 Jolette Stadium, Todd Fakara is here. He's the Director of Information Technology at Pine Manor College, right here in Massachusetts. Todd, welcome to theCUBE. Hi, thank you. Pat's fan, of course, we've been talking off camera. It's a great venue, isn't it? It is, this is wonderful. For VTUG, and have you been coming to VTUGs and the Winter Warmer? I've been with a few of them. This is the first Winter Warmer I've been to. Yeah, it's a good setup, isn't it? Have you been up to the one I'm named? No, I'm really looking forward to getting there this summer. You've been to the one in Maine, right? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, Chris had basically the Winter Warmer here at Jolette and the one up in Maine. It's usually held in Portland. It's going to be in an air-conditioned facility this year, I'm understanding. And then there's the world-famous Griddy's Lobster Bake, so it's a lot of fun. Different audience that you get tends to be some smaller enterprises up there in Maine as opposed to you get a very broad section here in the Boston area. Yeah, we've probably got, what would you say, 1,500 people here? Yeah, that's the number I've been here in. Mostly IT practitioners. I mean, almost exclusively the attendees. You know, a lot of vendors, small booths, it's not like obnoxious. And it's a good crowd. You know, New England obviously is a big center for IT adoption and virtualization specifically. So Todd, again, welcome. Why don't you give us a little background on what you're doing at Pine Manor and your role there? Well, I've been the director of IT for almost three years at Pine Manor. I was brought in at a transition time. College was going through some major changes. And part of the change that they're looking at is upgrading the infrastructure. The infrastructure that's there is, I will just say it's a little dated. It gives us a really interesting opportunity though because instead of having to maintain all these other technologies that other companies have invested in over the more recent years, we can just leapfrog into what the latest and greatest is and take advantage of all the learning curve and growing pains with virtualization that have been smoothed out. So you're in planning mode now, is that right? Yes, we've done a little bit of dipping our toes in the water with some of the free products like Hyper-V and the free ESXi. And it's worked out really well. We've saved a lot of money and hardware doing that. And now we're looking to leverage the next step, bringing in some more flexibility with the infrastructure, allowing it to scale and getting some more performance and disaster recovery. So generally you're not highly virtualized, is that right or? We have 60 hosts and 15 of those are physical. So two thirds, I mean three quarters. Okay, so it's not like you're in the dark ages, right? No. But so when you say the infrastructure is dated in what sense, where do you see putting your investments going forward? The first area that we're investing in right now is the network. So we're putting in a wireless environment for the students, but we're also upgrading the backbone between the buildings. We're upgrading the top ARAC switches, the core, and the firewalls and our internet connectivity. And we're hoping that when that's done, we'll be able to take advantage of not only the local virtualization, but leveraging a lot of the cloud offerings as well, pushing what we can out to either Amazon web services or ARAC space or some of these other vendors that do the dynamic. So Todd, are you looking at making the classrooms in the student population mobile? Is that kind of the big push? That's quite a bit of it. We have a traditional learning environment where you have a stage on the stage and you have very limited technology in the classroom. And there's a really big push to flip the classroom where all the reading and basic stuff, lecture type thing is done by the students on their own time. They come to the classroom and then they start engaging with the faculty and in groups to actually apply what they've learned and ask questions and explore. And a lot of that's becoming technology-based, whether it's embedded YouTube videos into the learning management system, like Blackboard or WebCT, or it's interactive creations with videos. So how are you gonna deal with kind of the plethora of devices that students come through? Are you going to give these of the supported devices? Are they getting a device? Well. Or what's the thinking there? This is a really interesting thing because I see a lot of corporate environments struggling with the whole BYOD concept. And in higher ed, we're looking at that. It's like, we've been doing that for a while. You know, we can't mandate the students to have a particular device unless we're willing to roll that into the tuition cost. And if we do that, that's gonna drive our costs up and students are gonna go elsewhere. Plus, to me, a device is a very personal thing. You know, I compare it to shoes. You know, what fits me isn't gonna fit you. And the students have their own preferences. And when we deal with a lot of our international students, they're bringing in devices that aren't on the US market. We've never seen them before. They're dealing with stuff that has character sets that I can't even identify. So they come to us for support and I'm sorry, I can't tell the difference between Kanji and Simplified Chinese. But we have to make that equipment work on our network. So it's the flexibility at the lower infrastructure level that's important. So starting with the network, maybe talk a little bit about the security implications that has for you. Well, we definitely have to be aware of segregation on the network. We have to keep the protected data, the internal data, whether it's our financial system or our student information system. What a lot of people in the corporate environment don't necessarily realize. You know, they identify SOCs and HIPAA and PCI as regulations that they have to follow. But in higher ed, we have to follow FERPA, the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act. So we can't even give out student information. I mean, if a parent calls and says, how is my student doing? Unless that student has signed a FERPA waiver, we can't even tell them to go into class. Honey, you're going to sign that waiver before you go off to college. I got news for you. My brother just went through this with his son, he had to get permission. Exactly. He went crazy. He went, what? My brother's old school. It's all mine. It's like, what do you mean? So I'm paying the bill. I'm paying the tuition. But there you go, right? Yeah, so we have to protect that data. And students, I mean, they're curious. Their whole thing is, you know, they're there to learn. And sometimes they want to learn by poking around in areas that they can't or they shouldn't be in. So putting the right segregation as far as, you know, V-lanning off or just policies to keep their devices in the areas that they're allowed to. Okay, so you're also looking at cloud. Yes, absolutely. I mean, what are your thoughts there? How familiar are you? I mean, Amazon was here speaking. You had Rackspace speaking, Microsoft obviously as well with Azure. What are you looking at? And what are you thinking? Well, I think we're going to start small. One of the first things I'd really like to do is not be the big email administrator. I'd love to get the student email off campus probably to a service like Google or Microsoft. It does a few things for us. It takes a load off the internal network, smaller server requirements, smaller storage requirements. But the nice thing is that once the student graduates, we can separate their account from their Active Directory account. And they'll just have their own login at whether it's Google or Microsoft. And they'll have email for life. You know, we've talked to a bunch of different career development people that help the students get jobs and internships. And some of these email addresses that students may have aren't really professional. I mean, QTBABE23 just doesn't look good on a resume. Cool to your friends, but... So you're looking at the cloud and you've got virtualization in-house. I'm wondering how much the strategy that you're building looks at how you span that. So we did a survey last year and a majority of customers said I'd really like my virtualization in-house to match what's in the cloud. However, most customers today, if you ask them what's their virtualization in-house, it tends to be more VMware. And if you ask them in their cloud, it tends to be Amazon. And of course those are not the same virtualization layer. So is that something you're thinking about or are you just going to choose on an application-by-application basis what goes where? It's going to be more application-based what we put where. If it's something that is going to be high availability, we definitely want to push that out. If it's something that the students are going to need after they've left the campus, we want to push that out. If it's something that really doesn't get served well being out like our financial system, we can keep that virtualized in-house. But I would like to be able to take those backups and push them off to the cloud in case of DR or some other problem. We can pull that down where we want to go. So will you look at VMware's cloud offering as part of that Microsoft, Amazon? Are you going to try to orchestrate that some or are you going to make those decisions independent? They'll be somewhat orchestrated. It really depends on the application that we go for. But when it comes to what platform, I am a big fan of not over-diversifying. So we're going to have to take a look at what external cloud service we want to use and stick with that one. I thought IT people were scared to death of the cloud because they think it's going to eliminate their jobs. You don't seem to be fearful of that. Why? Someone has to manage the cloud. I do think that's just the incorrect perception. But do you agree it exists that a lot of your colleagues- Oh absolutely, there are people that are afraid that if they, it's the consumerization of IT. And they think that if it's all pushed off to the cloud that it's going to be very easy for someone else to manage it for them. It's not self-managing. It still takes a strong skill set. And I think a lot of it is education at the higher levels as well. I mean, I've had a college president point out an article, and this was some years ago, but he pointed out an article and said, there's this whole concept of virtualized servers. This means we can get rid of the server room. I'm like, well, we can make it smaller. We can reduce your power. We can reduce the cooling. And we can actually push some of the stuff away to the cloud. I think a lot of it is going to be a hybrid cloud, which a lot of senior management, they think the cloud, they think automatically it's off site, it's out of mind. We don't have to worry about it. But there is a blend of what we keep in-house, virtualized, and recognized and realized the savings there and the performance gains as opposed to the thought of just pushing everything out because what they don't always realize is the further you push it out, the stronger your wind links need to be. The more tightly integrated your ISP is. And if you have a whole campus full of students downloading Netflix, you're going to have a problem when you need to push it back up. The physics professor understands that. Maybe some others don't. Okay, so what else are you tracking that people should be paying attention to? What are some of the big trends that excite you and interest you as an IT practitioner? Well, the whole idea of distance learning. And I use the term distance learning as anything that's off campus. And the great benefit, a lot of schools and people think of distance learning as well. I'm in Massachusetts, but I'm getting students that are in the UK or Canada or California. But another really big aspect of that is time shifting. If you have a local student that for whatever reason, maybe they're small children at home and they have to work full time, can't come to the campus for classes. But at nine o'clock at night, after the kids are in bed and the work day's done, they can have time to study. The distance learning's really great for that. But we have a problem with some of our applications that are traditional, installed, you have to go to the computer lab to use it. I see putting these applications into a sort of app store type interface where they can download it and use it as a concurrent license on whatever platform they have, whether it's Mac or Android or PC, and do their work. Yeah, the distance learning thing is exciting. I mean, talking off camera about the cost of education, it just keeps going up and up and up and I presume it's not, because they're paying their IT guys so much. But... No. In higher education, right? I mean, your budgets are always a major consideration. So, is the discussion around distance learning, does it help attack that problem? And do they kind of make it up in volume, if you will? Is that the... They can, because it brings it to a matter of skill ability. It's much easier to add capacity to an IT system that's like a cloud-based system where it's easy to manage. One person can manage that. It's not like you need to start increasing your full-time employees just to support more students. Does Pine Manor looking at a hybrid approach where you've got some sort of on-campus learning and some distance learning, is that a popular model? Absolutely, we're actually doing that right now. Every faculty member has the ability, and most of them have taken advantage of it, where they have their regular on-ground course, but then they have supplemental materials and discussions and even assignments and tests that are delivered through an online learning management system. So, how does that affect the pressures on IT? What special requirements do you have as a result of that, and how are you adopting? Well, we're using a hosted solution, and most schools do, it's easier to put it in blackboards, giant data center and let them deal with the support. But where it comes to be an issue for us is making sure that we have the bandwidth on campus to handle the students that are either in the classroom using those materials or in the dorm room. And then we have to put policies in place, especially on the wireless, to prioritize the traffic to that application so that the students that are playing Xbox are watching the latest movie aren't going to have a negative impact on someone's learning experience. So, you have a lot of hosted solutions, a lot of SaaS in higher education. How do you deal with SaaS creep? How do you manage all those different instances that some of them have different types of security? You got different sign on. How do you, I mean, this is where you're talking about the complexity of the cloud. It shifts, right? It might not be plugging in the ports. It's true. It's true. So how do you see that shaping up? How do you see the skill sets changing and how do you personally deal with it? The big challenge is identity management. There are some solutions in place that are easily available now. EduRome is really great for a wireless infrastructure and the great thing about that is it's no cost. You affiliate your radio servers with the EduRome radio server. So, someone visiting your campus from another EduRome-enabled institution logs in with their home credentials. So, you know who they are, you know where they're from. You have the same security and manageability with your own people, but they're coming from someone else. And then there's Incommon, which actually costs money. I'm not sure what the fee is. I think it's based on your full-time student equivalent. But that is more of a single sign-on process. So, how do you go about, you mentioned you're in the planning phases now. You've got, I like the way you're thinking about it. You've got an opportunity. You're not complaining about the past. You're looking forward. How are you gonna go about making decisions? How does that whole process work? Take us through that. Well, the first thing we did was look at the age of our equipment. Look at what problems we've had, how many tickets we get from failing hardware. How hard it is to get spare parts when something dies. That's all a significant cost and has a significant cost in downtime. A lot of people think about it, looking at just, oh, well, you know, the part costs X number of dollars. It's like, well, what about all those people that are idle now? And what's their hourly breakdown of their salary now that they can't work? You're still paying them. So we're looking at those kind of impacts. And the first thing that we wanna do is take everything that we possibly can, get it onto new hardware, virtualized. As is, just do a easy P2V conversion. And then we can start looking at stuff to break down, to re-engineer, because now we'll have the hardware space. We'll have the resources available to spin up extra machines, to redo configurations, to upgrade applications in parallel. How, I'm sorry, I think you mentioned this. How many users you have? Good question. It depends on how you wanna look at that. We have about 200 faculty and staff. Pine Manor students, we're roughly around 350 to 400. But then we have our own, we have an English language school that we own on our campus. That's probably another 100 students. And then we have several other schools that house their students on our campus. So 500 plus. Yeah, I'd say, yeah, with an active director, we probably have about 1200 active accounts. 1200, and so, and how are you managing like mundane stuff, like problem tickets, help desk stuff? Do you have an IT service management system? We do, we have a small ticketing solution. And it works well, I mean, when people use it. That's probably the biggest challenge is driving people to use the solutions. Oh, well they do typically, just pick up the phone and scream. They like to pick up the phone, they like to email, let's say, but if you send the email to the ticket solution, it creates a ticket. Yeah, and somebody actually pays attention. Yeah, I find it's much easier to resolve tickets when you have a team of people and everyone can see the ticket pool. Instead of, well, I sent it to this guy and well, he's at lunch. Plus you're tracking it, you gotta build up a database. I mean, there's so many advantages to doing that, but sometimes bad user behavior circumvents that. Yeah, that's always been a challenge. All right, so any predictions for this weekend? What do you think game-wise? It's gonna be the Pats. You think the Pats are gonna take him? Absolutely. Are you agree with that, Stuart? You concur, you guys? So, you know, I'd like to see them win. I think they, you know, we know Tom Brady can go and play. Denver was always tough for us, but it's a different stadium now, it's a different team. I think, you know, we've got a good trajectory, so yeah, I feel comfortable picking Pats. It was the last time the Pats won at Denver. It wasn't at the time they took that safety on purpose, remember that? They snapped it out of the end zone. Oh, man. There's another Bella Check. Bella Check, madness, genius. It wasn't at the last time they won in Denver. Am I right about that? Yeah, and we've had some horror shows. Remember that, you know, Ben Watson, you know, a hundred yard, you know, should have been a touch back. Pats had a good team that year, that's right. They could have gone and Brady choked it up and chumped it up on the goal line, right? Through the reception in the end zone, that hurt. Ah, some good times there in New England. All right, Todd, well, listen, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you. And really appreciate your insights and good luck with the plans going forward and love to see you around sometime. Great, thank you very much. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be right back with our next guest. This is Stu Miniman with Dave Vellante. I'm Dave Vellante. He's Stu Miniman. We're live at the VTUG Winter Warmer. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back.