>> Narrator: Live from the Bill Graham Auditorium
in San Francisco.
It's the Cube.
Covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2018.
Brought to you by
Pure Storage.
>> Welcome back to Pure Storage Accelerate 2018.
I'm Lisa Martin with the Cube.
I'm with Dave Vellante.
We are here in San Francisco
at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium
which is why we're sporting some concert t-shirts.
>> Who.
>> The Who and the Clong.
>> Roger. Roger Delchi.
>> Roger.
We are here with the CIO of the
David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA,
Pure customer,
Ben Nathan.
Ben, welcome to the Cube.
Thanks for having me.
So, talk to us about
the shool of medicine at UCLA.
You are the CIO there, you've been there for
about three years.
Give us a little bit of the
10,000 foot view of what your organization
looks like to support the school of medicine.
>> Sure. We're about 170 people.
We have changed a lot over the last three years.
So, when I got to UCLA there was
25 separate IT organizations,
all smaller groups,
operating in each individual department.
And, they had built their own
sets of managed infrastructure,
distributed throughout every closet,
nook and cranny in the school.
We've consolidated all that under
one set of service lines,
one organization,
and that's including consolidating all the
systems and applications as well.
So, we've brought all those together
and now we're
additionally running IT for three more
health sciences schools at UCLA,
nursing, dentistry, and school of public health,
Fielding School of Public Health.
Like a lot of CIOs, you serve many masters.
You got the administration,
you got the students, right.
You've got the broader constituency.
The community, UCLA.
Where do you start?
What's the quote on quote customer experience
that you're trying to achieve?
That's a great way to put it.
There's really sort of four pillars that
we try to serve.
The patient being first and foremost.
So, for us, everything is built around
a great patient experience.
And, that means that when we're
educating students it's so they can
be great providers of patient care.
When we're doing research,
When we're doing that research
in an effort to eradicate disease et cetera.
And, when we're doing community outreach
it's also around improving
health and peoples lives,
so, in IT, we try to stay very connected
to those missions.
I think it's a large part of what
drives people to be a part of
an organization that's healthcare
or that's a provider.
That mission is really, really important.
So, yes. We're serving all four of those things at once.
>> So, you had lots of silos,
lots of data,
that's all continuing to grow but,
this is data that
literally life and death decisions
can be made on this.
Talk to us about the volumes of data,
all the different sources that are generating data.
People, sensors, things and how did you
make this decision to consolidate
leveraging Pure Storage as that foundation?
>> Yeah, there's and incredible amount of work
going on at UCLA.
Particularly in their research education
and patient care spaces.
We had every brand of server in storage
that you've never heard of.
Things bought at
lowest, bitter methods
but, the technical data that we had incurred
as part of that was enormous.
Right, it's unsustainable.
It's unsupportable. It's insecure-able.
When I got there and we started to think about
how do we deal with all of this?
We knew we had an opportunity
to green field an infrastructure
and consolidate everything onto it.
That was the first,
that was started us down the road
that led us to Pure as one of our major storage vendors.
I had worked with them before
but, they won on their merits, right?
We do these very rigorous RFP processes
when we buy things.
The thing that really, I think, got them the
the victory is us is that
the deduplication of data got us to something
like an eight to one ratio
of virtual to physical.
So, we get a lot of virtual servers running
on relatively small amount of storage.
And, that it's encrypted you know,
sort of the time, right?
There's not like a switch you might flip
or something a vendor says they'll do but it
>> Always on. >> doesn't really do,
it is always on.
And, it's critical for us.
We're really building a far more secure
and manageable set of services
and so all the vendors we work with meet that criteria.
>> So, is as a CIO, I would imagine
you don't want to wake up every day
and think of storage.
With all due respect to our friends at Pure.
>> That's true.
>> So, has bringing it in for infrastructure in,
like Pure, that prides itself on simplicity,
allowed you to do the things that you really
want to do and need to do for your organization?
>> Yeah. I'll give you a two part answer.
I mean one is simply, I think, it's operationally
a really great service.
I think that it's well designed, and run, and managed.
And, we get great use of out it.
I think the thing that makes it so that I don't
have to think about it is actually,
the business model that they have.
So, the fact that I know that it's not going to
really obsolete on its own,
as long as you're like in the support model,
you're upgrading the system every few years,
changes, you know the,
model for me, 'cause I don't have to
think about these new, massive
capitalization efforts, it's more
of a predictable operational costs
and that helps me sleep well
because I know what we look like over the next few years
and I can explain that to my financial organization.
>> Just a follow up on that,
a large incumbent storage supplier
or system vendor might say,
"Well, we can make that transparent to you.
We can use our financial services to
hide that complexity or
make a cloud-like rental experience or
you know, play financial games
to hide that.
Why does that not suffice for you?
>> Well, I think, first and foremost
we sort of want to run our financials
on our own and we're pretty
anxious about having anyone else in the middle of all that.
Number two is
it seems to me different
in terms of Pure having built that model
from the ground up as part of their
service offerings.
So, I don't think we see that with too many
other vendors and I think that
obviously there's far less technical than
what I had in the previous design
but it can still add up if you're not careful about
whatever, what server mechanism
you have in place, et cetera.
>> But, it eliminates the forklift upgrade, right.
Even with those financial incentives or tricks,
you still got to forklift it
and it's a disruption to your operation.
>> Yeah, and I'm sure that's true, yeah.
>> So, when you guys were back a year and a half
or so, maybe two years ago,
looking at this consolidation,
where were your thoughts in terms of
beyond consolidation and looking at
being able to harness the power of AI, for example,
we heard a lot of AI today already and
this need for legacy infrastructures are
insufficient to support that.
Was that also part of your plan,
was not simply to consolidate
and bring your (speaks very rapidly) environment
unto Pure source but also to leverage a modern platform
that can allow you to harness the power of AI?
>> Yeah. That was sort of the later phase
bonus period that we're starting to enter now.
So, after we sort of consolidate and secure everything,
now, we can actually do far more interesting things
that would've been much more difficult before.
And, in terms of Pure,
when we had set out to do this
we imagined doing a lot of our analytics
and AI machine learning
kind of cloud only
and we tried that.
We're doing a lot of really great things in the cloud
but not all of it is makes sense
in that environment.
Either from a cost perspective or
from a capabilities perspective.
Particularly with what Pure has been announcing lately,
I think there's a really good opportunity
for us to build high performance computing clusters
in our on premise environment
that leverage Pure as a potential storage back end.
And that's where our really interesting data goes.
We can do the analytics or the AI machine learning on
the data that's in our electronic medical record
or in our genomics workflows or things like that
can all flow through a service like that
and there's some interesting discoveries that
ought to come from it.
>> There's a lot of talk at this event about
artificial intelligence, machine intelligence,
how do you see AI in health care, generally?
And specifically, how you're going to apply it?
Is it helping doctors
with diagnosis?
Is it maybe maintaining better compliance?
Or, talk about that a little.
>> I think there's two things that
I can think of off the top of my head.
The first is decision support.
So this is
helping physicians when they're working directly
with patients there's only, there's so many systems,
so many data sets, so many way to analyze, and yet
getting it all in front of them in some kind
of real time way so that they can use it
effectively is tricky.
So, AI, machine learning, have a chance to help us
funnel that into something that's immediately useful
in the moment.
And then the other thing that we're seeing is
that most of the research on genomics
and the outcomes that have resulted
in changes to clinical care are
around individualized mutations in a single
nucleotide so there's,
those are I guess, quote, relatively easy for
a researcher to pick out.
There's a letter here that is normally a different letter.
But, there are other
scenarios where there's not a direct
easy tie from a single mutation to an outcome.
so, like in autism or diabetes,
we're not sure what the genetic
components are but we think that
with AI machine learning, those things will
start to identify patterns in genomic
sequences that humans aren't
finding with their typical approaches
and so, we're really excited to see
our genomic platforms built up to a point
where they have sequences in them to do that
sort of analysis and you need
big compute, fast storage to do that kind of thing.
>> How is it going to help
the big compute, fast storage,
this modern infrastructure, help
whether its genomics or clinicians
be able to sort through masses amounts
of data to try to find those needles in the haystack
'cause I think the staff this morning
that Charlie Jean and Carla mentioned was
that half a percent of data in the world
is analyzed.
So, how would that under the hood infrastructure
going to help facilitate your smart folks
getting those needles in the haystack
just to start really making big impacts?
>> UCLA has an incredible faculty,
like brilliant researchers,
and sometimes what I've found since I've gotten there,
the only ingredient that's missing is
the platform where they can do some of this stuff.
So, some of them are incredibly enterprising,
they've built their own platforms for their own analysis.
Others we work with
they have a lot of data sets
they don't have a place to put them
where they can properly interrelate them and do,
apply their algorithms at scale.
So, we've run into people that are
trying to do these massive analysis on
a laptop or a little computer or whatever
it just fails, right? Or it runs forever.
So, giving them, providing a way to have
the infrastructure that they can run these things
is really the ingredient that we're trying
to add and so, that's about storage and compute, et cetera.
>> How do you see the role of the CIO evolving?
We hear a lot of people on the Cube
and these conferences talk about
digital transformation and the digital CIO,
how much of that is permeating your organization
and what do you think it means to the CIO world
going forward?
>> I wish I knew the real answer to that question.
I don't know, time will tell.
But, I think that certainly
we're trying to follow the trends that we see
more broadly which is there's a job
of keeping the lights on of operations.
And you're not really, you shouldn't have a seat
at any other table and so those things are quite
excellent.
>> Table stakes.
>> Yeah. Right. Exactly, table stakes.
Security, all that stuff.
Once, you've got that, you know,
my belief is you need to deeply understand
the business and find your way into
helping to solve problems for it
and so, you know, our realm,
a lot of that these days is
how do we understand the student journey
from prior to,
from when they maybe want to apply
all the way 'til when they go out and become
a resident and then a physician.
There's a ton of data that's gathered along that way.
We got to ask a lot of questions we don't have
easy answers to but, if we put the data
together properly, we start to, right?
On the research side,
same sort of idea, right?
Where the more we know about the particular
clinical outcomes they're trying to achieve
or even just basic science research
that they're looking into, the better
that we can better micro target a solution to them.
Whether it's a on prem, private cloud, or public cloud,
either one of those can be harnessed for
really specific workloads and I think
when we start to do that,
we've enabled our faculty to do things that
have been tougher for them to do before.
Once, we understand the business in those
ways I think we really start to have
an impact at the strategic level, the organization.
>> You've got this
centralized services model that was a
strategic initiative that you put in place.
You've got the foundation there that's going to
allow you to start opening up
other opportunities.
I'm curious, in the UCLA system,
maybe the UC system,
are there other organizations or schools
that are looking at what you're doing as a model
to maybe replicate across the system?
>> I think there's
I don't know about a model.
I think there's certainly efforts among some to
find, to centralize at least some services because
of economies to scale or security or
all the normal things.
With the anticipated,
and then anticipating that that could
ultimately provide more value once the
baseline stuff is out of the way.
UC is vast and varied system so
there's a lot of amazing things going on
in different realms and we're
I think, doing more than ever working together
and trying to find common solutions to problems.
So, we'll see whose model works out.
>> Well, Ben. Thanks so much for stopping by the Cube
and sharing the impact that your making at the
UCLA School of Medicine, leveraging
storage and all the different capabilities
that that is generating.
We thank you for your time.
>> Thanks so much for having me.
>> We want to thank you for watching the Cube.
I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante.
We are live at Pure Accelerate 2018 in San Francisco.
Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest.