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CIO Jason Thomas of CSK Law Firm explains how they painlessly upgrade their storage.
Clip Duration 00:35 / September 17, 2019
Jason Thomas, Cole, Scott & Kissane | Pure Accelerate 2019
Video Duration: 15:35
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(relaxing techno music) Voiceover: From Austin, TX, it's theCUBE covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2019 brought to you by Pure Storage. Howdy you all! How did I do Dave? That was great! (laughs) Lisa Martin with Dave Alante, and can you guess we're in Texas? We are at Pure Accerleate 2019, day one of our coverage here in the buzzy expo hall pleased to welcome one of Pure's customers to theCUBE. We have Jason Thomas, the CIO of Cole, Scott, Kissane or CSK Legal. Jason, welcome to the program. Thank you, glad to be here. So, talk to us a little bit about CSK Legal. You're based out of Florida, you're CIO. Give us a little bit of a picture of the law firm, your IT environment, and your role as leader of information. So, Cole, Scott, Kissane been around 20 plus years. I joined about 3 and a half years ago. And we have now, at this point, have 13 offices. We just opened our thirteenth office. We're the largest law firm in Florida, currently. Only in Florida. Interestingly enough, I actually live and work out of Boston, but, you know, these days, there's no reason why you can't work remote. I go there often enough when needed. Lisa: You can avoid the hurricanes though by living out on the Eastern Seaboard. [Jason Absolutely yeah, I'll take a snowstorm over a hurricane any day. Cause I've been through 2 of them. Good pro sports in Boston. Better college sports in Florida. Yeah, pretty much. No one cares about college sports in Boston. Lisa: Best of both worlds. All right, so, we're here at Pure. You guys have been a Pure customer for awhile, but give us this picture of the legal landscape from a data volume perspective. I can imagine tons of documentation. I think you guys have hundreds of attorneys. What was some of the challenges 3 years ago when you were looking for the ideal, long storage service that you were really looking for companies like Pure to help eliminate and allow you really deliver on the business needs? So, we're a heavy volume business, Tons and tons of documents, and when I came on board 3 and a half years ago, the environment was basically a lot of physical servers, a lot of local storage which, quite frankly, scared me. I came from my previous company I was at, I came from a NetApp shop, and that was one of my first initiatives was bringing in a SAN into the firm and centralizing all the storage and also setting up DR as well along with that. So, we started an evaluation process pretty much within a few months of coming onboard to the firm. Lisa: So you knew NetApp. Sorry Dave. You knew NetApp. You're a Pure customer. Give us that perspective of what was some of those things that you were looking for when you found Pure was like checks on the boxes. I can tell you what I wasn't looking for was: I wasn't looking to hire a storage admin, so I wanted to find something super simple. Something that I could manage or, you know, any of the guys could manage, any of the sysadmins could manage. So, that was like the starting point of the evaluation. Dave: So you had a bunch discreet DAS, direct access storage, and you said that concerned you, presumably because it was hard to manage, hard to get a handle on, so you wanted to consolidate. If we had our sequel box go down for a day, do you restore from backups from the previous night? Not really a good setup at the time. And are most of your attorneys centrally located in one location or are they distributed? They are spread out all across, up and down, Florida, so we have 13 offices so they're all over the place. But a lot of them work remote now too, so that's becoming a big thing as well. The reason I ask is that the pendulum is swinging, right? You had all those DAS and then you went to a SAN, and now you've got Edge, you got Cloud. I don't know if you're taking advantage of Cloud, are you? We are, actually, a lot of our software now that we, we've slowly started to move a lot of our mainline products to the cloud, or cloud edition of these products. So I would say, we're probably 50-60% cloud now. Dave: Yeah, so you were tied up in the keynotes this morning, but so, one of the things we heard in the keynote is you can have the Pure management experience no matter where your data lives. Bring the "Pure cloud" experience to your data on Pram and the public cloud hybrid. Is that something that's appealing to you? It that resonate? Absolutely, it makes, look, I can actually login into Pure on my phone if I want to and check. Not that I ever do, but I'll say I never really need to look at it. (laugh) Well, you're CIO right, I mean, you've got other things to worry about. I still like to be involved, get my little fingers in it. That's interesting, you know, a lot of times, CIOs, they don't, they let their But your technical, you're a technical CIO. We have a lot of technical CIOs as well. But, also, you don't want to hire a storage admin, so you want generalists to be able to do this stuff. Okay, so, your question, why Pure? Who did you look at? So, we looked at HPE 3PAR, big name, we looked at Pure, we looked at Tintri, and I pretty much, especially with 3PAR, I knew what that would be management heavy, so I tossed that one out, pretty quickly, not that it's not a great product, but it just wasn't for me, or what I was looking for. Dave: Not the right fit? Yeah, not the right for us, so it came down to Pure and Tintri, I had a buddy who worked at another law firm, and he's like "Look, just don't even waste your time, just go Pure." And it's a phrase that I use somethimes. I stole it from him, but he's like "Dude, this is like 'storage crack.' You'll love it." (laughs) Lisa: Storage crack, wow! They need to put T-shirts with that on it. First hit's free. (laughter) Okay, so that was the right fit for you. It was your peer that enticed you. I presume you take a lot of peer advice. A lot of peer advice. We didn't even do a POC. Dave: Really? >> Wow! Lisa: This is a good peer that you obviously trust. All I had to see was the interface. Yeah, he showed me the interface on a phone call one time, and he was like "this is it" and I'm like "That's it?" And he's like "yep." What did you actually bring in? What are you using? Jason: I'm sorry? What products are you actually using? For? Dave: With Pure? Oh, I'm sorry, Exchange Sequel that's our mainline bookeeping, time and billing, all that, that's the main application. So all the legal apps and the data is stored with which product from Pure? Do you know off-hand? Is it the All-Flash Array, right? Yes, I'm sorry, yes, it's the AFA. Dave: Okay, and so thinking about the before and after kind of the as-is and the to-be, how would you compare and contrast? To? Dave: When you brought it in? The pre and the post? Lisa: Your environment? Hear about your business? That's a good question. I felt more comfortable sleeping at night, you know. Dave: Why? Just the reliability, ease of management, you know if we need bring up a volume or expand a volume we can do it very quickly. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to do it, and from everyone I spoke to, I can't speak to it, but I don't believe I've ever talked to anybody that's had an outage or whether your array's gone down. In fact, it seems that they tell me before we even know if there's, you know, an issue, and they jump on it right away. So, we've never had an outage, never had an issue, never had an issue with an upgrade. It's been fantastic. It's worked awesome. No need for a rocket scientist or a storage admin? Right. Lisa: And you're sleeping better. We've established some very good things so far this interview. So in terms of traditional storage model that you're well familiar with, as you said, being very familiar with NetApp at a previous role. The whole every 3 years, the life cycle, we've got to switch things out. Disrupting operations. Pure comes along with the Evergreen model, and we go "how much is that marketing and how much of that actually happens?" And I know you're a big proponent. Jason: Yeah, I was like "Oh, I'm prepaying for support?" But once I understood what it really was and the advantages of it, it made sense, and we didn't, I didn't, think we would upgrade as much as we have already. We've already gone through 2 storage upgrades and 2 controller upgrades, so that's really where it really makes sense is when you're doing storage controller upgrades. So, if you want to start small, which we did start a little bit small, in the beginning, and then our business grew, like crazy, and our storage needs expanded, so, you know, we went through at least 2 upgrades. In 3 years. So, you bring an array, you're paying basically perpetualized upfront, boom, and then you're doing the Evergreen model, and then now you're on a subscription in perpetuity. Is that correct? Yep. Dave: Okay, so you effectively go from cap X to op X over the life cycle, and then what? When you add capacity, you're paying for that capacity and then it just transitions? So, you return the equipment, you get your money back, and you get new equipment. Is this truly non-disruptive? We've run through two upgrades, and two control upgrades which are major upgrades, and both of them we did at 5 PM, not at the firm close of 5 or anything, just to feel comfortable, I don't know, you do it at 5 and it's okay, cause if anything goes down from 5 to wherever, no one's working, right, so? But, here always, the attorneys are always on, and, no, they're really smooth, no problems, They have a great strategy and method to the upgrades, and we stayed up the entire time. It's a big issue for practitioners. We've done some quantification over the years, and it was like the minimum to migrate an array was $50,000 when you added it all in: people's time, the cost of the array, the complexity. And you're saying, first of all, sound reasonable? Yeah. And that's probably conservative. And has that, essentially, been eliminated? It gives you some planning, I guess, you know. Pretty much, and as far as the planning goes, these guys take care of all of it, so when we're ready to make the switch they just login and do their thing and then it's done. And in terms of training for yourself or your team, when you've done these two upgrades, what's that process been like? Login and figure it out. So it sounds pretty simply! Yeah, there's not much to it. So, what's on the CIO's mind, these days? I mean, you obviously don't stay awake at night now thinking about storage. Now I stay awake for security reasons. Talk about that. We've had a breach of security seems like every week now. I'm on my Twitter feed and there's a new breach, and it's almost got to the point where it's just another thing that happens. So what is your big challenge there? Is it managing all these tools? Is it knowing what to respond to? Is it the skillsets, all of the above? My biggest thing is, I believe in lots of redundancy. So, starting with the Pure, we have a second array in another data center outside the state, so we replicate the two arrays between each other. That's what we started on that side. We also running the regular backups. We run a rubric for that, We just established a cloud strategy for our backups, immutable, long retention so we also send our backups up to the cloud as well Now I'm feeling like I can sleep probably can sleep now. Just got to wait for somebody, for something to happen. And make sure, hopefully, our strategy is pretty solid here. Okay, DR and backup are a part of that overall data protection and security strategy, and then it extends into obviously into whether it's perimeter, device, et cetera, et cetera. Do you have a secops team? We don't have a dedicated team. Dave: Are you the cso? No, no cso. Dave: You're the cso. Yeah, I'm the exactly. (light laughter) Share roles with the small group of us that are also the security team, and we've got a pretty solid security stack. Always room for improvement, always looking at the new stuff out there. I mean, there's all kinds of cool tech out there. Sometimes, I get a little overboard, and the team gets a little upset at me, you know. I want to do another POC, and they're like, "We have three running." (laughter) Sounds like to me you guys have a pretty solid foundation running on Pure. You sound to me kind of like a Pure customer for life, so they should a at least give you a T-shirt. They've given me at least a T-shirt. I'll tell you, what really sold me, in the first year, was we had a VM that wouldn't boot-up, and we couldn't figure out what was going on. So we thought, initially, that it was a VM ware issue, so we called support and they couldn't really figure it out. They said it was a Pure issue. So, we decided to call Pure one night, I think it was 8 or 9 o'clock at night, and decided to give it a shot, and the guy got on the phone and come to find out there was some issue with the data storage VM where it crossed two data stores and one was deleted. Apparently, maybe me, had deleted a small data store, that had nothing on it, but it was apparently linked to the data store of this VM for some unknown reason. Lo and behold, VM ware issue. But the guy on the line actually knew of a resource within Pure that was a big VM ware guy and he came in and actually logged in and helped us unlink the 2 data stores, so totally not a Pure issue, but he went the extra mile to help us recover that VM and got a backup that same night. Lisa: Excellent! Dave: I know we got to go but I got to ask you a question. You have a lot of vendors, you've got a bit of experience. What do vendors do that really tick you off that they should stop doing? Now's your chance. I don't like the term "roadmap." Anytime I hear roadmap, it means you know Lisa: We don't have it yet? (laughter) But we're going to. So don't do business with people who have No roadmap talk. (laughter) All right, good. Awesome, well Jason, thank you so much for sharing your candor with Dave and me on theCUBE. We appreciate it. Congratulations on all your success. Thank you. Dave: Great to have you. For Dave Alante, I'm Lisa Martin You're watching theCube at Pure Accelerate '19. Thanks for watching. (funky electronic music)