In an interview at Nutanix .NEXT 2025, theCUBE Research’s John Furrier speaks with Mike Taylor, hospital ship joint task director for the United Stated Department of Defense. Taylor offers a firsthand look into the extraordinary world of maritime medical operations, where mission success depends on cutting-edge IT infrastructure and nonstop resilience.
The Navy’s hospital ships balance two high-stakes missions, combat casualty care and humanitarian aid, while navigating unique logistical and technological challenges, Taylor shares. The transition from VMware to Nutanix platforms strengthens operational reliability, reduces complexity and builds critical redundancy into floating medical environments where uptime truly saves lives, he explains.
The conversation dives into life aboard a ship where harsh environments, limited power and isolation demand innovative IT solutions. Nutanix’s cloud and edge computing capabilities enable continuous system performance even in the face of water intrusion, cooling issues and other sea-bound obstacles, Taylor emphasizes. It’s a rare look at the real-world impact of tech in military healthcare.
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Mike Taylor, U.S. Navy
In an interview at Nutanix .NEXT 2025, theCUBE Research’s John Furrier speaks with Mike Taylor, hospital ship joint task director for the United Stated Department of Defense. Taylor offers a firsthand look into the extraordinary world of maritime medical operations, where mission success depends on cutting-edge IT infrastructure and nonstop resilience.
The Navy’s hospital ships balance two high-stakes missions, combat casualty care and humanitarian aid, while navigating unique logistical and technological challenges, Taylor shares. The transition from VMware to Nutanix platforms strengthens operational reliability, reduces complexity and builds critical redundancy into floating medical environments where uptime truly saves lives, he explains.
The conversation dives into life aboard a ship where harsh environments, limited power and isolation demand innovative IT solutions. Nutanix’s cloud and edge computing capabilities enable continuous system performance even in the face of water intrusion, cooling issues and other sea-bound obstacles, Taylor emphasizes. It’s a rare look at the real-world impact of tech in military healthcare.
Hospital Ship Joint Task DirectorMilitary Sealift Command & the U.S. Navy
In an interview at Nutanix .NEXT 2025, theCUBE Research’s John Furrier speaks with Mike Taylor, hospital ship joint task director for the United Stated Department of Defense. Taylor offers a firsthand look into the extraordinary world of maritime medical operations, where mission success depends on cutting-edge IT infrastructure and nonstop resilience.
The Navy’s hospital ships balance two high-stakes missions, combat casualty care and humanitarian aid, while navigating unique logistical and technological challenges, Taylor shares. The transition fro...Read more
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What are some of the missions typically carried out by hospital ships?add
What has been your experience with Nutanix in terms of implementation, key milestones, challenges, and overall satisfaction?add
What is the main concern about updating technology equipment on hospital ships to ensure they are ready to go within five days?add
>> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage here in Washington DC. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE with Bob Laliberte. Nutanix NEXT. So, 2025. We got a great guest here, a long-time customer of Nutanix, but a keynote presenter, great guest, Mike Taylor, hospital ship joint task director, Military Sealift Command of the US Navy. Mike, great to have you on. You're talking about the hospital ship before we came on camera. So fascinating. For folks don't know it's a floating city. It's a hospital that goes into theaters and serves people and causes and other things. Welcome to theCUBE.
Mike Taylor
>> Thank you so much, guys. Thanks for having me.>> So, you're on stage, big part of the presentation, migration from VMware to Nutanix. We'll get into that in a second. But I want you to scope the size of a hospital ship and the magnitude of the operations.
Mike Taylor
>> Yeah, the hospital ships are gigantic. Remember, they were built during the Cold War when we thought we were going to fight Eastern Bloc countries and take massive casualties. So, 1,000 beds, lots of capability to make sure our service members get care while they're in theater. Nowadays, we don't have wars that are that big anymore, so our new ships that we're going to be building are a little bit smaller, but we take up to 1,200 people, healthcare providers, mechanics, ITs, all those kind of people when we go underway for our primary missions or humanitarian, whatever it is we're tasked with doing.>> What are some of the missions that people can understand some of the flavor of it? What are some of the missions that you guys do?
Mike Taylor
>> Yeah, our primary mission is of course, combat casualty care. That's if we're at war, we have wounded, marines, sailors, soldiers, airmen, that we come back to the ship where we would treat, we would help and either send them on to a bigger hospital if they needed additional care or we take care of them there and send them back to their unit. If we're not doing combat casualty care, another one of our mission sets is humanitarian assistance and disaster response. So, for instance, both Mercy and Comfort have deployed in support of typhoons in the Philippines or hurricanes in Haiti. Those are disaster responses that we've helped with. They have programmed humanitarian missions they do every other year. Pacific Partnership for Mercy, Continuing Promise for Comfort.>> Excellent. So, on the IT side, it's a floating city in my mind, but there's a lot of operational things. Just take us through some of the things that are set up. Plumbing... The plumbing? Networking. I always say plumbing. There's plumbing too.
Mike Taylor
>> Hey, that's the plumbing of IT, right? Yeah.>> Yeah, you actually have real plumbing, but you got networks, you got OSs, you've got a lot of things operationally. What are some of the big things you guys have to do to run that IT-wise?
Mike Taylor
>> So, I mean there's, of course, shipboard operations. So you have radios and you have computers that aid in navigation, the engine room, everything else. So, you have shipboard services, but then in addition to that, you also have a full hospital that uses modern devices and medical procedures and everything else. So, everything from vibration sensors in the engine room to unique surgical suite equipment that we have to make sure we're providing, which... Oh, by the way is also wireless. So, we have clinical wireless on the hospital ships. It's truly the full breadth in all disciplines of what you would do with IT, with a focus on security, with a focus on resiliency and redundancy. And that's one of the big areas where Nutanix helps us, because the core power plant of our systems has to be... It's running all the servers, it's running everything. It has to be survivable. We actually have a onboard continuity-of-operations rack. So, we have two Nutanix clusters that will fail over to each other, so lots of IT going on.
Bob Laliberte
>> Yeah, I was going to ask about that. I'm thinking that when you have all this IT gear and electronics surrounded by salt water, not exactly the kindest of environment. So, I'm wondering if you can maybe even highlight a little bit about if there's any special modifications, things like that, that you need to do to implement this on these ships?
Mike Taylor
>> Yeah, that's fair. So there are shipboard requirements. Everything has to be grounded a specific way. Shock mounting for vibration resistance and things like that. But above and beyond that, there's a finite amount of power that the ships will generate. So, we have to be cognizant of, okay, well, how much are we taking with our IT equipment? Environmentals. It's hard to cool a room on a ship when the ship is off the coast of Vietnam and it's really humid and everything else. So, then we have to take those things into consideration where shore-side hospitals don't really have to deal with that. And yeah, water intrusion, that's a thing. You may have heard me during the keynote that actually happened to us one time. I walked into that data center on Comfort and salt-encrusted on the Nutanix gear, but you know what? The system didn't miss a beat, it kept going. So, things we have to deal with, but that's why you look for things that are resilient, that have baked-in protections to make sure you don't lose anything.>> A lot of people are talking about in the industry, obviously VMware, Nutanix people want to move to Nutanix. Talk about some people just give up, it's too complex. Some people grind through it. There's use cases. What is your experience with Nutanix? You now have the platform, what's that journey like? What were some of the key milestones and challenges and is there scar tissue? Did you guys get through it unscathed? Was it painful?
Mike Taylor
>> That's the real question. Yeah, I mean, when nerds sit around and talk, it's really like, "Okay, how did this really work?" And truly, what I said earlier rings true, it was pretty anti-climatic. So, you do a little prep work. As good engineers, you talk to your support people. We had Nutanix support actually come out to the ships, just sit right there on the deck in the data center and just joke the whole time while we watch paint dry using Nutanix move, directly taking virtual machines ESXi and moving them over to AHV, with very small exception, and I mean very small, because we're doing live migration as well. It's a hospital, we have to be online all the time. Live migration. Nobody really knew what we were doing, because literally, redundant systems took over and it was good to go.
So, from our use experience, and keep in mind, this is all the way back... For Mercy, it was in 2019. Comfort was 2020. The tools have only gotten better. The processes have only become more refined. So, yeah, there will be a lot of chatter out there about experiences people had. Nothing ever goes perfect. Even for us, we had two or three VMs out of 80-some that wanted to misbehave, but the Nutanix support team was there on-site, worked through it with us. Over the shoulder, taught our guys at the same time, "Hey, when you plan, these are some things you need to look out for." And those things are probably smoothed out now, so our experience would probably even better if we were doing it today.>> Do you get phone calls from... Phone calls? No one makes phone calls anymore, but messages from other peers that are looking at this?
Mike Taylor
>> Oh, yeah.>> Do you get a lot of collaboration on that?
Mike Taylor
>> Believe it or not, I mean, the military is huge, but in informatics, especially healthcare, it is a very small community. We have an old guard of people that have been either in the Navy or some of them in the Army. We all talk and share horror stories about products we bought that didn't really live up to the propaganda that they were pushing out there. I'm very pleased that Nutanix is one of those products that just does what we bought it to do. We've never needed to go out and be like, "Oh, well, our licensing was wrong," or, "Hey, we're not getting the throughput on our storage." It literally has just done what we needed to do.>> Got it. As advertised, as they say.
Mike Taylor
>> Yeah.
Bob Laliberte
>> Yeah. So quick question for you. When you're thinking about the operational aspects of this and managing it, is it something that you're always deployed with the ship when it goes out, or are you managing it from stateside remotely?
Mike Taylor
>> So, because there are times where, on purpose, that ships will not communicate and have no external communication, we do need to be able to do everything on-premise. So, would we like to have the ability to do management from afar or at least visibility? Of course. That only makes things better, helps headquarters understand better what our capacity is, what capabilities we have, but we built them to be self-contained, so that if we don't have connectivity, we can still maintain the system.
Bob Laliberte
>> Got it.>> What's your biggest opportunity going forward? You heard the Nutanix story here at NEXT. You know their platform, you know the folks there, they're a super smart team. Nvidia was just on, obviously partner with Nvidia. There's a lot of action, not a lot of power on the boat, but we'll see how you get the GPUs on there. But what are some of the things you're looking forward to in your role to expand footprints? I mean, platforms are great. You can consolidate things down to a smaller footprint, potentially. Size factor, you're a floating IoT machine.
Mike Taylor
>> Yeah. Well, it's leveraging known good pieces of Nutanix that we haven't implemented yet. Like I spoke earlier about NDB. NDB may be a really good one for my admins and my engineers to have visibility into different parts of our infrastructure to help them manage. But more than that, VDI has always been something that we've really wanted to do. We have done VDI in the past, but this is around 2017, 2018, and tiered storage and other things back in the day, which was standard back then, couldn't really keep up with the demand. We actually had to decommission our VDI-
Bob Laliberte
>> Really?
Mike Taylor
>> Purely because the back-end couldn't keep up with the demand that our crews put on it. Healthcare. Healthcare is an extremely demanding when it comes to IO recalling diagnostic-quality PACS images, multi-gigabit files, so it's a big deal. But now, with the advent of especially some of these new things that are coming out with the way that flash is integrated with GPUs and other things, I think now may be a really good time... And I have to be honest with you, my Nutanix support team is amazing. The federal side support team, if I can just give a pitch to those guys, they're wonderful. Helping us to look at what makes sense for us as far as footprint, how many new servers we might need in a cluster to make sure that we can prepare ourselves for that and more. It's really comforting. And no pun intended, with one of my ships being the Comfort. It's very comforting to have a really intelligent, really die hard, they understand our mission, they're there to support us, group of people with Nutanix that'll help us to build these things out and walk through the engineering process.>> That's a great shout-out.
Bob Laliberte
>> Yeah.>> Yeah. All right, Nutanix, you hear that? You got a big shout-out from a customer. Big opportunities. What are some of the things that are keeping you up at night, obviously besides water getting into the boat? In terms of tech, on the tech side, what are some things you think about?
Mike Taylor
>> Truthfully, so the hospital ships have a charter to be able to activate and steam within five days. So, they literally will go from a small crew on board of 80 to 120 people to 1,200 people in five days. And during that time, we have to get the entire ship ready to go. My biggest fear is that we'll be doing updates or something else to our Nutanix equipment or something else and it won't go as planned. And now, we're behind in getting the ships ready to go. Nutanix has been great about making sure that not only can we do dark site if we need to, so that we can update when it's the right time for us and not just as updates are available, but also keeping us in the loop as to what those updates do. When is the right time to... For instance, we're on 6.10. Our guys are guiding us when the right time to go to 7 is for all of our equipment. It keeps me and the teams on the ships awake at night, wondering if our gear's going to be ready because we have to be ready as people, but is our tech going to be ready to support them too? So, we worry about that, but I have to say with Nutanix, I don't lose sleep. I know who to call if something's weird and it needs attention.>> Yeah, great support. What I love about the military and what you do, and it's a tactical edge solution that's going to have a real-world implication because we're all going to be edge and AI factories. Physical AI is coming, that's going to map to what you're doing. Mike, thanks for coming on and sharing your story with theCUBE. Appreciate it.
Mike Taylor
>> Oh, no. Great. Thank you so much.>> All right. Nutanix, changing the game.
Bob Laliberte
>> Appreciate it.>> Obviously, a great example of live migration. Not for the faint of heart, but healthcare, they have to do it. theCUBE is here bringing you all the live coverage. We'll be right back after this short break.
Bob Laliberte