How HCI Forms a Simple Foundation for Hybrid Cloud and Composable Infrastructure

A discussion on how IT operators are seeking increased automation, built-in intelligence, and robust security as they look for turnkey hyperconverged appliance approaches for both cloud and traditional workloads.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the BriefingsDirect Voice of the Innovator podcast series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing discussion on the latest insights into hybrid cloud and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) strategies.

Gardner

Speed to business value and simplicity in deployments have been top drivers of the steady growth around HCI solutions. IT operators are now looking to increased automation, built-in intelligence, and robust security as they seek such turnkey appliance approaches for both cloud and traditional workloads.

Stay with us now as we examine the rapidly evolving HCI innovation landscape, which is being shaped just as much by composability, partnerships, and economics, as it is new technology.

Here to help us learn more about the next chapter of automated and integrated IT infrastructure solutions is Thomas Goepel, Chief Technologist for Hyperconverged Infrastructure at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). Welcome, Thomas.

 

Thomas Goepel: Thank you for having me.

Gardner: Thomas, what are the top drivers now for HCI as a business tool? What’s driving the market now, and how has that changed from a few years ago?

Goepel

Goepel: HCI has gone through a really big transformation in the last few years. When I look at how it originally started, it was literally people looking for a better way of building virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions. They wanted to combine servers and storage in a single device and make it easier to operate.

What I am seeing now is HCI spreading throughout datacenters and becoming one of the core elements of a lot of the datacenters around the world. The use cases have significantly been expanded. It started out with VDI, but now people are running all kinds of business applications on HCI -- all the way to critical databases like SAP HANA.

Gardner: People are using HCI in new ways. They are innovating in the market, and that often means they do things with HCI that were not necessarily anticipated. Do you see that happening with HCI?

Ease of use encourages HCI expansion

Goepel: Yes, it’s happened with HCI quite a bit. The original use cases were very much focused on VDI and end-user computing. It was just a convenient way of having a platform for all of your virtual desktops and an easy way of managing them.

But people saw that ease of management can actually be expanded into other use cases. They then began to bring in some core business applications, such as Microsoft Exchange or SharePoint, logged onto the platform and saw there are more and more things they can put on there, and gain the entire simplicity that hyperconverged brings to operating in this environment.

How Hyperconverged Infrastructure Delivers
Unexpected Results for VDI Users

You no longer had to build a separate server farm, separate storage farm, or even manage your network independently. You could now do all of that from a single interface, a single-entry point, and gain a single point of management. Then people said, “Well, this ease makes it so beneficial for me, why don’t we bring the other things in here?” And then we saw it spread out in the data centers.

What we now have is people saying, “Hey, let me take this a step further. If I have remote offices, branch offices, or edge use-cases where I also need compute resources, why not try to take HCI there? Because typically on the edge I don’t even have system administrators, so I can take this entire simplicity down to this point, too.”

And the nice thing with hyperconvergence is that -- at least in the HPE version of hyperconvergence, which is HPE SimpliVity -- it’s not only simple to manage, it has also built in all of the enterprise features such as high availability and data efficiency, so it makes it really a robust solution. It has come a very long way on this journey.

Gardner: Thomas, you mentioned the role of HCI at the edge gaining traction and innovation. What’s a typical use case for this sort of micro datacenter at the edge? How does that work?

Losing weight with HCI wins the race

Goepel: Let me give you a really good example of a super-fast-paced industry: Formula One car racing. It really illustrates how edge is having an impact -- and also how this has a business impact.

One of our customers, Aston Martin Red Bull Racing, has been very successful in Formula One racing. The rules of the International Automobile Federation (FIA), the governing board of Formula One racing, say that each race team can only bring a certain amount of weight to a racetrack during the races.

This is obviously a high-tech race. They are adjusting the car during the race, lap by lap, making adjustments based on the real-time performance of the car to get the last inch possible out of the car to win that race. All of these cars are very close to each other from a performance perspective.

Traditionally, they shipped racks and racks of IT gear to the racetrack to calculate the performance of the car and make adjustments during the race. They have now replaced all of these racks with HPE SimpliVity HCI gear and significantly reduced the amount of gear. It means having significantly less weight to bring to the racetrack.

How Hyperconvergence Plays
A Pivotal Role at Red Bull

There are two benefits. First, reducing the weight of the IT gear allows them to bring additional things to the racetrack because what counts is the total weight – and that includes the car, spare parts, people, equipment -- everything. There is a certain mandated limit.

By taking that weight out, having less IT equipment on the racetrack, the HCI allows them to bring extra personnel and spare parts. They can perform better in the races.

The other benefit is that HCI performs significantly better than traditional IT infrastructure. They can now make adjustments within one lap of the race versus before, when it took them three laps before they could make adjustments to the car.

This is a huge competitive advantage. When you look at the results, they are doing great when it comes to Formula One racing, especially for being a smaller team compared to the big teams out there.

From that perspective, at the edge, HCI is making some big improvements, not only in a high-end industry like Formula One racing, but in all kinds of other industries, including manufacturing and retail. They are seeing similar benefits.

Gardner: I wrote a research paper about four years ago, Thomas, that laid out the case that HCI will become a popular on-ramp to private clouds and ultimately hybrid cloud. Was I ahead of my time?

HCI on-ramp to the clouds

Goepel: Yes, I think you were a little bit ahead of your time. But you were also a visionary to lay out that groundwork. When you look at the industry, hyperconvergence is a fast-growing industry segment. When it comes to server and data center infrastructure, HCI has the highest growth rate across the entire IT industry.

I don't see an end anytime soon. HCI continues to grow as people discover new use cases. The edge is one new element, but we are just scratching the surface.

What you were foreseeing four years ago is exactly what we now have, and I don’t see an end anytime soon. HCI continues to grow as people discover new use cases. The edge is one new element, but we are just scratching the surface.

Edge use cases are a fascinating new world in general -- from such distributed environments as smart cities and smart manufacturing. We are just starting to get into this world. There’s a huge opportunity for innovation and this will become an attractive area for hyperconvergence.

Gardner: How does HCI innovation align with other innovations at HPE around automation, composability, and intelligence derived to make IT behave as total solutions? Is there a sense that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts?

HCI innovations prevent problems

Goepel: Absolutely there is. We have leveraged a lot of innovation in the broader HPE ecosystem, including the latest generation of the ProLiant DL380 Server, the most secure server in the industry. All of these elements flew into the HPE SimpliVity HCI platform, too.

But we are not stopping there. A lot of other innovations in the HPE ecosystem are being brought into hyperconvergence. A perfect example is HPE InfoSight, a management platform that allows you to operate your infrastructure better by understanding what’s going on in a very efficient way. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) to detect when something is going wrong in your IT environment so you can proactively take action and don’t end up with a disaster.

How to Tell if Your Network
Is Really Aware of Your Infrastructure

HPE InfoSight originally started out in storage, but we are now taking it into the full HPE SimpliVity HCI ecosystem. It’s not just a support portal, it gives you intelligence to understand what’s going on before you run into problems. Those problems can be solved so your environment keeps running at top performance. You’ll have what you need to run any mission-critical business on HCI.

More and more of these innovations in our ecosystem will be brought into the hyperconverged world. Another example is around composability. We have been developing a lot of platform capabilities around composability and we are now bringing HPE SimpliVity and composability together. This allows customers to actually change the infrastructure’s personality depending on the workload, including bringing on HPE SimpliVity. You can get the best of these two worlds.

This leads to building a private cloud environment that can be easily connected to a public cloud or clouds. You will ultimately build out a hybrid IT environment in such a way that your private cloud environment, or your on-premise environment, runs in the most optimized way for your business and for your specific needs as a company.

Gardner: You are also opening up that HCI ecosystem with new partners. Tell us how innovation around hyperconverged is broadening and making it more ecumenical for the IT operations consumer.

Welcome to the hybrid world

Goepel: HPE has always been an open player. We never believed in locking down an environment or making it proprietary and basically locking out everyone else. We have always been a company that listens to what our customers want, what our customers need, and then give them the best solution.

Now, customers are looking to run their HCI environment on HPE equipment and infrastructure because they know that this is reliable infrastructure. It is working, and they feel comfortable with it, and they trust it. But we also have customers who say, “Hey, you know, I want to run this piece of software or that solution on this HPE environment. Can you make sure this runs and works perfectly?”

We are in a hybrid world. And in a hybrid world there is not a single vendor that can cover the entire hybrid market. We need to innovate in such a way that we allow an ecosystem of partners to all come together and work collaboratively and jointly to provide new solutions.

We have recently announced new partnerships with other software vendors, and that includes HPE GreenLake Flex Capacity. With that, instead of doing big, upfront investments on equipment, you can do it in a more innovative way financially. It brings about the solution that solves the customers’ real problems, rather than locking the customer into some certain infrastructure.

Flexibility improves performance 

Gardner: You are broadening the idea of making something consumable when you innovate, not only around the technology and the partnerships, but also the economic model, the consumption model. Tell us more about how HPE GreenLake Flex Capacity and acquiring a turnkey HPE SimpliVity HCI solution can accelerate value when you consume it, not as a capital expense, but as an operating cost affair.

Goepel: No industry is 100 percent predictable, at least I haven’t seen it, and I haven’t found it. Not even the most conservative government institution that has a five-year plan is predictable. There are always factors that will disrupt that predictability plan, and you have to react to that.

How Hyperconverged Infrastructure
 Solves Unique Challenges
For Datacenters at the Edge

Traditionally, what we have done in the industry is oversized our environments to calculate for anticipated growth over five years -- and then add another 25 percent on top of it, and then another 10 percent cover on top of that. Hopefully we did not undersize the environment once we get to the end of the life of the equipment.

That is a lot of capital you are investing into something that just sits there and has no value, no use, and just basically stands around, and you take off of your books in the financial perspective.

Now, HPE GreenLake gives you a flexible-capacity model. You only pay literally for what you consume. If you grow faster than you anticipated, you just use more. If you grow slower, you use less. If you have an extremely successful business -- but then something in the economic model changes and your business doesn’t perform as you have anticipated -- then you can reduce your spending. That flexibility better supports your business.

IT shouldn't be a burden that slows you down, it should be an accelerator. By having a flexible financial model, you get exactly that.You can scale up and down based on your business needs.

We are ultimately doing IT to help our businesses to perform better. IT shouldn't be a burden that slows you down, it should be an accelerator. By having a flexible financial model, you get exactly that. HPE GreenLake allows you to scale up and scale down your environment based on your business needs with the right financial benefits behind it.

Gardner: There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. And I suppose that also applies to innovation. If you are doing so many new and interesting things -- allowing for hybrid models to accelerate and employing new economic models -- sometimes things can spin out of control.

But you can also innovate around management to prevent that from happening. How does management innovation fit into these other aspects of a solution, to keep it from getting out of control?

Checks and balances extend manageability

Goepel: You bring up a really good point. One of the things we have learned as an industry is that things can spin out of control very quickly. And for me, the best example is when I go back two years when people said, “I need to go to the cloud because that is going to save my world. It’s going to reduce my costs, and it's going to be the perfect solution for me.”

What happened is people went all-in for the cloud and every developer and IT person heard, “Hey, if you need a virtual machine just get it on whatever your favorite cloud provider is. Go for it.” People very quickly learned that this means exploding their costs. There was no control, no checks and balances.

On both the HCI and general IT side, we have learned from that initial mistake in the public cloud and have put the right checks and balances in place. HPE OneView is our infrastructure management platform that allows the system administrator to operate the infrastructure from a single-entry point or single point of view.

How Hyperconverged Infrastructure
 Helps Trim IT Complexity
Without Sacrificing Quality

That gives you a very simple way of managing and plays along with the way HCI is operated -- from a single point of view. You don't have five consoles or five screens, you literally have one screen you operate from.

You need to have a common way of managing checks and balances in any environment. You don't want the end user or every developer to go in there and just randomly create virtual machines, because then your HCI environment quickly runs out of resources, too. You need to have the right access controls so that only people that have the right justification can do that, but it still needs to happen quickly. We are in a world where a developer doesn’t want to wait three days to get a virtual machine. If he is working on something, he needs the virtual machine now -- not in a week or in two days.

Similarly, when it comes to a hybrid environment -- when we bring together the private cloud and the public cloud -- we want a consistent view across both worlds. So this is where HPE OneSphere comes in. HPE OneSphere is a cloud management platform that manages hybrid clouds, so private and public clouds.

It allows you to gain a holistic view of what resources you are consuming, what's the cost of these resources, and how you can best distribute workloads between the public and private clouds in the most efficient way. It is about managing performance, availability, and cost. You can put in place the right control mechanisms to curb rogue spending, and control how much is being consumed and where.

Gardner: From all of these advancements, Thomas, have you made any personal observations about the nature of innovation? What is it about innovation that works? What do you need to put in place to prevent it from becoming a negative? What is it about innovation that is a force-multiplier from your vantage point?

Faster is better 

Goepel: The biggest observation I have is that innovation is happening faster and faster. In the past, it took quite a while to get innovation out there. Now it is happening so fast that one innovation comes, then the next one just basically runs over it, and we are taking advantage of it, too. This is just the nature of the world we are living in; everything is moving much faster.

There are obviously some really great benefits from the innovation we are seeing. We have talked about a few of them, like AI and how HCI is being used in edge use-cases. In manufacturing, hospitals, and these kinds of environments, you can now do things in better and more efficient ways. That's also helping on the business side.

How One Business
Took Control of their Hybrid Cloud 

But there’s also the human factor, because innovation makes things easier for us or makes it better for us to operate. A perfect example is in hospitals, where we can provide the right compute power and intelligence to make sure patients get the right medication. It is controlled in a good way, rather than just somebody writing on a piece of paper and hoping the next person can read it. You can now do all of these things electronically, with the right digital intelligence to ensure that you are actually curing the patient.

I think we will see more and more of these types of examples happening and bringing compute power to the edge. That is a huge opportunity, and there is a lot of innovation in the next two to three years, specifically in this segment, and that will impact everyone’s life in a positive way.

Gardner: Speaking of impacting people's lives, I have observed that the IT operator is being greatly impacted by innovation. The very nature of their job is changing. For example, I recently spoke with Gary Thome, CTO for Composable Cloud at HPE, and he said that composability allows for the actual consumers of applications to compose their own supporting infrastructure.

Because of ease, automation, and intelligence, we don’t necessarily need to go to IT to say, “Set up XYZ infrastructure with these requirements.” Using composablity, we can move innovation to the very people who are in the most advantageous position to define what it is they need.

Thomas, how do you see innovation impacting the very definition of what IT people do?

No more mundane tasks 

Goepel: This is a very positive impact, and I will give you a really good example. I spend a lot of time talking to customers and to a lot of IT people out there. And I have never encountered a single systems administrator in this industry who comes to work in the morning and says, “You know, I am so happy that I am here this morning so I can do a backup of my environment. It’s going to take me four hours, and I am going to be the happiest person in the world if the backup goes through.” Nobody wants to do this.

Nobody goes to work in the morning and says, “You know, I really hope I get a hard problem to solve, like my network crashes and I am going to be the hero in solving the problem, or by making a configuration change in my virtual environment.”

These are boring tasks that nobody is looking for, but we have to do it because we don't have the right automation in our environments. We don't have the right management tools in our environment. We put a lot of boring tasks to our administrators and let them do them. They are mundane and they don't really look forward to them.

How Hyperconverged Infrastructure
Gives You 54 Minutes Back Every Hour

Innovation takes these burdens away from the systems administrator and frees up their time to do things that are not only more interesting, but also add to the bottom line of the company. They can better help drive the businesses and spend IT resources on something that makes the difference for the company’s bottom line.

Ultimately, you don’t want to be the one watching backups going through or restoring files. You want this to be automatic, with a couple of clicks, and then you spend your time on something more interesting.

Every systems administrator I talk to really likes the new ways. I haven't seen anyone coming back to me and saying, “Hey, can you take this automation away and all this hyperconvergence away? I want to go back to the old way and do things manually so I know how to spend my eight hours of the day.” People have much more to do with the hours they have. This is just freeing them up to focus on the things that add value.

HCI to make IT life easier and easier 

Gardner: Before we close out, Thomas, how about some forward-looking thoughts about what innovation is going to bring next to HCI? We talked about the edge and intelligence, but is there more? What are we going to be talking about when it comes to innovation in two years in the HCI space?

Goepel: I touched on the edge. I think there will be a lot of things happening across the entire edge space, where HCI will clearly be able to make a difference. We will take advantage of the capabilities that HCI brings in all these segments -- and it will actually drive innovation outside of the hyperconverged world, but by being enabled by HCI.

But there are a couple of other things to look at. Self-healing using AI in IT troubleshooting, I think, will become a big innovation point in the HCI industry. What we are doing with HPE InfoSight is a start, but there is much more to come. This will continue to make the life of the systems administrator easier.

We want HCI as a platform to be almost invisible to the end user because they shouldn't care about the infrastructure. It will behave like a cloud, but just be on-premises and private, and in a better, more controlled way.

Ideally, we want HCI as a platform to be almost invisible to the end user because they shouldn't care about the infrastructure. It will behave like a cloud, but just be on-premises and private, and in a better, more controlled way.

The next element of innovation you will see is HCI acting very similar to a cloud environment. And some of the first steps with that are what we are doing around composability. This will drive forward to where you change the personality of the infrastructure depending on the workload needed. It becomes a huge pool of resources. And if you need to look like a bare-metal server, or a virtual server -- a big one or a small one -- you can just change it and this will be all software controlled. I think that innovation element will then enable a lot of other innovations on top of it.

If you take these three elements -- AI, composability of the infrastructure, and driving that into the edge use cases -- that will enable a lot of business innovation. It’s like the three legs of a stool. And that will help us drive even further innovation.

Gardner: I’m afraid we will have to leave it there. You have been exploring the speed to business value and simplicity benefits from the latest HCI solutions. And we have learned how built-in intelligence, flexible economic models, and a drive to the edge are advancing the nature and value of composable IT infrastructure and hyperconvergence as well.

How to Achieve Composability
Across Your Datacenter

So please join me in thanking our guest, Thomas Goepel, Chief Technologist for Hyperconverged Infrastructure at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Thank you so much, Thomas.

And a big thank you as well to our audience for joining this sponsored BriefingsDirect Voice of the Innovator hybrid IT and composable infrastructure strategies interview.

I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of Hewlett Packard Enterprise-sponsored discussions. Thanks again for listening. Please pass this along to your IT community, and do come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

A discussion on how IT operators are seeking increased automation, built-in intelligence, and robust security as they seek turnkey appliance approaches for both cloud and traditional workloads. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2019. All rights reserved.

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How a Widely Distributed Dental Firm Protects Sensitive Data While Making It Highly Available

Transcript of a discussion on how a rapidly growing dental services company combined hyperconverged infrastructure with advanced security products to efficiently gain data availability, privacy, and security.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Bitdefender. 

Dana Gardner: Welcome to the next edition of the BriefingsDirect  podcast series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator.

Gardner

Modern dentistry depends on more than good care. It also demands rapid access to data and applications. For a rapidly growing dental services company -- consisting of hundreds of dental offices spread across 10 American states -- the task of managing all of its data availability, privacy, and security needs started out as complex and costly.

The next BriefingsDirect security innovations discussion examines how Great Expressions Dental Centers found a solution by combining hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) with advanced security products.

Here to share the story of how to best balance data compliance and availability requirements via modern IT infrastructure is Kevin Schokora, Director of IT Operations at Great Expressions Dental Centers in Southfield, Michigan.

Welcome to BriefingsDirect, Kevin.

Kevin Schokora: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: What makes Great Expressions Dental Centers unique? How does that impact your ability to deliver data wherever your dentists, staff, and patients need it with the required security?

Schokora

Schokora: Our model is based on being dispersed in multiple states. Across those sites, we have many software packages that we have to support on our infrastructure. Based on those requirements, we were afforded an excellent opportunity to come up with new solutions on how to meet our patients’, doctors’, and customers’ needs.

Gardner: You have been in business since 1982, but you have really expanded a lot in the past few years. Tell me about what’s happened to your company recently.

Schokora: We found our model was ripe for success. So we have experienced tremendous growth, expanding to 275-plus sites. And going forward, we expect to expand by 62 to 100 new sites every year. That is our goal. We can do that because of the unique offerings we have, specifically around patient care and our unique software.

Gardner: Not only do you have many sites, but you allow your patients to pick and choose different sites -- if they need to cross a state border or move around for any reason, but that wide access requires you to support data mobility.

Snowbird-driven software

Schokora: It does. This all came about because, while we were founded in Michigan, some of our customers go to Florida for the winter. Having had a dental office presence in Florida, they were coming to our offices there and asking for the same dental care that they had received in Michigan.

So, we expanded our software’s capabilities so that when a patient has an appointment in another state, the doctor there will have access to that patient’s records. They can treat them knowing everything in the patient's history.

Gardner: Who knew that snowbirds were going to put you to the test in IT? But you have come up with a solution.

Schokora: We did. And I think we did well. Our patients are extremely happy with us because they have that flexibility.

Gardner: In developing your solution, you leveraged HCI that is integrated with security software. The combination provides not only high availability and high efficiency, but also increased management automation. And, of course, you’re able to therefore adhere to the many privacy and other compliance rules that we have nowadays.

Tell us about your decision on infrastructure, because, it seems to me, that’s really had an impact on the end-solution.

We were able to go from five server racks in a co-location facility down to one -- all while providing a more consistent services delivery model. We have been able to grow and focus on the business side.

Schokora: It did, and the goal was always to set ourselves up for success so that we can have a model that would allow growth easily, without having huge upticks in cost.

When we first got here, growing so fast, we had a “duct tape solution” of putting infrastructure in place and doing spot buys every year to just meet the demands and accommodate the projected growth. We changed that approach by putting a resource plan together. We did a huge test and found that hyperconverged would work extremely well for our environment.

Given that, we were able to go from five server racks in a co-location facility down to one – all while providing a more consistent services delivery model. Our offices have been able to grow so that the company can pursue its plans without having to check back and ask, “Can the IT infrastructure support it?”

This is now a continuous model. It is part of our growth acquisition strategy. It's just one more check-box where we don't have to worry about the IT side. We can focus on the business side, and how that directly relates to the patients.

Gardner: Tell us about the variety of data and applications you are supporting for all 275 sites.

Aligning business and patient records

Schokora: We have the primary dentistry applications, and that includes x-rays, patient records, treatment plans, and all of the various clinical applications that we need. But then we also have cumbersome processes – in many cases still manual – for coordinating that all of our patients’ insurance carriers are billed properly. We have to ensure that they get their full benefits.

Anywhere we can, we are targeting for more provider-payer process automation, to ensure that any time we bill for services or care, it is automatically processed.  That level of automatic payments eliminates the touch points that we would have to do manually or through a patient.

And such automation allows us, as we scale and grow, to not have to add as many full-time employees. Our processes can scale in many cases by leveraging the technology.

Gardner: Another big part of the service puzzle is addressing privacy and compliance issues around patient information. You have to adhere to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) nowadays. What were your concerns were when it came to balancing the availability of data with these compliance requirements?

Schokora: We had to ensure from an infrastructure perspective that we afford all of our customers -- including the software applications development team -- a platform that they can have confidence in, and we had to earn their trust. To that end, the HCI approach allowed us the capability to use encryption at rest, which is a huge component for compliance for HIPAA, PCI, and things of that nature.

The other benefit was to move our entire environment -- what I call a forklift of our entire data center. That allowed us to then review what I would call the sins of our past to ensure that any of that cobbled-together infrastructure is built with the security needed to meet all of the requirements of the customer. We can now plan on a top-down basis.

We just completed this project and we have made a lot of changes to that model to support a better and more secure infrastructure.

Gardner: Before you had a Swiss army knife approach to security. What was the problem with that approach? And what kind of performance tax came with that?

HCI scalability adds value

Schokora: To meet the needs of the business at the time, the Swiss army knife approach took us far. But as we ramped up our acquisition strategy and expanded Great Expressions, we found that this was not scalable to achieve our new business needs.

We needed to look at a couple of key pieces. One was automation, and two was how we revolutionized how we do things. Once we looked at HCI and saw the differences in how we used to do things – it was an easy decision.

We put our new plan through a proof of concept (POC) test. I had some people who were heavily invested in our former technology, but they begged for this new technology. They wanted to use it. They saw how it translated into a value-add for the customers.

Gardner: What was the story behind the partners and technology you chose?

The one thing that really stood out for us with Nutanix was their customer approach, their engagement, and how they ensured that they are a partner with us. They were there hand-in-hand with us.

Schokora: We looked at three different vendors. We were an existing VMware customer, so we looked at their solution. We looked at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) SimpliVity, and we looked at Nutanix. They were all very similar in their approach, they all had their strengths.

The one thing that really stood out for us with Nutanix was their customer approach, their engagement, and how they ensured that they are a partner with us. They showcased this through the POC process, throughout testing the equipment and environment. They were there, hand-in-hand with us, responding to our questions -- almost ad nauseam. They ensured that customer experience for us, just to make sure that we were comfortable with it.

They also had their own hypervisor, what all their virtual machines rest on; same as VMware has their own. There were some benefits in moving with that, and it also aligned into our backup strategy, with the product we use called Rubrik.

So given all of this, as a complete package, we felt that this was an opportunity that could not be passed up on. When we wrote the business case -- and this was the easy part at that point, showcasing the benefits over five years -- this solution easily won out from a cost perspective and aligned with the business requirements of growth. That alignment supported our whole business, not just IT. That was also critical.

Gardner: How quickly were you able to do the migration? How did it go across 275 sites and 4,000-plus workstations, laptops, and other client devices?

Well-managed migration

Schokora: This required a lot of testing. This was about us going through with planning, with the test migrations, working with our users to have maintenance windows, so that once we did move we could execute a fully developed test plan to ensure that our customers also signed off on, “Okay, yes, this works for me, this meets my requirements.” I thought that was key as well.

Going through it, we did experience some hiccups, things that impacted project events, and so we had to adjust our timelines. We still finished it before we thought we would. We were on a pace to beat our timelines by half.

Gardner: Wow.

Schokora: Yeah. It was great. We were moving at this rapid pace and then we discovered that there were some issues or some errors happening in some of our virtual servers and some of the ones that were rather big, and this kind of showcases that support from Nutanix.

So we had Nutanix on the phone. They were with us every step of the way. They took our logs and they evaluated them, and they quickly issued out patches to address some of the things that they noticed that could be better within their migration tool. So we had a positive effect on Nutanix as well, recognizing some of their opportunities and them quickly addressing them.

Once we implemented this new tool that was provided to us, we were able to move some of our extremely large systems over without impacting the customer outside of our maintenance windows. And we are talking, not necessary petabytes, but very close to it, with database servers and customer entry points into our dental software.

Gardner: And this is for 2,400 employees, but you only have an IT staff of 30 or so people?

Schokora: Correct. And you will hear the A word a lot: Automation. While we had some late nights, given the tools and some of the automation techniques that the vendors use, specifically Nutanix, we were able to get this done with limited staff and with the result of our board of directors personally thanking us, which was great.

Gardner: Not only did you consolidate and modernize your infrastructure, but you in a sense consolidated and modernized your approach to security, too. How did the tag team between Nutanix and your security vendor help?

A secure solution

Schokora: From a security perspective, we chose -- after a lengthy process of evaluation -- a Bitdefender solution. We wanted to attack our endpoints and make sure that they were protected, as well as our servers. In addition to having a standardized methodology of delivering patches to both endpoints and to servers, we wanted an organization that integrated with Nutanix. Bitdefender checked off all of those boxes for us.

So far the results have been fairly positive to overwhelmingly positive. One thing that was a positive -- and was a showstopper with our last vendor -- was that our file server was so big. We needed to resolve that. We couldn’t run our antivirus or anti-malware security software on our file server because it made it too slow. It would bog down, and even as we worked with the vendor at the time we could not get it passed to “green.”

With Bitdefender, during our POC, we put it on the [file server] just to test it and our users had no impact. There were no impacting events, and we were now protected against our biggest threats on our file server. That was one of the clear highlights of moving to a Bitdefender solution.

Gardner: And how important was Bitdefender’s integration and certification with Nutanix?

The integration between Nutanix and Bitdefender put them ahead. Leveraging encryption at rest was a huge win for us from a compliance standpoint.

Schokora: It was one of the strengths listed on the business case. That integration between Nutanix and Bitdefender was not a key decision point, but it was one of those decision points that if it was close between two vendors it would have put Bitdefender ahead. It just so happened, based on the key decision points, that Bitdefender was already ahead. This was just another nice thing to have.

Gardner: By deploying Bitdefender, you also gained full-disk encryption. And you extended it to your Windows 10 endpoints. How easy or difficult was it?

Schokora: Leveraging encryption at rest was a huge win for us from a compliance standpoint. The other thing about the workstations and endpoints was that our current solution was unable to successfully encrypt Windows 10 devices, specifically the mobile ones, which we wanted to target as soon as possible.

The Bitdefender solution worked right out of the box. And I was able to have my desktop support team run that project, instead of my network operations team, which was hugely critical for me in leveraging labor and resources. One team is more designed for that kind of “keep the lights on” activity, and not necessarily project-based. So I was able to leverage the project-based resources in a more efficient and valuable way.

Gardner: It sounds like you have accomplished a lot in a short amount of time. Let’s look at some of the paybacks, the things that allowed you to get the congratulations from your board of directors. What were the top metrics of success?

Timing is everything

Schokora: The metrics were definitely based on timing. We wanted to be wrapped up by the end of June [2018] in support of our new enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Our new ERP system was going through testing and development, and it was concluding at the end of June. We were going for a full roll-out for our Michigan region at that time. The timing was critical.

We also wanted to make sure there were no customer-impacting events. We wanted to ensure that all of our offices were going to be able to provide patient care without impact from the project that was only going to be deployed during scheduled maintenance hours.

We were able to achieve the June timeframe. Everything was up and running on our new Nutanix solution by the third week of June. So we even came in a week early, and I thought that was great.

We had no large customer-impacting events. The one thing we will own up to is that during our IT deployment and maintenance window, the applications development team had some nightly processes that were impacted -- but they recovered. All cards on the table, we did impact them from a nightly standpoint. Luckily, we did not impact the offices or our patients when they wanted to receive care.

Gardner: Now that you have accomplished this major migration, are there any ongoing operational paybacks that you can point to? How does this shakeout so far on operational efficiency measurements?

Schokora: We now have had several months of measurements, and the greatest success story that we’ve had on this new solution has been a 66 percent cut in the time it takes to identify and resolve incidents when they happen.

If we have slow server performance, or an impacting event for one of our applications, this new infrastructure affords us the information we need to quickly troubleshoot and get to the root cause so we can resolve it and ensure our customers are no longer impacted.

That has occurred at least five times that I can recall, where the information provided by this hyperconverged solution and Bitdefender have given us the ability to get our customers back on track sooner than we could on our old systems.

Gardner: And this is doing it all with fewer physical racks and fewer virtual servers?

Schokora: Yes. We went from five racks to one, saving $4,000 a month. And for us that’s real money. We also do not have to expand personnel on my network operations team, which is also part of infrastructure support piece.

Now, as we’re preparing for even more expansion in 2019, I’m not going to have to ask for any additional IT personnel resources. We are now attacking things on our to-do lists that had always been pushed back. Before the “keep the lights on” activities always took priority. Now, we have time back in our days to proactively go after those things that our customers request from us.

Gardner: Because you have moved from that Swiss army knife approach, are there benefits from having a single pane of glass for management?

Know who and what’s needed

Schokora: Based on having that single pane of glass, we are able to do better resource evaluations and forecasting. We are better able to forecast availability.

So when the business comes back with projects -- such as improved document management, which is what’s currently being discussed, and such as a new learning management system from our training department -- we are able to forecast what they will demand from our systems and give them a better cost model.

From an automation standpoint, we are now able to get new virtualized servers up within seconds, whereas it used to take days. We have a window into more metrics, and are in a better place as we migrate off of legacy systems.

From an automation standpoint, we are now looking at how to get new virtualized servers up within seconds, whereas it used to take days. From a support of legacy systems standpoint, now that we have a window into more metrics, we are in a better place as we migrate off. We are not having lingering issues when we are moving to our new ERP system.

All of these things have been the benefits that we have reaped, and that’s just been in two months.

Gardner: Looking to the future, with a welcome change in emphasis away from IT firefighting to being more proactive, what do you see coming next?

Schokora: This is going to directly translate into our improved disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC) strategies. With our older ERP system and that Swiss army knife approach, we had DR, but it was very cumbersome. If we ever had a high-impact event, it would have been a mad scramble.

This new solution allows us to be able to promise our customers a set schedule, that everything will be up in a certain number of days or hours, and that all critical systems will be online to meet their requirements. We never really had that before. It was hopes and prayers without concrete data behind how long we would need to get back up.

From a business continuity standpoint, the hyperconverged solution affords us the flexibility to leverage a hybrid cloud, or a secondary data center, in a way that my technicians feel, based on their testing, will be easier than our older approach.

Now, we haven’t done this yet. This is more for the future, but it is something that they are excited about, and they feel is going to directly translate into a better customer experience.

Being able to have Bitdefender provide us that single pane of glass for patching and to get critical patches out quickly also affords us the confidence in our compliance. For the latest assessment we had, we passed with flying colors.

There are some gaps we have to address, but there are significantly fewer gaps than last year. And other than some policies and procedures, the only thing we changed was Bitdefender. So that is where that value-add was.

Gardner: Any words of advice now that you have been through a really significant transition -- a wholesale migration of your infrastructure, security, encryption, new ERP system, and moving to a better DR posture. What words of advice do you have for other folks who are thinking of biting off so much at once?

Smooth transition tips

Schokora: Pick your partners carefully. Engage in a test, in a POC, or a test plan. Ensure that your technicians are allowed to see, hear, touch and feel every bit of the technology in advance.

Do yourself a favor and evaluate at least three different solutions or vendors, just so that you can see what else is out there.

Also, have a good relationship with your business and the business representation. Understand the requirements, how they want to accomplish things, and how you can enable them – because, at the end of the day, we can come up with the best technical solutions and the most secure. But if we don’t have that business buy-in, IT will only fail.

Gardner: I’m afraid we will have to leave it there. You’ve been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect discussion on how Great Expression Dental Centers combined hyperconverged data centers with advanced security products to solve their security and data-availability needs.

And we’ve learned how balancing compliance and availability requirements with new modern IT infrastructure can provide for greater automation, IT staff productivity, and allow for broad improvements in a very short amount of time.

Please join me in thanking our guest, Kevin Schokora, Director of IT Operations at Great Expressions Dental Centers in Southfield, Michigan. Thank you so much, Kevin.

Schokora: Thank you.

Gardner: I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing series of BriefingsDirect discussions.

Do follow me please on Twitter @Dana_Gardner and find more security focused podcasts at briefingsdirect.com. A big thank you also to our sponsor, Bitdefender, for supporting these presentations. A big thank you as well to our audience for joining. Please pass this on to your IT community, and do come back next time.

 

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Bitdefender. 

Transcript of a discussion on how a rapidly growing dental services company combined hyperconverged infrastructure with advanced security products to efficiently gain data availability, privacy, and security. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2018. All rights reserved.

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