Veeam Community Podcast

The Veeam Community Podcast is focused on giving the global virtualization community a new resource for connecting with industry experts, bloggers and peers, as well as for staying up to date on the latest industry news, developments and trends. Each 30-minute weekly episode of the Veeam Community Podcast will be available through RSS subscription and the Apple iTunes store. The podcast is hosted by Rick Vanover, a writer, blogger, VMware vExpert, VMware Certified Professional, Microsoft Certified Professional, Microsoft Certified IT Professional and a Microsoft Certified Systems Administrator. He currently works as Software Strategy Specialist at Veeam.

Welcome to the first episode of the Veeam Community Podcast! This episode features host Rick Vanover (on Twitter at @RickVanover) of Veeam Software and Kelly Culwell (on Twitter at @KCulw) of Interworks. During this episode, Rick and Kelly talk about a mix of virtualization in the field today, what it is like being a partner, an iced-over Atlanta and other aspects of the Americas Kickoff for Veeam.

Rick: Hello and welcome to the Veeam Community Podcast, I'm your host Rick Vanover. This is Episode 1. Welcome to the Veeam Community Podcast. Here we go.

I'm really happy today because our guest is Kelly Culwell.

Kelly: And now.

Rick: He did it, there it is.

We are gathered here in Ice-lanta, if you will, we're centered into the Veeam Community Pod (inaudible), the Community Podcast is being launched within the Veeam Kick-off.

Veeam Kick-off is an annual thing that we're starting to do this year. Where really the whole America's team gets in line for the goals of the year and we kind of go forward with it.

Kelly, as a pro-partner and as a social media personality, we had an opportunity to bring a few people in to kind of bring the community inside of Veeam. A little bit different than simply having the traditional Blogger Day in a normal sense because we're not doing the one-way traffic type of session or something.

We've had quite a deal with this weather, Kelly. What do you think of the weather thus far?

Kelly: It's horrible.

Rick: That's a good way of putting it.

Kelly: Bottom line, I had a lot of trouble getting here. There were Veeam employees in Atlanta that couldn't get here. We're north of Atlanta,in Alpharetta. So, I'm fortunate to be here. I'm very lucky. I'm thankful for the opportunity as well. But maybe next time let's do it somewhere warmer.

Rick: Right on. Well, I will say, Kelly, I've got to give you props because you were by far the most passionate guest I'm wanting to get here. I really appreciate that as well. I know just by flying offerings and schedules - and then with the transportation on the ground. You had the biggest obstacle. So, props to you.

Kelly: Thanks.

Rick: So, rock on. So, Kelly you are a solution architect with Interworks. Can you tell us a little bit about your role and what Interworks does and then also that relationship to be.

Kelly: Sure, Interworks is a full service IT consulting company. We do everything from desktop support to service support, virtualization storage, data visualization, business intelligence, web development, software development, pretty much anything IT we do. We like to say we do it - IT - better.

With the virtualization offering we had a lot of challenges when customers would ask us how do you backup your virtual environment. We found that answer with Veeam. We have become Veeam evangelists, Veeam pro-partners. Love the product and I can't personally wait to see what comes up next because things like V-Power just really changed the game for me and my customers as well as the whole virtualization industry.

Rick: Yeah, that's a good way of putting it because there is definitely a lot of Veeam love. Some hype or interest, or whatever and myself. I'm new to Veeam myself, I'm only a few weeks in at this point. That was an observation I had.

Even before I started, there is definitely interest with Veeam. Community is a big thing with this company and I really appreciate that. Thus far, I'm having a blast. So, this is kind of cool. This podcast, by the way, let's take a quick moment and just talk about what the podcast is.

Again, Kelly, thanks for coming and you are an example of what we're going to try and do here. We're going to focus on a number of things. I tried to be slick and I tried to be smart and outline these by letter. So, I have my four Cs of the Veeam Community Podcast and one of those is "community."

Okay, so we're going to focus on people in the community that represent the interests of Veeam. Okay, this is not, Kelly you and I both have been on Virtumania and some other podcasts. It's going to be a little bit different. You know, we are focusing on the community of Veeam and virtualization as a whole.

We're focusing on the "channel." Veeam is very focused on the channel and our partner, the business models. We're going to work through those to bring those people into the Veeam Community Podcast. To really tell their story and explain what we offer as a company and what the channel and the partner system feels like from their local perspective.

We're going to talk with customers. Customers are end all, be all. If you're a customer, definitely reach out to me or Doug Hazelman, that we can work on getting you on to the podcast. I'll give some contact information for the podcast later on.

The fourth C is "cool" Veeam products. I had to put a c in there. So, that's kind of the objective on what we're trying to do with this podcast.

Kelly: That's like a diamond thing, you know. Cut, clarity, color, and cost, yeah, so.

Rick: There's five, isn't there?

Kelly: I don't know.

Rick: Not that I'm in the market of diamonds frequently. Cut, color, clarity, I'm worried about the cost.

Kelly: Right. So, what we're doing here is we're associating Veeam with diamonds.

Rick: Yeah, it's not like that, is it. No, it's not like that. Anyways, we'll think about that. One of the other things that also important on the podcast - I want to just take a moment here - is that we, as Veeam, as the podcast, we're really big on disclosure.

Take a moment to talk about the podcast in general. In general the people that show up on this podcast are not sponsored, endorsed, or paid or anything like that in anyway. It's a community gesture. You know, I'm taking time out of people's busy agenda, that type of thing.

So, it's usually a free endeavor unless we say otherwise. I actually say "otherwise" for this particular case because of the Veeam Kick-off, Veeam did sponsor the airfare for Kelly and a couple of other members of the community to come on site. It's just a direct, you know, we paid for the airfare, transportation, hotel. Very nominal, nothing extravagant, real similar to business in general but it's just a matter of disclosure and it's important to us.

Kelly: The disclosure, you didn't bring me here specifically for this podcast ...

Rick: Right.

Kelly: ... this podcast could've happened remotely and anything else. For the people who don't know, I sat in on a panel with a few other folks today in front of the entire Veeam America's crew that is here and had the opportunity to talk about two of the Cs. Community and Channel partners at the same time and talk about how our role effects, you know, how we fit into the theme and how it affects our customers. Then also take questions from the Veeam audience on how we do business and how what they do helps us or works for us.

Rick: What was your thoughts on that? Because, no offense to myself, I didn't really prep you for that. I just kind of said, "Here's the agenda." Before you know it you're sitting on stage for questions, miked up and everything.

Kelly: Yeah, a microphone and a camera pointed at me, yeah, so thanks, Rick.

Rick: You're welcome, I'll talk to you about the next one later.

Kelly: Honestly, I didn't have any idea what to expect. I didn't know what I was getting into but it was very cool. It was very casual. Everything was easy and it was just kind of like talking like we are now except there were a whole bunch of strangers in front of me.

To me it's always nice to be able to express how we do business. The things that make sense for us and share how we see it makes sense for our clients as well which is, you know, ultimately the end goal.

Rick: For sure, for sure, and I think people within Veeam, they walked up to me after the session, like, "Wow, that was great stuff." Because it's a perspective, it's the community, again, it's a big thing. We really appreciate your feedback. This is a tool that Veeam uses internally to kind of, you know, equip the staff to do what they need to do. Technical people, sales people, marketing people, the team work, that's a big thing.

So that's kind of the objective here and, again, Kelly wanted to thank you for taking the time out of your day from your other responsibilities to be available for that.

Back to your specific role, and it was kind of cool because, you know, you are literally the IT solution. You know, the full solution for your customers and - we got a little bit of insight to that. Back up away from Veeam and - back up, ha, ha, joke funny.

Step away from Veeam for a second, what's the bigger, you know, perception on virtualization. I don't know if you gravitate to another medium, a small type of environment. Are there still people getting started with virtualization? Going to the next step or, okay, virtualized and now I need to do the rest of my stuff - virtual enhancement.

What's the picture in the field that you're seeing?

Kelly: It's not always a pretty picture. I mean we go into sites where it's still completely physical. You know virtualizing for some of the smaller clients doesn't necessarily make sense. We talked about ROI and TCO which is always going to be there but to spend the kind of money to virtualize two or three servers may not make sense to everybody.

Otherwise, people are pretty open to it. We at least get, yeah, I've heard about it just haven't done it yet. That's where I come in. Sure, let us help you. Let me show you. Let's talk about this. We see environments where they just do it for development. They don't have their critical servers on it but they've got it in there.

Maybe they've played with it a little bit. It's really when I sit down and start talking about the product, about virtualization, how it works - specifically with VMware. How you can actually get better performance in a virtual environment than you can in physical instances.

It isn't until we have those conversations that the people really grasp it. So, going back to your comment, we get all - the whole gamete. Fully virtualized to, you know, what's that?

Rick: Right on and, you know, one of the objectives I had in my professional work experience, in the mid-small enterprise type of environment was, okay, we already spent this money on this new server. It's under warranty, you know, it's fast, it's got great local storage, it's got ubber amounts of RAM. I don't even think you can easily buy a mainstream, like, you know, 2U server with, like, less than 12 gig of RAM with the new processors. It's almost free, right to go ahead and get the 12 gig.

You might only be using an operating system that can use 8 gig of it, or 4 gig, or whatever. There's a lot of equipment out there that's brand new on the physical installs that's really kind of like, well, why would I. So, I mean I can see that challenge being an issue in a small environment.

I mean, you see a lot of people trying, especially in that Sandbox, you know, playing with like the free ESXi vSphere Hypervisor. Do you see a lot of people toying around with it like that?

Kelly: We do and it's interesting that you bring that up because some people, you know, they do - they poorly provision those environments. So they don't get the performance that they're expecting and that turns them away from virtualization as a whole because they think it doesn't work right or it's slow or whatever.

It's actually just a - it's a configuration issue. It's an informational issue. It's an educational issue to the client. It works that way with any product. You can play with it, you can do whatever but until you quote unquote know what you're doing or have somebody show you or set it up properly you're never going to get a correct or full evaluation of the product.

Rick: Yeah, I use to always kind of, it's always, you know, in the small, medium business experience or, you know, medium or small enterprise experience I have - it was always a battle of, honestly, money. I use to frequently say, "All virtual machines are not created equal" and the logic was don't tell me to just jam a virtual machine into the existing environment.

I was always frequently with a lot of virtual machines coming in trying to provision additional resources for it. Rock step capacity, if you will, so that there's a lot of battles and poorly provisioned virtual machines. Yeah, that's a whole other thing.

Podcasts, the next episode, we'll definitely talk about that. So, in your professional work experience with Interworks what Veeam products do you use most frequently, occasionally, and, you know, would you like to see more of?

Kelly: Most frequently is going to be Backup & Replication. Obviously, that is our lead in. We want to look to lead in with things like Veeam One just because of the potential there but, you know, Backup & Replication for me is a core piece of the Veeam solution offerings.

The Veeam Monitor product is excellent. I'd love to see more use in it. People, you know, they have Veeam Center and they have this and that and just, maybe, don't understand exactly what it can do for them. So, we need to really show the love and get that message out there.

Rick: Sure.

Kelly: Reporter and Business View, following right up behind. I had some people talk to be specifically about capacity planning in their existing virtual environment which is something that you can do with Business View and Monitor and Reporter type thing. So, definitely Backup & Replication and I'd like to see more on any other products.

Rick: Yeah, one of the things that, you know, in my experience again was - the Backup & Replication's really two core functions or collections of features that go along with that one product. Do you see a lot of replication in use?

Kelly: Yeah, we're starting to do that and that's definitely sell and pitch as a VR solution. You know, we sell storage that does volume based replication immediately. Does it very well, perhaps they're strategy needs to be a little to where you not want to do the whole volume at the same time. You want to do a virtual machine that's on that volume every couple of hours versus every 6 or 12 and small amounts of data.

VMware's SRM product is very good but it's also quite costly. So, for small clients, people who are tight around the budget needing replication allows us maybe not in quite such an automated fashion for recovery but it allows us to do exactly what we need. Then the system administrators can go in and recover rather quickly in an appropriate time for their business.

Rick: Yeah, it's like does anybody really want to push that big red button, you know, to launch the managed fail over. Yeah, I understood. In fact that's something I'm working on. I'm going to have some material coming out here soon, talking about that very topic. Very well timed.

Hey, Kelly, I've got kind of a trick for you. Every podcast has a gimmick. I haven't prepped you at all for this.

Kelly: Topic of the day.

Rick: Well, no, I've got an official name for it. Let me look at my notes. It's called "Three Views from You." Okay, and three views from you is I'm going to ask you three questions that I want you to answer just as you the technologist. You know, throw everything else we've been talking about out the window. Because one of the things we want on the community side is to get to know everybody.

The first question is kind of weird. I took this from the holidays and if you follow the holidays, you'll say that's a softball there, Rick. But anyways, so my first question is, in your professional work experience, just as a general technologist, what was the most interesting story, job role, that you've ever done thus far working with technology in your career?

Kelly: Probably the one I'm at right now.

Rick: Ah, come on, okay. Talk on.

Kelly: Well, the difference is I've got so many different hats, if you will, and I could be looking at so many different things on any given day. I focus and specialize mainly on virtualization with Interworks and storage. It really allows me to dive into different environments and do things. Do what really keeps my interest and peaks my interest in, you know, that's what I want to learn about more everyday.

Rick: Gotcha.

Kelly: So, that's pretty interesting in that aspect. So, I mean, I've had some odd. I mean I use to work for a large enterprise, so I've got stories if you want.

Rick: Oh, fish tales, bring them up, that's what I'm looking for, fish tales. Yeah, it doesn't necessarily have to be now - your current job or your past job. It's just, you know, I guess what I was looking for is like a one particular keystone story, something cool. That was going on in your professional experience. It's like the trademark Kelly Culwell story from the past. What you got?

Kelly: Well, it's probably going to be from VMworld and I don't know if I've talked about this on Virtumania or anywhere else. When I was at the VMworld I was waiting for the investees to show up at the booth.

Rick: Oh, that one, yeah, tell the story, it's great.