 from Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE, covering WTG Transform 2018. Brought to you by Winslow Technology Group. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE at WTG Transform 2018. Happy to welcome to the program two gentlemen from the Boston Architectural College. To my left is Carl Jasperson, who's the Systems Administrator, and to his left is Jason O'Brien, who's the Director of IT. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. Thanks for having us. All right, so Jason, why don't we start with you, help us power up this conversation. Tell us a little bit about the college. So Boston Architectural College, you started in the late 1800s, it's a small design school, and we offer programs in landscape, interior, and traditional architecture. Yeah, so I love that. Talk a little bit more about the charter of the school and how IT fits into that. So we are a mission at the schools to provide excellent education to a diverse population. Technology factors in is very important, and over the last 10 years that Carl and I have been at the school, technology has, use has increased immensely. Our students are using it more and more every year, and meeting those needs has become difficult, and it's a challenge we strive to achieve every year. Well, design thinking is so important these days. I studied engineering as an undergrad and wish I'd learned more about design. One of my favorite authors who I happened to interview about a month ago was Walter Isaacson, and the ones he studies are the ones that can take that design thinking and technology and bring them together. Carl, bring us up to speed from an IT standpoint. How big of a team do you have? What are you involved with? You said, you know, things have been changing over the last few years. Yeah, so, I mean, we've got Jason. In addition to running the department, he runs our online learning system. I'm responsible for all the backend infrastructure, servers, networking, backup virtualization. We recently hired a junior systems administrator to help me out. We've got a web guy, we've got a DBA. The wood shop is under IT because we have a fabrication guy. It's a 3D printing, laser cutting. We have the help desk and the help desk manager who also does our purchasing and she and I will take escalations. So it's, there's not a lot of crossover, you know, skill crossover in the group, but we manage to keep everything going. Yeah, but as you said, I mean, you know, woodworking, not something you think of initially as, you know, an IT thing, IT and OT are, you know, really converging a lot when you talk about manufacturing as, you know, we talk about sensors and IoT, it's hitting everywhere. Yeah, for us, you know, 3D printing and laser cutting, and we also have a CNC router. They all started as experiments at the school and have turned into a major factor in, for our students, it's a resource that they demand. And the increasing use every single year and how we meet those demands is becoming tricky to accomplish in our, you know, we're in the back bay, real estate's very expensive and we have to make our space do amazing things. Yeah, Jason, that's great points. I mean, I've talked to lots of higher education and even you talk to the K2 through 12, it was, you know, well mobility has had a huge impact, you know, therefore stresses and strains on wireless, you know, how do I get devices into the classroom? How do I manage it? I had a gentleman from BU who's here at the show. Last year we were talking a lot about MOOCs. So, you know, it's that role of IT's expanding, but luckily they're throwing way more money at you, I'm sure, more headcount it sounds like, so. Well, we've been a flat headcount over the last eight years. We lost someone last year and gained someone this year. So, you know, we basically have to do more with less every year like most IT departments. So, you know, we redesign our spaces periodically to meet our students' needs, you know, and we're turning what was labs, just computer labs, into more flexible space where students can move the tables around and the computers are available. Sometimes we have high-end alienwares in a cabinet. They pull out and use or they can use it to make models. We have, they can put up their designs on a 3D TV. They're using VR headsets to walk around their own designs. It's really fascinating where the technology's going. Okay, I wish we could spend more time in the alienware and VR stuff and everything like that. Our production crews, gamers, my son's into this stuff. But Carl, I'm hearing things like a space constraint. We need to do more with less. We need to simplify this environment. Wow, that seems like a really good setup for kind of infrastructure modernization. So, how long have you guys been there in about 10 years, right? 10 years, yeah. So, things have changed a lot in 10 years. So, walk us back 10 years ago and give us that point when you went to modernize. Yeah, when we started, there's no virtualization. Three server racks in a room in the basement. The 10 years that we've been there, there's been water in that room twice. So, that always gave us the warm fuzzies. You're saying it wasn't water cooling? I mean, no, we tried for that, but it didn't work out. Last year we moved to a Colo facility in Somerville. So, and by the time we did that move, we started virtualization with VMware like 3.5 within a year or two of me starting. And the racks got less and less full. And now in the fall, we rolled out VxRail and we're in a single rack in a data center and there's I think three physical servers in that rack that aren't the VxRail at this point. So, it's consolidation, power savings, stuff's in a much better physical location than it used to be. Moving that server room out, we were able to free up that space for the students to be able to have. It's a meditation space now. So, it's been really interesting kind of going through all that. Great, we don't have a ton of time, but let's talk about that VxRail. Was your team, were you looking for HCI? Was it just time for a server refresh? What kind of led to that? Was there a specific application that you started with? So, this event two years ago, we saw Brian from BU give his presentation on Nutanix. And that really turned us onto the whole hyper-converged option. We worked with Winslow, we actually talked to another vendor and we looked at Nutanix, we looked at Pivot 3, we looked at rolling our own VSAN on FX2 and after kind of comparing everything and seeing the pros and cons, VxRail made the most sense from a management perspective and a price perspective. Our old cluster was coming up on the five-year mark, things were going out of warranty. We had Equalogic SAN with 7,200 RPM drives, one gig iSCSI, so it's slow for most of its life. We were just doing lightweight servers and applications. Two years ago, we needed to virtualize our database server and we threw Pernix in there with 800 gig NVMe drives and that was a great stop gap, but we needed something more permanent, more robust and that's how we got to VxRail. From a management standpoint, the hyper-converged model gave us more flexibility. It's easier to expand and since we're small, we're not talking about racks and racks working together. We started with just three hosts. So from an overview standpoint, it's easy for us as we grow to just add another node and we get the compute, we get the storage and we get the memory all at once as an expansion. So the model is just fantastic for our workload that we put on it. We've got like 70 servers in there. The only stuff that's not in there yet is our student file server and exchange. And they're going in there in the next six months. Yeah, yeah. Great, so it sounds like you're real happy with the solution. You've been with Dell for years, so from an operation standpoint, was there a steep learning curve or was this pretty straightforward and very easy? I mean, I was already really familiar with the VMware piece going into this so that wasn't a big deal. We were already on vSphere 6 and we started in vXrl with vSphere 6. vXrl Manager is kind of a stupid, easy interface. You can go in, you can see are there alerts? Is there an update? Can it see my hardware? Is all that good? There's not a whole lot to learn from there. If we were doing vSan on our own, my understanding is that's a lot more complicated to stand up. Once you have it going, you're good until you try to make a change. So the vXrl Manager abstracts all that away and just kind of gives you the VMware experience that you're used to. Yeah, any commentary on the economics of this? We actually found, it was very interesting because our original assessment of our own needs were there was no way we could afford all flash. And we focused exclusively on hybrid solutions. And after a certain point, we saw I think a presentation from Rick on vXrl platform. And we saw that vXrl was inline D-dupe and compression with the all flash. And we thought, wait, maybe we could make this work with all flash. And so we actually had a very slight reduction in raw storage in our new platform. But the percentage that we're actually consuming is far less than on our old platform, simply because of those gains. And the performance is far, far faster. And we've just been very pleased with the implementation of it. From a cost perspective, the all flash vXrl came in under the hybrid pivot three and the hybrid Nutanix products. So it was a huge win from that perspective. We were shocked we'd be able to do it. Thrilled with it. Okay, either of you final word, it sounds like you're real happy with the solution. When it smoothly operates well, economics were good. What final takeaways would you give for your peers? I mean, to say the implementation was, the vXrl platform, the installation is as advertised. It was, it's basically a wizard that walks you through the installation process. The very few minor issues we encountered. The Winslow team and the ESE. EMC Dell support. Support people had no problem solving for us. It was really a pretty easy migration to the new platform and we were able to do it with essentially zero downtime. Yeah. Awesome. Well, gentlemen, thanks so much for joining. That's the promise is to get that easy button for IT. HCI definitely helping to move in that direction. Next time we'll get to talk a little bit more about cloud and everything like that. Be back with lots more coverage here from WTG Transform 2018. I'm Stu Miniman and thanks for watching theCUBE.