 Live from Massachusetts, here is your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, this is Stu Miniman with wikibond.org, SiliconANGLE TVs, on the ground coverage of VTUG Fall Forward 2014, the virtualization technology user group. So we're talking a lot of the users here. Joining me from this segment is Scott Hendry, who is the infrastructure lead at Crico. Scott, thanks so much for joining us. No problem. So can you tell us a little bit about, you know, who is Crico as a company and what's your role in the organization? So Crico is a captured medical malpractice insurance company that provides medical malpractice insurance for all the Harvard-affiliated hospitals in the area. My role is, as the infrastructure lead, is to help facilitate all the, you know, the direction of the upgrades and migrations, hardware choices, vendor choices, and help keeping things run smoothly. All right, and so what's under your purview, then? Directly, just all the infrastructure, so all the hardware and VMware, and then assist with all the desktop support. And pretty much if it has a wire or if it's wireless, it comes under the infrastructure. All right, so all that software has to sit somewhere, and it sits on all that gear that you take type. All right, talk to us a little bit about how you guys use virtualization and how your adoption of virtualization has changed over the last few years. Sure. So about six years ago or so, we were running into a problem where we were trying to develop some new applications, and it was cost prohibitive and space prohibitive in our data center to buy all new physical hardware to support all those different Dev, QA, UAT environments, and all the new production stuff. So we started doing a proof of concept of VMware to try to figure it out, see if that would work. It did, and the POC turned into a full live implementation of VMware. All right, so today, what percentage of your environments would you say are running under the VMware? We're very close to about 95% in both of our data centers. All right, so what isn't virtualized today, and will that ever be virtualized? So primarily we have one domain controller in each location that's not virtualized. We have a couple applications that just haven't made the migration that are scheduled actually in the next six months to go. And then a few security appliances that aren't offered in virtual. All right, so Scott, you and I were talking before we started the discussion. There's all these big themes out there, software defined storage, and software defined networking, cloud, and big data. Out of those, it sounded like big data is one that you guys are at least trying to come to grapple with. Can you talk to us a little bit about what you guys are looking at when it comes to big data? So being a medical malpractice company primarily, one of the things that we focus on is prevention. So how can we prevent people from getting hurt in the hospital? So we have data back from the 70s for claims, as well as all of our hospitals and some of the other hospitals that we collect data for that aren't part of Harvard. And we use that data to mine and figure out ways that we can put out programs that will, if a hospital adopts this, they will be less likely to have a claim or patients will be safer. So they're trying to figure out a way to take that data and be able to mine it in a way that they're going to get the results they need. So we're currently trying to figure out how to do that. I love that. There's a discussion in all the big data worlds as we had some of the smartest minds working on how to do ad clicks better. It's solutions like this that allow us to really bring good back to the users, take all this information, turn it into actionable environments. So from an infrastructure standpoint, what are you doing today to make sure that you're ready to take advantage of new types of technologies like the analytics? So in the past two years, we went from an iSCSI infrastructure and rack-mounted VM host to a blade chassis and then fiber-connected three-par storage, which has enabled us to scale a lot better. Descott, it's my understanding that this is your first time at the VTUG, but you've been to VMworld before. What do you hope to learn attending sessions and networking with your peers? So one of the things you gain is, even just sitting, having lunch, you get to see what they're doing, what issues they've run into, how they solve those issues, what things they're looking at in the future and you can gain insight into some of the technology that they've chosen. They've gone through all the hard work and you can then have their narrow list of items. And one of the sessions I'm looking forward to is one with Mark Gabyowski with WEI, doing the what to look for in VMworld 6 because we just did a 5-5 migration. So we want to make sure that we're all set to go to a 6-1 that's available and right for us. All right, so Scott, just to put you on the spot, if some of your peers asked you, you just went through the 5-5 migration, what did you learn that if you wish you had known at the beginning that you might have done a little bit different or would have saved you guys some time? Probably with some of the networking things that we did. We didn't segregate out our development and production environments with networking. VM where you can easily create as many networks as you need. And if you need to, and like for us we have Dev, QA, UAT, production, if you keep them separate it allows you to target some of your systems of management and patching and all that stuff a little bit easier. Well, thank you so much, Scott. It's always user groups like this is where peers can share amongst themselves, which is what Wikibon was founded on. No better place than talk than sitting across the table from somebody that has done it before you. So thanks so much for joining. We'll check out all the coverage from VTUG and all the other cloud and virtualization events.