Unify US8 150 watt PoE switch. So this is your basic Unify switch with all the cool Unify features ties into the Unify dashboard. And I realize I haven't reviewed one of these or taken one apart. So I figured time to take a look at them. This is actually destined for our office because we have a handful of PoE things at the very front of our office that we've added. And this is a convenient switch to do so. It's compact, it's small, it will fit in the rack but unfortunately it's not rack mountable. Now it does come with some ears that are already stuck to where it's going to go so I actually don't have them. I'm grabbing this before they get finished mounting it but you'll see in the box it comes with ears. It's not rack width so you can mount it flush on the wall but it's a great little 150 watt PoE. And I figured first thing we're gonna do is pop it apart. So we're gonna go ahead and take it apart here because I wanna look inside before we talk about some of the other features. And carefully, carefully, maybe, maybe, all right. There we go, we got it open. There's only two screws in it by the way. I took those out before we started. There's only two little screws in the back and now let's take a look inside. So the only two screws are go through this and into this so two at the back and it slides but we also have the light in the front which you do have to disconnect. So that gets that part of it off there, no big deal. And you see that there's no fan in it. So we have 150 watt power supply, the standard AC adapter right here, AC plug, Molex style connector. The one large passive heat sink which just does seem to operate. We left it on for a while, testing a handful of things on it. It seems to stay right around the 120 degree mark. I figure what that is in Celsius.   But it does not seem to be too hot nor need a fan. It did not come with one like I said here. So that's not been a problem. Build design standard. We got the nice little ubiquity right here. We did not find and if you referenced back two years ago in one of the first Unify videos we did find a fingerprint in one of these. This is no fingerprints inside of here. Everything's nice, clean and exactly as you see it. And being passively cooled is not bad. It does have the venting on the side right here to kind of passively get air flow through but I don't recommend stacking things on top of it. Is a all metal design here. So you can, all metal, metal and that will help kind of keep the heat somewhat dissipated cause metal will dissipate heat but if you start stacking things on top or blocking air flow on these side vents of just the ambient air flow that may happen it may get even hotter. So pretty basic from the inside. Like I said, everything looks solid. Somewhat easy if you were to have to replace the power supply because it's not soldered to the board.  But in the past because people have asked me about this have we ever had Unify switches go bad? Yes we have. Their army process is pretty pain free. Not really a problem. All right, let's go ahead and slide this back on. Oh, a little comment. It does have these little notches right here. So when you're putting it back together they clip into these when they slide so make sure it all lines up. Which is not difficult to do. It's just noteworthy if you're wondering why it doesn't line up. If you for some reason are like me and take your switch apart cause you wanna look inside of it. Or maybe you don't need to look inside of it cause I took it apart for you. So you kind of gotta get it on there and then push, squeeze and now it's lined up. Now if we look at the front here we have an SFP ports SFP not SFP plus these are standard one gig ports. Then we have eight POE ports. Now, in case you're wondering they do make a lower wattage version of this. They make a USG eight port with no SFP and only four of them are POE. That's a little bit less money than this one. This one right now a list for like 199. You may be able to find a cheaper but it's not, it's only a little bit more but you're getting 150 watts and this is full 802.3 AFAT POE plus. The other one I don't believe has the full support on there. You can compare it on their site and they have the specs listed but having the SFP obviously these ones are not POE but these are POE so you don't have to waste any POE ports interconnecting it between a switch or whatever your uplink is. So the switch is set up, adopted and I just threw a couple devices on there. This is what we were testing it with before we finished mounting it and putting it into our network here. But the switch works perfectly fine with POE. I'm running a Unify HD here and I grabbed a real link POE camera and plugged it in as well. And let's look at the software real quick. So it's part of any other Unify from air with the Unify software. It shows up in the dashboard, we adopt it, update it to the latest firmware and it's working perfectly fine. It also does a little mouse over so you can see how many watts each thing is using in here and it's got, we'll go over here to configure the ports. Here we go. Move this up. You can select, I'm gonna select them individually. It will show you exactly how many watts each port's using. So the camera's currently using 2.78 and the HD, which is plugged into port three is using 6.57. And if we go to edit the ports, you can see that we have, let's go down here, turning off the POE, 24 volt passive is supported and POE plus. Plus your other features such as switching, mirroring, aggregate, unicast, multicast, broadcast, LLDP med, this is for your pass through for your phones. The spanning tree protocol is supported and you can do egress rate limiting. So if you wanted to set a specific egress rate limit for it, that is possible as well to do some restrictions. Those are all the features that are supported on this, which it does not have some of the more advanced options that you may find in other ones, but for a small office, this is probably perfectly adequate for a lot of the use cases that you would want to use such as plugging in a couple of POE phones in a wifi and maybe a couple of cameras in a little four person office. That's where we've used a few of these before. Now the switch does support opening a terminal. I like this feature a lot. This is part of a unified feature, but you also have to have a new enough modern piece of unified equipment support. This is supported on quite a few different models and it's being able to turn all right to the device. And you can SSH into it of course, but I like being able to do it all through the UI right here and this allows us to start looking at what's plugged in and start pinging things. Cause sometimes just the basics is where you have to start to figure out why something's gone wrong. And let's look at uptime for example. And we can see how long it's been up for 16 minutes after I restarted it. That's some of the editing and me setting up for this video. So didn't, didn't, it has not been up too long. The system also has the ability to tell you what temperature it's operating at. And after 16 minutes we're at 49 C. I don't know what that is in Fahrenheit. I think it's like about 120. So it's a roughly 120, which is what we see it kind of peek out at after it's been on for a while. So it doesn't get much hotter than this, at least you are testing it has not. I imagine if I leave this on top long enough, maybe it'll get a little bit warmer. But like I said, the venting is on the sides here. But overall it's another solid little switch from Unify. I like the fact, like I said, it being passive. There's no fan story about. There's no noise if it's in a small office or happens to be sitting in your desk. And I've mentioned this before. I really like for example, these Unify nano HDs. If you were a home user and looking to get a basic but good switch and jump into the Unify ecosystem, you can combine for example, the Unify Gen 2 plus controller, the Unify nano HD and maybe a couple of cameras. And you can build out a pretty small home office or small home user setup for not too much.  So I think it's a good buy. Well, that's why we bought it and that's why we're deploying for some of these small offices and things. And thank you for making it to the end of the video. If you liked this video, please give it a thumbs up. If you'd like to see more content from the channel, hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon if you like YouTube to notify you when new videos come out. If you'd like to hire us, head over to laurancesystems.com, fill out our contact page and let us know what we can help you with and what projects you'd like us to work together on. If you wanna carry on the discussion, head over to forums.laurancesystems.com where we can carry on the discussion about this video, other videos, or other tech topics in general, even suggestions for new videos that are accepted right there on our forums, which are free. Also, if you'd like to help the channel in other ways, head over to our affiliate page. We have a lot of great tech offers for you. And once again, thanks for watching and see you next time.


This study focused on developing a novel-targeted drug delivery system for tummothoxiastradial, TUMI, a promising anti-cancer agent. The researchers used titanium dioxide, TIO2, nanoparticles coated with polyethylene glycol, PG, and loaded with TUMI. They then characterized the resulting compound using infrared spectroscopy, FTIR, and Raman spectroscopy. The results showed that the TIO2-PG-TUMI composite had distinct vibrational modes compared to pure TIO2 or PG alone. This indicated that the drug was successfully attached to the surface of the nanoparticle. The authors also found that the TIO2-PG-TUMI composite had a higher loading capacity than pure TIO2 or PG alone. Finally, they discussed the potential applications of this drug delivery system. This article was authored by Andrea Leon, Patricia Ryukwin, Carolina Garan, and others.


Hello everyone, my name is John Hammond and welcome back from the try hack me video today I'm going to be showcasing the lazy admin room it is a free room So you do not need to be subscribed to access it. I'm joined the room here, and I've spun up a machine The prompts here are what is the user flag and what is the root flag? So it's not a guided sort of hand-holding procedure that try hack me does in some of its other walk-through rooms This is more of a challenge oriented room. So I've gotten started created a directory for ourselves. I'm connected to the VPN I've also gone ahead and made a simple read me where I've got my IP address set up as a variable that I can reuse And the tasks and stuff so we can take take our notes And I've also gone ahead and started the nmap scan with nmap tack SC tack SV tack on nmap initial So it looks like we have SSH open on port 22. We also have port 80 open So it seems to be hosting a web server. So what we can do is we can go ahead and go access that server I will grab the IP address one last time go fire it up in a web browser If Google Chrome will let me go to that address bar and we're reading with just the simple Apache to Default page so it doesn't seem to be anything here. We could scroll through the source But nothing particular jumps out at me. So we'll start our regular enumeration techniques. I'm going to go ahead and end map HTTP colon slash slash our IP address. I think it needs tack H I don't know why I'm fluking on that idea looks like it does so let's go ahead and tee that out to Neato log I'll also get started with some go buster so we can go ahead and enumerate. Okay, what does this web page actually have for us? So we need our URL. Let me grab that IP address. Just nice quick and easy Great now. Let's go buster tack you HTTP That IP address go ahead and use a word list and I'm going to be using the directory list that Durbuster typically ships with so, okay that immediately found a slash content and We can go view that Nope misspelled content there and it says welcome to sweet rice Thank you for your install of sweet rice as your website management system The site is building now. Please come late Roger if you are the webmaster go to dashboard general website settings and uncheck the box site close Open your website looks like this will link us to The documentation or some things to do when sweet rice is installed sounds like sweet rice is a Content management system or CMS. So I'm gonna view the source here. It's kind of messy I want to get an idea on what version number that the sweet right page is Looks like there's some JavaScript dashboard course and 0.54 Not sure if that's the current version of the sweet rice package Nothing else seemingly in there any other links No, no, okay, so no real version number as to what this sweet rights installation actually is No other pages that go Buster found anyway, let's go ahead and do our research on sweet rice I'll go ahead and start up a search exploit So I can look for Sweet rice, okay looks like there are a couple options here remote file inclusion Multiple vulnerabilities looks like those are just text files They might be explaining what the process actually is arbitrary file download and arbitrary file upload again Not sure the version number 0.53 0.54 which we saw in the JavaScript might Tell us that okay. We know that's at least a potentially real version number not just something arbitrary We saw in the JavaScript Cross-site request forgery cross-site request forgery in PHP code execution that does sound peculiar Okay, let's take a look at what that is search plate tack x on that path Looks like what we'll do Reading through this in the sweet rice CMS panel adding an ad section will allow an admin to add PHP code It can take advantage of the CSRF vulnerability or cross-site request forgery and allow the attack to execute PHP code on the server In this exploit. I just added an echo Hacked PHP info and you can customize this for yourself. Okay, so it gives us some HTML code and allows us to go ahead and inject it We might need To modify where this is actually showcasing it though Local host is obviously not going to be our target We need to change the IP address and sweet rice might need to be changed to content We can certainly try that Let's let's go ahead and copy this and Work with it. I will Kind of check in our other scans seemingly nothing Let's go ahead and move into exploit and then search exploit tack M So we can copy that and let's move that over to our own like exploit HTML or something Let's go ahead and check out what we can do with this We don't need all these comments here, but we should go ahead and change this specific IP address so that should be what we're looking at. Oh and content as well. So let's actually just completely change that AS type equals add hidden move adds hack and it would put it in what location where would it put this? Okay after HTML executed you can access the page on that location ink adds a hacked Let's tinker with it Because it has the correct URL in there now, we should just be able to open up this HTML document and add it in To our specific page. Why does the text area HTML just muffed with I go hacked and showcase PHP info Let's see if that will actually work for us. Just tinkering just exploring. Let's fire Fox over to exploit and Oh Boy, okay, did it already do it? Do I need authentication doing to access it? admin admin log in failed That did not seem to work Maybe it automatically rent it because it said on load document exploit submit so exploit Yeah, is the name of this so go it went ahead and submitted it And I don't know if it's actually going to be accessible or not without having actually Now without having any credentials it didn't seem to work for us. Okay, so what could we do if we have Arbitrary file read and some of those other search plate options Let's check this out one last time Remote file inclusion multiple vulnerabilities arbitrary file download backup disclosure. Maybe that has some potential Credentials in some of the backups so let's try that search exploit tack x Proof of concept you can access all my sequel backup and include and download them from this directory local host Ink my sequel backup. Is that a thing? Oh We saw earlier ink actually just can't comes off of the Content page in our case because it's not sweet rice on this site. It's content. So let's go ahead and try that ink my sequel backup Is that a directory? Oh, no, it needs the it needs the ink right back to that It needs ink To include right there we go. Oh my sequel backup. Let's try and copy this link address Let's move back and make a directory for backups backups backups backups and Let's W. Get this see what we have here sequel file It is a PHP script weird. Oh boy. Okay attachment as a table Category as a table. I don't care about those. I want users. Do we have some users? Oh Oh Going down. What is that? Global settings looks like a serialized objects here Author title keywords. That's a long string. Oh Admin user is manager and his password. It password is this that looks like a hash That looks like so I'm seeing how many characters is that 32 so 32 hexadecimal characters may very well be a hash Let's go over to crack station and try to see if we can crack that hash So I'll just slap that in here. Yep, not a robot Password one two three classic super cool. Okay, so now with that we might be able to Go ahead and use that upload Vulnerability so manager was his username and password one two three was his account What is the user flag? What is the root flag? Those are just the tasks I need to finish Let's go back to access our exploit Firefox exploit That's gonna go ahead and submit it but we need to log in so it's manager and password One two three fired off that succeeded Did that work? I Don't know Let's go find out It put it in content and where did that exploit say would put in ads hacked dot PHP Let's try that ink ads that hacked on PHP. No, let's try and run that again now that we have that session created within our browser And I killed Firefox when I did that so that was lame. Let's go ahead and do that exploit one more time Log in Okay, now that I've backgrounded Firefox I should be able to Firefox exploit one more time They go ahead and submit it and now I've created that page. Okay. Awesome. Now. Let's go see if we can go ahead and access it Just for our simple proof of concept, right? We wanted to see if it would load that PHP info page and it does Okay, awesome. So we could potentially leverage this to remote code execution. Let's go ahead and Copy our PHP reverse shell over in here So let's just call it like rev shell dot PHP. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to modify that to include my IP address as the attacker which is 1080 38 currently so That should be the correct IP address and let's listen on port quad nine and Now let's include all of this inside of that exploit rather than running Their little PHP info proof of concept. Let's include this whole thing Okay, so now we have that whole reversal in there let's change this to rev shell and That's all that it needs seemingly so it's not not longer going to be put in the hacked page But the rev shell PHP page. Let's go ahead and try that. We still have Firefox open and running So I can go ahead and use that Firefox exploit one more time and That has submitted and created rev shell dot PHP. Okay, great. So now let's start up our listener Oh, that port is already in use. Why is that port already in use? What am I doing something else? What are you doing? How does a SS show me processes is it supposed to pseudo P kill net cat Maybe I already have something up when I was just testing things Our just already in use. Well, dang it. I already made that as a prompt. I don't have net set installed And I don't know the syntax for SS off the top of my head. Let's go learn it Let's go figure it out SSC process name. Maybe it is tacky TLNP probably the same syntax TLNP Oh PP to show processes, right? Crap 999 e What is that? That's totally not what I'm referring to. That's totally not what I need All right, let's just friggin change the port Quad 8 who cares So now we can go use that and let's change it to just shell rather than rev shell because I'm apparently just making mistakes in this video great now let's Firefox our exploit and Because he's logged in this will has that session now we have a shell great Can I please listen on quad 8? Please pretty please. Okay, awesome. That's good. So now that that's created Let's go over to our ads and go to shell PHP and that will execute and give me a shell over here Okay, awesome So I wanted to use this video as kind of a vessel to showcase some of the Pty upgrade elevation techniques So you've probably seen me before use Python taxi Import Pty Pty dot spawn bin bash, etc. Etc. I found this resource net sec And I want to showcase it to you because it has kind of needs some some neat tricks Not just doing this within Python, but also doing it with other commands So Pearl some syntax here to execute bnsh same thing in Ruby and Lua You can also do this. Okay, if you're in Vim or vi and NMAP those will be able to break out and get you a shell The Pty is super duper helpful one cool trick that I learned just recently is actually using the script command. So Did's that not like that I Guess he's just still spawning sessions. Okay user bin script should allow me to use QC and Start bin bash and save all that output to dev null. So now you can see dub dub dub data thm Shell I've spawned a Pty without using Python So in the cases that you don't have Python available or you don't know if it's using Python 2 or Python 3 this user bin script Tack you see spawning bin bash and writing up to dev null will give you that this technique does still let you use that foreground or background the neck at connection and then run your STT raw minus echo so you can foreground the session again and Then gain your auto completion tablet auto complete and command history and left and right arrow keys So that is very very nice as well. And again, you're not using Python. So that's a good help Okay, now that we're here we could go ahead and look around the file system We're start to do some enumeration because we have our initial access. So let's go ahead and try and upload Lynn peas again, I'm gonna use my poor man's pentest framework. So I can just simply Upload that guy nice and easy Good good I'm already in that directory. Let's make Lynn peas executable and let him run a lot of stuff rolling through. Oh Boy, okay pseudo entry. I should just ran pseudo attack L just to see user dub dub dub data may run the following commands here No password to run pearl with a specific script. Okay peculiar Can I see what that script does? Home that was in it guy. Can I see his files? I can oh, there's a user text file. Can I read that? Yes, nice nice. So that's going to be the first flag that we need Go ahead and keep note of that and submit it on the page there we go and Let's see this backup.pearl file. So cutting that out It's running pearl. Can I write to that? Can I write to pearl? No, I cannot But it seems to run SH on its et cetera copy dot SH, okay What is that guy? Whoa someone else Someone else was someone else here already What is it? Why is it creating our verse shell? Can I write to that? I can write to that and it's running his route owned by root. So maybe it's running his route Oh, I mean, I'm gonna run it as root when I use pseudo. So let's go ahead and modify this nano et cetera copy dot SH and Let's nerf that guy's Reverse shell and let's put ours in pentas monkey reverse shell cheat sheet Let's slap in the syntax for Simple netcat. I mean, I guess we kind of had it already From this guys. We didn't need to do that. But hey, I am my attacker at 10.8 38 and let's put it on port 777 Cool. Okay. So now let's get another shell ready and waiting for me Tack Ellen VP can't see because of my microphone. I shouldn't be looking at the keyboard anyway So catting that file out now we have our reverse shell in place and if I run it as root Thanks to our pseudo tack L We should be able to go ahead and pseudo user bin pearl call a pearl script which in turn it calls a bash script Whack enter and now I have that shell here. I'll go ahead and stabilize Python taxi. Do I have? Python 2 or just regular Python my prompt I do. Okay, so let's stabilize that shell quick and easy for us We could do the same thing with that Script technique that I just showed but now that we are in root. Let's go ahead and grab that root dot text file. Okay All done nice and easy That was kind of cool. I hope you I hope you like those techniques Abusing the sweet rice CMS Finding out some of those credentials because of their backups that we were able to look through and then using that PHP code execution to add an advertisement into the page So very very cool and search exploit totally Really really sped up our research for us because we're able to go ahead and find that vulnerability and It's already well known. So that's that I also wanted to kind of use this video to showcase those spawning a PTY or TTY techniques Because I was able to open nano with that setup that I had I was able to potentially run SU if I needed to I know if you're just a regular kind of reverse shell without stabilizing anything then it's gonna ask you Hey, you need to be in a full PTY you can do that just as easily with these commands that you see me run often That new trick that I learned the bin script user bin script tack you see bin bash dev null and Exporting the terminal variable and using stty raw minus echo to get your foreground lots of lots of good stuff So okay, that's all that I wanted to cover a good quick and easy Linux room to showcase some of that stuff Thank you guys so much for watching if you did like this video Please do do the YouTube algorithm things press that like button comment Subscribe hit the bell That's so weird to me Hit a bell. You got a real a real life bell that you're just like whacking repeatedly Whatever Thank you guys. I hope to see you in the patreon if you were willing to support PayPal donations I'm so so grateful loves you guys on discord server link to description Twitter Facebook Instagram LinkedIn all the others. Thanks for watching


Good evening. I was not aware we were starting on time today. Usually we start nine quarter past, but since we're so full-house Let's get started Welcome to our second talk here tonight in the Istanbul 95 Series. It's a great pleasure for us to have Algar here. I got Blitz from Amsterdam We're very curious to see what you will show you they show us here tonight But being from Istanbul, I'm sure you know some of the work that the Algar have done in this city But I will leave the floor to you Algar and looking forward to here Okay For your kind introduction. It's actually great honor for me to be here The first time ever that I'm simultaneously going to be translated by someone Thank you. I've never had that before only people repeating my words Istanbul I'm from Amsterdam Amsterdam is a village compared to Istanbul. That really intrigues me I was thinking what am I going to tell you actually? What can I bring for you? Because I don't know anything about Istanbul or hardly So I thought it would be good to actually tell you about what intrigues me what I find important and hopefully You like it First a small introduction because Carp is the design studio. I found it 20 years ago But Carp is not only me Carp is a whole bunch of people and without them I'm nothing that's how simple it is These are not the actual people yet because I didn't have a newer picture that gives you an idea But this is how we still like to see each other Children playing around because designing is actually also kind of play we play With the stuff that we have and we shape that into a design and we try to keep this Childhood way of looking at a child is not not Charlie, but like looking at it as a child We work all over the world Which is very very nice It also means a lot of traveling and It's very strange to come in other areas where you have no idea about the culture and they expect you to tell you something I always feel a little bit strange them because what shall I tell actually? Just a few products that we have done over time to get you an idea maybe you've seen part of our work, maybe you haven't And Quickly the one in the left corner is a museum area The second one is in Singapore. You will probably recognize the right lower and core low Corner, which is the soil center here in Istanbul Many different projects so now we are going to the real subject What does play mean? people have lots of Descriptions for play, but this is how I look at it and what I have learned over time First of all play is the base of all culture now. We're playing at this moment. You're listening. I'm telling there's a kind of a role play This was there is a famous book of your own house can go as such a story in that wrote the book home alluding that's all about play Play is everything that comes after mankind's need if you have slept If you have eaten if you have a roof over your head all the rest can be considered play This is an image of Aldof van Eyck who used play actually to have people meet in the city Now what kind of playground mean because we are designed playing playgrounds. I Wouldn't mind if it's a little bit lower Can everybody hear me very well? Okay What kind of playground mean what can I contribute actually to a place? Well, first of all it should evoke play that's kind of obvious because otherwise it's not a playground Then we Should be able to give identity to a place because if I look at playgrounds They're all the same. They're all the same houses. You're not saying I I meet you at the playground there But here you meet at the blue square, you know actually Where you are sense of place that is something that the playground can do for a neighborhood Could be sculpture. I don't know why should it actually be the equipment that we know it should actually If the option for a non-directive way of using Or could it even cater for the unexpected something that we didn't design But on this one hot day out of the year in the Netherlands because usually it's very cold People just filled it up and it became something else. That is actually what I cannot design this This is a part surprise for me as well. And this is a very old project and I still like it up to today Because this is what people do with the design that we the play design that we make A brief history Because what we do there's nothing new about what we do And I found this picture of Kuro Kaneko This is from 1935 in Japan Even for today's standard. This is a very very exciting Different playground No Gucci famous artist actually he wanted to give I Am a little bit faster you wanted to give some sort of a social meaning to a sculpture and that's how we got into designing playgrounds and We are still learning from that today, but again, there's nothing new. This is design I can tell you lots about it, but we have seen what other people already have done in the 20th century Or in this oiler center learning from Kuro Kaneko Actually, I didn't know about the Japanese slide before but there's nothing new in this world And that is actually very interesting every time we reinvent play for certain spaces But what happened? Before the 80s of last century many playgrounds were actually being designed or developed by artists by architects by Local initiatives we wanted to do something, but suddenly the world Or I should say the commercial world took over Safety became a big issue which is of course a big issue, but it resulted in this kind of Playgrounds you're probably all familiar with For me, they're not very attractive although Children might think about that in a different way And then we even invented a natural play we make wooden playgrounds. This is probably not the nicest example There's nothing natural about this as there is natural about that It's the same house actually The natural play should be playing in nature and not with a swing made out of a natural material And then my question is isn't all Play natural by nature It doesn't matter where you play it is about how you play And that can be in a green environment And this is a bad image, but it's Sorry for that But this is the one after it is completely artificial Environment, but it's the same type of play So we should actually look at it From a broader perspective see what can you do with it rather than what does it look like? Which is strange saying so because I'm a designer Another thing that I wanted to address is we're always talking about all inclusive everybody's invited if you're in a wheelchair You should be able to get there, which is also a good thing But this is what we built for impaired Children to me it looks like torture incidents I found this on a website. They were actually Saying look at this playground. How great is it? We built this as all inclusive playground There are no children there, but I don't see how it works either And what does that mean all inclusive because we're talking about wheelchair people are we talking also about mentally impaired Physically impaired socially handicapped autistic children. We always forget about it. We think about wheelchairs Um So my question would be should play focus on disabilities or capabilities And I'm showing you this image because it's a playground actually built around a ramp But nobody actually recognizes this as a playground for disabled And that is the main quality of it Um So should it look like that this is also built around the toolkit For disabled children they can actually reach practically everything on the wheelchair Only for the last bit they have to get out Um visually impaired They can actually use the playground very very well But we never have the sign so that they can learn how work develop discover on forehand how you can use this playground and um To be honest this boy is not impaired, but do we know we have no idea um Because it's actually the son of my uh companion in the company, but I just want people to look at it. We have no idea. We don't know we we have no idea what impaired we are all impaired in a way Um, then another thing why should playgrounds have lots of color Very nice colors cotton candy like everybody likes it Or I hope we all agree this is not such a nice color scheme Or maybe the ugly Probably we don't even want to have this around the corner Although I think it's very nicely done and they nicely stay within the shape of the skate park Um It's a little bit difficult to see but this is actually all black with a hint of color And this is one time we did all black playground and um Children won't mind. They just see your playground. They're totally not interested in the color schemes that we all think of And actually what they did they used it as a blackboard One of these other things we tried to or I wish I could incorporate in the design Of uh beforehand, but I cannot they they just did this and this is great so Then can play be a catalyst and with can play be a catalyst. I mean can it be A catalyst for a certain space in the city or in the village or maybe even In a park And I chose this image of a mine site in Belgium Where they actually Use this to attract tourists It's a playground the question is can you build a playground? But it's meant to get tourists back into the area because the mine is closed that need to be a little bit more activity Uh And people look at it and ask what is it for? I don't know but can you play on it? Yes, certainly you can play on it. Take a look at it And and it's a very steep climb everybody wants to get up. I can tell you if you're in front of it you want to get up and Over here, there's also what we call a stairway to heaven all grown-ups are using this playground If we say it's a playground, they are probably a little bit scared off, but if they look at it, they're all They're all willing to try to see how they can get up And I call it a monument for camaraderie because all people that used to work in the mine Before that don't see each other anymore Go there with their children and they talk to each other and they meet each other again And Well, I can go on like this, but it's Quite clear what we mean Um Can history repeat itself? um Let me further explain in the beginning of the 19th 20th century, there was this health And A health movement I should say people should get outside Shoot exercise Should Be in the open air the building should have large windows, etc. etc and in Amsterdam in the layout of Amsterdam From that time that is the beginning of the 20th century They had the urban layout and they kept open spaces for playground and this is seriously in 1908. It was an open field with swings and sea sauce um That really became the place to be to go to with for all families with kids But also for grandparents for everyone and they had an organization there a playground association that Maintained the equipment, but there was also a social hub People gathered there people met there And But then something happened The city was taken over by cars And in the meantime I need to express that the organization of these playground Foundations collapsed people didn't want to do that anymore And 30 years later we have solved the problem a little bit of the cars. They're nicely parked But still there is I actually need to explain sorry um This street here There's hardly any cars there Here you have more and here actually the whole playground has disappeared because it's surrounded by cars And the children that live here actually cannot really easily reach the playground anymore And then the next step in Amsterdam because this is an episode was taking out the cars and put them under the ground And now the buildings are again connected to this playground again the the playground is actually here It's all the same space. We're talking about And this is what it looks like today It is An area that is completely renewed and used for play sports Etc but it's Also a commercial space because there is a little coffee shop And that is the new neighborhood. This is taken over from the playground foundation So we try to find new ways to solve the same problem. That's actually what I want to express here so I've called this steps strategies to enhance play spaces in urban Areas And what can we do? I recently have been working together with or urban design for the city of Amsterdam on a book called the active city And the active city was all about strategies about how can we make the city more interesting and actually This is where I wanted to go with my previous story Because we can think about nice playgrounds. We can think about nice sports facilities But how can we actually use play and sports to keep the city active and interesting and attractive to live in? Because that is actually the question behind it or that is a question behind it for me and There were many contributors to this book and of course I contributed to the part of play And this is the new manifest for the city of Amsterdam And I chose this to tell you a little bit more about this because actually This is where I see the relation with Istanbul Except for probably the problems that Istanbul faces are much bigger than Amsterdam Not only from the size But also from the importance of having a car because the active city Is a city that is a healthy city and this refers back to the playground movement in the 20th century again And And I've chosen two projects actually to tell my story One this project You saw in the previous picture. It's called from burning a plane and that is the first one and In short This is the new active city How can we get cars out of the street? How can we make people move in buildings? How can we let children play? How can they reach the playground? How can we cycle to school? How can children cycle to school? How can we have small sports hub near your house? Lots of things Are addressed in this book And for me sports and play Although sports is probably for a different age group don't differ that much. You've got recreational sports I used to be a skateboarder. Is that playing? Is that sport? I don't know And first of all and you've probably all seen this and this is a little mistake in my presentation here It's the importance of spatial justice. I'm not telling you anything new And this is about how much hours per day should children actually have physical activity Adult and uh all the people because that is really important. They need to do that to stay healthy But where can they do that? These were the two main Issues that we discussed in the book from certain perspectives and from my perspective that was Uh play Okay cycling or walking main activities. I know that director is from Copenhagen. He'll recognize it is although these are tourists on a bicycle But your green spaces are being used as activity spaces these days um So people already do this They invent things in the city to play and Activities like parkour or free running and What we are doing at the moment in Amsterdam is having sports facilities being opened up And if you take a good look there's no fans around it. This is just a public Running track So you need to have open facilities not closed off facilities and An example case of an active space And I start with a park and this is an old project and this is a project that has been very important for me because it's a long time ago and It took quite a while to achieve this But actually it already addresses the elements. I've just discussed open spaces and Here we go to design tools for for sports and it's about shared sports facilities And big sports facilities and open structures Amsterdam this is Amsterdam is a City that is built like an onion. This is the old city And we've got the first layout then we've got the after second world war layout And this is mainly After 2060 This circle is our periphery And we are discussing this part here This is a big green area within the periphery one of the Parts of the city that is thrown to fell in the hands of developers for building Actually giving up this space To for new buildings Instead of keeping it green and it's very important For all of us. You notice that I'm not specifically talking about play, but this is all about play as well. We play It's very important to keep these open spaces in your periphery Within instead of building them. So you have to go outside in your car to go to a park to go to a playground And this is the area was an old sport complex for For every anyone who is into soccer. This was the old former Ajax Soccer stadium site And this is what it looked like This was an abandoned area people only used it to go from a to b And not after 10 o'clock because you didn't feel secure anymore And our question actually was Can you build a playground here if you build a playground there probably is becoming an attractive space And then we started thinking and I don't know Having a playground Somewhere in the middle where people don't want to go that's not making that is not going to be an attractive space So what we did actually is This is the whole sports facility we discussed with the municipality To see if they were willing to take out all fences Make it public sports facilities. So that there was a new 24-7 activity going on in on this facility rather than going at four o'clock to your training for soccer um And then they suddenly turned out plans of 10 years ago that they had discussed that And they said maybe we should do this. So What we did is we took out first we took out all fencing of this area And then we developed Only this part and we said all the areas in between the sports facilities is actually already park You can run around freely. There's no cars You can make use of it the way you want. You can use the soccer or the sport court facilities and even the Organization that were already there benefited from it because suddenly there was much more activity going on And Then the only thing we actually did physically is building this playground This is a strip in the middle And our only Intervention was this part and the strip here making it green again and making a large playground And this is what it looks like today Um This has a park like character Everywhere it's explained how the How it works that you can make use of everything. So we actually turned it into the largest playground that you can think of um Center section Um families like to go somewhere and bring their lunch and and play Of course, there is the the playground Interesting to mention is that is this is actually a part of the water system of Emsen and that we turned into a water playground um So from here you can actually go to the sports facility and and go back again And this needs no further explanation um What we find important important in playgrounds and this is the hub of this particular area is blending functions Um because we don't believe in making playgrounds that are separated parts 2 to 4 4 to 6 6 to 8 8 12 Can you tell if someone of 5 years old has the motor skills to run up that hill? And uh, does that also mean that another one of 5 year olds has the same motor skills playing is about discover To discover what you are capable of rather than saying this is for you. You cannot do that Um, then we put in and this is another thing For playgrounds. We put in something very specific that is actually not for children for playing Is the professional boulder climbing wall? We had a reason for doing that because it brings in a certain group of people to this area that If you remember, I said it was an abandoned area Now we bring in a dedicated group of professional climbers that are going to use this and then Here they're using it, but please Take a look at this this little boy here is playing and is actually Seeing what these grown-ups are doing there and he's going to ask what are you doing there? Can you teach me etc?   I cannot climb but it's too difficult this wall is really as Tens of different routes On it But they just see how it's being used by the professional wallers. They ask They teach them then they try to do it themselves Uh, and it has become a very very lively part of this sport facility Only because we put a playground in the middle and again I'm not emphasizing on the playground itself But that has all the elements you can expect in the playground as well Again, we use play as a catalyst for space and to activate the space And to turn it or maybe even bind it together because everybody that goes there with his kids Talks to someone else with kids And that is probably More important than anything else Then the von Beuninger plan that was another part that is being addressed in the book um again places without borders And a small square In a Free war layout that means houses for I cannot really say but let's say the working class They had new social housing there. They had this playground there And all these areas in Amsterdam gentrify rapidly Um And are being refurbished renewed Uh, including the playground, but what should you do on a playground because if you participate Are we going to have a bowl court? Are we going to have a playground? Are we going to have a slide? Are we going to have a skate park? Are we going to have a splash pad with water? It's only a small square and it should cater for the whole neighborhood And we always think of elements that we should Incorporate in the playground where we think there are better strategies um Just quickly This this is the square. This was the old playground We have seen it before it developed in the 80s into a sort of a Abandoned place actually here was the the basketball court. He was the cent fit. He was the clubhouse Um, and then we tried to think of a plan and I didn't do this on my own. I did this together with uh for the building's concrete architects and for the Landscaping from dyke and co landscape architects We took out the streets and so All houses around that are connected to the square again. That is already very important So you can move because it's very important for children that they can go somewhere safe They shouldn't be Brought out there by a car.  That is very important. You don't see it anymore When I came to Istanbul today, I was uh sitting in the taxi another taxi a car And I see the new coastal development And there's plenty of playgrounds there But when you are a child you cannot reach those playgrounds your parents have to bring you there And then you can play for an hour and then we all go to the restaurant or somewhere else importance of play in a city is Places that are Dedicated for play where everybody is welcome and that you can reach when you're six year olds that your parents still believe that you Uh can go there on your own and feel safe not being hit by a car Um And why shouldn't we combine sports and play? Why should a playground and this is uh part of that strategy? Why shouldn't it be a water playground or a panna field or a basketball court in the same time Because we only have the small square and we didn't want to make choices And of course this is not the best basketball court that you can think of or the best water playground that you can think of But it has it all on a very small space Um Again as said about the sports facilities Borderless spaces This is the playground that you can sit there and it has a tree there. What I mean is it is You want that Yeah, sure I come to that later, but it's a good question. That is uh, of course we do but we can elaborate on that a little bit more um Actually, we think this is very nice because you want to be not sitting on this formal Ben share you want to be part of the playing of your kids and look at this She's bringing her baby And daddy is watching and somebody is passing through it should be an environment and it's up to you how you use it um And we also made these transitional areas around the sports facilities because um It can be used for skating. It can be used for uh, uh, on a bmx bike at all There is no Um rigid border Of course, this is the soccer field, but if you want to go skate go skate on on the edges here Um We try to and I showed this image before design Playgrounds that don't tell you this is for this is not a spring rider for two years old Um, actually in the morning. Oh, oh, I'm going way too fast now In the morning, you will find toddlers here because for them there are little, uh Hamok swings Um At the end of the day you will find Very often girls actually sitting there that are 12 years old. They talk to each other and they Play with their phones So it can change over the day Why should it be a spring rider and this place for girls where they can sit or for boys where they can do whatever It can be everything. It depends on the user So what we try to do is we try to almost design Each independent it's on the user Or the user defines what it will be Um, that is also actually raising questions because sometimes people ask what is it for? um Another thing Is the playground for children or for parents or is for families actually it's for all um Again, if I take a look at at most conventional playgrounds, what I see is um Equipment and then there's benches around it, but actually this is designed in a way That you're almost invited to run over Nobody can tell you you're not allowed to run over because is it is it a bench? Is it a table? Is it a playground? We have no idea that also depends on the user. It's obvious obviously that all parents are sitting here and watching the playground But you can also have a lunch there You see what happens children are climbing the trees And we purposely try to design in a way that it doesn't look like a playground because if it does You can play there and you're not allowed to use the other part anymore because that is meant for for as is for sitting or that is meant for Playing basketball So we try to have all these functions overlap in obstacles that are not quite obvious what they really are um For me, this is all clear. It doesn't need any further explanation and again Is it for skating? Is it to sit? You'll have to find out and the whole deer deer is About having a playground for all ages and then i mean two to 88 Somebody then asked me should you put up a sign? Are you not allowed when you're 89? No, everybody's invited. It's 24 seven It's on the user groups how they use it how they make use of it and Honestly monday morning 10 o'clock. Would you expect many skateboarders or be a mixers coming in now their own school? Totals go there with the parents with buggies and believe me, uh, oh I'm using the wrong button They also used it on the on the little trikes. They also Go around it. It's not but you also know that someone on the skateboard will use it differently I guess this guy just did some shopping and it started now and is looking how people actively behave on this square And how they do that so again For us these edges here are very playful and we don't think in designing in um Certain activities, but almost in affordances in it is what you see in it and how you can use this And and then i'm going to be ahead of the question is this Giving problems Because you have different user groups that might come in there on the same time Um, well, we discovered that it takes a couple of weeks, but then they all know exactly in this neighborhood how it works Sunday afternoon four o'clock this This guy, uh, and his friends. I just made this up Play basketball. So this the the people that play football come at a different time slot um skateboarders usually Stay behind this, uh, ball catcher because there's another block of concrete that they can use and Again, nobody that is playing basketball bothers about this child that is having fun with this water jet and The whole neighborhood can use it For other activities as well. Why should it be all filled in and squared off and be exact? and Although this is a little bit of a cheat because this was at the opening It was only To explain that you can use the spaces for much more and believe me the size of this is three small basketball courts And you have a playground for children You have a soccer court. You have small football courts football, uh, or a panna court. You have skate facilities Uh, you have water facilities. There's a clubhouse. There's a coffee shop. There's tables. There is a stage But there is no defined border. It's up to you how you would like to use this Um, again, and this brings me back to the history Is this the new playground or is this the new neighborhood hub where you meet your friends where you meet with other people that have Do have kids where you meet with different age groups um, well, I don't know but After 20 years we're still questioning play That was my story for today. Thank you Thank you very much. I got that was amazing And I think before we open to the to the room. I'm sure there will be plenty of questions and I'm getting noise from there and I have one question How do you get to there let's say we talked before the lecture starts and Do you do workshops with the neighborhoods or have you gained so much experience time over now that you let's say have a menu of things or Maybe because we of course Part of this is also to engage our community I wish it was that easy because it's always it's always a different story and And now I have you had the time to think it think about a little bit more for this particular Um Area it there were many workshops including workshop with disabled because you can reach also of course again with your wheelchair um The thing here is that in this area of Amsterdam people loved it to have their cars being parked on the ground although of course there was a group of people that didn't want to have a Uh building place in front of the house for two years But everybody thought that it was needed In the renewal of this area to have a new playground and everybody was cooperating we had all kinds of user groups we had Images of Playing not of play equipment, but of play activities that they could stick or what they would like or they wouldn't like But most important and I cannot stress this enough Most important is that you cannot be better than your commissioner in this case the municipality That really wanted to believe that this could be done Because I can tell a nice story and say this is this is how we should do it And then people start laughing and they buy some equipment somewhere else. So You're never better than the group. You're never better than the municipality and the commissioning party and you in this particular case There was also besides the participation part a collaboration between architects landscape architects and I call myself then the playground designer That were really willing to mingle everything if the the the playground elements are suspended actually from the trellises There is a part of the playground on one of the rooftops. There is this coffee shop that Have benches of front or tables in front of it that are public So they cannot dominate the space. So everyone was working together in this particular situation Why am I saying this because currently I'm working on another project in Amsterdam that looks like this And everybody is against the parking Garage underground And then nothing happens. You can participate what you want And nothing happens so far. Hopefully we we are able to get there somehow So I'm only saying participation is also about willingness. It is about thinking for other groups if you are You're not a parent, but you want you still should think That is a public space where children play Let's see what I can contribute to that to say it wouldn't it be nice if children could do this and that Rather than only defending your own area and saying not in my backyard So again, there is no tactic. There is no strategy. It's about people from the audience You have some mics that will travel around Thank you very much for this very inspiring presentation Maybe I can take over from gregors. My question was also about how do you approach the locality? I mean, I'm sure even in Amsterdam from neighborhood to neighborhood The cultural background and the demographics are so various That each approach as you said is a different story So, um, how how about this incorporation of this locality into it like because you also have lots of international experience abroad So we we our major issue in in the context of Istanbul is the same So the stratification of cultural differences and then the approach to the to the public space as a play Place can vary as in the case of Zorlu and then in the suburban Regions of Istanbul So how would you approach to this locality issue because it's a very subtle and very complicated complex issue I know there are no very right Answers to that as you mentioned But maybe you can give a couple of hints to the new designers and to the design educators educators Thank you. Well, I started with telling that we are all Experienced because we all have been kids That is so that is really important start thinking about what you like as a kid that that I always tell that because Otherwise we start thinking about images Of what play playground should look like So that is probably my first story that I would tell um Yes, we are working abroad and that is um Strange actually, I know nothing about Turkish culture I know you have very nice food and people are generally very friendly But I it is already very very difficult to address all things that are going on in a space that I live very close to Actually, I live around the corner from the From burning a plane So What shall I say it is it is okay Um It's also about trust I had the opportunity actually to build up this um This uh Amount of uh play space I learned I I wasn't afraid to fail and You know the Zorlu Center Which is a very outstanding playground probably nothing alike in the world You either like it or you hate it. That's what I think and um But Zorlu trusted us to do this And if you don't trust your The the people that are involved You can never do such a thing because then you are watering down everything So it's about building trust between groups of people or stakeholders Going to places show them What is possible? or trying to tell Why they should look at it differently or trying to bring them back to the neighborhood when they were climbing a tree rather than Going up a stair and down a slide with fences next to them so that they cannot fall out or Well, there's hundreds of ways of of of doing this but again Um, there is no strategy or tactic. It's all about you want something you believe in it And you need to understand what is and that is what you said the local finesses the the What is the real problem here? Maybe I show with the park We were asked to do a playground. We said that is not the real the playground is not the real problem It's about having a space there where children can reach the playground where people want to go so maybe You should first rethink and re-question. What is the real question behind the playground because The gentleman At the back standing there told me that there is a saturation of playgrounds in Copenhagen. There is also an Amsterdam But there's not so many good playgrounds where people would love to go to where parents would love to go to Don't don't limit yourself to the playground see it as a contribution to to that space That's all I can say What's next? Of course, we also take questions in Turkish and I think we can have them translated to alga. So Please feel free How about adventure playgrounds? Have you done any of those? Like the ones that are actually kind of completely without any structures like I guess they were started back in the danmark after the war And then now again, I think there's one in wales that was uh, quite famous. I think with because of our documentary You you actually mean like a building playground where you can work with materials or yes, yes where you can Fire and Yeah, well, we we work on premises that had that but the thing is we didn't work on the building playground itself because that Is about having the materials having the tools and there is always someone that is guiding that so We worked on the remnant park, but there was already one there Uh, we don't have to do much About that because that's almost like programming If you mean adventure playgrounds in adventurous heights Things that look like they're extremely dangerous Because believe me, there's two things that kids always and I'm talking about older kids. What do they want? Should be really dangerous And your parents shouldn't be able to see you that are the most two most important things um How can you design for that with all the standards and rules and scared parents that want to have secure places Still you can do many things if you want to one of the examples is that off mine site Nobody believes that 65 meters high one big that is very adventurous, but that's not what you meant with the adventure playground Then if we go back to the issue of the standards, I know this is kind of a boring question But how do you actually deal with new products and getting them approved? Do they go through testing or how do you actually get them manufactured because this was one of the problems that we had As designers we we thought we designed something very cool, but then we couldn't really get it manufactured because none of the playground Producers wanted to deal with it and then the and we didn't want to take the risk of working with kind of a non-playground producer so I've got one sitting there that maybe can give you the answer why they didn't want to produce it No, that this is actually two different questions Very often they don't want to produce it because they want to sell what they have So that is not to their advantage unless they want to explore that part of the market The standard this is a fair it's good that we have standards They're meant to avoid the worst accidents But we have forgotten about that playing is about learning to deal with risks Learning to deal with what we call calculated risks and How are we dealing with this? I happen to be in the German board in the beginning of the 90s and The German safety board the Deutsche Industrie Norm Or standard and I learned that is not by far as strict As the people that are handling the standard that is a problem the people that are making the standards try to keep an open end Because you cannot make a standard for something that is not there yet Another thing actually I took it as serious homework to study the standards To know more about the standards in the background Then the people that are actually what we call the security police that is checking the standard They read it should not be more than this and that and that Not approved where we say it's about Not about Following the standard it's about Understanding where that measurement is coming from I give you an example if you can stick your head in and they get stuck And it's only 60 centimeters above the floor You cannot choke yourself because you can always stand on the floor even the child But the the engineer that is checking that is only measuring and saying hey, it's uh 20 centimeters is not okay not approved. So you really need to know more about it than they do And then there is something what we call safety in a different way But again, you need to have this build-up Knowledge because otherwise you cannot get this across safety in another way is we always use the Dutch example Where if you go to certain countries and there is a pond or a lake there's always a fence around it because otherwise children might drown another way is We have almost obligatory Swimming lessons from four years old on in the Netherlands so all children can swim That's another way of dealing with the issue Where again the standard is not telling you how you should deal with it It says if you do it like this is it's okay, but it doesn't say that you cannot do it in a different way You only need to have this specialist safety inspector Following you and approving it and there you need a lot of As I said build-up knowledge to get that approved again. I give you the example of the mine Uh Hill 65 meters high Basically, you can roll down all the way from from the hill and still we could get that improved approved Took us quite a while, but we we we managed so to your homework and outsmart I think the main maybe the main issue is uh at least in istanbul or in our country We talk about children play parks I don't know how I can translate it to english better This means We are talking about a space Where we have to feed in with certain equipment so that children can play there When the focus is this I mean when the approach is like this then you start thinking of well, what can I put in this park to Make children satisfy children for physical play for social play or for this or that type of play And then it comes up to you know designing, you know, very complex or I mean very artificial units But I think we should took the issue like we have to Provide spaces for Where play is also possible or where children can play I mean not parks for children to play But open spaces open areas Where play is also possible But yeah, it's it's nice to hear that you agree, but I think it's an important issue For us to reading This it is it is all us designers That should advocate this isn't it also the case and not follow what we think is a playground We try to spread that and say it can be done better Can you after you have finished your question can you then translate it for me? No, oh, okay Try to understand, okay Okay, thank you very much. It was a very pleasant presentation. We are also participating in the presentation. How do you get feedback in the designs in the projects you do? Follow the projects as I understand How do you transfer feedback to new projects? Nice question Sometimes we do sometimes we don't if we do a project Let's say here in Istanbul Zorlu We don't get much information about it and I'm not here every day to see what happened how it has changed Etc um in Amsterdam On my bicycle. I very often park through Uh the project that we have done or people even call us say hey Have you noticed that this and that and so and so? so it is We were in in our studio We were actually thinking about that we should do a tour Around all the projects we did in Amsterdam to see what they look like for instance after 10 years one of the complaints we had or actually I should say preconceptions that they were hard to maintain Where standard equipment shouldn't so we should make the tour see if that is true Um But there is no not not a set way that we follow up very often it depends on either the the client or People that make use of it what they tell us and if we think that we need to go Somewhere and then we of course incorporate that experience in in in new projects From the user perspective, I give you the example of the von Beuninger plan Um That worked really well, but we suddenly were here from the project that don't work really well Because people don't call us. They have no idea So there's also a very strange thing It's like the benches in a park If nobody sits there They stay good forever and everybody think this is a good band. That's a little bit of the problem problem We do get information when People think that Certain places need a lot of maintenance And very often that we we do go there and have a look and then we discover that is being used so frequently If you use something very often it's also deteriorated as we are in tear So we get bits and pieces of information in Learning by doing experiencing over the years, but it's not like a Fast way of dealing with it. We always go check after one year after three years after five years.  Okay It's heavily heavily used every day Isn't that true? So there is always Weird things going on From the room? Yes You talked about your clients Probably as municipalities Or like shopping malls and so on But the end user Is the children And you don't really get to talk to your client Most of the time probably During the business time So after 20 years Of experience What would you say is the biggest challenge To have kids as your final client? Good question They're the easiest clients you can have Because they're always happy Because they're the parents that are complaining So I've never showed an image to them And they said that No, no, this is what we don't want So I think They all talk about it And all like it They are my best clients Thank you very much Thank you for having me


Okay, we're back. This is theCUBE, siliconangle.tv's continuous coverage of Oracle Open World 2012. We're here at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. This is our third year of having theCUBE inside the Moscone. We have to be a gorilla as we've been explaining to you. We're inside the Q-Logic booth. They've been really kind and gracious with their space and allows us to broadcast, to extract the signal from the noise and bring you the smartest people that we can find in the community. And this is the backup and recovery segment where we're talking about Oracle backup and recovery. And we're here with one of the leading practitioners in the world here, Tony Vaden, who's the Vice President and CIO of ATD, American Tire Distributors, a CUBE alum. Tony, welcome back. Good day, good to be here. Thanks for having me. So, we're here at Oracle Open World. Obviously, you're an Oracle customer. Absolutely. And this is quite an event. 45,000 people take over San Francisco. Can't find a cheap hotel room. Our room period. Yeah, right. And so, Oracle's really an interesting company. So, what do you guys do with Oracle? What brings you to Oracle Open World? Well, Oracle is basically the backbone of our systems. We've been deploying or have had some level of e-business suite, 11i, in our environment for almost 10 years at some capacity. We have basically a distribution model across the entire U.S. and we have a lot of hourly, actually transactions per second for order entry for the business and logistics perspective of delivering, receiving tires to retail tires, companies, independents, big box or corporate retail companies and even the auto dealers. So, e-business has always been our core. We've expanded on that in the last few years with things like SOA, with a lot of the e-commerce business, with intelligence and a lot of other activities that really encapsulate that e-business core. So, you guys are critical part, obviously, of the automotive supply chain. Yes. How has technology affected your business over the last 10 years or so? It's been quite transformative for us. Probably four or five, six years ago, you know, it was really an evolving model, especially with the independent tire dealer. We really represent them as a smaller footprint in the industry for them to be successful and trends actually, it's just amazing, the data that we've gathered, the data transactions that we get, it's just exploded for us and just the sub-second response is that we need to take an order, process the order and have it near time for the customer. A lot of times we'll have a customer either go online and order a product or call in, literally get in their truck and come to the distribution center. It's there in a dock waiting for them. So, one of the big things that we do, the value add for our customer is have that product ready for them and what Oracle's allowed us to do is really have what our CEO calls the secret sauce of the business is to be able to transactional and logistically have the product there when they need it. Yeah, so a lot of people talk about how, remember the book, Does IT Matter? And you as a CIO, I'm sure, have felt that pain of budget cuts and the like. And the premise of the book is essentially that IT doesn't deliver a competitive advantage that's sustainable. I think based on what you just said, would disagree with that. Absolutely. Just giving you a sustainable, differentiable competitive advantage, hasn't it? Yeah, we wouldn't be in business today if we did. You'd be out of business. We would be out of business. I mean, if you think about just the pure logistics, shipping a tire and a wheel, it may seem simple, but having the product in the right distribution center for the right type of customer. If you look across the company, the country in the US, you look at a place like Miami where they have a lot of wheels. It's a big business in their market. You go out in the Midwest, place like Nebraska, where agriculture products are very pervasive. And you go out to other, like the Northeast, where the winter tire products are actually selling today. We've probably been a huge business for a month now without having a lot of supply chain visibility, a lot of transaction capability, store the right data, looking at things like big data, being able to go out and look at the abstract data that's available to us, something we've never dreamed of two or three years ago. So even the future where we're going, I see a lot of opportunity. Yeah, and potentially even larger, we talked a lot on theCUBE about the transformative effects of technology generally, but specifically big data and having potentially a bottom line impact. Do you see, Tony, the day in which the CEO in the corner office of your organization says, you know what, I actually see this, let's say in a case of big data, the advantages it can bring. I'm going to double down on that. I'm actually going to spend more. Do you see that day coming or is it going to be two more with less? I see it. You know, I think a lot of folks that aren't in IT struggle with understanding things. Let me just look at the nomenclature of the acronyms that we have. It's mind boggling. It's mind boggling for those that are in it every day. So if you look at those, but I think if you provide proven success, you demonstrate capability by delivering on time and quality. That goes a long way with the CEO and the CFO and the COO and looking how you're delivering for them. You know, the last two or three years, we've pushed the envelope on virtualization, how we've been able to replicate to our secondary data center, what we've done with the elimination of tape and all those seem very tactical. But at the end of the day, if we can't recover and failover and support the business, they get nervous. So I think they've looked at what I would call growth from the core. Right, if you look at cloud computing being prepared for that, if you don't really have a roadmap and a technology direction, it's hard to get to things like big data because you don't have the data to do it with. Right, now one of the processes that CEOs and CEOs don't want to overspend on or spend too much on is insurance, protecting their data. And that's really with backup and recoveries all about. It's an insurance policy. So you clearly want to make it as efficient as possible. You want to make sure it works, meets its objectives, but it's not necessarily going to drive sustainable competitive business advantage. It's table stakes. It's fundamental. You've got your corporate data. You've got to protect it. So talk about how you protect your data, what your strategy is and how that's evolved over the last several years. Okay, I'll go back about three or four years. We had basically a tape model. We had a very disparaged storage environment. We really, for lack of a better term, would buy an appliance for the type of storage whether it be a tier three or tier two. This was before cloud or virtualization and the storage layer was very pervasive. And so as we saw the value and what we had done with server virtualization and partnering with EMC, we really saw that strategy start to unfold. So building blocks, building server virtualization, how we connected both of our data centers really to become much more than the DR. It's really moved to a failover now to really almost a high availability model. We use a common innovation of data domain, two VNX integration model, two VNX storage devices or environments between both data centers that we interface with a recovery point and manage that ability to replicate or move back and forth with recovery manager. So it's really turned into quite a, if you look at the EM product suite, they've needed to gather very nicely to help us be successful. So can we drill into that a little bit? So using a recover point you said? Yes. And so you're taking snapshots in time? Yes.  Do you do that by application or? Actually no. We do it holistically across the board because what we've committed to our business is really the ability to recover the environment in total if needed. So that way if you look at the cost of storage and what we're willing to do from a footprint, we have a light for light copy of everything in both of our data centers. So you say they have a platinum service for all your apps? Yeah. And you said you used a combination of data domain and VNX. So talk about the, you brought in data domain three years ago? That's when we first started. We probably put in production data domain about two years ago. So that was post acquisition? Yes. Is that right? Yeah. Okay. Well, our goal initially was to try to find a strategy for the disparate systems we had, especially in the storage area. So building the model to get the data replicated was our first step, but quickly we realized that that was only part of the story. And then when we looked at data domain and how we would manage the duplication and archiving is another piece of how we're trying to be successful. Again, it just like it was really a complete package to do that together. So I wouldn't say you re-architected your backup processes per se, but you certainly changed the way in which you did backup. Or did it affect, did it change your backup processes? Well, it simplified it. Yeah, okay. You know, before we were looking at what should we backup first? From a timing perspective, the data got so large, the Oracle production database continues to grow even though we archived it, it still continues to grow. So we looked at being creative of what times of the day we could back up before some of the systems power had grown either at the storage layer or at the server layer. We were always orchestrating how we dealt with that. Today it's really just automated. I don't want to say it's so simple, but it is. So essentially you were prioritizing what got backed up? And when?  Absolutely, Oracle database, bar none was the most important thing we backed up. Right. How much data are you managing? We have almost a petabyte of storage in production. Now two, if you count the fact that we doubled it, and really more than that because our secondary location, we have, we do our dev and test in our fellover location. So dev and test is kind of an additional piece of the storage that we have from production. So it's a little over two petabytes. Okay, and so you're using RecoverPoint to take snapshots. Yes.  Well, RecoverPoint, we do really more continuous stream. Right, continuous data protection. It's data, so when a transaction hits production, it's replicated directly to our failover location. What's the RPO? Five minutes. Oh, wow. That really is a platinum service for the entire organization. So what's the, have you had to test the RecoverPoint? I mean, I know you test it, but have you had to test it in real life? We, only for individual file deletions or probably where it's more pervasive has been in the dev test world, where a developer will blow away a test environment where they've worked weeks on and they get to the point where they did something, they blew up a clone database of Oracle and they're two days away from going live and it's gone. So the good news is we've not had to test it from a failure of the system or anything in production. We do test, we do unit testing, is what I call it in our DR facility, but back in the old days, development in QA was probably the last thing we backed up, but that's the one we end up recovering the most. Interesting. Now you mentioned virtualization before, what are you doing in that regard? We are almost 100% server virtualized. The one item we haven't put in production is the Oracle Rack, but we have tested it in our Oracle Rack node. It's actually in production in our DR facility, so we know that it works. We just, it's just been a workload issue for them not being 100%. So you use VMware? Yes. Yeah, so you're virtualizing almost all your apps except for Rack, which is, I think Rack is the one system that Oracle actually will embrace. Yes. VMware, right? But everything else, the sort of little friction there, right? What's your experience been with regard to virtualizing Oracle? Many of the customers we've talked to say, works great, never really had a problem. Yep, that's our story. And your relationship with, and Oracle's maybe at first was not all for it or did you get some friction there? Or how'd that all work out? You know, we've got a great account team with Oracle and with EMC and it's been a partnership along the way. You know, and the folks like in the support organization with Oracle, I think as long as you engage them and tell them what you're doing and share the knowledge of what you've done, it works well. And then, you know, Oracle, again, they're such a big partner to what we do, we couldn't avoid that. You know, and I think instead of, a lot of times people have an abrasive relationship and tell the customer or tell the supplier what quote they're going to do. And that's just not the approach we take. We sit down and plan in advance and say, look, it's the right thing for us. And if we ever had to recover, Oracle certainly doesn't want us not to recover quickly. So at least the account team I have and the part of Oracle I've worked with have done nothing to be supportive. Excellent, that's a, I have to say, that's not a common theme that you hear. So maybe your approach is one that other practitioners in the community might want to think about. How about cloud? We've seen a lot this week about Oracle's cloud strategy. You know, you have to laugh and tongue in cheek. We were, John Furrier of my coast and I were watching this morning, Larry Ellison's rant from the Churchill Club when he was saying cloud is water vapor. And in many respects, he was right on. And now we got the Oracle cloud and you know, almost like they invented it. But what do you make of the cloud strategy at Oracle? And what's your cloud strategy? How's it dovetail? Well, you know, let me start with ours first. We started cloud before it was called cloud. I mean, we back again four or five years ago, probably when the ESX 2.0, the first one or 2.0 VMware models, we've been on a heavy focus of server virtualization. As a matter of fact, we have no more physical servers today than I did five years ago. But our environment's probably five or 10 times bigger than it was five years ago. So for us, we've always had that path and you know, I think the one thing we have added is storage virtualization and a lot of the ancillary things. So for me, I look at it twofold. One is the core. Build from the core has always been somewhat our strategy. And what I mean by that is if you build an internal infrastructure as a service type approach, whether you're provision or you charge back or any of that stuff, the way I look at it is you've already built your application to be a cloud service. You just happen to be serving it to yourself, right? So a lot of the Oracle products we have are internally virtualized and on our internal cloud. But we've went external, our budgeting software, we've went CRM, we do a lot of things like our HR applications, our time in attendance, travel, you know, a lot of those things are in the cloud. They're very simple to plug into the cloud. We've implemented SOA services from Oracle and a lot of their REST APIs to let us integrate the data exchange. So if you create a service to present the data and receive the data, it actually makes it simplified. It's worked well. Tony, I appreciate you coming on theCUBE. We're out of time and you've been really generous with your time. It was a pleasure seeing you again. Absolutely. All right, keep it right there. We'll be right back with our next segment on the Oracle Backup and Recovery Spotlight live from the Moscone Center in San Francisco. This is theCUBE. Silicon Angles coverage, we'll be right back.