize the facility in a way that we can increase that average over time as we see the models get more and more dense. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit, Alex, about what you are looking for in a supplier. I mean, oftentimes cloud service providers have one of everything in their shop. And so I've always said, well, that's kind of interesting. The cloud service providers, you know, historically looked, or maybe I should use the term managed hosters, look a lot like traditional IT shops where they've got, you know, a lot of diversity. Is that changing as you try to achieve economies of scale and really serve a much larger customer base? Yeah, absolutely. It's one of the things that we oftentimes fight with internally because every customer will come to us and say, well, I like HP or I like that app or I like, you know, so and so. And, you know, there's a trust that that customer has, that enterprise has with that particular technology provider. And we have to kind of, you know, pull that apart and say, hey, look, you know what, we've got to manage by a standard. You know, we'll give you a provide, we'll give you and provide you an SLA that says this many IOPS or this much reliability. Don't worry about how we provide that because on the back end for us to achieve the, you know, cost efficiency that we want for us to achieve the scale that we need to support the business, we've got to make sure that we standardize and that we use one platform for our storage environment for a particular area or one platform for our server environment. If we have all these different pockets of kind of snowflakes, so to speak, it creates a problem for us from an efficiency standpoint. And then we could never offer the service to the customer at, you know, a rate that they would see as a cost savings to them. It's a homogeneity as your friend. Well, talk about your infrastructure. I mean, obviously we're here at the Dell Storage Forum. Sure, sure. I presume you're a Dell customer, but maybe you can talk about specifically what you guys are doing with Dell. Yeah, we absolutely are a Dell customer. We've been for a long time. We were a long-term server customer for Dell. We bought lots of servers from Dell. We didn't buy any storage from Dell. And, you know, after seeing some of the pieces that they had once they acquired Equalogic, we started to purchase some Equalogic. We started to run them in our virtual pods. And we found that we were really, really happy with the price per performance and as well as the reliability of those platforms. And we actually go through and we use Equalogic to manage hundreds of terabytes of storage today in what we call pods for our virtual environments. And that's really the backbone of our storage. But in addition to that, while we might have 10 or 15 Equalogics in every data center and that number continues to grow, we also always have some compelent around. Because what we do is we use the Equalogic as a standard building block that's a good price performance to capacity ratio. And then for anybody that needs that special solution, so we might have a large Ecom site that has a high amount of IOs with a low amount of storage or somewhat a medical company that has a huge archive amount, that's where we'll leverage the compelent. And that really is what we kind of call our snowflake container. So that's where we put all of our customization. And then we have a whole bevy of different backup solutions, whether that's deduplication using Commvault or traditional tape-based backup using Quantum. So we have that as well in solution. So were you in the keynote this morning? I actually wasn't able to attend, I had another meeting. So one of the things they talked about, two things that struck us. One was this notion of separating the software and the hardware from the Equalogic array to allow greater scaling and more flexibility. And the second was just their whole flash vision. And I wonder if you can maybe talk about each of those. Maybe you're familiar with them, maybe you're not. We can probably give you more detail. But generally speaking, does that, do those, well, let's start with the sort of, what do they call it, do HV? HVS, so sure, and Alex, just to give you the thumbnail on it, is Equalogic, you're going to kind of take the software, the management and the virtualization layer of that and separate it from the platform itself and therefore you could spin it up kind of as a virtual machine workload. Yeah, that's very interesting to us. I mean, we talk a lot about the software getting kind of segmented from the hardware, kind of this idea of software-defined networking, we see this in storage, and everybody's moving to more programmatic and everybody's going to be a software programmer sooner or later, it seems to be the case and everything's going to run in a virtual environment. We're definitely seeing that in market. I don't know if we're there yet on the adoption cycle, it's still something that's relatively speaking new, but it's definitely something that we're watching and being very, very interested in to see how this progresses. Because for us, again, efficiency's the name of the game and when you've got to operate on scale as a provider does and handle the increases that we see that we have, I mean, we're talking 139% year over year growth is what we're seeing in our storage environments and that's increasing, not decreasing. So we've got to make sure that we have a function that we can maintain a vast amount of scale and that's part of the ways that we can potentially do it. You're at an exponential curve in terms of storage growth. Alex was wondering, you talk about everybody being a programmer, on the networking side, I definitely hear that service providers need a lot of customization and programmability. Can you speak to how big of a team of programmers do you have in your environment? I mean, I think the lines are blurring a little bit, right? We've gone from traditional sand administrators, traditional network administrators to people that are kind of thinking outside of the box and how can I script this? How can I get more engaged? We're seeing a lot of interest from our engineers with things like Arista networking where they've actually got a Linux box behind the switch that you can do different sources coding inside of that. Right now, we're still at a pretty decent ratio about one developer to five engineers, but it's something that we're going to see, that line kind of blurs over time and we're going to, I think, continue to see it blur. So in the flash front, I'm interested in your thoughts on where that's all headed. In particular, I mean, a lot of cloud service providers will do a cost plus model and what's interesting to us about flash is, particularly for, you've seen these all-flash arrays come out, particularly for block-based applications. Will we see block-based applications come into the cloud? Maybe we are already, obviously, using equal logic. So that's, and then the second and kind of more interesting is there's a discussion around quality of service and pinning quality of service IOPS bandwidth to a particular application and essentially monetizing that as a cloud service provider. I wonder if you could talk about those two things. So there's a couple of things there, right? One, we definitely believe in flash storage. You know, we're seeing some great gains by use of flash storage, especially in some of the high transaction environments. We have a very, very large e-com site that hosts with us that we actually put a lot of their database components onto flash and we can actually pin it in that flash, especially when, you know, what is it, Black Friday comes out and they've got all the different sales and deals. It definitely helps us there. We definitely believe in it. We think that it's still got some time to mature, though. You know, there's concerns about right wear and potential drive failures. Those are still kind of off on the back of our heads of concern, but we're definitely investing in that technology. Not going to use a cost plus in that environment, though. It's kind of, the cost plus for us is maybe the easy way out, right? What we want to do is we want to build a backbone of storage technology, you know, centered around spinning disk and flash that we can go back to a customer and really look at what their utilization rate is. One of our challenges as a provider is every customer in the world can easily identify how much storage from a capacity standpoint they need. Hey, I need 10 terabytes. I need 20 terabytes. But nobody understands their IOPS requirement and that's really the trick. You know, I'm doing, I'm speaking a little bit today about some of the things that we do as a storage provider, as a service provider, to go and say, hey, let's figure out what that IOPS need is. Let's figure out what you need and let's bake that into an SLA because that's really key. A lot of times we'll talk to a customer and they'll be like, you know, two terabytes of storage just cost me, why is it cost me this much? I can go to a Best Buy and buy, you know, it's the drive for 99 bucks. It does that same thing, but they don't understand the IOPS need and part of it is advising that customer and teaching that customer. And I think that's where you're going to see the market go is we're going to further develop as a service provider community this idea and understanding of IOPS and kind of standard componentry that we can push back to our customers and say, hey, here's how we can truly measure so you can know what you're buying when you buy it from a provider. So essentially you're talking, you're saying that people, like you say, understand how to virtualize capacity and you can carve that out for multiple tenants. But essentially you're talking about virtualizing performance and guaranteeing a certain performance level. What kind of management capability do you require as a customer slash cloud service provider in order to see that vision through? Well, I mean, there's a lot of management, right? We have to maintain good logs, we have to maintain good statistical performance and be able to watch that and have thresholds. And we actually do that today in a lot of our platforms. A lot of it's custom grown, a lot of it's homegrown based upon our platforms that we use, and we actually expose that data to our customers today. So there is a definite amount of management oversight that we have to put into the product and management applications that we put into the product. So that's obviously a differentiator. That's the intellectual property that you have. If the supplier community starts to offer that, will you adopt it or will you lean toward your own internal because it gives you a competitive advantage? I think there's always this thing where you have to look at it at a case by case basis. Some things where a provider provides a product that's just uniquely better than yours, you adopt it and you embrace it and you bring it into your environment and show it under a single pane of glass. In other environments where things are lacking, we'll go back and we'll build it ourselves and maintain that, so just out pens. Alex, so I was checking out your website and it looks like you guys have done a lot of growth through acquisition. I'm wondering if you can talk about from the management standpoint some of the kind of the challenges and what you've learned from adding new data centers and pulling it all in. Sure, so we've definitely done some acquisitions recently. The thing that we see is we really go after a best-of-breed approach. So we'll go into that acquisition and the nice thing is there's a lot of bright people that we see whenever we go in and say, okay, we're going to bring in this company and we'll go look at all of their processes and we'll bring them in and say, hey, is this one better than ours? And we'll actually go through and reverse adopt some of those. And it seems kind of strange because you're purchasing another company but yet you're actually going into and adopt their practices. A lot of times we see maybe 70 to 80% of the services are very, very common. The way they deliver might be different but on hardware refresh cycles and those type of things, standard things that enterprises are used to seeing and doing, we actually will go through and standardize them back on all of our processes to maintain that operational efficiency. Can you talk about security as a differentiator in your business? We had Edward Haleckian the other day and he basically made the point, which of course I would totally agree with it, cloud service providers, it's always, you know, security's the one of the evil twins. I guess the other is management of the cloud but you guys are always getting danged on security but the reality is you have better security than 95, maybe 99% of the organization's out there. Maybe not the Fortune 20, maybe not the Fortune 50 but certainly the average, you know, small and mid-sized business. Can you talk about security in a multi-tenant environment? Is security or how do you make security a differentiator for Expedient? Yeah, security's definitely a challenge for any cloud service provider because what you're doing is you're asking a company or an enterprise to come to you and say, bring your critical data and applications and trust us to hold on to it and make sure that nobody else can see it or touch it or interact with it. That's a big challenge for a lot of providers out there today and there's definitely a trust that needs to be built up with the enterprise. And we do that by a number of different ways. We actually have to adopt and adhere to many different standards whether that's payment card industries, the PCI DSS, FDA, HIPAA, all of these different standards. Our customers have requirements from their auditors to be met and so what happens is we are very open to audit. We end up actually having auditors come through probably twice to three times a week we'll have some auditor asking questions, verifying security policies, doing those type of things. And really what it does is where one company says, hey look we need this requirement. If it's a good solid requirement we'll actually go and attain that and then a kind of a rise in tide serves all. So all the other companies kind of get that additional benefit. But the big thing for us is making sure that we're able to maintain the audit needs so we know the different regulations and how they work and we can talk to our customers about how they can interact with us and make sure that they maintain and meet those regulations. And then there's another side of it which is the technology side which is how do we better and make ourselves more efficient with some of the technology. So we're doing some cutting edge stuff working with folks like Intel using their trusted execution technology to do hardware level attestation of our hypervisors to make sure that when they boot up we're actually not having any malware or it's not being run in a different location that we don't want it run in. We're doing things with AES encryption using hardware based accelerators to try to encrypt every piece of data into and out of our data centers to make sure, again, we're meeting those stringent needs and actually exceeding them in many cases. How about something as mundane as incident reporting? Are you, will you provide the flexibility for instance if I can say, okay, here's how I want to define an incident, here's how frequently I want it reported, can I essentially dial that down and dial it up according to my corporate edicts? We have a pretty high standard as it relates to incident reporting and any sort of troubles, whether that is a security related problem or a reliability, anything that trips any sort of SLA or any sort of bound, we have a very, very high threshold for that to make sure that we're sending out more data and then the customer can say, hey, look, I want to see these, I don't want to see these, I want to see these in a summary format. We can actually allow them to pick and choose what they need from that perspective and that's really key around customization because what we see is there's many, many different standards but auditors have different interpretations of those standards and we've got to make sure that we meet them. So that's a major differentiator from say for instance an Amazon web services, obviously you don't get that kind of flexibility. Do you also offer an object store? No, we don't offer an object store today. It's something we're absolutely looking at. I think you'll see us probably release something in the end of this year, early side of next year in a beta format but we definitely see more adoption and what we're seeing is this trend for, customers were initially just taking their enterprises and they were moving them into the cloud as is and what's happening is they're seeing the benefits and the functionality of some of the different options like an object store. They're really interested in coming up saying, hey, do you have a cloud based object store that we could potentially leverage and use in our environment? So Alex, one of the other hot applications that we've been kind of watching and starting to see show up in the clouds is big data. So I'm wondering if you have any examples or what you guys are doing in that space. Yeah, so no examples just yet but it's an area that we're spending a lot of time working with, we've got some trials running internally to see how we could potentially utilize this as a provider. It's definitely an interesting environment because you've got a lot of data, right, that you have to manage and maintain and how do you get it into the cloud environments is key, how much bandwidth do you need, how do you get it out for processing but we feel that there's definitely some common threads there where we could actually provide some operational benefit by way of leveraging common CPU resources, leveraging common disk elements and platforms that could really make that work for the end consumer. Not only that, you've got to adjust, I mean, 10 to 1000 of cores sitting there in the data center with that line between compute and storage kind of changes and as Dave says, big data gives the cloud something to do. Yeah, absolutely. We see this kind of almost race towards zero, right? Where prices continue to go down, cost per gig of storage, cost per gig of memory, a lot of the folks like Dell and Intel are driving some of that, but the end of the day, we've got to find something to fill that back up and big data could be a very, very large part of that. Are you, what are you doing for virtualization? Are you a VMware shop? We are a VMware shop, so we're a VSPP provider, we've been so for a number of years at this point and we see that as a lot of our enterprises, they own 97% of the ad enterprise space, I think is what their claim is and we see that, it makes it easier for us to integrate with those enterprises. So I wonder if you could comment on this, I mean, I certainly, you see VMware strategy, obviously it's done very well with private cloud and for its public cloud strategy, it's very much pushing VMware, looking to guys like you to adopt VMware, so there's homogeneity in a hybrid situation between the public and the private. That seems to me, it's conceptually to be very advantageous. A lot of cloud service providers are pushing back on that, saying, no, no, we have our own virtualization, we want to use open source or Zen or whatever it is. What you guys obviously chose for that homogeneity and maybe I'm answering my own question, but you can talk about the philosophy there and that sort of tension in the marketplace. Well, I think there's a couple of things, right? I think there's a lot of different cloud providers out there that cater to a lot of different businesses, right? There's some that take credit cards online and they'll do a couple of VM hosts or they'll just meant for pure bursting for a particular application. Our environments are really focused around enterprise and growing enterprise-based clientele, so when you go to them and they're already running VMware, they already understand the stack, they're looking to have some sort of model where it's hybrid or burstable, it's key for us to have a hypervisor on the other end that can easily take that workload on and that they trust as well. You mentioned earlier too about who administers the cloud and that being another kind of sticking point for folks. I mean, we actually can allow our customers to interact with the cloud, interact with our VMware environment just as they do in their own environment. So to the VM administrator, it just looks to them as a different virtual center that they're logging into and yet they can see all their resources. The only thing they don't get to see is the underlying servers and storage. They can just touch their VMs and interact with them. That really is the vision of the hybrid cloud, is that you're in control type of thing. And so can you talk about adoption of that, specifically that hybrid cloud piece? Are you seeing a big uptick in the last 12 months? We've seen it in our surveys, but I'm wondering if you can confirm that. Yeah, we've seen a huge adoption, right? There's a number of different facets that we've seen that adoption. And one, we've seen customers just come to us and say, hey, we don't want anything. We don't want to manage hardware. The disk drive fails at three in the morning, it's your problem, not ours. We just want to know that it's being fixed. We've got a lot of other customers though that say, hey, you know what, we've got our site but we need a secondary site. So can you provide that? Very, very attractive option for customers looking to do DR where they can continue to do QA and utilize our resources. So I think that there's a lot there. And then another model that we're starting to see adoption in is, customers will, because we can physically co-locate, they'll bring in their VM environment, their virtual or their cloud environment, put it in our data center. But from time to time, they might need to burst over into us. And because we can interconnect with 10 or 20 gigabits per second, we can actually take on that workload and allow that to burst up and meet their needs. And then they can burst right down and go back to normal operations. So there's a lot of benefit. Alex, I've always said the Achilles' Heel to Hybrid Cloud is really the network. So when you can co-locate it, that makes it obviously easy. Still moving data does take time. Can you speak a little bit to kind of the network offering that you pair with the services that you offer? You know, it's an incredible enabler and that's one of the things that we feel is also a differentiator for Expedion is the fact that we can deliver bandwidth on site. So we're a competitive local exchange carrier in a lot of different environments. We actually can leverage telecommunications, resources and what we can do there is we can actually provide a high amount of bandwidth to our customers. Like I said before, we've got some customers that are consuming 10 gigabits per second as a point to point site. And that's really, really great for them because it's just like they're sitting on their local land and they can move data around as needed. As well, between all of our different data centers, we have 10 gigabit protected path networks that we actually run. And being able to do that allows us to shift workload around if we need to but it also allows customers to do the same for DR purposes and the like. Are you guys going to be at VMworld? We absolutely will be at VMworld. We'll be there, we'll have theCUBE there. You're a great guest, Alex, and welcome back any time. I really appreciate you coming on theCUBE. Thanks so much. Spending some time with us. Pleasure meeting you guys. All right, everybody, keep it right there. We'll be back with SiliconANGLE's coverage of Dell Storage Forum right back after this.