Speaker 0 | 00:08.381

All right, well, welcome to another Dissecting Popular IT Nerds, where we’re allowed to geek out with fellow nerds and there’s no loss of conscious thought as people’s eyes glaze over. Today, I’m proud to introduce Drew Harris, who helped one of the casinos on the Strip become the first one to go fully hyper-converged, and during his next opportunity went 100% cloud. So Drew, tell us a little about yourself and let’s talk about that journey, hyperconvergent, and what it means to be 100% cloud.

Speaker 1 | 00:37.862

I appreciate you having me on. This is a great opportunity, and I’m really looking forward to having an opening discussion about this. Just a little bit about myself. I’ve been in information technology almost 30 years now. I’ve done various verticals, almost 10 years sled with the state of Florida. You know, I’ve been in banking and finance with a lot of virtualization, casino hospitality for five years in a public company before coming over as an executive advisor with the current company I’m with. So, yeah, I’ve done a lot of technology and infrastructure. And like I like to tell my engineers, I don’t have them do anything I haven’t done myself. So I’m an engineer by trade. And so. Having the opportunity when I did to come on to the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas and help them with their journey to go from that traditional server, SAN, EMC, Dell architecture stack and move into a hyperconverged infrastructure was a great opportunity and a great learning experience.

Speaker 0 | 01:45.627

Yeah. I mean, I remember the first few times that I started looking at hyperconvergence. It was mainly because there was some kind of an issue and you always had to look at one of the three areas of it. It was either the host, it was either the network fabric, or it was the SAN, or a combination of all three in the configuration. So hyperconvergence helped bring all of that together into a single unit and hopefully made life easier. We actually decided to jump towards the cloud before we ever went hyperconverged. So tell me a little about trying to take a casino from that level of infrastructure down to a hyperconverged infrastructure.

Speaker 1 | 02:25.524

I wish I could say it was easy, but it was not. Oh, God. Yeah, because you had to keep everything running,

Speaker 0 | 02:31.105

right? This is one of those truly switching out the engines while the plane’s in flight.

Speaker 1 | 02:36.207

Yeah, yeah. It’s exactly that. I mean, casinos are open 24-7 to be 65. You know, our president, CEO of the Catholic Hall of Fame at the time told us, I think, that the casinos had only ever closed three times. 9-11 for like eight hours. And then… also during COVID. Taking the movement systems in a 24 by 7 environment and moving them into something that’s hyper-converged at the time was net new. It was new technology that was a challenge, but it was fun. It was a great challenge. We learned a lot. Analyzing what our current capabilities were when I walked in the door, it would take 12 to 24 hours to provision storage between two data centers. Right. And then, you know, it took anywhere from eight to 12 hours to set up a VM just to get the OS on it, then fully patch it and all these things. And then work out all the routing, switching and firewalls because there was it was overly complicated and needed to be simplified. So there was a lot of work that had to be done for every application. You know, so we had to catalog every application. We had to. understand who the stakeholders were for every application, build in maintenance windows for those applications, right? And then go back and do a fair amount of analysis, understanding CPU needs, IOPS, networking needs, things like that. A lot of it was talking to the manufacturers of the applications, right? The vendors of the applications. And sometimes they…

Speaker 0 | 04:20.428

they still develop their applications to run on bare metal right uh one for one server for instance um oh yeah they always want that because they want to make sure that they they have complete control over that environment or that there’s no unknowns that they’re not expecting in the middle of it exactly

Speaker 1 | 04:40.184

so you know it was one of those things where it’s like all right well you know here’s the in-depth analysis of your application from the app stack all the way down to the db and what’s running on the network here’s that analysis, here’s where it fits in a virtual environment with a little bit of growth and then going through a process of putting together a plan. seamlessly moving those applications over one at a time um and using various tools that were out there and available to us uh we we were unique in using zerto for instance um a lot of people use zerto for uh dr bcb or sorry i don’t want to do the acronyms but disaster recovery and business continuity planning um

Speaker 0 | 05:21.159

to replicate one of the shows where it’s perfectly okay to use all of that and if i don’t understand it i’ll ask i know dr and bc man

Speaker 2 | 05:29.923

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Speaker 0 | 07:49.543

So how complex was that environment? How many applications did you end up cataloging? And how much was cataloged prior to you trying to bring this on? Because that’s always been one of the challenges for me, was trying to free up the resources to go through that list.

Speaker 1 | 08:07.574

Yeah. I remember… If I can recall, I want to say we had over a thousand servers, which made two data centers and then an all site DR data center. And we had over, I think the number was over five or 600 applications.

Speaker 0 | 08:23.507

So the, the, the two centers, the two data centers exact duplicates of each other or a primary and a secondary. And, and did you have everything in the primary and the majority of it in the secondary or was it? Talk to me a little about that because I always found myself, I had 50% over here, 50% over there, and then trying to get across the wires and making sure everything could switch to one. Oh, man, it was a cluster.

Speaker 1 | 08:51.074

Yeah, I cut my teeth in IT in Florida. So I like to say in Florida, we do DR first before we do production. And so… Makes sense.

Speaker 0 | 09:00.980

I mean, in that culture, that makes sense. All the hurricanes and everything else, but…

Speaker 1 | 09:06.502

i mean exactly i i worked hurricanes i worked uh the oh four and oh five hurricane seasons under governor jeff bush and so i i i’ve i knew disaster recovery and how important it is and how to have how sites are down and how quickly it is to get them back up and i’m not southwest where we got wind not hurricanes not tornadoes wind yeah well and and that was the thing there was no there was no process no cataloging process done to identify those things and operationalize it right so um you know one of the very first things i did was you know catalog catalog we cataloged all the applications me and my team um went through to figure out who owned those on the i.t side but who was also the owner on the business side right yeah

Speaker 0 | 09:55.845

because you always got to have them because they’re the they’re going to be the ones that are complaining when you bring it down

Speaker 1 | 10:00.539

Exactly. And with that, I enhanced it and added additional components to it. Like, again, DRBCP tiers, right? Is this a tier zero application that can never go down? Or is it a tier four or tier five where we can shut it down and nobody screams, right? Right. And then also looking at maintenance windows, right? If it’s not a tier zero. I got to be able to have a maintenance window somewhere where I can take this application down and, you know, do preventative maintenance on it, patching, security updates, things like that. So that was the process we went through, sitting down, understanding, is this a critical application? If it’s critical, why is it so critical? Right. And we did that for every application. What that lent itself to do was we found a lot of applications where they’re like, I don’t even know why we have this. How do we know it’s using it?

Speaker 0 | 10:56.430

Turn it off.

Speaker 1 | 10:57.223

you know, you know,

Speaker 0 | 10:59.884

and that’s, that’s about the time that somebody starts screaming because they use it. They’re just not in that, that communication loop that you were talking with.

Speaker 1 | 11:07.229

So then you have to have a, you have to have a really good, you know, our, our CIO at the time had introduced a really good change management methodology. So, you know, one of the things I did was I bolted on a decon process onto that change management process, right? So my engineers would go through a decon process of first, we take a backup. then we shut it down we wait 30 days to see who screams nobody screams we take a cold storage back up then we delete the bm right um and and and so we introduced that per application so we had a repository where each one was tagged it in our systems things like that so um going through that process and it did not take years uh we were able to do the overall migration um of all the non-gaming environment i think it It took roughly, I want to say about nine to 10 months.

Speaker 0 | 12:00.998

Yeah, I was going to ask how long it took to catalog 500 applications. So nine to 10 months. How many people full time?

Speaker 1 | 12:09.725

Let’s see. I spearheaded the effort I had at the time. I think I had four engineers. We had some what we termed application managers that we were able to work with as well. I think there was roughly six or seven of them. Everybody still had their day-to-day jobs. of keeping the lights on. But this was an important project as far as helping us make the environment more efficient and get onto more stable hardware. That’s really what I believe, having stable and secure environments are my first priority.

Speaker 0 | 12:44.507

Was that one of the primary drivers? Was that instability? You had a little bit of the gremlins in the network?

Speaker 1 | 12:52.830

There were… there were three. We had gremlins in the network. So there was some instability and performance issues. You know, there was the aging of the hardware, right? When you’re in that traditional server, sand network, fabric stack, you’ve got, you know, capital costs start to wear their heads, right? You’ve got renewals like every three to five years. And,

Speaker 0 | 13:15.197

and of course, none of the three tiers are, are three pieces of the fabric. are aging out at the same time. Exactly. Which even if they were, that would be even more of a problem because now you’ve got even more of a capital expenditure.

Speaker 1 | 13:30.966

Yep. Yeah. And then it just came down to efficiencies, right? I mean, we can’t react to the business fast enough if we’re taking, you know, two weeks to stand up one server to load one application on it. That’s just not feasible. But business needs to run faster. You know, at the end of the day, we need to deliver IT services.

Speaker 0 | 13:51.215

at the speed of the business so the business can operate and you know they can you know generate revenue and you know help our customers and our guests and things like that so that those were the three factors behind yeah and i’m laughing to myself because i’m thinking back to that day or those days when we would spec the server and everything else and and then we’d order it from the manufacturer and and you’re talking about oh two weeks to get it up and running and have it ready and and operational uh being too long and and back then it was like a month between the time we started specs and and placed the order let alone receive the hardware and started installing stuff um yeah but then yeah in today’s world yeah we can spin something up like that you i was talking to somebody else and and they were setting up that automation in the uh in the cloud so that they could spin up spin up and spin down servers in a matter of minutes yeah

Speaker 1 | 14:48.991

Well, the concern we had with being able to move that much faster ended up being server sprawl. Right now, now the business realize. realizes that you can run really fast, right? So now it’s like, oh, I bought this thing, this new shiny thing, and I want you to install it right now. And it’s like, all right. So we’re not going to go back to where we were, where we have all these applications all over the place and all these virtual servers, and you don’t know what’s what, right? And so doing all that work, it’s like, all right, you know what? From here on out, we have an application onboarding process. And this process before a server is even built, there are key members in the room talking through specifications.

Speaker 0 | 15:30.049

licensing costs and when is this going into production that’s you know i’m sitting here putting my head in my uh or shaking my head you know smh um and thinking it’s got to be nice to have or to be at an organization that thinks that way that acts that way because i was still in that kind of that mom and pop yeah they were are approaching a billion dollars in revenue but it was more of the mom and pop and you know the It was, hey, we just bought this thing. Make it happen now. And quit talking to me about all that geek crap. You know, just make it happen. I want to see this thing. I want the blinky lights to start blinking. Let’s go.

Speaker 1 | 16:12.512

Well, and that’s one of the things that, you know, as a IT executive, you need to explain to the business the benefits of doing the homework up front. Right? Like, why are we doing all this work up front? Yeah. The reason we’re doing that is so you have a stable and secure platform moving forward and the system is available when you need it, right? If I just shove it in, then you don’t get minor things like, we don’t know if we’ve got the performance right, or you’re screaming when I bring it down because I need to patch it so we don’t get hacked, right? So to do the work upfront and to walk the business on why we do it, then they can understand that later on. It’s like, all right, you know what? This is the expectation of the software I have. and I’m not expecting it to be able to do any more than this, unless I engage with the IT team and really be partners in that effort, not to be somebody that’s a roadblock for.

Speaker 0 | 17:06.126

How much, how much when did you have to deal with? I’m kind of assuming that a majority of the stuff at the casino was all contained into a LAN versus, you know, a major WAN environment, but that’s an assumption.

Speaker 1 | 17:22.356

So, yeah, it’s, it’s It was a little different. I mean, all of our networking components were on the property, right? So we had roughly, I think at the time, I was at almost 3,500 rooms. Excuse me. And so we had two data centers and a massive MDF and a lot of IDFs. I think last count I remember is like 160, 170 IDFs. So we had a massive amount of networking. Robert Leonard Yeah. Well, the data center, primary data center didn’t hold 100% of everything. It was more like a, it was the primary and our secondary data center was really that. It was a backup, critical things we can bring up just in time. The WAN component was interesting because, you know, the core itself was only in one location, right? And so we didn’t replicate that core one for one with all the fiber connections and everything. We had some of the same hardware, but. a lot of the physical fiber that was running the property was not redundant to both sides right we did have uh we did have some cross connects in there for bandwidth across the board between the two data centers i think we were running in uh i want to say we were running about 200 gig throughput between the two data centers okay um and you know some you know some of the things that we took the opportunity to do like we did a room refresh um And in conjunction with the business, we were able to refresh the technology. Right. So we literally ran 10 gig fiber to every room. Wow.

Speaker 0 | 19:02.015

To every room in the facility so that every unit.

Speaker 1 | 19:06.097

Yeah. Had 10 gigs run into every room. Right. With one gig stepped off of each port. Right. And because we had done that application onboarding component. Right. My network team at the time. did the due diligence of making sure that every switch that went into every room all 3000 plus everything that was plugged in the same port was identical across every room so the ap was in the six port in one room it was in a six port across all three thousand rooms okay you know if we needed to bounce the phones that were the void poe and running off the switch they were on the same port we could reboot all the phones with the switch which i automated

Speaker 0 | 19:49.777

Command and it’s down to four or five boom on all of these and yeah

Speaker 1 | 19:55.358

It’s kind of like resetting your Cox modem at home or Comcast or whatever it is, right? They always tell you to reset your modem first when you have outage. A lot of times your VoIP phones are acting up. That’s usually the same thing, right? So we would take a maintenance window with the business. We’d let the business know, hey, at 2 a.m. this time, we’re going to reboot all the phones and they’ll be down for 30 minutes. And we’d hit the button and our service desk would verify everything happened. The network engineer that was running it would, yep, everything’s back online and that was it.

Speaker 0 | 20:24.197

Wow. Okay, cool. And that’s some discipline too, though, because then you get so many, a 3,000 room refresh, you probably had some subcontractors that were in the middle of that, that you had to deal with, and you had to hold them to the fire and have to go double check everything just to make sure. But let’s get back to the data centers and hopefully you never really had to, but it sounds like there were some potential challenges. in that BCDR with not having every, not having a like for like on the data centers.

Speaker 1 | 21:00.723

Yeah, that’s correct. We had a couple of times where we had to fail over from our primary to our secondary, whether it was network challenges or, you know, at times we weren’t perfect. I mean, we’d have hard worry that would fail like a firewall or something like that. And we’d need to fail over to the data center. The great thing about it, but yeah, at that point you know we kind of understood what our mission critical applications were and we had advised those and replicated those appropriately in the hybrid converge infrastructure right so uh we were running new tennis at the time and so we were replicating via new tenants between the two data centers right um but since we had tagged everything and we knew what applications needed to be online 24 7 365 right um we could just move just those and bring those up in the secondary data center if we had to right so in a bit that like like i said we would have a firewall outage or something like that um or we’d have a the internet connection coming into one data center was down we could flip over to the other and bring communications online and bring on you know the casino applications you know all the mission critical business apps that needed to be functioning at that time okay

Speaker 0 | 22:17.414

so what level did you take the um bc2 When you talked about like your tier zero through the tier four, was it all zero, one, two, or was it zero, one, two, three, and all the way through four that you had stuff ready for? Because you said you had like the secondary was a little bit smaller or couldn’t take absolutely everything. So did you separate it that way or did you just separate it with, you know, these are the ones that they considered?

Speaker 1 | 22:50.406

the most critical so you had some zeros that would still go down did you have to go through that we went through the the process of doing away with things like traditional file servers and things like that so a lot of times your biggest your biggest issue with replication between data centers is data storage size right okay backups you got database video oh my god you guys you’re we’re talking a casino so we’re talking thousands of cameras yeah yeah camera separate system but yeah cameras on that component um you know file servers understand you know nobody wants to throw away anything so we probably had every email from the beginning of time for the cause of all those orders yeah since they were talking about building the place um which we did um and so all you have all that data so one of the things we did to be able to reduce that footprint was one we were running Commvault at the time. We were one of the first organizations to shift our Commvault cold storage backups to Azure, right? So as opposed to running it on-prem in a data center and backing it up to a SAN or another set of servers or something like that, I’m like, no, we’re not doing that. We backed it all up to Azure, right? All of our cold storage backups, anything after, I think it was after 30 or 90 days, one of those, went to Azure, right? So when I left, I think we were close to 2.8 petabytes in Azure.

Speaker 0 | 24:23.656

You need one petabyte, son.

Speaker 1 | 24:26.518

All of it went there. But that helped because it helped reduce the footprint. Also, a lot of us working alongside and at the direction of the CIO at the time, things like file servers. Well, we moved things to box. So it was in cloud storage. Using the footprint of some of the data stuff. So I don’t have these massive you know six terabyte file servers that i have to send up shares for and things like that we we did a process of working with the business and getting them over to bots and moving things over right so once we started to do things like that it started to reduce the footprint of what we needed for the vm storage right and so from that standpoint it got to the point where we could literally replicate all the storage because we had it identical on both sides for the on the bridge infrastructure the storage footprint was identical so we could replicate the storage my constraint was and it’s like this for everybody everybody understand you can’t turn everything on at once right you don’t have unlimited you don’t have unlimited cpus and ram or you may have a limited network connection or whatever it is um and and we would have some of that right so you’re you’re having the issue of possible boom storms and things like that and so what we would do is anything tier zero has to be able to come up automatically. So we look at how much resources we have as far as compute. We know tier zero applications take X amount. Boom. So that gets carved out automatically. All right. We got tier one, which it is depending on the time of the outage, right? And depending on the stakeholders or the primary users of the application, we could figure out if a tier one or tier two application was going to actually be restored. on the other side right away right so if we’re thinking point of sale we’re 24 7 365 we’re always selling something right that’s automatic right it’s moving um but there may be something that’s a back at house like third-party application that’s not necessarily needed until you know any plot the following morning and i’m at a 10 p.m outage right now right well i don’t need to worry about that system coming online right away Yeah. So it’s really a methodology process, right? But you have to understand how your applications work and who those primary users are. If you don’t understand it, you’re doing a firestorm. You’re just like, all right, well, we’re going to move all this stuff over, right? And that’s not going to work, right? I know from experience, I’ve done that in the past, previous engagements, like in Florida during hurricane season, it’s like move everything. We don’t have enough compute to move everything. So somebody’s got to pick some stuff.

Speaker 0 | 27:10.690

Yeah, and we can’t just grab it out of the rack, put it in the truck, and drive to the other data center. There’s a batch going on.

Speaker 1 | 27:18.114

Exactly. So, you know, we can’t just pick it up, move it, turn it all on because that’s not the case, right? And there’s a lot of money and time invested in that to be able to do that. Yeah. And understanding your applications goes a long way to be able to have a more mature process.

Speaker 0 | 27:33.422

Yeah, and having that duplicate data center or that duplicate physical footprint. It’s huge. Not to mention the logical footprint, too, of the networking and everything else and being able to switch logical networks. Because that’s something that always throws applications for a loop, too. If your whole infrastructure isn’t built for that virtual flip, then you’re suddenly working on new network fabric with completely different addressing. And applications sometimes don’t handle that very well. That’s why they want to be on their own box.

Speaker 1 | 28:07.616

Yeah. Especially, you know, you have people… And, you know, you may have a loss of travel knowledge or, you know, somebody may have done something like, you know, hard code IP address into something.

Speaker 0 | 28:17.360

And it’s like,

Speaker 1 | 28:18.680

yeah, move these VMs over, starting up a new fabric. And, oh, you know what? It’s not working. Can’t communicate to any of it. Oh, it’s hard to reinstall the application. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 28:28.403

Or the application or the DHCP server is now on the switch, not on the infrastructure or on one of the servers. And, you know, man. Yeah. Little things, things,

Speaker 1 | 28:41.190

not that big of a deal. Yeah, there’s a lot of things to think through. I mean, load balancers, router configs, DHCP, DNS. There’s a lot of stuff to think through.

Speaker 0 | 28:49.895

Yeah, and all of this is just like basic stuff, not even really the world of the hyper-converged. And, you know, like you said, you were going from all of this into the hyper-converged where a lot of this is blended together into a single interface instead of three separate interfaces. where you had to have three different experts around because typically your SAN network or your SAN expert is not your network expert, is not your server expert. They may be two of the three, but not all three. Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 29:24.014

and none of those three understand the application. That’s the other thing that’s overlooked, right? It’s like, you’re turning the world, can you make it work? And they’re like, how does this application work? And they’re pointing fingers. Everybody’s pointing fingers at each other. It’s like a Spiderman meme. You got three different Spider-Men. All right. You understand application? You understand application?

Speaker 0 | 29:43.911

No, that’s the users. Who cares about them? You know, the Blinky Light to Blink It. We’re good.

Speaker 1 | 29:49.588

Yeah. And the application, it doesn’t matter how great you make the infrastructure and how fast the network is and how efficient you can deploy things. And at the end of the day, if the end users can’t consume the application, the application sucks. It’s not running good or it’s not a bit. It doesn’t matter how great your infrastructure is, how great the network is. The application is not available. It’s not available. They have a they have a negative view of. everything you just did.

Speaker 0 | 30:20.044

Yeah. So, all right, let’s move forward in this conversation. And so now you’ve moved on to your next opportunity and you’re not dealing with the hyper-converged locally. Now you’re working with somebody else’s infrastructure and you’re moving, you’re taking everything locally and putting it into the cloud. What was that process like to go 100% cloud? Because, you know, we always thought that we… that that was the ideal but we always were like well there’s got to be something that we got to leave on premise well of course you got the uh the networking fabric um or the networking layer because everything needs to be able to talk to each other but what other things what was the last thing that you moved up into the cloud um

Speaker 1 | 31:08.433

so i was working at a public company and so the last thing we moved into the cloud was their data environment which was in scope for socks audit right so they’re public company right so uh everything was through audited socks right at the fall um and i’m used to being audited being in banking i had auditors in every month whether it was private public in-house whichever and they just rotated so i was getting audited every month so um that was the last thing we moved i think the overall size we had fairly massive SQL environment that was roughly, I want to say about 12 terabytes. And we’re talking all data reporting. We’re talking billions of rows. We’re talking various applications that hit it, read that data. Senior executives and C-levels needed to be able to have their reporting applications hit the data in order to get accurate reports up to the hour, right? And a lot of times they needed to get those together and have those put together for Wall Street. And so that was the last component we moved. And that took a lot of analysis. I hear people say, move to the cloud. Let’s move to the cloud. We got to move to the cloud. And it’s like, great. But understand, it is not quick. If you want to do it right and don’t want to get bit later, it is not fast. And still a lot of work once you move. It took me that last component that I moved.

Speaker 0 | 32:42.328

um all in it took uh two years and nine months okay so what was now in in one sense we’re almost talking about the same kind of thing um going from you know the traditional infrastructure to hyper converge and going from the again that on-prem to cloud it’s almost the same kind of thing where you got to keep everything running all the time for everybody um but there’s some major different concerns. What are the things that really stuck out as the difference between the two?

Speaker 1 | 33:17.881

There’s a lot of different things to kind of pull in. So this particular data center that we were moving into the cloud was third-party hosted by Rackspace, right? And so it had been the company’s data center for almost 10 years, I think. And so you had a lot of tribal knowledge that was lost and a lot of ad hoc things that were… stood up in that environment, right? So really that process that I described with Cosmopolitan and having to understand every application and catalog it, I was lucky that a lot of the same individuals that were Cosmopolitan are at this public company and they had a similar process. So we were able to go through a similar process and recatalog and figure out these applications and who’s doing what with them and how do they work. The gotchas that I didn’t realize that were different were more users. specific scenarios or use cases, right? Like users having direct access into applications, like to a level I hadn’t seen before. You know, there were more always on VPN connections, a lot more users that were able to access directly into data and components, right, and do various things. And so really having to figure out alternate solutions.

Speaker 0 | 34:37.056

Reporting in analytics is typically one of the ways that most users are grabbing or being given permission to get directly into applications like that. They’re using it typically for that reporting analytics. Were you seeing for other uses or?

Speaker 1 | 34:51.572

um reporting analytics uh you know sharepoint right i mean let’s be honest in the sharepoint environment there are so much things that could be customized in there are things that even if you have admin rights in sharepoint you don’t see because you didn’t create those private workspaces or whatever they are within sharepoint right um and so and and a lot of data is based off of that right so they’re running a lot of traditional things or a lot of uh um you know efficient processes or business processes that were going through that. And so you had to understand to a certain level how you would impact moving those environments and what’s going to be the workaround to move those. There were some of these areas where, let’s say you have one project to move to the cloud. Well, when you have 80 servers that possibly represent about anywhere from 80 to 160 applications. So that’s one project. Well, that’s now a program. Your program is to move to the cloud because you’re going to have multiple projects to get it out, to peel off those systems. And you can’t just do it one for one. The way something looks in a data center and the way it moves to the cloud are two different things, right? Right. Our CEO at the time was, you know, he’s essentially our chief architect. But you’re having to work with your CTO, your enterprise applications group, your security folks, things like that, because you need to figure out. Can we move this one for one and replicate it in the cloud? Right. Or do we need to refactor this application in the cloud, move it from maybe it doesn’t need to be traditional SQL. Maybe it needs to be SQL pass. Right. Yeah. Engineers love pass because, hey, I don’t have to patch any servers. It’s one less thing I got to worry about. Right. Right. How does it applicate? Did we configure failover for passing environment? Is there failover? And what’s the cost, right? You have to do those details, right? When you’re running an infrastructure and somebody runs a SQL statement on a local data center, you have no idea what the costs are related to compute and RAM and things like that. But when they turn around and run that same SQL statement in the cloud, whether SQL pass or traditional SQL server, your costs can go through the roof.

Speaker 0 | 37:11.719

Well, wait. I mean, you can put a cap on it. You can say, okay, we’re only using this level of resources, just like you can with the stuff on-prem, but you can also open that up, which is one of the advantages of the cloud of saying, okay, let things spike. But that’s where that cost that you’re talking about comes in. That’s where, oh man, yeah. Select star from star. Yes.

Speaker 1 | 37:40.350

Select star across 2 billion rows. Yeah. You needed a more detailed and more mature SQL statement.

Speaker 0 | 37:48.681

I just wanted to see how many times or how much we sold of what over the last two years. What’s the big deal? Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 37:56.908

Until you get that bill, right? And then the next month, the bill for Microsoft or Amazon or whoever it is, and you’re like, why did my cost go up $50,000 in a month?

Speaker 0 | 38:05.996

Yeah. And then you’re having to get somebody to start go. looking through all of those logs, trying to figure that out to find that, that spike that caused.

Speaker 1 | 38:16.043

Yeah. And so, you know, going through the process, we would actually do things like do the analysis on what was running on a virtual machine in that data center. And what would be the estimated cost to put it in the cloud? Right. One for one, right. Looking at it. And we would do that estimate. And. And this is just high level process, but that was what my engineers would do is that they were required to give me an estimate before we could move it through change control. Right? Once we put it into the environment, they were required to look at it like every, you know, I think it was two weeks or after 30 days to kind of see if it’s using the same amount of resources as it was in the data center. If it wasn’t, we would scale it down further, right? To reduce its cost. Yeah. It’s cost control. So it’s the basis of FinOps. But before you can do FinOps, there’s a lot of things you got to understand. You can’t just jump in and do FinOps. It’s like, oh yeah, I see this running over here. Let me just turn it down. Well, if you don’t understand how that business unit is using that process, before you know it, you could be killing something that’s mission critical for a C-level, right? It may have been somebody in a different department, a manager or a director that’s doing it, but they may be doing a mission critical task for a C-level and you just turned down a… SQL Server or, you know, decommed a VM that wasn’t getting used except for once a month.

Speaker 0 | 39:37.534

Right. But that once a month was critical. It created knowledge that was needed. Yeah. Oh, man. And I had a most awesome question and now I can’t remember. I hate that. So the, oh, okay. You know, one of the other things, the initial argument for going to cloud from on-prem typically is that hardware refresh and that capital outlay. And if you stay in the cloud for more than one refresh cycle, that’s when you start to see some of that savings or it’s the easily justifiable ROI of cloud. Did you guys? run into any others did you see anything else that that anybody that’s trying to make this move that’s tired of their aged infrastructure and then trying to go to the cloud um what other things can you help point them at for them to look for for roi and justification to the cloud besides the fact that they don’t have to do the updates to the os and the hardware and the um all the driver management and well sometimes

Speaker 1 | 40:49.948

So with my last gig, it was, you know, it was, they had already set the standard that anything that new was built in Azure, right? And they had some stuff in AWS. And there were some things that we moved into Oracle Cloud as well. That was required for that particular application. But anything that new was moved into Azure already. And what I was dealing with was helping them deal with that legacy environment and getting it to the cloud. That being said, if everything’s in the cloud and you’re familiar with the cloud architecture, it’s a net benefit. So if you’ve got a team that thoroughly understands AWS or Azure, then it just makes sense to have everything in that component, to have everything in Azure or AWS. If you don’t have a team that has the knowledge about cloud, that’s your first step. Right. You need to ensure your team’s knowledgeable about it. You’re right. Do they have the training, the knowledge? You know, can can we do this with the in-house team we have?

Speaker 0 | 42:00.613

And that’s a moving target, too, because all of this stuff there. I mean, it’s changed radically in the last eight years. We started doing our journey in 2015 and and there were so many times like we’re in this data center and. it doesn’t have these capabilities. But if we’d moved over to this data center, it had those capabilities. We start migrating over there and then suddenly they instantiate those capabilities where we weren’t. But you know, that’s, that’s just some of it. So it’s definitely a moving target and constant training for these people, for them to stay up to date on capabilities, no matter which cloud center it is, you know, Google, AWS, Microsoft, IBM.

Speaker 1 | 42:40.881

I’ve been using, I’ve been using, uh, Azure since 2014, 2015. And, you know, I’ve used AWS, a little bit of Google Cloud, a little bit of Oracle. And I mean, I’m nowhere near an expert, but it changes so much, right? I mean, it’s one of those things, to your point, it’s a moving target. So it’s, do I have the staff to get up to speed? And can they get up to speed in the timeline to where we can still run our components? in this infrastructure as it stands today right um and then looking at that can i actually get these things moved over right i mean you know if you talk to anybody um and if they’re a uh a rep for any of those big cloud companies or you know maybe a reseller or something like that everybody will say yeah we can get you to the cloud yeah you can run anything yeah team horizon Yeah. Don’t worry about it. We get it up there. It’ll be more efficient. And then, you know, your CFO or somebody comes to you later and says, hey, you’re over budget by $2 million. It’s like, oh, I don’t know how that happened.

Speaker 0 | 43:57.609

Yeah, that goes over well. That’s a fun discussion. And then not to mention the other one, and I was going to ask about this. You also have, or I ran into vendors who were like, no, we’re not, we are not cloud compatible. You cannot put our stuff on the cloud. We won’t support you. um you could you’re fully welcome to virtualize it in your own environment but you can’t virtualize it in the cloud i’m like yeah it’s the same thing well just virtualize it okay thanks this is how you access it oh by the way you’re

Speaker 1 | 44:29.371

in azure the hyper v i forget what they call their vmdks or whatever it is their disk files but i mean it’s the same file whether it’s in on-prem data center run in hyper-v or it’s in azure it’s the same like bmdk type file so yeah i yeah that’s a lot of educating your your vendors i dealt with that just moving to hyper converge i mean i would deal with a lot of the the gaming companies or manufacturers and they’re like oh well you can’t you can’t put this in nutanix i’m like well i’m running new tannings with vmware on top of it and we’re already running your same vms and vmware so what’s the problem yeah what’s the difference you need business in this oh you need 34 or 32 cpus okay but you’re only using like four cpus and ten percent of those Yeah. Right. And so when you start to question the process, you find out sometimes that they don’t know enough about their applications.

Speaker 0 | 45:29.064

No, because we’re not talking. We’re normally not talking to the technical teams. We’re talking to the the non-technical teams.

Speaker 1 | 45:39.867

Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, you’re talking to you’re not talking to the people that, you know, get me somebody on the line that’s actually installed application in X environment. or get me somebody on a network that comes for the application. Let me ask them the question. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to do that. So that’s where I kind of like, you know, I love my current role as a field CTO because, you know, even when I have customers that they’ll reach out and say, hey, we’re looking at doing this or have you heard anything that does this? I’m like, let me understand your use case. What is it you’re trying to accomplish? But then I would go back to the conversation before and I’m like, look. We want to find out if you can actually do this first. Then we’ll listen to the sales pitch and some of the other stuff. But can you actually do X for this customer for me? Let me speak to a technical person. Put an engineer on the phone. Because if I start saying VLANs and compute, and your eyes gloss over, I’m not talking to the right person. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 46:37.128

Yeah, just like this conversation when we were talking about the BCDR. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 46:43.350

Yeah, yeah. I thought I could never out there and you have to come back and say, what’s that? And I’m like, all right, yeah, I’m not talking to the right person. Get me an engineer on the phone or get me somebody that can actually use this. And, you know, tell me they can technically do it.

Speaker 0 | 46:55.895

And you hit upon one of the most critical things in IT. Why? Or what’s the goal? You know, what are we trying to do? Just tell me the simple aspect of that, because then that way I can help make sure these things match up. If I don’t know what the goal is, yeah, I can make that happen. But why?

Speaker 1 | 47:20.340

And I, you know, sometimes, I mean, you’ll have, and I did this myself as an executive, right? I mean, you know, people would ask me why. And I’m like, sometimes I fight back. I’m like, you don’t need to understand the why. But, you know, the more I think through it, sometimes it’s just, it’s good to allow people to understand what. your thought process is or maybe your people process or just maybe some background on why you’re doing it um you’d be surprised how um i’ve kind of found that sometimes you can kind of sell them onto your way of thought um and they can go back and advocate even better for you like i’ve had conversations with you know people that VMware or some of the vendors that I’ve talked to that I’ve worked with in the past and my past roles. And I’d say, hey, I want to do this and this and this. Your platform’s never done this before. I’m getting ready to do this. I’m going to let you know if it works. But this is what I want in return for that happening, right? And they’re like, well, we can’t support you to do that. I’m like, well, if it works, will you guys support me? Yeah, let me write it through. But once they understand the use case that, hey, I need this to be 24-7, 365, because this is a single problem. Right. I can’t have this going down. Yeah, we understand. Let me go back to my engineers, things like that. Yeah, we previous CIO of mine said we should be driving vendors roadmaps. Right. And that’s really what it is. Yeah. I want to get to here. Can you get me there or not? And if you can’t just say you can’t work with me, you know, or, you know, help me get away. Maybe not. Maybe I can’t get all the way to C, but help me get halfway to B.

Speaker 0 | 49:02.574

Yeah. And at least be honest about it. You know, how long is it going to be until you can get to see? Because I’ve talked to too many frontline people who were just trying to make the sale. And, oh, yeah, we’ll get to see. We’re about to release that. And then you finally get in and you’re getting a little deeper. You’re talking to that engineer and they’re like, wait, say what? No, no.

Speaker 1 | 49:29.512

Yeah, I’ve had. Yeah, my previous roles, I had some conversations with some technology CEOs of certain manufacturers I won’t mention. They’re like, yeah, yeah, we got that on the roadmap. It’s coming out in Q2 or Q3. And they’re like, you know, they come knocking at Q2, Q3 and they’re like, hey, when are you going to send us a check and buy some of this or buy some of that? And I’m like, did you do the one thing I asked for? And they’re like, oh, yeah, we’re getting around to it. I’m like, well, I’m not cutting you, Cenk. You had one job.

Speaker 0 | 49:56.760

Yeah. I only wanted that.

Speaker 1 | 49:59.922

Yeah. I had one ask, and you said yes. You didn’t deliver.

Speaker 0 | 50:04.445

No. Well, we didn’t say which year. We just said Q2. Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 50:08.287

exactly.

Speaker 0 | 50:10.708

No. That’s so frustrating when they do that. So what was the hardest? learned lesson from moving everything to the cloud oh what’s what’s the thing that sticks what’s the thing that immediately comes to mind as one of the gotchas that you ran into from the cloud migration or was or was your experience with all of the other data center stuff did that make that easy couldn’t have been easy because you said two two years and nine months so yeah no i there was a couple different things but you

Speaker 1 | 50:47.906

the two things that stand out the most were um from a financial perspective right um thinking of moving to the cloud thinking about how much it was going to cost out the gate and keeping that as my metric like trying to meet a budget um that that kind of defined how we’re going to do things in a low-cost fashion which was great um the things i learned was if you’re thinking about it from that mindset if you set a budget right out the gate of I can only have this much cloud costs year over year. It may increase 1%, 2%, 10%, whatever your budget threshold is. As you start to dig into your applications, you’re going to find out that technically you could move an application one-to-one and replicate it or forklift it or whatever you want to do. But you’re going to exceed your budget. So how do I refactor this in application? So that was one of the first things we did. So that process. you know, forced me to get more involved in the coding, the SDLC process, some of the, some of the data and business analytics components, things like that, things that aren’t traditionally in my wheelhouse, but I can figure it out if I have to, right? And so that was one of the biggest things, right? Having to refactor the data heavy applications. Maybe you need to move them into something of a Kubernetes. right or you’re having to use data factories or things like that right so um that domain driven design that the organization uh i was with last you know that was kind of our that was our goal was to have that domain driven design um and it was one of our tenants and so making sure that what i was moving was fitting that design um and also working with the architects within the department to come up with ways to get that moved over and then track those costs to make sure i’m staying within the budget so budget first it helps that it then helps you figure out how you’re going to refactor applications to stay within a budget um the second thing is like you know like i said budget first and then refactoring data role parallel to that or right next to that is you know visibility of cloud after the fact you know things like monitoring logging right you may you may do things like monitoring and logging now how are you doing those in a traditional data center syslog you know i don’t know if ton of people are still using solar winds but we wanted it but yeah exactly uh no payment no comment uh but you know whatever your monitoring logging platform is for visibility right right make sure you’re gonna have that same visibility when you move to the cloud and i’m not just talking about you know things that go bump in the night like you know a server going down or a job failing or something like that but also from the standpoint of phoenix right um can you actually go through and singularly find an application and figure out how much it costs you the vm the data storage the backup the failover the networking the security groups can you do that per application yeah because especially if you

Speaker 0 | 54:10.206

start talking about paths like you were talking about platform as a service and you’re blending multiple applications onto a single infrastructure oh yeah so pieces of it and or even back to that yeah you know we were talking about that that um that query getting out of hand same kind of thing you know you you have this one machine and suddenly it spikes in cpu which application caused it exactly right and that gets back to the you

Speaker 1 | 54:39.690

like the application catalog component or process that i was kind of talking through that we did at cosmopolitan um similar at the previous job i was at and Again, it’s almost identical. But again, you know, one of the things that I had my engineers perform was any deployments that went into a cloud environment had to have application tag. Right. That tag was the application ID for the cattle. Right. So let’s say I’m deploying, I don’t know, some financial system, you know, at finance one. Right. Its application tag is one zero zero one or so. Any and all resources. whether it was infrastructure as code you know manual deployment powershell whatever it was any and all resources tied to application had that tag before they went into production right so they were doing these in lowers first to try to learn right so then i turn around and i could go into any of my cloud platforms and application tag all right here’s my cost by application right and and then have some semblance of all right am i staying in budget right or is this cost me more than i thought it was going to cost but if it did go up you know being able to trace that back to changes in the environment and like here’s why the cost went up you know when i originally scaled the project it was this but then you know maybe we did some new initiative or you know we we decided to do something for a security component or you know something in the business wanted to happen and we upped

Speaker 0 | 56:14.222

a resource or created more resources or whatever it was now i can see where that application cost increased then it’s like all right this is my budget but it increased here because of this yeah and and because then you can explain it and or you know the consumers and the people who help drive that increase of consumption they get to explain it you just get to say okay this application started doing this on this date what did you guys change in your processes because I made sure it was running. I made sure everything was working. But you guys, you know, and then it’s not just your, it’s the business’s concern, not just IT’s responsibility because it’s a blinky light.

Speaker 1 | 56:58.557

And what about that? Those are my two primary things learned and concerns, right? And what I had gotten to was a more proactive component of that, like being able to show almost real time or even before the changes made that. you know, this is going to impact this in this measure. Right. And maybe have somebody in the business side office say, Hey, I’m okay with this increased cost of X and add it to Drew’s budget.

Speaker 0 | 57:26.565

You know, we, we ran into things like that, but we ran into it especially. And we wish we’d started off with that tagging. We ultimately ended up tagging like you’re talking about, but it was because we had a multi-tenancy situation. So single cloud tenant. But we had multiple organizations leveraging that infrastructure and allocating the cost per those companies. So we had to put the tags on not only the application, but, okay, so here’s one application that three companies are using. And, you know, how much goes to company A, company B, and company C, because they’re all running the same ERP. So we got one instance of the ERP. Yeah, we could have used the simple things like, okay, we got five users here, 10 users there, and 20 users there. But they all wanted to know why the costs were what they were. And if you could use those tags, that helped greatly.

Speaker 2 | 58:23.867

Hey guys, this is Phil Howard, founder of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I just want to take a few minutes to address something. It has become fairly apparent, I’m sure all of you will agree, over the years that… slow vendor response, vendor response times, vendors in general, the average is mediocre. Support is mediocre. Mediocrity is the name of the game. Not only is this a risk to your network security, because I’ve seen vendors on numerous occasions share sensitive information, but there’s also a direct correlation to your budget and your company’s bottom line. Not to mention the sales reps that are trying to sell you. and your CEO and your CFO on a daily basis. That causes a whole nother realm of problems that we don’t have time to address. Our back office program at Dissecting Popular IT Nerds, we’ve put together specifically for IT leadership and it’s on a mission to eliminate this mediocrity. And the best part is that we’re doing this in a way that will not cost your IT department a dime. So if you’d like us to help you out, get better pricing, better support, and jump on pressing issues in minutes, not days, then contact us now so we can get on. a call with you and conduct a value discovery session where we find out what you have, why you have it, and where you want to go and how we can improve your life, your IT department, and your company’s bottom line. What you’re going to end up with is, number one, just faster support from partners who care about your organization’s uptime and bottom line. And because you’re going to be able to access our 1.2 billion in combined buying power, you’ll be able to benefit significantly from historical data. And on top of that, you’ll also benefit from the skills of hundreds of on-demand experts that we have working behind the scenes that are all attached to our back office support program. So if you’d like, again, none of this is ever going to cost you a dime. At the very least, it’s going to open your eyes to what’s possible. Let our back office team provide you the high-touch solutions and support that your IT team deserves so that you can stop calling. 1-800-GIL-POUND-STAND for support. Now, if you’re wondering, what does this apply to? This applies to your ISPs, your telecom providers, all your application providers, whether you’re a Microsoft shop or a Google shop, what you might be paying for AWS, even Azure, co-location space, any of those vendors that you’re paying a monthly bill to, we can help you with. Hey, it’s Greg, the Frenchman secretly managing the podcast behind the curtain. To request your one-on-one call, contact us at internet at popularit.net. And remember,

Speaker 1 | 61:17.241

it will never cost you a dime.

Speaker 0 | 61:19.903

Hidden GIFs. And let’s finish up with, did you find any hidden GIFs inside of either the hyper-converged or the cloud? What was something that surprised you and you said, ah,

Speaker 1 | 61:34.455

for the win! There wasn’t one singular huge one. I mean… I guess overall, I underestimated how great performance would be in both environments. Right. I knew there’d be a performance gain. Right. Even moving from traditional over to hybrid and verge and then going from a data center up into the cloud. I knew that there would be a marginal performance gain, but it’s like night and day, honestly. there’s a lot of work up front but the the net benefit of putting a resource up there is just it’s i mean it’s like it’s like dropping a ls corvette engine in a you know in a toyota or something it’s crazy right i mean it’s you get that performance that power and then you start thinking oh man like i should have put the ls in like a a gto or something but uh um but yeah no it’s it’s it Right out the gate is that. I mean, the net benefit of the performance out the gate is great. You know,

Speaker 0 | 62:45.324

this is also that goes right with that warning of the budget, because you got that performance, man, you hit that gas pedal. The gas tank is going to get empty.

Speaker 1 | 62:56.109

Exactly.

Speaker 0 | 62:56.889

It’s going to go away.

Speaker 1 | 62:58.770

Yeah. And so, you know, you have to make sure you don’t oversize things for sure. But the other side of it is the efficiency gains. you know um you know going into the hyper conversion environment i mean the engineers my engineers were deploying vms you know fully patch ready to go you know within you know 15 20 minutes right and it was just sitting there waiting for the application to be installed i mean it was and i mean fully load balanced redundant applicate our servers right yeah so i mean that was great and the same the cloud right i mean as i was leaving we were pushing every all the engineers to infrastructure as code right everything was getting deployed via code and the engineers weren’t even future state engineers weren’t going to deploy it you know the production team support team was going to deploy right so you know engineer writes out all the code to get everything going they put it in a pipeline it goes through a approval process and somebody clicks a button and the engineer’s like oh they’re looking over their shoulder like oh yeah it looks like it’s working okay my job’s done So those are those net benefits. Those are great. But, you know, being an executive and being responsible for, you know, the infrastructure, the stability of the platform, you know, you have a responsibility for security, too, because, you know, it all falls on the infrastructure team. Some operational component of it, right? So you have the best interest in security too. Plus I’m always the type that doesn’t like their name in a paper for any reason. So, you know, that being said, you know, the insights you gain into your environment and actually understanding it and being able to. you know, taught through some of these things is, you know, it’s, it’s next level. It, it helps, you know, especially for me being an engineer by trade, I can’t punch the keyboard as much as I like, right. The engineers, they don’t, they don’t, uh, your, your role doesn’t dictate you to have the rights to be able to deploy a server. I’m like, okay. But, uh, but

Speaker 0 | 65:07.648

I like hearing those jet engines take off.

Speaker 1 | 65:10.729

Yeah, exactly. Um, but at least being able to poke around an environment and understand what’s going on, right? The level of insight you get, I mean, at the end of the day, if you’re an executive or a director, even a manager in IT, you have a responsibility to know what your team’s done and what’s getting done, right? And if you know that, you’re on your way. And if you know that with the process behind it, you’re even better off.

Speaker 0 | 65:41.385

Yeah. Then you’re the type of employee we need.

Speaker 1 | 65:45.566

Yeah. Exactly.

Speaker 0 | 65:48.667

Not just one of the ones that we have to have. You’re one of the ones that brings value and that we need. Hey, Drew, you got anything personal out there that you’re doing that you want to support or upsell or tell the world about? I know I’m catching you flat-footed with that.

Speaker 1 | 66:04.812

I don’t want you.

Speaker 0 | 66:06.772

But, you know, lots of people are doing, they got some kind of a side hustle that they love doing. You know, even if you’re like a soccer coach or something.

Speaker 1 | 66:15.897

No, you know, I don’t have a lot of side hustles or I don’t have anything going on like that. You know, one of the things I like to do is just I like to share my knowledge around IT. I was an adjunct professor, part-time adjunct professor for a number of years teaching IT courses. And, you know, I’ve, you know, my oldest son is now an IT manager. So, you know, I… you know kind of walked him through the progression of how to get into information technology and things like that and he’s gone from a technician all the way up to i.t manager in a short time so i hope you feel a little bit of what i’m talking about but um one of the things i do right now is uh i do it works um i mean sponsored by like tech impact uh they’re originally out of like philadelphia area but they have a uh they have a chapter here and Las Vegas. And so it’s really about, you know, mentoring young individuals that maybe they’re not going to go to college out the gate, right? Maybe they’re in high school and they’re like, I really like this IT stuff, but I don’t want to go to college or I can’t afford to go to college or whatever it is. And they can go to IT works to get back and they can take a, I think it’s like an eight week course. And hopefully they train them up to come out of that with some certifications and they get internships. right so doing lunch and learns with that and uh mentoring um some of the kids um do that process is uh one of the things i like to do so that’s that’s fun it’s rewarding um you know it helps uh if if i can help other people um get through um some of the hoops of learning the trade then i’m all for it i didn’t have a lot of uh mentors coming up through i.t initially um But the few I did have, they made a huge impact. So I just, I try to share some of that knowledge.

Speaker 0 | 68:16.719

Right on. Well, thank you for that. That’s awesome. Because, you know, I think that’s part of why we’re doing the podcast is because we want to help share that knowledge, share that experience and help teach the next group so that they don’t have to struggle like we did when we were going through all of this stuff. Yeah. Truly appreciate your time today. Thank you for being on the show. And as we come to a close on another Dissecting Popular IT Nerds, I want to invite all of the listeners to comment, rate, podcast on iTunes or wherever you’re grabbing your copy. And please, just let us know what you think of the show. We really appreciate the time and the support of the program. So thanks for nerding out with us, geeks.

Speaker 1 | 68:57.876

Thanks, Mike.

Speaker 0 | 68:59.377

Thank you.