Broadcom Delivers the Modern Private Cloud, APJ | University of Bristol Modern Private Cloud with VMware Cloud Foundation

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Keith Woolley

Chief Digital and Information Officer

University of Bristol

play_circle_outline Journey to implementing VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) initiated in 2019.

play_circle_outline Security testing features ensure safe deployment of services and systems.

play_circle_outline Enhancing University Research Flexibility: Multi-Tenancy and AI for Improved Collaboration and Data Integrity with Research Partners

play_circle_outline Enhancing Cost-Efficiency and Accessibility in Academia Through Virtualization, Cloud Technology, and Automation

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University of Bristol Modern Private Cloud with VMware Cloud Foundation

Keith Woolley

Chief Digital and Information Officer University of Bristol

Keith Woolley, chief digital and information officer at the University of Bristol, joins theCUBE’s John Furrier at the “Broadcom Delivers the Modern Private Cloud” event to share the university’s journey to modernize its IT infrastructure using VCF-NINE. The conversation examines how Broadcom’s platform facilitates agility, cost efficiency and enhanced cybersecurity in a research-intensive academic environment.

Woolley details how the University of Bristol moved from legacy systems to a scalable, multi-tenant private cloud model tailored for both edu... Read more

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What was the motivation behind initiating the digital strategy and virtualization efforts in 2019? add

What are some key capabilities of VCF nine that users find valuable? add

What are the key features and capabilities of the VCF platform, particularly in relation to multi-tenancy, Kubernetes, application layers, security, and compliance with different policies? add

What factors influenced the decision to implement cloud technology in the context of research funding and academic collaboration? add

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>> Hello, welcome to theCUBE Studio here in Palo Alto for a special presentation with Broadcom VMware. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, talking about delivering the modern private cloud with the launch of VCF-NINE. Keith Woolley is here as the Chief Digital Information Officer at the University of Bristol in the UK. Keith, welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you.

Keith Woolley

>> Hi John, welcome. Thanks very much for having me.

>> We heard a lot today about the trends, technology, architectural approaches, even what's new with VCF. Now we get to hear from you who's implementing VCF, the customer. So thanks for coming on. Set the table. Talk about what you do there at the university, scope, the environment, what's it like and what do you do?

Keith Woolley

>> So my role as the Chief Digital Information Officer is to look after all of the mainstream technology that we have at the university. We operate mainly of the UK at this moment in time, but we obviously collaborate globally. So we work with many partners around the world. And we're a campus university, so I have the pleasure of actually delivering technology into over 300 sites in the UK.

>> And the technology you guys have there, it's research, academic?

Keith Woolley

>> Yeah, it's a cross-platform, what's called a 50/50 university. So we have about 32,000 students, 7,000 staff, and we're working around 50/50 on the education to research capability. We're a billion-dollar enterprise, so we've got a large-scale IT infrastructure and we are one of the major partners now for national infrastructure for AI in the UK and in Europe.

>> Talk about the transition from the classic IT to kind of the modern era you're in. I mean, obviously you got to set the table for all the work you're doing, the environment's demanding. We know. Security is obviously a big concern. You got sovereignty. What's the environment? What's been the approach that you guys have had?

Keith Woolley

>> You got to think about the history rather than just what's the approach now. So the history of the university is that very organically grown infrastructure because universities were at the forefronts of most things. So when I came in, one of the things that I realized very quickly was that we had a traditional infrastructure environment, very server-based, very standalone application-based, a lot of it homegrown. And then you get the transition of moving that to something that you can actually demonstrate not only the fact that you need to be secure now, secure is only one word in the whole technology stack. You have to be trusted. And so I had to move an environment that we could talk about being a legacy infrastructure environment into something that was very agile and flexible. And if I was to think about what I was needing to do, I needed to have an adaptive technology business platform that could actually deliver business cases that weren't even imagined yet. And that was the challenge that I was facing. How can I move our technology from something that's very legacy into something that I don't even know what business case I'm trying to address? And there is the main challenge and that's what I've been working on.

>> That's awesome. You guys almost envision the future, the enablement need to be there. What's been the approach on the private cloud? Why is private cloud the approach for the University of Bristol?

Keith Woolley

>> Well, if we take that, again, a slightly step back as to why private cloud, why not public cloud? There's a couple of things that I really wanted to make sure that I could achieve to start with. First of all, I needed a secure and cost-optimized environment. I couldn't be in a hyperscale environment where I didn't know from day to day what my cost model may be. So I needed something that we could actually position well, control correctly. And also I wanted a facility that could really facilitate flexibility in my digital and also my environmental asset utilization. So naturally I was drawn to, I need my own data centers, but I didn't need the overhead that came with a data center. I needed the flexibility of the cloud. Private cloud gives me both. So I got the control that I needed so I could actually have auditable sovereignty and demonstrate trust in a data center that we manage and have control against and can actually do our cost optimization with. But with the flexibility of cloud technologies that I can run on any technology, I can run it on any TIN. So I get the best of all worlds inside an environment and it gives me that flexibility to grow.

>> I love that sovereignty, trust angle. It really makes sense, especially with AI. Everyone wants to have all their crown jewels on-prem, have it right there and manage the resource effectively. How did it all begin? Take us through the story for VCF and kind of where you guys are. Take us through that journey. What was the platform rolled out? How did you guys adopt it? What was the origination? And take us through how it all began and where you're at.

Keith Woolley

>> It came from really, and John, on this one, it came from trying to solve a business problem we had immediately, which was an aging platform that needed to be virtualized. So we did the classic VM virtualization to start with. And once we started down that route, I started working very closely again with our senior leadership team at VMware and looking at your strategic roadmaps as to what they were creating, where they were going. And this, by the way, started in a 2019 vision. So in 2019 we wrote the first digital strategy to actually take us from an environment that was very organically grown, ran traditionally, and we set out to build ourselves what we classed as a boundary-less education and research capabilities. So we could operate anywhere in the world, have the flexibility without having to move data around, without breaking through the boundaries of going between hyperscalers. So 2019, we started this journey. We started with a business problem we were trying to fix, but we set out a strategic vision that said that eventually we'll get to the place where we've got total strategic flexibility and that's how we got to where we got to. But we worked directly with VMware to make sure this could happen. We started putting VCF in over four years ago and we've built on that platform ever since. We've actually built out VDI virtual desktop environments around it as well so that we have the whole stack. And we're getting really excited as well. We're running the latest version at the moment of 521, but we're getting the really excited about getting into version nine because when we start thinking about version nine, I can really start to move into multi-tenancy. And multi-tenancy with our AI capability gives me absolute what I need to be able to take the university to the next level. So we're getting really excited about that. We can talk a lot about that today if you want to John, but that's where we're going to.

>> I love it, let's get into some of those capabilities, multi-tenancy is great when you start having all these experiments, boundary lists. I mean, that's implied. You got the right call right before COVID, certainly that's nice headroom there. I'm sure that's going to scale out into as people work these new workloads. What are some of the capabilities? You got multi-tenancy, anything else? You mentioned sovereignty, that's a huge thing. You got a lot of IP, you got a lot of data. What are some of the key capabilities you like the most around VCF nine?

Keith Woolley

>> Well, apart from the fact that I can make sure that I've got this thing secure and I can actually test the security before I deploy it because it's software driven data centers, we're in a position also where I can demonstrate that to our client base that we partner with. And as a university, we partner with significant research partners around the world. And they are looking to be able to know that what they are working on with us isn't getting contaminated with anything else. And so the multi-tenancy side of things gives me absolute certainty that that's not going to happen. So we've got that real control. Also, the fact that we can set up a Kubernetes stacks, the way in which we can do containerization, we could sit here all day and go through all of the different application layers that actually the VCF platform brings to us because it's a true suite of complete capability. And depending on what use case you are looking for, especially as we go into version nine, we've basically got the whole toolset to be able to deliver what we need. But segmentation, security, trust, as I say, sovereignty in the fact that we work in a UK environment at the moment, we are also governed by European policy for what we do with AI and the way in which we manage data as well as UK policy and they're different. And then we're working with worldwide policy around trust. There's loads of different things that we're trying to balance. And the great thing is, and it's a pleasure to be able to say it about a product in the marketplace, it actually meets the requirements. It actually does what it says on the TIN. So we're in a very fortunate position that I have the adaptive technology that I need and I can scale it at my own requirements. I don't have to buy massive amounts of hyperscale and then worry about how I'm going to move it or use it. I can scale as I go.

>> That's a great story. And a lot of people say that having that platform, that unification if you will, or having that capability gives a lot of leverage. For you, it's research and other things. And then you've got the cost complexity and compliance to deal with. You don't have to worry about if it's in that platform. What has been some of the outcomes? We've seen a lot of great examples certainly on research side where people are doing stuff in open source and they have proprietary data and they want to collaborate across the environments, across the boundaries. There's a lot of cool examples. What are some of the outcomes, Keith, you're seeing that's coming out of this? Operating value leverage, whatever you want to call it. I mean, you've got that one management plane gives you a lot of advantages, a little simple to run, but it takes care of all the cost, complexity and compliance.

Keith Woolley

>> And again, John, it depends which hat I put on when I answer that question because-

>> Put on your business hat.

Keith Woolley

>> Yeah, it depends which lens you want to look at it. Because if I look at it from how does my departmental areas now run and how efficient has that now become, it's significantly different. A single pane of glass, single management structure, a way in which we can now control all of our cyber security patching capability, roll out deployment, roll back, all in there. So from an operational standpoint, it revolutionizes the way in which we operate rather than just looking at single boxes, single TIN, we have a platform as a service to software driven and we can actually make sure our policies and processes are driving it. From a business standpoint, when I think about one of the first reasons why I looked to putting cloud in and I looked at how we were getting our financial grants coming in for research, and why also at that time, the digital department wasn't the shop of choice for our academics. And it was, well, what do I need to do to change that? And when I got into the actual understanding that the reason they weren't using me as a shop of choice was it came down to I was too expensive and I was too slow in responding. One of the first things that happened with VCF was our capability to automate. And so we've now put the technology in the hands of our academics through scripting. They go to a portal, they subscribe to a build, and they can build the services that they need when they need them in minutes rather than actually waiting for TIN to be delivered and configured and all the rest of it. So our time to research is significantly decreased and our value model in our research has increased substantially. Also, as we go through that, we have a hyperscale stack that we can walk through. We go from desktop computing to actual VCF environment and all the way up to national infrastructure. We can share code between our partners who are also working with VCF platforms. So it gives us massive capability for collaboration and I don't even have to move any of the data from my network. So from a business standpoint, it means that we can absolutely operate quickly, we can respond to technical needs virtually immediately, and we can scale out depending on the research that we require. We're now in a process where we are teaching our students how to actually run cybersecurity courses inside our VCF environments as well. It's that secure to allow us to do it. So we can now teach and research within this platform. And we could never do that before.

>> Keith, that's a great testament to having a private cloud. It's your cloud, you could do whatever you want with it. You got the team benefits. So you got really strong efficiency with the teams. You got the business agility and speed. And now you're actually repurposing it for courseware and cybersecurity training. Was that on the radar or was that more of a surprise benefit out there?

Keith Woolley

>> This is a platform you don't know the business cases you're going to imagine until you imagine them, right? And being in a university, we talk about imagining things because we develop things, the next minute we'll have an idea about something and we need to be able to respond to that idea. And that's how innovation starts. When we put this platform in and we start getting people excited about the self-serve capability, which is where it started in our academic community. And we then started talking to our student communities. One of the benefits that the students got out of this was especially when we put the virtual desktop to it, we gave digital equity to our students. And what we were finding were that we could take out the barriers between students that could or could not afford particular technologies and put a level playing field in there as well. So these were benefits we never envisaged in the first place, but have actually started to drive out here now. And I think what we're now starting to understand the more we utilize the platform, is that you have to start testing it and saying, what else can this do? And we are now starting to really think about how we do containerization differently, how we even educate to write code and containerize differently. So we're in a very different position to what we can do in this and how we then start thinking about our coursework to deliver.

>> We love to talk about speeds and feeds. We get under the hood talk about Kubernetes, talk about all the microservices, the scale of the platform. What you just kind of highlighted is interesting because in a way the democratization value to the end user is an advantage. That's a benefit that goes into the outcome, which is, hey, what's computing for? And with all these new use cases, you've got certainly AI out there. You mentioned data movement, that's a cost, but also value to the researcher, to the student. So you're having all these kind of edge benefits to the consumption side. So you got the value creation with VCF and now you got the value extraction to the end users. The people who need it, need the compute, they need the data, they need to do research. Who knows where the next breakthrough is going to come from. And I think that time to value story is really key. Who knows? That student that's on the equity plan says, "Hey, you know what? I made a breakthrough. I discovered a new algorithm." You don't know.

Keith Woolley

>> And John also, we don't know. And what we are doing now also is we're learning better around how to use our resources more effectively as well. So again, the platform allows me to give and take capability as in CPU, GPU, memory, so on. So it means that depending on what we're trying to run in that environment, I can allocate calls and I can allocate GPU to it. So I'm not now bound by the fact that I put particular TIN on a box onto a desk. So we can now start thinking about how we set up our labs. And one of the things that was really important to me was to be able to change a word in a sentence. And the word I wanted to change was or. We used to be able to build labs that could do one thing or another. Now we build labs that can do whatever we want. It's an and statement. So we can run Windows workshops, we can run Linux workshops, we can run high-powered graphical workshops. These are all things now we can do on the same equipment because of the way in which we've set this thing up. The other difference we get is that as a university, students go home and then what you have is a load of equipment that potentially is not being utilized. Because it is our cloud, because I can now configure it how I like, I can take things that used to be configured up for small server or desktop environments through VDI and I can pull all of those resources together and make it a high performance compute environment and run high quality research jobs on it and I can schedule them. Now I've got a multi-talented multi-tasking environment that's at our control. So my GPU, CPU investments are constantly being utilized, or I can shut them down and take all of the environmental benefit from them as well. So there's so many different cases for the organization we work in as a seasonal business that this gives me so much flexibility to be able to manage that.

>> It's a great resource. And just to compare that to the old way, what would be the use case or the scenario without VCF, if you had traditional IT? It's too much work. If the context switching in the work of all, just paint that picture, what's the old way look like? And then now with VCF, hey, people go home, let's turn this, turn on the supercomputing, crunch those jobs, no change to the workloads.

Keith Woolley

>> Well, if we look at a typical lab in a previous environment, it would've been kitted out at a particular point in time and it would've been kitted with the latest and the highest technology we possibly can to make sure we stay on the leading edge. After two years that will now be just on an edge. It won't be leading anymore. It'll just be fit for purpose. Three to four years in, it's no longer fit for purpose, it's old technology. Now we would then need to still financially sweat that asset as much as we could. But it's already started to age. With the way in which we're running our technology now, we can keep the actual core up to date and make sure it has the CPU and GPU capabilities there and we can just keep moving with the times. We can keep adding capability into those local environments. When we think about the server environments we used, well, we still operate, we're still migrating across, you think about the server environments, they're fixed. They are fixed environments. It has a limited amount of resource it can have. We can't scale easily for when we have seasonal business. And of course we are a seasonal organization. So when we want to make sure that we are running our applications that make it possible for us to take in new students and we're looking at all of our clearing and making sure that we are taking in people coming on boarded, we need to be able to scale up. And that's very, very difficult to do unless you can actually move a Kubernetes stack around and give it more resource. And in the past it was sat on a static box and that box got busy. So those types of things now give us lots and lots more flexibility and control to actually run our business more efficiently.

>> Yeah, it's a great resource. Scale up, scale out on all capabilities, be flexible and work in those benefits to get the cost savings, the IT modernization, all in play. It's been a great conversation, Keith. I really appreciate it, thanks for sharing your story with theCUBE audience. If you had some sage advice for your peers evaluating VCF, trying to understand their own paths to the private cloud, what advice would you give? Obviously you're deep in it, you got really good use cases, you got a great enablement, you got outcomes you're hitting now and then enabling future outcomes. What advice would you give other folks?

Keith Woolley

>> Make sure you have a great partner to come with you on this journey that understands VCF well. You still have to know how to run cloud. And making sure that you have somebody alongside you to keep you current on that skill set is definitely the way to go. But also be very open-minded. What you think you are buying this for and what you end up doing with it could be two totally different things and the business benefit you'll gain from it will be significant. It can run all your AI jobs. It can give you that sovereignty you are looking for. And there's hidden benefits in here that we're only just starting to discover.

>> Keith, thanks for coming on and congratulations all the great work at the university. Where there's great breakthroughs on the research side. You've got students innovating. The innovation's happening super fast, you're enabling it with VCF nine, congratulations and can't wait to hear what's next.

Keith Woolley

>> John, thank you for your time. I hope theCUBE goes well. Take care.

>> Appreciate it. Okay. We are here in the Palo Alto Studio for the special presentation Broadcom VM. We're delivering the modern private cloud. You heard it from a customer who's deep in VCF. Looking forward to expanding the scope of the value. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching.