Mike Somerville, Systems Support and Chief Cloud Evangelist at the University of San Diego joined Dave Vellante in theCube during the EMC World 2013 Conference this week. Vellante and Somerville discuss the University of San Diego network and the institution’s decisions to virtualize and use VBLOCK.

The University of San Diego uses a CISCO based network with wireless cloud over the whole campus. At any given time, 750 students use the wireless network concurrently. In addition to g-mail, the University uses Microsoft exchange for on premise email, oracle e-business suite, kronos time card and various other applications.

Vellante asks, with all the different technology, what is not virtualized? Somerville suggests the University of San Diego may never be 100 percent virtualized. Appliances, for example are not virtualized. But, according to Somerville: “If I don’t run exchange in a virtual environment, I’m a moron…And, it’s not going to run as well.”

From his own experience, Somerville suggests there is a myth that the layer is going to cause performance problems for your critical applications. He suggests this perception is due to a lack of expectation and experience. The remedy for him is simple: “All we can do is roll out more and more applications the same way and people will get more comfortable with it.”

When the University of San Diego decided to bring in VBLOCK to increase storage capacity they had two options. They could either simply buy more storage ore embrace a paradigm shift by utilizing converged infrastructure. Somerville was initially concerned that the latter would be too expensive, perhaps with a soft-sell afterwards. In other words, he thought a salesman might suggest: “So, now that you have this great new software, it will only cost you a little more for us to train your staff to use it.” Somerville says the cost was fair and the knowledge transfer and training was efficient.