 From Chicago, it's theCUBE. Covering Veritas Vision Solution Day 2018. Brought to you by Veritas. Welcome back to the windy city everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We're going out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. We're here at the Veritas Vision Solution Days in Chicago. We were just a few weeks ago. We're at the iconic tavern on the green in New York City. We're here at the Palmer House Hotel. Beautiful hotel, right in downtown Chicago. Near the lake, it's just an awesome venue. It's great to be here. Arista Thurman, the third is here. He's the principal computer engineer at the Argon National Labs. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Yeah, good to be here. Thanks. So tell the audience about Argon National Labs. What are you guys all about? About science. So we're all about the advancement of science. We do a lot of different experiments from technologies with batteries and chemistry. And the project I work on is the Vans full-time source, which is a light source that's used to collect data and experiments with a full-time source. Okay, so you're an IT practitioner. That is correct. Serving scientists. Yes. What's that like? Is that like an IT guy serving doctors? Are they kind of particular? A little bit. There's some challenges there, but yeah, it's great. So basically you have a unique customer base and they have additional requirements. So it's not like a normal customer base. They're very smart people. They have a lot of demands and needs and we do our best to provide all the services that they require. Yeah, so given that they're technical people, they may not be IT people, but they have an affinity to technology. So first of all, they must be hard to BS them. No doubt, no doubt. They cut through that. And so you got to be straight with them. And they're probably pretty demanding, right? I mean, they have limited resources and limited time and limited budgets and they're probably pounding you pretty hard. Is that the case or are they more forgiving? They're great people to work with, but there can be some challenges. I mean, it's unique in an idea that they work on multiple platforms. So it's from Unix to Linux to Mac, multiple computers and offices, multiple data requirements and a lot of things happen without a lot of process and planning. Some things are at hot. So it puts a little bit of strain sometimes on you to try to make everything happen in the amount of time they have. And everything is, it's not, there's some challenges with regard to how to get things done in a timely fashion when you don't know what's gonna happen with some of these experiments. I mean, I imagine, right? They can probably deal with a lot of uncertain processes because that's kind of their lives, right? And you must have to cobble things together for them to get them a solution sometimes. Is that the case? We do sometimes. I think it's all about getting enough funding and enough resources to take care of all the different experiments. Balancing act. Yeah. Okay, so you look after compute and storage, right? So talk about what's happening generally there and then specifically data protection. So in general, my primary focus is Linux, Linux administration, Red Hat Linux and we've seen a lot of data growth over the last five years and we've got projections for more growth as we are planning for an upgrade. So we're gonna change our B-Mind, make it more efficient, have a better life source and that's called planning in two or three years. And so there's a lot of extra projects on top of our normal workload. We have a lot of equipment that probably needs to be refreshed. There's resources and with IT and any kind of data management, things change. So whatever we're doing today in the next three years, we'll be doing something different because things change with regard to CPU speeds, performance to IO, networking, storage requirements. All those things are continually growing exponentially. So, and when scientists want to do more experiments and they get new resources in, it's going to require more resources for us to maintain and keep them operational at the speeds and performance they want. Yeah, we do hundreds of events with theCUBE. We do about 130 events this year and a lot of them are so-called big data orientation. And when you go to those data-oriented events, you hear a lot of sort of the roots of that or at least similarities to the scientific, technical computing areas and it's sort of evolved into big data. A lot of the disciplines are similar. So you're talking about a lot of data here. Sometimes it's really fast data and there's a lot of variety, presumably, in that data. So how much data are we talking about? I mean, is it huge volumes and maybe you could describe your data environment? Primarily, we have things broken up into different areas. So we have some blocks of storage and that provides a lot of our virtual, the back end for our virtual relation environment, which is either Microsoft or Red Hat Rev. I would estimate that's somewhere in a petabyte range and then we also have our NAS file systems which spread across multiple environments providing NFS version three and four and also to Windows client sys and some of the Mac clients also utilize that. And that's it about a little less than a petabyte and we also have HSV high-performance computing and that's a couple petabytes, at least. And all those numbers are just estimated because we're constantly growing. Any given time, it's changing. But you're talking about multiple petabytes. So how would you, how do you back up? How do you protect multiple petabytes? Well, I think it has to, it's all about a balancing act because it's hard to back up everything in that same time Windows. We have multiple backup environments providing resources for individual platform likes where Windows would do something a little different than we do for Linux. And we have different retention policies. Some environments need to be trained, retention is three years and some is six months, some three months. And so you have to kind of have a system of migrating the storage to faster this and then layer off the tape for long term retention. So it's a challenge that we're constantly fighting with. How do you use Veritas, your customer, obviously, and... Yeah, we've been a Veritas customer for many years and we utilize Veritas in our virtualization environments. They kind of help us have a central platform. We've actually explored other things but the most cost-effective thing to us at this point has been Veritas. We utilize them to back up primary our NAS and our black files, our black file systems that provide most of the virtualization. Why Veritas? What is it about them that you have an affinity for and there's a zillion other backup software vendors out there, why Veritas? I think we have invested a lot in Veritas over the years and so predate my time at Argonne. We've been using Veritas in my previous career in some micro systems. We also had some kind of relationship with Veritas. So it's easy. And I think we, like I mentioned earlier, we explored other things but it wasn't cost-effective to make that kind of change and it's been a reliable product. It does require work but it has been a reliable product, so. So you mentioned your Linux, Red Hat Linux. Yes. You saw this, IBM announced it's gonna buy Red Hat for $34 billion. Yeah. What were your thoughts when you heard that news? I was like, wow, what is gonna happen now? I mean, is that gonna, what is the, I was like, how is that gonna impact us? Is they're gonna change our licensing model or is it gonna be a good thing or a bad thing? Right now, we just don't really know. We're just kind of waiting and seeing. But it's like, okay, I mean, that's a big deal. Yeah, it's a big, biggest deal, I think certainly from IBM, the biggest, previous deal was, I think Cognos of $5 billion, so that's worth that. The deal, of course, doesn't close probably till the second half of 2019. So it's gonna take a while. Yes. Look, I mean, look, IBM is known and it by software companies. Saw this with SPSS. You've seen it with other companies that it buys it. Oftentimes, we'll change the pricing model. How do you license Red Hat? Do you have enterprise license agreement with, you know, off-hand? We do have an agreement with them. Lock that in. Lock that on-term in now. For the deal goes down. One of my counterparts is in charge of that part of it. So I'm sure we'll be having that conversation shortly. Yeah, interesting. All right, well, listen, Arista, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. Really appreciate your insights. Thank you. And it's great to meet you. Appreciate it. All right, welcome. All right, thanks for watching everybody. This is a wrap from Chicago. This has been theCUBE Veritas Vision Days where check out siliconangle.com for all the news. theCUBE.net is where you'll find these videos and a lot of others. You'll see where theCUBE is next. Wikibon.com for all the research. Thanks to the team here. Appreciate your help on the ground. We're out from Chicago. This is Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time.