Interview with Big Switch Customer - American Fidelity Dell Tech World
Transcript
[Music] hey welcome back to the CTO of Iser coverage of bail tech world 2019 a lot of customer interviews this year we have Scott Miller technical infrastructure engineer at American fidelity Oh this show is sponsored by big switch in which we're going to talk about Dale networking so let's dig in first off how long have you been a big switch customer since about 2013 before big switch what was your primary platform so before big switch so if you step back a little further than that during
that time period we had the opportunity to purchase a new campus for our company ok as such we have the opportunity to build a new data center from scratch that's why at our previous headquarters site that data center was very old and at the time in which we were starting this process we were kind of a collapsed core at Cisco 6500 and everything you know that the we used the faxes you know kind of as our top of rocks which is so typical environment that most
CC II's were walk into day after day the good old trusty 6500 at the core yes 2013 where you know we're at the beginning of the big public cloud movement we're learning a little bit from the hyper scale there's not a lot talk to us about that decision process process to go with open network solution because that's 2013 it was it was new to us as well so we have had a long-standing good relationship with Dell and they're the ones who you know we went to
then kind of told them you know what we're looking for and basically wanted to know what's new right we kind of have had over the last five years a pretty top-down decision to try and be an innovator you know in our fields and so we wanted to do something new something that was a little more you know non-traditional right so that's kind of where we starting learning more about open networking the other people who are playing in the field you know cisco ACI so you were
talking to all the big names the wrist is the Cisco's I'm assuming juniper you know you got our you know our you're getting RFP answers from everyone sure and Dale while again extremely respectable platform not a lot of people knew about it but you're you guys are coming in with not just Dell networking which if you went with Dell networking by itself which would be a big win big label win for Dell you went with the open network solution of bringing Big Switch a different operating
system that the manufacturer tell us about some of the kind of conversations what was their resistance internally to the idea it wasn't like oh wow let's let's do this let's open arms sounds like a plan so we were absolutely open to doing something different part of it is that as we wanted to do something new we knew that there was going to be a learning curve right we would be on the edge of we don't fully understand probably everything around any of these solutions from the
beginning it's gonna take some time to really get comfortable around the solutions the thing with the Big Switch solution was that it was much more straightforward as far as hike out operated through the demos and through the talk to them it was obvious that that was gonna be solution that wouldn't require like just constant care and feeding of maintaining of having all these people trying to keep it running you know like a top as smooth as it could so I was one of the things that
really appeal to us when we entered the POC with Big Switch I mean by the end of the day we were passing packets which is something that we were pretty shocked about so let's talk about like day two okay you've deployed the solution what was the either big AHA or big old moment of day to operations well one of the immediate things that kind of strikes you is that you know coming from the 6500 platform and going into Big Switch is that you can do everything
and a GUI which is just a long way whole day you have some networking guys like cursing at us through the video whoo - shall never GUI but that is expecting the day of cloud where you don't want to spend a whole lot of intellectual thought on managing your environment and thinking what was that one command to do and what and what context of the OS do I have to be in to make it happen yeah it's kind of nice it's a nice nice crutch for
sure and as far as analytics to get the data in front of you to see the actual state of the network you can't beat it so instead of having to go into you know remembering all your very specific commands to go and it's that kind of the health of you know different links you know check for errors etc you can do these sort of things for the GUI which is great all right so let's talk about more day two let's talk about support okay one of
the big kind of a think mental world blocks I hear a lot when it comes to this a curated network operating system from big switch and then hardware from Dale mm-hmm when there's a problem who did I call like who do you guys call when there's a problem typically we reach out straight to Big Switch if they're very knowledgeable with the platform I think Dell is probably the main vendor that they typically usually support and if we've ever had any issues related to Oni I'm sure
I can only ever think of one it was found pretty quickly in the platform so for us it's big switch has provided pretty well pretty good support on that if there's anything that's ever that's just completely crazy and we need escalation from that we usually reach out to our SES at Dell um kind of let them but escalation has typically never been a problem for us so more day to stuff because these a lot of questions that I get is operations perspective you know when I
when I'm in the Cisco or juniper world or even in the dill nice world there's like a whole ecosystem around tooling - for performance management network monitoring etc talk about kind of that life of living in a only world of having to manage your network from a practical perspective what is this physical under underlay doing versus what is this config doing how do i do configuration management etc what tools oh yeah it's the big switch overlays all of that completely so you don't really have to
have an interaction with Oni other than the original provisioning of that switch so all the interactions that you do is going to be straight through pretty much big switch if you're doing you know straight if you have to debug something right and you're in the CLI then yes you may end up you know somewhere in the Oni realm to look at things and make sure the of environment is okay since we've been using the last couple years it's rare that we have to get into the
weeds that deeply there have been a few instances but the engineers have never had a problem with it well so talk to me about from a wool dip a little bit into the management realm when it comes to your job how does your job changed net now versus pre-big switch so before things were very hands-on any time we had a new host that came online there's quite a lot of work that had to be done to be prepped to get that set up it's not the
case anymore I'm it's very easy to script these changes big switch has some very well done automation pieces so you can you know connecting to the the vCenter api's and basically it can discover a new host when it comes online and it can provision the appropriate VLANs as needed so we haven't talked about that integration at all big switch has just made a big announcement Delon big switch oleum agreement they signed a new OEM agreement agreement you can buy I'm assuming big switch directly from Dale
now and the the purchasing is a lot cleaner but let's talk about kind of that integration VMware and Dale have had this story VMware del better together mmm obviously there is great V Center integration with the VX real Vic's rack platform etc but then you know we VMware has this small product called Ennis X you might have heard of so let's talk about big switch in nsx integration what what what have been like the niceties or even challenges of running big switch so the one big
thing that we use nsx for from the beginning was to stretch our layer to boundaries so with our old data center we want it to go ahead and start moving things to the new data center real time so to be able to stretch that boundary to V motion straight into the new data center without interrupting productions this is their bread and brother VMware cell just as their HDX on there on the backend product side you need to move from one data center to another data center
mmm complex enough migration as it is mm-hmm if you can stretch layer two from one data center to another data center makes migration a lot simpler you don't have to worry about reaiiy peeing your apps hardwire IP addresses none of that become a challenge you just have to the motion the pieces over so sex is a good solution exactly so that was kind of one of the things that really kind of caught our eye with the solution nsx from the beginning its morphed into you know
quite another things now especially now that we were in we've completed our migration and we're working out of our new data center so we have a second data center as well that we use mostly for disaster recovery but we have you know internet lines I speak connections there so we're able to use both of them simultaneously with NSX based on where VM lives it can aggress its local ESG and vice versa so nsx being the overlay there are some complications when it comes to this troubleshooting
as far as you know it's hard to get that insight to still kind of the pack of flows and where things are gonna go especially when things you know the RIT Center hosts traffic or inter host traffic and how that pack how those packets flow across the network you know there it's encapsulated VX land so it can be it can be difficult to understand how those flows are gonna function which is as we move until kind of this error of clout becomes a challenge as the
underlay is just continually abstracted the way in NSX and competing solutions have this challenge of this this observability or visibility challenge understanding what's going on what path and the network is a packet truly taking on a much more difficult problem correct so there that's where some of these integrations come in so big switch can integrate with NSX and so it can you can do like path traces so it pulls that information straight from the nsx manager it understands all the networks have defined and so from
big switch you can see all the NSX networks there as well and so if you go so far as to go the other way you could also see the beat the big switched information and NSX from this pretty tight integration I think when I first got briefed by Big Switch a couple of years ago and we're talking about NSX might well how are you guys going to continue to compete with VMware NSX all right no no no you have the story wrong it's not a compete
as they you need both solutions you need a underlay you need some intelligence for that underlay in an NSX if you embrace that overlay for your VM to VM track with traffic for NSX I musics absolutely so we use heavily for our microscopy micro segmentation environment but we also have what we would call a flat network as well so all of that exists just within VCF that would be their bread and butter you know different tenants different segments etc to kind of achieve kind of what
you could do in NSX but without some of those complexities you know all these Mel different segments don't have to be far walled off from each other so we're not we're not doing any of that and what I taught and one more simple and when I talk to the Internet 16 and actually well how does that how does nsx help me with my physical network you guys have been around for a lot wow I'm in any environment I still have stuff that can't be virtualized so
it's hard wired into a physical port but I want that NSX type intelligence around that port I can't get that NSX does nothing for me mm-hmm top does Big Switch offer you any operational advantages from either overlay perspective or etc for those legacy workloads that can't be or those were not even legacy work workloads that just doesn't make sense to virtualize they they have to go into a physical port yeah so we still have plenty of use for that kind of thing so one of the
things we we do like about the big switch environment is that when we do have these physical things that we have to connect you know if we have network staff should be defined it's very easy to just set those ports up for that you know we don't have to run cables all over the dentist Center everything's virtual so any port can be a part of any network there's one switch yes that's a one switch yes so the day-to-day management to support that becomes much easier yeah
I can't tell you how many projects have been delayed because I needed to run a physical wire from one side of the data center to another one yeah just so I can be on the right network like that is that is cloud liking capabilities you know the ability to to software to find your network any port on your network super important I wish you know and and I not see why being where hasn't gone into this route Wow I want NSX on a physical switch well
what a what if I just gave you one big switch mmm you can do whatever you want with it absolutely so I really enjoy Scot you coming on the program offering some input really appreciate you coming in and having a sit-down discussion with me we really think big switch for sponsoring this episode of the CTO dose talk to you next episode be sure to follow the channel for more coverage of Dell technologies world 2019
