 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. So you dial up or down, you set your RPO. 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? Because if you had to miss something, you couldn't be your production database. 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. And then you back it up locally and then you push it off. 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.