For the second time at VMworld, Rodney Perkins, IT Director Farmers Insurance Group FCU, was interviewed by John Furrier and Dave Vellante, theCUBE co-hosts, about the virtualization that took the world by storm.

Looking back to the time when Perkins started with Farmers, only three years ago, the virtualization was just taking hold and there were talks about consolidating servers. Now everything revolves around the cloud, business continuity strategies, delivering better disaster-recovery services, and trying to keep the end users by providing them better services and support.

With 50,000 members on board, Farmers Insurance Group needs to be cautious about embarking into the cloud. However, “you can’t but fall in line with the technology,” says Perkins. He needed to find ways to go around the red tape in order to provide the best technology that is out there, like Nutanix and VMware.

On Converged Infrastructure

Having mentioned Nutanix, John Furrier asked Perkins on his stance on Converged Infrastructure.

“Early on, when I was looking at virtual desktops, I looked at the traditional Blade and HP systems, and Nutanix was introduced to me on a small scale, so I started to do my research. My background is mainframe, desktops, network systems, and as soon as I saw the engineering behind the technology that Nutanix was running, it was a no-brainer.”

Rodney Perkins was so impressed with Nutanix that his quotes are featured as testimonials on their site: “The main selling point for us was the failover technology and being able to have our end users working without missing a beat. Nutanix continues to stay ahead of the innovation curve with this release. It is critical to have a solution that can adapt to such a fast paced industry while scaling at a level of granularity that best fits the growth of my business.”

Nutanix was the first company to offer a scale-out compute-and-storage appliance. Using a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) was almost like a greenfield, as nothing needed to be ripped and replaced. As far as protecting data is concerned, it is basically a one-day operation. Every day everything erases and you have a brand new desktop. Nothing stays dormant on that environment. Nothing accumulates caches and cookies.

To Rodney Perkins Agile means making sure that you have ease of administration and, simplicity over complexity.

See the full interview with Perkins here: