Joe Cowan, Carlisle Interconnect Technologies | VMworld 2017
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 2017-08-29

Joe Cowan, Carlisle Interconnect Technologies sits down with Stu Miniman & Justin Warren at VMworld 2017 in Las Vegas, NV.

#WMworld #theCUBE

https://siliconangle.com/2017/09/11/why-carlisle-made-the-switch-to-hyperconverged-infrastructure-vmworld/

Why Carlisle Interconnect made the switch to hyperconverged infrastructure

Although businesses live in a time of change, few companies are willing to swap out their current technology for something new without good reason. Right now, as older systems fall into the dark realm of legacy technology, companies are discovering the benefits of upgrading to hyperconverged infrastructure solutions, or HCI, which virtualizes certain elements of hardware-defined systems.

“We were at a great spot where we could say, this is legacied and depreciated; do we need to do something else or continue with what we’re doing? It was a great decision point,” said Joe Cowan (pictured), system engineer at Carlisle Interconnect Technologies Inc., about moving to HCI.

Cowan spoke with host Stu Miniman (@stu) and guest host Justin Warren (@jpwarren), of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the VMworld conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. They discussed the process of going hyperconverged, culture shift and the company’s use of Nutanix’s Enterprise Cloud. (* Disclosure below.)

Discovering the benefits of a hyperconverged system
Companies don’t change their infrastructure on a whim. There are reasons. For Carlisle Interconnect, those reasons came down to building a system that would be simple to use and easy to deploy. HCI fit the bill, according to Cowan.

As a side-effect, the relative simplicity of a hyperconverged system allowed the company to build out and expand quickly. People could see what they required and knew how to make it happen, without the help of a trained specialist. This power was a major reason why Carlisle Interconnect chose the technologies they did, Cowan explained.

A change in infrastructure also requires a change in culture. “When people got into the product, they thought it would be really complicated. We showed them it was not,” Cowan said. Most people enjoyed the ease of use, and those who needed their own tools could document and pass along through the system what they required.

Switching to hyperconverged technology, in this case via Nutanix’s Enterprise Cloud solutions, also allowed the company to support its remote offices with one set block. It was also able to extend Nutanix into its private cloud.

“It made it very simple to capture the block-level snapshots quickly and then import them to our private cloud, where we have a huge stack of Nutanix,” Cowan said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for VMworld 2017. Neither VMware Inc. nor Nutanix Inc. have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)