>> From the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston,
connecting with thought leaders all
around the world.
This is a cube conversation.
>> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman
And we're digging in with the VMware cloud
on AWS update, of course,
an important solution set
we've been talking about for a couple of years.
If you see we've done interviews
with some of the VMware and AWS executives,
we did a deep dive on some of the technology.
And now we get to dig in with one
of the users of the technology.
Of course, the executive talk about the proof
of how many customers have been using it.
So happy to welcome to the program
I have two guests
from KLM insurance.
First, sitting right next to me on the screen
is BJ Gardner, who's the lead system architect.
Next to him is Dave Zeigenfuss,
who is a senior systems architect.
BJ and Dave,
thanks so much for joining us.
>> Thank you for having us.
All right.
So BJ, just for our audience that does not know,
Pennsylvania lumberman Mutual Insurance Company,
give us a little bit about The company 125 years in history,
obvious with the name,
it's in the insurance business
but help us understand, you know, what your business is
and what you and Dave do for the organization.
Sure,
so Pennsylvania Lumbermens has been around
for under 125 years,
we just celebrated the 100 and 25th year.
This February Actually,
we are commercial insurance company, property Casualty.
And we specialize in the wood niche.
So we cover everything from lumber yards to auto fleets
that have anything to do with moving wood selling wood.
So we're pretty niche,
we're pretty specific in our brand.
And we're a mutual insurer.
We're one of the few if not only one,
left that does not offer insurance on individual space so...
>> Alright, and BJ give us a little bit of snapshot
from an IT standpoint, obviously, you're using VMware,
coz you're here, talk to us about what data centers
and cloud usage looks like for perpilimi
So I've been without Pennsylvania lumber mints for
about 15 years,
and we were operating in full on-prem
with bare metal servers,
and 2007-2008, We started with the VMware product set.
And since then we've been moving little by little
to the cloud.
We have many of our core applications
are sitting with vendors in the cloud as of right now,
we have a small data center in Philadelphia that
is an on prem.
And then we have,
which we'll talk about,
why have cloud data center as a service model
with the VMware Certified cloud partner cont faction.
And then we also now have our disaster recovery
as a cloud product.
Excellent.
Since we're talking about the the VMware cloud
on AWS bring us inside a little bit,that DR
In this case that you're using.
That hybrid model,
help tease that out.
BJ will Start with you.
And I'm sure,
Dave will have some color
to give after you share.
>> Sure, I mean, you know,
when you're talking about disaster recovery in general,
the need to maintain business continuity,
while keeping a lean IT staff
and with no extended downtime and data loss
is just... it's not an option.
You can't afford to be down,
you can't afford to lose data.
So having a cloud service now for disaster recovery,
or at least the concept of that
helps us more IT shop, in the way of resources
that we just don't have on hand on staff.
So, that's, pretty much the biggest goal for us,
is to maintain business continuity
and you know, with our lean staff at the same time.
>> Echoing BJ a bit,
having an on prem solution and really,
to BJ'S point about our lean staff,
It made things quite cumbersome for us
with maintaining backups replications and such.
There was a lot involved.
It was very time consuming.
So the handoff to utilizing VMware cloud
for our disaster purposes really,
really helped that benefit our team as a whole.
>> All right, you mentioned your partner
on this solution is faction.
Help us understand how you made the decision
to go down this path.
>> So I can give you a quick...
a quick rundown here how faction came to be.
so we're located our corporate is in fellow Philadelphia PA.
We occupied two floors in an office building.
Our data center was on the one floor we were consolidating.
And we moved up to just one single floor.
So we basically lost the footprint of the data center.
So I went out hunting for co location type vendor,
and hooked up with faction.
And yeah, so we've been with faction for since 2015.
We've had their, I call it kind of co lo,
plus data centers or service model,
since then, since 2015.
And we've been with them doing different initiatives
here and there over the years and disaster recovery
as a service is now one of them.
>> Great, Dave,
you've maybe supply a little more color on that piece.
>> Yeah, sure.
Yeah, the use of VMware cloud
with Site Recovery Manager.
Again, from a technical standpoint,
it was second to none
as far as the flexibility it gave us to grow our workloads,
to maintain them.
Recovery point objective was what really sold me.
It allowed us to get extremely granular
from a business continuity perspective.
And, yeah, I'm a fan.
I just, I really like VMware cloud with SRM.
It's proven to be top notch.
>> Yeah, maybe follow up on that,
you've been a VMware customer for a number of years,
you're familiar with the tooling,
and everything else like that.
So, how long did a solution like this take to roll out?
>> So, I will guess so, absolutely,
there was a good portion from when we started,
so you have to kind of put it in perspective,
because we had a data center in Atlanta, Georgia,
that was our data recovery site with action.
So we had a two fold project,
we were going into a contract year, a renewal year.
And faction pitched, the AWS VMware on AWS service.
So we were decommissioning a data center at the same time
as we were rolling it out.
So I'll just give you the quick timeline.
So November of 2018,
was basically the contract negotiations.
We finalized everything kind of in February of 2019.
As far as kicking off the call
on how we are going to actually do the project.
Work began around April of 2019.
Faction went ahead and set up the AWS DDC environment
in early May.
Faction builds out the environment for the rest of May.
June, we did some non disruptive load testing
on the environment in AWS.
We set up the replication recovery group build out
throughout the summer of 2019.
And then we had a full sign off
in September 17th actually 2019
so I'll just kind of highlight though,
in that process, that it took roughly about four months
to do the full build out testing
and the Atlanta data center decommissioning.
>> Okay, and PJ after having done this,
we've now got DR as a Service,
what are the hero numbers?
Have you reduced their cost savings loannes,
How do you report up?
The success or result of what you've done so far?
>> Yeah, so speaking to that,
so when we did the contract negotiation,
in November of 2018,
one of the things we realized when we were pitching
the cloud disaster recovery as a service model,
we saw roughly about a 20% annual savings
in moving to this cloud service.
So, a breakdown of what kind of the savings
is it's pretty much in Atlanta we have
some resource costs because we're running basically
on a pillow type environment with with Baxter.
and then we had a circuitry call,
so we had a point to point line
that would run out to, actually to New Jersey
and then down to Atlanta.
So we that cost as well.
So we saved basically, we ripped out the point circuit
And we got we offloaded some resource costs.
So, like I said about a roughly
about a 20% costs saved.
>> Alright, so that that's some of the hard figures.
Dave, bring us inside a little bit operationally, obviously,
there's got to be a little bit of changes
to how you manage things, automation is,
has been hot for years,
but even more so when you talk about cloud environments.
So, how is this deployment,
changed what the workers are doing and beyond that?
>> Well, it's it's simplified things quite a bit,
just by the partnership with faction
and in conjunction with VMware cloud
for our disaster recovery solution,
It's offered many benefits.
For one, we had a primary engineer who left the company,
we found some benefits
to not having to fill that staff resource,
so that that was also a positive from a money aspect.
But as far as the day to day functioning
where we go about doing things up,
it really took things off my plate,
off the rest of the teams plate
And just really,
really gave us a peace of mind as it pertains to our,
our infrastructure and our data being secured.
>> All right, well,
I want to give you both the final word.
What learnings do you have out of this?
Any best practices you'd share?
Or there's also some updates coming,
taking VMware being able to take advantage
of the latest bare metal offering from Amazon?
I'll let you choose maybe BJ,
we'll start with you and wrap with you Dave
as to that those final words that you would share
with your peers
>> Yeah, I'll certainly start it off.
I mean, coming from my perspective as kind of the manager
of the team here,
our goal as a company,
our goal as an IT shop,
our goal as an operations team,
is to ensure the company's technology needs,
will be met after, in the event of a disaster.
And that is the key.
You want to protect itself,
you want to protect the data,
you want to protect the customers.
So, in the case of the cloud for us,
is maintaining business continuity
while reducing physical footprint
and keeping the IT operations lean,
like I had stated before.
And one of the most important things
and this is not just about disaster recovery,
but establishing good partnerships with vendors,
is absolutely imperative.
Because I don't care how big your shop is,
and again, we're on the small side, obviously,
but you can't you can't do it alone.
So you need really good strong partnerships
and good relationships with them.
>> And I would say,
make sure you are Identify your critical business workloads.
Know your environment, absolutely.
It's imperative.
Get it, you have to plan efficiently.
And by all means, test,
test test test,
you can't test the solution enough.
So that's really about all I have.
>> All right, Well, David, BJ,
thank you so much for joining us
appreciate you sharing your your journey along
and wish you the best of luck with the
solution going forward.
>> Thank you.
>> Thank you for having us.
>> And thank you for joining us for this update
VMware cloud on AWS,
be sure to check out the cube.net
for all the rest of the coverage we have
both in the VMware and AWS ecosystems.
I'm Stu Miniman
And thank you as always for watching the cube.
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