Excited to speak with a customer, John Furrier and Dave Vellante welcomed Brendon McCaulley, Executive Director of IT Service Operations at Heartland Payment Systems, to theCUBE at the IBMEdge conference in Las Vegas.

• Innovation on the rise despite a flat IT budget

Furrier began by asking McCaulley how innovation was changing in IT and if he could elaborate on some of the “resets” that many technologists see occurring throughout the IT market.

McCaulley noted that in the past five years, his company has maintained the same budget, but experiences “explosive growth.” Outlining the challenges Heartland has been facing, McCaulley described “taking infrastructure that was very siloed […] and building in more flexibility into a true multi-tenancy environment with a real IO blender.” This new environment McCaulley cautioned, “has become a lot more unpredictable.”

Another difficulty McCaulley mentioned is the “competing interests” in IT: the “old stodgy way of doing IT” and the “new startup” mentality.

Automation encourages innovation and cooperation

Furrier delved a little further into the divide, asking “what does the collision course look like?”

Acknowledging a lot of companies likely face this issue, McCaulley said implementing automation had bridged the gap at Heartland. “What we’ve found,” he explained, “is immersing newer talent with employees that have been in IT for a long time and building those wins around automation, it gets everybody out of doing the mundane.”

McCaulley also touched on how automation has freed employees from humdrum tasks, affording them more time to invest in innovation. The ability to add new business value, McCaulley said, “Keeps IT relevant. It keeps IT part of the solution.”

• Balancing the budget to increase innovation

Vellante asked about the ratio of budget spent on innovation versus that spend on keeping the lights on at Heartland. McCaulley said that his department is moving closer to 50-50 ratio, which is drastic progress from when he first started, when the ratio was 80 percent keeping the lights on and 20 percent on innovation.

Infrastructure changes to handle business challenges

Next, Vellante asked McCaulley to talk about Heartland and “what’s driving things.”

Heartland Payment Systems, McCaulley said, “Is the 5th largest credit card processor in the US.” But they also penetrating new and complimentary markets: “debit card processing, gift and loyalty, payroll, school solutions, student loan processing.” The experience of handling a mixed workload and unpredictability, McCaulley said, “Has been eye-opening for IT.”

He also mentioned DevOps, where he said his department has taken an integrative approach to development and product offerings. The focus, McCaulley said, is “delivering value to the business and bringing transparency, good monitoring, and rapid infrastructure delivery to market.”

• Platform infrastructure better supports emerging applications

Vellante asked McCaulley to discuss the infrastructure Heartland uses, wondering: “have you been able to build a more horizontal infrastructure platform to support these emerging applications, to support acquisitions and the like?”

Describing his department’s move away from a silo infrastructure, McCaulley said, “We now have a platform infrastructure team” and infrastructure engineers focused on integration. The “siloed view” doesn’t function when teams attempt to work towards rapid infrastructure delivery and rapid application delivery.

• Using tech to spark organizational change

Pressing McCaulley on the move towards a platform infrastructure, Vellante asked, “How did you achieve that?”

“It started with virtualization,” McCaulley said, which contributed to server growth and caused storage and network challenges. These challenges pushed Heartland to switch to the IBM XIV platform. McCaulley explained that they chose the IBM XIV because it allows the IT department to  “add value to the business quickly.”

He said that the technology speeds processes up from hours to minutes — or seconds, adding that the XIV also allows for “a lot of transparency and monitoring.” McCaulley calls the XIV “the iPod of SANDS: you know what you’re getting, there are not hotspots, there’s no surprises and it’s really easy to manage.” The changes sparked by new technology in the server delivery and storage earned IT “some clout in the company,” allowing them to push for changes to the network and firewall environments. “All phases of our infrastructure delivery,” McCaulley added, “are accelerating.”

• Ops and infrastructure need to weigh in during the app design phase

Furrier asked McCaulley about automation and orchestration at the Ops level. He was also curious about the pressure McCaulley is getting from the drivers of the app developers.

“More and more what we’re seeing,” McCaulley said, “is developers going back to the consumerization of IT.” McCaulley explained that that the best way to make an application work well from an operations perspective is to have the infrastructure and operations teams present when the application is being designed. DevOps, McCaulley said, should take into consideration the “monitoring, measuring, health, scalability, recoverability,” and the ability for applications to repair themselves at the beginning of the design process for an application.

At Heartland, McCaulley continued, they’ve instituted “Ten Commandments of operational values” that function for both developers and operations.

• Dev and Ops come together to improve applications

Then, Vellante asked how McCaulley resolved the finger-pointing issues that arise when apps collapse, whether he drives an application-centric skill set and how that affected operations.

McCaulley explained that, much in the same way that he built clout when it came to servers and storage. McCaulley unites development and operations to construct best-of-breed applications.  Furrier pressed him on the process he went through and the learnings he drew as he overcame bumps along the road. In both the development and operational environments, McCaulley said, he felt as though he were running for mayor when the first started. But, as the process unfolded, both sides of the equation recognized the value in this effort: they’re working together to figure out how to “re-purpose applications with DevOps in mind.”

• Heartland’s Flash and Big Data technologies

Switching gears, Vellante asked “Do you use any Flash?”

McCaulley replied that they’ve “done a bake-off of several flash systems over the last six months.” They’re currently involved in a “try-and-buy on a flash system 840” and heartily approve of the “multi-purpose VMWare data storage and database driven app.”

Furrier then asked, “how about Big Bata?”

“Right now its purpose-build,” McCaulley said, sharing that they use Pure Data. He also mentioned that they use SQL-based data warehouse.

Furrier also wondered if McCaulley uses a different system for “the low-latency for big data cost per gigabyte by through-put.”

“Not really,” McCaulley replied. He explained that what they’re really trying to do is virtualize their SAND environment. “We’ve standardized on XIV or a long time,” he said, but what they found was that workloads like big data and high IO low-latency environments need something faster than XIV, which is why they’ve started looking into Flash 840 and SVCs and multi-tiers. He added that he doesn’t believe that they should put everything on the 840 — their goal is to virtualize their data center as much as possible.

Previously, Heartland “exposed all [their] XIVs to Flash systems as data stores and VMWare and let VMWare do that,” but they discovered that software like Virtual Storage Center will do that a lot better than any human can. By using software, McCaulley believes they can drive the efficiency and usage of their Flash System to deliver better value.

Moving towards software-defined infrastructure

Vellante commented, “That sounds like a step towards software defined,” and asked McCaulley for his take, as a practitioner, around software-defined.

McCaulley expressed his view that “software-defined should be around automation and orchestration.” It should, McCaulley said, add value-added services on top of high performance hardware. He believes this is also true for networking: “you need a high-performance infrastructure and then lay intelligence on top of it.” McCaulley also warned against “cloud washing,” which he describes as “putting automation and orchestration in top a poor infrastructure.” With a high-quality infrastructure, he said, waits are shortened to the sub-millisecond.

McCaulley’s innovation road map

To conclude, Furrier asked McCaulley to share his road map, his best practices, for innovation.

When optimizing delivery of infrastructure or operations, McCaulley recommended finding the area where there is the most room for improvement and starting there. He also cautioned that IT professionals should never stand still, or assume that they’re on top. All technologists, he said should aim “to be a ruthless follower of tech innovation.”