Dell & VMware - Better together?
Transcript
hey thanks for joining the CTO advisor here at Dell technology's world 2019 beautiful but not so sunny Las Vegas is we have a little thunderstorm going on in Vegas first time for me I have Mike Stanley Mike what's your title over at the University of Tennessee agriculture I'm an IT administrator Institute of Agriculture so big big announcements today at Dale tech world and we're gonna focus a little bit on the end user experience I know your roots are you don't do in EUC to anymore but
your roots are on EUC how did I know that because we've been friends on social media for what about three years now yeah got there about three years now we've never met in person so thanks for joining the CTO dose what do you think of the announcements today around EUC so you know a lot work space unity was workspace one unity I didn't get the whole gist of it but what did you get from that announcement I didn't get the whole just either other than the
fact that they're partnering with Microsoft and I'm really interested in that I attended a Microsoft ignite last fall and they talked about Windows virtual desktop which i think is what they called it it's a neat product I unfortunately I think it has limited value in my scenario my environment partly because of cost we're we're a state funded institution so we don't have all the money that a lot of these private companies have to throw around on technology also just because of frankly IT staffing that's probably
required for it and maybe some uniqueness to our environment so today was all about kind of alleviating some of those challenges one of which I think you guys have which is overworked staff for too many resources right before we started recording he was telling me give me kind of the lay of the land how big is the organization we're about 2500 employees we're headquartered on the University of Tennessee Knoxville campus but we we have about a hundred and fifteen locations across the state we're composed of
four units we're UT Extension UT AgResearch the Herbert College of Agriculture and the UT College of Veterinary Medicine we're in all 95 counties we have ten major research centers across the state we have four 4-h camps it's part of UT Extension we're essentially a distributed enormous environment that that tries to provide services the way an enterprise would right but but we're actually composed of I would call it a lot of small business remote office locations that is quite the challenge so anywhere from connectivity to just
listen the logistics our imagine some of these places are some of these offices are in remote little offices what did you hear you comment you sent out a tweet about Adele VP made a comment in one of the sessions that you're in what was interesting about the comment he the session was about focusing on the end user experience as a method to recruit and retain outstanding talent hmm all of these companies Dell was representative was represented both as an employer of people as well as McLaren
the Formula One racing company and a company called lyft Academy which trains pilots and they were all talking about how they see IT as a way to differentiate themselves from their competitors so that they can draw on the work force and hire talented people what the VP from Dell said was that they focus on their day one experience they want their new employees to be able to hit the ground running immediately on their first day to be useful and I'll be honest with you I don't
really support users on day one or even day 100 I'm not really into end-user support but I know being an employee of the University that that's one of the areas where we stumble I mean I find out I find users who are three four days even a weekend who maybe haven't been able to check their email yet or or aren't sure how to deal with payroll issues and things like that and it at an institution as large as the university because our employees are University employees
as well I think that's a huge challenge but what what this VP Adele did was really auch about focusing on the technology side of it making sure that they had each employee had a device that was appropriate for them the right screen size the right amount of power but also that it just worked from day one because they really wanted to impress upon the employees how valued they were and how much they they could contribute even from day one so let's talk about change from a
technology perspective what have you learned whether it's at this show over the net over the past few months just watching the industry how has the industry enabled you whether it's Dale Technologies VMware or even competitors however the industry alone enabled you to basically do more with less and change your platforms at the University at least it it's actually possible to spend your entire career as a system administrator and never have to worry about the network right you know we had a network team to take care
of the network I knew enough about the network to get my servers on the network to know that they you know this part of the farm might have to be on this VLAN or that VLAN but I didn't have to touch anything I just had to ask for help in that area a couple of years ago I was actually asked to pivot in my career to learn about networking and to help build a statewide network statewide VPN infrastructure and do a complete network refresh at all
hundred and fifteen of our locations easy speed and then this is someone who you know I'm a Mac user by preference I prefer to live on my Mac actually I'm quite comfortable at the terminal which which ended up helping me a lot as I moved into programming switches or configuring them and what Dell helped us with was taking me from someone who only understood networking at the abstraction level maybe even a little more at the virtualization level because I played with vSphere helped to build some
of it on campus had to know enough of it to to program a V switch to configure it properly but they took me from that point to what I'd like to call now is I'm not a network engineer but I play one on TV all right and I can speak the lingo I can ask for help in areas that I don't understand it but I can also help my regional IT administrators fix things when something goes wrong so that that's what I would say and and
what I learned from Dell you know I heard this for years that Dell was a company that could deliver an entire solution that they could help you with everything and you know frankly as an IT administrators an IT guy I've kind of learned reflexively to not trust salespeople when they say things like that project but they really deliver it here in a way that just blew me away they they brought best of beep breed products to the table for us we built a solution that was
best built on SonicWALL firewalls which were part of Dell at that time of course they're not now our switching is Dell in series I think they call it their campus line right we also use their x-series out at some of our smaller locations or where we have dormitory type situations and we used air high for wireless we could have used if we jumped in a little bit earlier because this is around the time it's a little bit after HP bought Aruba so at that during that
time period L was an enormous reseller of Aruba but we didn't want to go with Aruba even though Dell would have happily sold it to us because we had prior experience with air I've mm-hmm they put all of that together they arranged everything brought us in for training at their Center in NASH brought SonicWALL and arrow hive and dell networking engineers together to give us kind of a bootcamp in how to deploy our solution they helped us architect it was phenomenal one of our sales engineers
and and I know the difference between a sales engineer and a post sale engineer because I used to be a post sale engineer who kind of moonlighted on the sales engineering side but our sales engineer he's a little older than me he's probably got 30 plus years networking experience he was available anytime I had a question to call on to help me with a config they've just been phenomenal partners so let's wrap up one last question I had to be mug bore president on right before
you and one of the things that I talked about is the development of relationship between the vmware and dil the you we've both been around the industry in long time we've both been part of the bee community for a long time vmware has always been viewed as that kind of independent thing even when EMC bought them Dell VMware have gotten a lot closer over the past couple of years versus Dell and EMC from a customer perspective how do you view that tightening of the relationship has
it benefited you as a customer you know I don't know that it's benefited me as a customer because frankly I'm a delighted customer of virtualization as a service for a central IT I no longer have to run vSphere myself what I can tell you though is I believed very strongly back when I was part of central IT that we wouldn't move away from vSphere because we're very cost-conscious right as hyper-v came into being through those rough first few years and then got better and better and
better and I think it's a great product today I sincerely believed that central IT would transition away from vSphere to hyper-v and it's not happened and I'm glad it hasn't happened because frankly when I think about all of the VMS that are central IT guys have to run I'm glad that it's on a rock-solid platform I don't as a customer who makes use of services that VMware delivers through our central IT folks I'm I'm happy that dellons EMC have gotten even tighter hoo-wee we actually built
several years ago this have been 2011 we at one time we deployed what was at that point the largest public sector FlexPod in the country a lot of a lot of NetApp storage cisco ucs blades we loved it I blogged about it extensively as a great product that's all gone all of the Cisco UCS has gone out of their data center it's all Dell servers now well running vSphere and I think the partnership is good I think the tighter they integrate the better but I think
that I saw this on Twitter somebody mentioned it today one of the things that helped VMware grow was that it was allowed to to be agnostic hardware wise and I think that there's nothing wrong with Dell integrating as tightly as possible with VMware but they need to always let it work everywhere I think on that note that's a good place to end it is a interesting period of change in the industry VM Wardell cozying up as a result you know my argument is that you know
as a result Nutanix and HPE have now become cozier that VMware HPE relationship is is interesting because HP is one of the largest sub resellers of be spear but from a customer perspective can't I can't argue with customers they seem to really like the level support the level of collaboration the solutions coming to market from VMware in dáil combined while VMware still maintains their traditional relationships with the net apps and the cistal's and HP ease of the world Mike you block a lot or you tweet
a lot I don't know these new blog not as much as I used to but I need to get back into it so you tweet a lot people can find you on twitter s at Mike Stanley that's really easy that well when your nerd and you hear about new services you join them early so you get your name 2006 2007 I joined in early 2007 join that I could have got Keith Townsend and I didn't I got something else and here we are today you can
find me at CTO visor on Twitter you can find the blog the CTO visor com talk to you next CTO DOS
