 From Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE, covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2019, brought to you by Pure Storage. Welcome back to theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. We are in Austin, Texas for Pure Accelerate 19, and we're excited to be talking with another one of Pure's happy, successful customers. We've got Scott Pedron, the storage architect from OneGas. Scott, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you for having me. So OneGas, give our audience a little bit of an overview of what OneGas is, what regions you serve, and then dig into your role as storage architect. Of course. So OneGas, we're a natural gas utility company. So we, I'm more of the downstream, the inline. So we actually deliver the natural gas to our customers residential and commercial. We operate across Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas in various regions, including Austin. And my role as storage architect, I help, I mean, basically one man show. So design the storage, implement the storage, run the storage, and I also help out in other areas such as the servers, the DBAs, networking, kind of a little bit of everything. So being a Pure customer for about three years where we're talking before we went live, give us an overview of your storage infrastructure, your IT environment three years ago, and what the impetus was to evaluate Pure. Sure. So we were previously an IBM storage shop, had IBM sand volume controller backed by DS-8000s, flash system 820s, store-wise the 7000s, and so different tiers of storage all being managed by DS-VC. As is common, the warranty runs out on the DS-8000. So it's time to look at a forklift upgrade or whatever the case may be. I had a plan all in place to replace it with IBM, but we are a fully-regulated utility company, so I did my due diligence and brought in some competitors, EMC and Pure Storage. Heard Pure's story, especially the Evergreen storage model, and the five- and six-year total cost of ownership was actually pretty close, but once you went beyond that, there was no contest. Pure won hands down, and again, as a utility company, we like predictable flat costs. So the fact that we could do that and not have to have this multi-million dollar expense again in just another three or four years. So I got to ask you, so TCO done a lot of TCO studies, and the biggest component of total cost of ownership is labor, humans. That's how presumably you did a full TCO, you looked at it. I'm surprised to hear you say that the five-year TCO was about comparable because Pure's, the Kool-Aid injection says it's simpler, it's more modern. Wouldn't that save headcount or at least FTE? It could if we were a more complex environment, but as it stood, there's me and one other guy kind of as my backup. So I mean, you still have to have somebody to run it, right? So that's what I'm asking. So sometimes CFOs go, wait a minute, if we're not going to reduce headcount, I'm not going to accept that as part of the cost reduction. Is that what's going on here? Because we're going to shift labor to more high value activities. So often times the CFO doesn't count that in his or her business case. Was that the case? Or did you find that because you're so small, it really didn't matter in terms of the management complexity? I'm interested in your thoughts on that. We didn't factor in management complexity when we were calculating TCO. It was purely the cost to acquire the storage and then the maintenance. Oh, so it was no management cost, no human capital. Okay. And you said it's you and somebody else? Correct. And has it, have you now spent less time managing the Pure than you did previously with the IBM? Oh, for sure. Okay. When I first got it, I was afraid, am I going to work myself out of a job? The Pure. Because it was so easy. Okay, so if you think about it, you had two FTEs managing storage. Yeah. What percent of your time prior to Pure did you spend managing storage versus doing other stuff? I mean, a rough ballpark. Yeah, a rough ballpark. 50-50, was it? I was maybe doing 60, 70% doing just Pure storage before. And now it's 20? So you've gone from 60 to 70, let's call it 65% of your time, was spent managing storage, tuning, troubleshooting, provisioning lones, provisioning more capacity, planning, all those things that we love. Down to 20%. Probably. About roughly. I'm not going to hold you to it, but I guess we're live TV, so I will hold you to it. But that's a significant savings. I mean, you can calculate that over five years, right? You can take your fully loaded costs and boom, that adds up. What have you done with that time? What are you now, I mean, I'm presuming you're not just hanging out, you're publicly traded, regulated utility, somebody's watching, right? No, of course not. No, I've been able to be a lot more proactive. So helping out, like I said, with the server teams, VMware teams, on consulting them, on looking further, what is our long-term goal or strategy? How, what's the five-year plan type of thing? Instead of just fighting fires all day or, you know, oh, next week, we have to deal with this performance issue that's going to be coming up. So you've been able to be more strategic. For sure. And then I have one more question on this whole, because there's intangibles there that everybody overlooks, but actually, when you live them, they make a big difference. Has there been a quality effect? In other words, instead of putting out fires, you're doing things that are more strategic. Do you feel like you have better quality infrastructure and does that affect your business? I would say better quality and the fact that it's more consistent. So we ended up sweeping the entire floor with all pure storage. And so all of production and non-production, in our case, is all on pure. So the consistency of the latency and the response times and the performance that you can get out of the storage, it's, there is no more performance problems. It doesn't exist. And in terms of workloads, I know you're running Splunk on flash array. Give us a picture of that infrastructure, the workloads that you're running on it and the stakeholders. I can imagine in different departments and different functions within one gas that are using this system and not even realizing it because it's just available, it's there. But before Splunk, we had one application when we went to flash. They thought their processing was broken because it completed so quickly. That's a good thought to have. Yeah, so it finished so fast, they came back to us and said, it's broken. Like, no, it's not. What's your use case with Splunk? Is it secure here? It started out of cybersecurity. That's kind of what brought it in, but it has since expanded to monitoring analytics. We actually use it when we roll out our trucks to the field to ensure that we're meeting the SLAs. There's so many different areas where we use Splunk, I'd have to refer to my notes. So infrastructure ops has become this big thing, right? And automation and things of that nature are not quite there? Not so much automation yet, but we do have a plan or project to start doing more automation. And other analytics, I presume, I mean, it's all about analytics, right? Yeah, a lot of our application teams, like our web development team, they use Splunk a lot for their application monitoring and trying to be proactive on that. Thinking about the security use case, you know, security practitioners often tell us, well, it's just, we get inundated with incidents. And, you know, we don't have the time to sort through them all. Just having Splunk on an all flash array, high performance, all flash array. Does it affect the response of the security team or how does it affect the security side of the business? I'm not able to answer that directly, but I can say that, you know, I have seen them do a lot of, you know, select all type queries where, you know, they're just searching for a needle in the haystack type of thing. And previously, when we had multi-tiered storage, those queries took forever. But now that it's all flash, it's really quick. So they spent more time waiting than they do now. I mean, that could be a two-edged sword. Maybe they have more stuff to sift through now, but that's somebody else's problem. Well, the data security is critical because you're dealing with customers' data, right? And almost every month, we hear about data breaches in the public, whether it's a bank or it's a social media platform, unfortunately, they're becoming quite common. But when you're dealing with personal customer data, that's a big concern. Using, and some of the things that we're hearing Pure talk about is what they're doing with data protection and data security, and also kind of the shift from not looking at data protection as an insurance policy as much as it's an asset, because you have so much information, you're storing it for longer, more and more customers, more data, how is that being reflected up the chain, even up your chain of command into the executive folks in terms of being confident that what they have your customers' data running on in those three states that you talked about is on a very solid, secure platform? Well, security, it requires multiple layers. So Pure having always-on encryption is a big help. So if we do have a failed module that we have to be replaced, I don't have to worry about making sure that it's securely erased, destroyed, and all that, because without the encryption key, it's virtually crypto erased. And then, of course, we have all the security agents on the servers and the applications and our cybersecurity team manages all of that. And what about cloud? What are you doing with the cloud? What's the strategy? Cloud, we do cloud where it makes sense. For instance, ServiceNow and O365, we're customers of both of those. So SaaS stuff? Mostly SaaS, in my opinion, doing cloud, just doing the lift and shift and using cloud as infrastructure as a service doesn't make a whole lot of sense for us anyway. As a utility company, we're very pro-capital. So if we just shift that to another provider that's all operational. Whereas take ServiceNow, for example, it changed the operational model, right? And you had a clear business impact where it wasn't a lift and shift, it was a transformation, really. Exactly. What, where do you want to go with pure and storage infrastructure? Is it just like, hey, I just want it to work. I want it to be rock solid, dirt cheap, and highly available, high performance, or other things that you would like to see pure do that can help drive your business? Well, I think the announcement today of the Flasher AC is what I am probably most excited about in that I've already asked my business partners to get me some pricing, some quotes on can I use that for my backups as a backup target instead of, you know, Nearline SaaS, you know, SATA disks. So that's exciting for me. The fact that it's going to be the same software that I'm used to, and that's all plus. How are you protecting your Flasher A's today? We just, we're implementing Commvault right now. Okay. So we do leverage Commvaults, it's called IntelliSnap. So it basically does a pure level snapshot and then we can mount that on our media agents. Okay, and then, so using Flasher AC, that's the right model number, I think. Do you see that having, so obviously you want to use Flash if it's cost effective for everything. If it's cheap in the spinning disk, why not use it? Do you see any advantage in theory for recovery? Recovery speed? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's, if you need to do a fast recovery, it's, I mean, it's on Flash. So with what I'm looking most forward to though is the, even the ingest of the data, the initial backups. If there's a lot of, you know, queering and trying to figure out what to change and what's not, that can be a lot of disk thrashing on traditional spindle drives. So let's look into the future a little bit before we wrap here. You've been a pure customer for three years now. Yep. Presume you've done some upgrades and swap out some controllers in that time? Not quite yet. In the coming months, we will have our first ever green controller swap. But we have done, I've had, I've actually had a failed controller. So effectively the same process where one controller is down and didn't have any issues with performance or- No downtime, no disruption. Absolutely not. I've even upgrades where they, you know, take one controller down and upgrade it. I'll do those during business hours. Be comfortable with the, go ahead, sorry. Just because there's no performance, degradation, whatsoever. So you're obviously comfortable with the architecture. You seem like a pretty happy customer. A lot of people, some of the critics will say, oh, it's a dual controller architecture. That doesn't bother you. No, not at all. A lot of, I had to ask with a straight face. What would you like to see pure do? You know, if Charlie G. and Carlos sitting right here is he, what's the one thing that I could do to make your life easier? What would it be? Besides cutting price, you can't say cut price. Yeah. You know what, that's a great question. I think what I would have been asking for top of mind would have been the lower tier, what they came out with today, the C. Do you, you know, another criticism from some of the competitors is they don't have tiering. And when you talk to Purebo, they go, oh, we don't need tiering. We don't believe in tiering. What are your thoughts as a practitioner? Would you want to have like a tiered array, like high performance flash, lower? In the same array? Or is it not something that is necessary for you? I don't think so. I go back to the consistency. You know, we have all the production on flash now and it's, I don't have to worry about performance. Whereas before, I was constantly having to monitor and manage, you know, is all the right stuff on the right tier and it was a headache. Yeah. So automated tiering wasn't so automated? Is that, is that a fair statement? It worked fairly well, but there were some cases where it didn't. Yeah. So you better just throw it at flash and it'll take care of itself. Yeah. Cool. So you've got a foundation now that's going to allow one gas to evolve continually. And we look forward to hearing in the next year or so when you go through that first big evergreen upgrade, how that goes. But it sounds like you're, you made the right choice and the foundation that you've got is pretty strong. And then so many other layers of the business are benefiting and they don't even know it. Because as you said before, one of the constituents thought something was broken, it was that fast. So well done on your decision. Thank you. Thank you so much, Scott, for stopping by theCUBE and talking with Dave and me about what one gas has been doing, how you're succeeding and we look forward to hearing more of your success. Thank you. Great to have you. Thanks. Appreciate it. For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Pure Accelerate 19.