Cinemark speaks about their great experience with Mobius Partners and VMware

We recently worked with Cinemark on a project that they were trying to accomplish, and we thought it would be a good idea to have this event in the Cinemark Theater, celebrating the end of that first project we completed with them. Scott Bower is going to come up and talk to us a little bit about his experience and what they were trying to accomplish and where they were and where they are today.

Okay, great. I want to say thanks for having me and thanks for coming to the Cinemark Theater to watch The Great Movie today. What I talk about is going to be really different than Rena Center—Rena Center is really advanced in what they're doing, and at Cinemark we're still moving forward slowly on a lot of these things. A brief history: I've been with Cinemark about nine years. We have approximately 500 theaters, we're in 14 different countries. Where you see most of the technology at Cinemark is actually in the theaters; the corporate data centers and things like that are very small in comparison to a Rena Center. About 10 years ago, Cinemark had a data center and it was underpowered, unorganized, it didn't make a lot of sense. When I came into Cinemark, we made the move and did it the old-fashioned way: we put in old 6513 Catalyst switches, ran a bunch of cables, put in a whole bunch of power. About a year ago we renewed that contract for a data center, but we started looking towards the future—everyone's talking about cloud and all these emerging technologies. Beginning in January of this year, we replaced all of our Cisco infrastructure and went with the UCS path. Now we have our UCS blades, Nexus switches, and all the latest and greatest technologies. Way back when I saw VMware, I didn't quite get it. I have to be honest: when I saw a GSX server and I could run two servers on one, I thought it was the greatest thing ever. Then I could run three and four, and all these different new versions came out. I can say now that Cinemark is all in on VMware. The reason we're all in is because we believe it's the best hypervisor; it has the best tools, and it has solutions for more than just technology-related problems, as we heard from Rena Center. Something else that I think is very important is how I met Mobius. Depending on what positions you're in, you get a lot of phone calls and emails—'Hey, come see the Steve Jobs movie,' or 'I want to meet with you, I want to do this.' That's a challenge for all of us to manage. The reason I'm here today is not because Mobius has great cold calling; it's because VMware brought Mobius to us when we expressed an interest in changing and updating our VMware environment. They said, 'Let's bring in Mobius.' Inside every company there's challenges related to politics—if we do this here, do this here, do this here. I can say with confidence that we navigated through that process and we've been very successful with it. If there are concerns related to that, it's something we were able to get through. I'm also told if I say 'Mobius' I get $10 each time, so I'm going to say Mobius, Mobius, Mobius, Mobius! But again, VMware brought them to us. Now we have taken that small piece of business where we used to run some VMware here and we were on 5 Standard, and now we're up on vSphere 6 Enterprise Plus. We're obviously using high availability, distributed resource scheduling. We got the Operations Manager piece, which I can't speak to in all the detail because we just recently finished the product and I'm not that experienced with it, but from what I've seen, it's wonderful and what it can do for us. Site Recovery Manager is something else we're using, and that is critical to our continuity plan for moving forward in the future. Now, we talked a lot about automation and one-button clicks in terms of the future for VMware and what we're going to do at Cinemark. We don't know for sure, but we know there's a big cloud out there. In a few years, I'm going to have to look at my data center again and decide what I want to renew. The most important thing from a management perspective that I could leave you with is that we have put ourselves in a position where, in two, three, four years from now, we're going to be able to make the right decisions to best serve the needs of the customers—which could be our theaters, the accounting department, whoever it is. We're going to be able to serve them and make sure we're getting the best value. If that best value is implementing many of these automation methods, we have the ability to begin that process now. It's been a long road with me and VMware over the last 10, 15 years, and every time I see it, I'm still a little bit amazed that we can do more and more and more with it. I know my presentation is significantly different than Rena Center's—it's not necessarily a technology viewpoint—but if you have any questions or doubts, I know there's a few minutes for an open session that we'll be filming, and then I have two guys that work with me and we'd be more than happy to answer any questions one-on-one.

Yeah, so I know that when we started the project, when we were brought in, some of the things you were trying to address and Cinemark was trying to address were the need for a highly resilient, available infrastructure and a better way to do disaster recovery and high availability. Talk a little bit about the project we just completed with Cinemark. They were a vSphere 5.5 customer, they wanted to upgrade to vSphere 6 to take advantage of new features, specifically around distributed switches and NetFlow, but also for high availability and DRS. Also, they didn't have DR and wanted to address that. How has this helped you address those problems and needs? How has this vSphere 6 upgrade and Site Recovery Manager addressed your needs and problems? Has it been good, bad, different? Where do you stand on those things today?

We finished the project just a few months ago. When we started, I gave them an impossible date to meet—they met another impossible date. We missed it by about a month, which was actually ahead of when I thought it would be done, so they did a fantastic job. Since then, we have Site Recovery Manager up and running, and we're still in the initial phases of testing and validating that it's doing what it should. I have to admit, sometimes you just don't believe it works because before, there were complicated processes. Sometimes when things are too easy, we don't trust them that much. We're still walking through that trust process. As we continue to do our tests and document them and get the trust of the various departments, it will accelerate, and we'll be able to have 100% of our plan implemented. But it is a great way to do continuity—it really changes the way we think about the levels of difficulty to get things accomplished.

Okay, and Cinemark also has some vCloud Air, similar to Rena Center. When we talk about that, it's different primarily in scale. They're still doing a lot of the same things; big organizations and small organizations can all take advantage of this, and it does good for everyone. But what were your DR—how did you handle DR in the past before Site Recovery Manager?

DR in the past: we have a person directly responsible for that, who works with the key players—the application owner, the technologist, etc. While we still have that coordinator, now they're not focusing on how to do this little data part or that little part. Instead, we're focusing on 'okay, we need to take this object, get it over here, know it's going to be here, let's automate a small process here.' I think it's made it a lot easier for us. Again, we're still in the early stages, so I can't tell you that I've tested all my key applications and there were no issues, but from what I've seen on the applications we've tested, it looks really good. I think our continuity program is going to be able to expand and be more detailed. Continuity has a lot more to do than just technology, so now instead of focusing just on the technology, we can take this particular resource and have them focus more time with the business units and do other things that really add value. A lot of the value gain for Cinemark has been outside of bits and bites.

Right, right. Okay, and your plans to leverage—we have Site Recovery Manager working, and you also have vCloud Air Disaster Recovery as a service. I know you're not fully using that yet but starting to dip your toe in the water and test it out. How's that going?

Right now I would have to leave that for the technical guys to get into the details honestly. But it looks very promising, and again it's the path we're looking at. We're looking at moving potentially some development servers out there first—that's the first step everyone does. After we get comfortable with the development steps, we'll go into more of the continuity side. We have Site Recovery Manager and we still have the old way of storage and servers. The reason we did that is because we're comfortable with it and management is comfortable with it. To say, 'Hey, we're going to put in this new stuff and everything's going to be up in the cloud in case of emergency'—that's a bit much for them to swallow, especially when there's an investment in infrastructure. Site Recovery Manager is the main method right now, with an eye on the future being that cloud-based service.

Okay, and I know before we started this project, you didn't know Mobius and we didn't know Cinemark that well. We've made it through this first project together. What was your experience working with Mobius and the consultants we have, and the project in general? How did it go?

I traveled a lot during the implementation, so they actually got to use my office. They didn't leave a mess, so that was good. But seriously, they did a great job. It was very clear what the objectives were—it wasn't like 'maybe we're going to have this done'; it was etched in stone what our objective was. By defining the objective, we could determine if we had success or a level of failure. Every week I would get a nice update that, while it was a little long-winded sometimes reading on my phone, it had a page that said, 'These are the areas where we have issues, these are the people responsible for working on them'—whether it was a Cinemark employee or a Mobius employee. We actually ran into issues on our side that we had to resolve with our UCS implementation, and because of that, we slowed Mobius down. They were still able to accelerate through the issue after we got our part corrected and come very close to our date.

Yeah, I appreciate that. I will say Scott was tough to get over. It wasn't just because VMware brought you here; it was a test. We were going to let you come in and do this one project and see how it goes. I think we passed that test.

Absolutely. Mobius has done a great job for us. I don't know where everyone in this room is on their VMware path and converged infrastructure, but if you're interested in doing basic things like Cinemark is doing or more advanced things like Rena Center is doing, Mobius can be the partner that helps you do that. VMware, I can't stress enough, is a great platform. What I've talked about is just the small part—server compute and storage and things like that—but when we get into not just vCloud Air but mobile device management and other technologies, they're building a great portfolio of products that I think are going to help me and Cinemark be successful in the future. I think it can do the same for others.