 Live from the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2016. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. Now here's your host, Stu Miniman. Welcome back to theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman here with SiliconANGLE Media's flagship program, VMworld 2016 in Las Vegas. Happy to have on the program. I've got a first time guest of customers. It's Steve Bunch with Wabash National. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me, Stu. And welcome back to the program. It was two years ago at VMworld last time we had Sachin Chattow who's with Nutanix. Oh, great to be back here. All right, so Steve, let's start with you. Tell us about kind of your role at Wabash. And for audience that's not familiar with the organization, just, you know, real brief thumbnail of the company. Yeah, so Wabash National's based out of Lafayette, Indiana. We're the leading semi-trailer manufacturer in the United States. We've got manufacturing in five other states than Indiana, as well as Mexico and the UK. I think the stats are somewhere around six out of 10 trailers you actually passed on the highway or one of ours. So I've been with them for about eight years. Started directly out of college doing basic printer repair, PC imaging, that kind of stuff. Currently it's server and storage manager. So leading a team of five great guys that are managing our infrastructure. So, yeah. All right, and Sachin, you know, real quick other than, you know, bringing him over, you know, what's your role? So I run Solutions Marketing at Nutanix, focused on the whole customer success around different use cases and verticals. All right, so Steve, let's dig right into it. So you've got a team, you manage your server and storage. It sounds kind of siloed, almost. Can you tell us, you said kind of eight locations. Give us kind of thumbnail as to, you know, number employee meetings, you said, I think eight sites. You know, what's your IT look like in the size of the team? So I think if you actually gave me my real title, it'd be too long for anything to be useful. So, so we've converged it. Yes, sorry, I've converged that, so. Pretty siloed into servers and storage, but we also handle all the applications and stuff on top of the servers. So, nine data centers, so it's interesting trying to bring all this stuff back home. Most of our manufacturing sites will probably always have some kind of server and storage footprint on site, so, yeah. And you've been there for a number of years. You've been there longer than Nutanix has existed at a company. So what do you walk us through kind of that journey as to, you know, what your infrastructures look like and what was going on in the business that made you, you know, look at making a change. So our environment before Nutanix was super complex. We had highly available sites, but different storage on each side and different servers on each side, different sand switches. It was just overly complex for what it was. The business was growing very quickly, mostly through acquisition, but most of just by selling more trailers. So the IT team wasn't growing at all. So I had to find, we had to find a way to kind of do something different. Maybe updating firmware on a sand, on the weekend probably isn't the best use of your time. So we did some research, found some hyper, hyper-inverge, maybe this will work for our environment, so. And when was that? So we actually bought our first stuff in December of last year, but I've been on the radar for about the last year. Yeah, so Sasha, let me ask you, let me see. IT a little complicated, team's not growing, throwing an M&A, each application has its own little silo of what they're doing. That's not what we've seen out there for how long? Yeah, forever and ever, and that's actually a great point, right? Businesses are now relying on IT for actually as an enabler for some of these functions, right? Whether it's business growth, digital transformation, or even M&A from that perspective, it's actually a key differentiator from a strategy perspective. All right, so Steve, was this a project-based deployment? Was it new data center upgrade? What did that first piece look like, and who championed moving to a hyper-converged option? Yeah, so it was a little mix of all of that, so actually a new data center, actually the local ISP was building a new data center across the street from our manufacturing, so we currently have two data centers that are off-site from our production, so that's nice. It was a five-year refresh time, so it was time to do something different, get some new hardware, some better performance, some easy management interfaces, so yeah. And where in the executive chain was that, if you got the refresh, you have a certain pile of money, hopefully sitting there, but did that kind of meet what you need, did you have executive buy-in, or is somebody driving kind of innovation? Yeah, so I was a champion on the project, was pushing very hard, was interesting with the team, trying to get them experience with it, so Nutanix actually has a community edition, so free software you can actually use, so that was critical in getting the team on board with some new technology. All right, Sgt, pretty typical for a lot of your customers. Yes, matter of fact, since releasing community edition, we're seeing a lot of first-time users of Nutanix start their journey down that path, get familiar with the product, and again, community edition runs on a variety of different platforms, so they get a chance to experience it. Now we've actually changed the setup, so you actually can do a test drive of community edition in the cloud, so you really don't even have to install anything, and that's very typical of customers nowadays where they want to know what does that mean from an operational perspective, and then how does that affect their day-to-day, and day-to-operations. All right, so Steve, talk to us about that rollout, how did it kind of meet from your expectations? If you can share any details, number of nodes, number of sites. Yeah, so one very cool issue that we were trying to resolve was, so we installed our normal infrastructure at one of our remote sites, and it took two guys two days to actually install three servers, so we had to install storage array and sand switches. So our first purchase of Nutanix was two, three node clusters that we set up in Metro Cluster, and we had that set up in two hours, so two different sites, Metro Clustering, so we could be motion VMs between the two in two hours. Just kind of crazy. And why are you to comment on it? Have you added to that since you've done the kind of the four-letter word in the storage industry has been migration for so long? Tell us what your experience has been. Yeah, we're 100% virtualized on VMware, so it's not difficult. We purchased 16 more nodes, so we're expanding both sides of that, mainly at our main data center, or main corporate headquarters, so just doing basic shared nothing storage emotions, and it's working really well, so. Trivial, real easy now. Yes it is. Just like, you know, when you think back to the way you were doing things before, you know, what's that mean for your business? It saves us a ton of amount of time. I mean, I think some executive staff was worried that we weren't prepared because we were talking so easy. Just right click, it's like copying a Word document, so it took some talking with the management teams to get them on board of what we were doing and explaining it, how it works, and they wanted to see big project plans and all that stuff, and I'm just migrating to VMs, so it's not difficult. All right, so you've freed up all that time, so I'm sure you cut staff, and is that or are there new projects that they're doing? What will happen? Yeah, they're just not working 80 hours a week anymore, so it's all good stuff. Wallbush is actually, we were just kind of an IT service for the business before, so we were just, yeah, like we said, we got printers, setting up new servers, that kind of stuff, but now we're actually doing some cool stuff with business analytics and pulling in data from PLC machines on the floor and actually putting some sensors on a test trailer so doing humidity and vibrations and stuff like that. So Sasha, now I'm curious, kind of the mindset of IT so much is, I need to control it, I need to understand it, risk is a big thing. I was listening to a podcast that John Troyer did with a couple of your customers, and there was this guy, he's like, he kind of flip, he's like, remotely I go on my mobile device, I say I do the upgrade, I get on a plane, and when I've landed, everything's fine, and I talked to most IT guys and they're like, he's crazy. But what are you seeing with your customers and how do they change and adopt that? I mean, the whole concept of day two operations has changes with Nutanix, and you've heard us talk about this at Dotnext and even before that, that we have this whole concept of invisible infrastructure. Our whole goal is to make infrastructure so easy to manage that it is almost invisible from an operational perspective. Now, coming back to the comment around the upgrades, the whole non-disruptive upgrade model is something that we've been very proud of. We introduced it a while back and we've had a lot of customers actually go out and try upgrades on their test systems, using, again, mobile devices, et cetera. But the whole point is that it's given them time back in their day and to tackle, either take time that they can actually go and apply it elsewhere or even give them time back in the day that they were initially not intending to spend on it. So from an upgrade perspective, the ability to get new features in a very quick fashion and then ability to remove the whole plan downtime concept has been great. All right, so Steve, I wanted to just kind of step back a little bit, give us kind of a wider view of your IT because it doesn't sound like today. Nutanix isn't the whole environment. You haven't swept the floor with it. How do you manage that kind of compared to everything? How do things like replication and backup fit into the overall puzzle? So we're starting to roll it out at our remote sites, actually. So we've got three sites that need refresh and we're looking at putting Nutanix there as well. So it gets interesting with back, can we just replicate that data back? Is that a backup, is it okay to do that? Or should we be putting backup software there like Rubrik or something else? So it's definitely, it's been interesting. So we run everything from SQL to SAP to exchange actually on our Nutanix nodes. Yeah. All right, so Steve, your team's gotten some time on the solution, you've grown it now. What advice would you give to your peers and kind of a follow-up question to that is, what are you asking of kind of the vendor ecosystem? What more do you want them to do to kind of make your life easier and run your business better? So some pointers for migrations. I think maybe you should get your applications teams involved in the migration, so we didn't... Wait, wait, wait, I'm sorry. The infrastructure team and the application team. Once again, somebody's crazy here. Exactly. So we actually didn't tell our application team that we were migrating their servers to the Nutanix nodes and they came knocking on our door asking what we had done and they were seeing three, four X performance increases on their backup time. So I told them what we had done and they were pretty excited about it. And then actually we upgraded our software that day on Nutanix to four dot six, which increased performance more and they came knocking again. So you didn't involve them but it was a good experience because they're like wait. Yes. What happened? It's running so much faster. They were worried something was broken or their software wasn't working correctly. How about kind of looking forward as to from your business, the I team needs, not just from a Nutanix VMware and beyond, what are you looking for to help? So I'm excited. My team actually has time to do some training so I'm pushing them hard on programming so Python, PowerShell and getting them involved and maybe setting NTP on 30 VMware nodes probably isn't the best use of time so let's automate that, let's fix it, let's power script that stuff. So trying to get them more experienced in areas they aren't maybe comfortable in so yeah. Okay and we're brought back to kind of VMworld itself. You know what are you bringing back to your team from what you learned at this event? So first VMworld actually, very cool. Lots of people, I think I've done it in every other world there is but VMworld's been great. So the network, the community is awesome. So everything from the brown bag to just sitting next to somebody and eating a lunch and learning something more from them than you would have maybe a breakout session. Moving into people at parties and stuff like that. So I don't know, I don't do that. Exactly, they do have parties as part of the community. Yeah, you talk all night, everything. Sochyn, give you the final word. So kind of takeaways from VMworld that you're seeing especially from the customer viewpoint that you've talked to. Yeah, so I'm always excited to be at VMworld because you get a chance to really interact with so many of our customers and the community in general. It's an exciting place to be, it's an exciting forum to be. It's interesting to see the shift from storage and to hyperconvergence and now onwards to enterprise cloud. So from my perspective, the key takeaways I'm taking back is that people want to move, keep that transition going to cloud-like infrastructure that helps them kind of bring the cloud infrastructure on prem. And we're going to keep innovating on that front. And if I were to also summarize one other thing here, I mean it's great to have customers like Steve who are looking at the whole IT as an enabler for their digital transformation. So I encourage again all your viewers to look at IT from that perspective. Yeah, so my seventh year at VMworld, it's always great, the VMware customers that are here are ones that have continued to innovate not only when they deployed virtualization but hopefully they don't become satisfied with what they've done. They keep moving forward, keep trying new technologies. And on the storage piece, we kind of half-joggingly came in and said this used to be called storage world, trying to make it invisible and trying to make it look more like a cloud. Maybe we should make it storage lists going forward. Kind of like in the cloud, they are talking about server lists. So lots of great stuff here at the event. Thank you both for joining us. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from VMworld 2016. You're watching theCUBE.