 Live from San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering Oracle OpenWorld 2015 from Studio C, brought to you by Cisco. Now your host, Stu Miniman. Welcome back to theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman with wikibon.com and you're watching coverage of Oracle OpenWorld 2015. Here from the exhibit floor in Moscone, South. Happy to have on the program a return guest, Jason Kutsoffis, who's the Senior Director of Oracle Solutions at AMC. Jason, welcome back to the program. Good to be here. Thank you for having me. All right, so Jason, we've got like 55,000 people here. I mean, this is the center of the database universe. Oracle's trying to say it's the center of the cloud universe. I'm not sure that I yet buy that. But what's new in your world? Well, for us right now, the database is definitely key. The DBA is really key, and we've been talking most of the time, all flash. All flash arrays, not flash disk, but the simplicity of all flash arrays has really been our hottest topic right now with DBAs. Yeah, so I interviewed John Fowler yesterday. And it's interesting to hear him talk because there's certain things he's like, well, you know, the move to the cloud is tough. You know, we've been spending, you know, like 10 years recoding and real working on this. And, you know, flash, you know, flash is interesting, but it's all going to go in memory. I mean, that's really what we see as kind of interesting. So I'm just curious, your view of the Oracle world. I mean, a great point. At the end of the day, it's all about the application that you're trying to run. It's all about the business value of that application. But there's key underlying technologies that have to be there if you're going to go to the cloud, if you're going to have multiple applications in the cloud with great response times for end users. And flash is really the key. You even heard Larry a few times last night in his keynote start to say disk and correct himself to flash. And, you know, it's been fun to watch Oracle, you know, come along on that train with us. Yeah, certainly it's not all about flash, but it's a key foundation piece. Yep, absolutely. Last year's trash technology is this year's Oracle's focus. So, absolutely. We cloud, you know, IoT, a big discussion, and boy, security. I mean, security, major, major, major focus of what they're talking about here. So, Jason, David Fleuer put out a new piece on wikibon.com where you can find all our research under the infrastructure segment. He called it, driving business value for Oracle environments with an all-flash strategy. Now, David's been, you know, covering flash. I mean, I remember back in 2011, he did like the first forecast and everybody was like, yeah, yeah, that's interesting. But, you know, prices are never going to get there. And, you know, there's so many challenges here. Today, I think most people have kind of caught up to where we are, but still all-flash seems a little bit out in the future. Where are we along that journey? And, you know, what's your first take looking at David's research? Well, first of all, David's research is fantastic. I mean, he's been out on the forefront of where flash technology is and where it's going to go, particularly for databases. I mean, several years ago, he was one of the first to pioneer research around the impact on database licensing and things people weren't even thinking about then. You know, where we are and where we're going, I think we're at a really critical point. If you look at over the next 12 to 18 months and you guys have put up some fantastic research on this, we really feel that the all-in total cost of ownership of flash is going to actually dip below the traditional economics of disk or other types of flash drives. And it's not about performance and IOPS, although that's important. It's about the simplicity of the end user, the DBAs, the developers, the fact that they can get information faster, all the copies they need, when they need them, the all-in productivity benefits. David's done a really insightful job, I think, putting up some great research on that. Yeah, so you're right. There's a few different pieces. Let's walk through some of the aspects there. First of all, there's cost savings because if you go to most people, it's funny. You say, okay, well, how much is the infrastructure itself? Well, if you look at the pie of how much things cost, those Oracle licenses jump out at you. And of course, it's not something that you snap your fingers and say, oh, it was like, VMware, I'm going to take 20 servers or reduce them down to three. It's not like Oracle licenses go away overnight, but what is the impact of using all flash or a lot of flash into that Oracle license? It's a great question. And it's been really heavily confused in the marketplace. One of the first messages we started to hear a lot of was, if I buy flash, I can save licenses. It's really a little more complicated than that. One of the first, if you think about Oracle licensing in general, there's different ways to license it. One of the most common ways is buy the CPU. So just very simply, if your storage is causing you to wait for IO, if you're having high seek times and very poor latency on your storage array, you're not going to be getting the value out of those licenses that you've paid for from Oracle. So just by putting a very predictable, low latency flash system in, you're going to get more ROI out of the licenses you've already paid for. That's a huge deal for a lot of our customers. The second benefit though that goes a little bit beyond that is, if you've already licensed Oracle for say, 100 CPU cores and you swap in new latest flash technology and perhaps upgrade your CPU servers, you can actually run the same workload on less CPU than you did before. And that's really a result of both upgrading CPU and having all flash together as a unified solution. Now, you're probably not going to be able to go back to Oracle and ask for a refund, right? Oracle's not in the business of giving refunds, so what's going to happen is a lot of customers, we've seen some great examples of this. Balli Gifford is a great example on EMC.com. They've actually redeployed that extra CPU and stand up another database at the same cost. So flash is a really important technology, not just for performance, but optimizing the use of your licenses and really getting the most value out of that software you pay for. Yeah, that's great. I mean, there's nothing worse than, I've got some resource and I'm just not utilizing it. It's like they say, you know, the cheapest resource is the one that you've already got, you know, that you're not doing it. And if I've got all these licenses, I think one of the things David said is we might be able to reduce, you know, the Oracle licenses in production and redeploy them either another database as you said or I could put some test environments, spin them up without having to increase my licenses. Correct. Yeah, and you're getting at another point which is within these all flash arrays, such as ExtremeIO, there's fantastic in-memory snapshot capabilities, copy services. So we can create instant copies of the database with no penalty on disk, no penalty on performance. So another way to look at your ROI from a customer perspective is my developers, for example, in test dev, get the copies they need right away and could start running and executing Oracle Test and Development much faster than they could before. There's an operational value to this TCO ROI too that goes beyond just CPU, core savings and licensing as well. Yeah, and one of the things we looked at, you know, what this means to the business is it's not just about IT, it's about employee productivity. It's time to value to the business. It's, you know, allowing me to just do more with this which, you know, impacts the bottom line. Yeah, I mean, we heard Ellison say it last night, right, the number one thing he talked about was the cost of operations in the cloud. So, you know, to your point of is flash everything, no, but if you take it down a level and look at a very practical time sink for a lot of DBAs, creating and maintaining copies and the operational savings of that with flash, it's a big part of the cloud. And so I think you're absolutely right, the operational piece, the operational efficiency that even flash can bring is a great, great value proposition. Yeah, it's interesting. David, you know, doing some of the analysis said, you know, if we can reduce the elapsed time to deployment on a new application, if we cut that in half, what that actually is going to do is it doesn't double productivity, it actually improves it by a factor of six, because you talk about kind of the internal and the external factors. So it's kind of this multiplicative effect that, you know, just, you know, those little improvements that, you know, make everything run so much faster and better. Yeah, yep. So, I guess, you know, you know, let's talk a little bit about kind of the architecture from the EMC standpoint. Extreme I.O., you know, is really the all-flash array solution. You know, bring us up to speed as to, you know, Extreme I.O. in the Oracle environment. What are you seeing? What are you hearing from customers? And what can they do differently than, you know, that they couldn't do with previous architecture? Sure, yeah, it's been a good evolution over the last 18 months. When we first started introducing Extreme I.O. mainstream to our Oracle customer base, you know, the first thing is, of course, it's fast, it's low latency, but we saw that, regardless of the workload you're running, you could be running OLTP, data warehousing, analytics, test and development. We've shown in our solutions testing that you're going to get sub millisecond latencies, no matter what workload you're running, and while running these workloads at the same time on the same array. It's a big headscratcher for a lot of DBAs we talk to. They're not used to hearing that you can do this, that you can mix these workloads and not sacrifice your production SLAs. So just the predictable any workload performance has been probably the biggest thing to start, but what came right after that is all the data services you get in the array that come with it, basically for free, compression, D-dup, in-memory snapshots, security, all these things come with the storage array. Oftentimes, with traditional storage, you buy those kind of Alucard menu as you go along. With Extreme I.O., they're included and they're always on and they're free, basically, with the storage system. And that's been a really good step for us to helping DBAs see storage as simple. It's very complicated to them, or abstract in a lot of customers we talk to. They're focused on Oracle as they should be, and storage is a secondary thought. So I think Extreme I.O. goes a long way to making it very simple and very open for them to understand. So, Jason, when we look at various applications, databases and Oracle databases, particularly, have been one of the tougher ones to kind of change how we do things. We're going to have the guys from House of Brick on, later on this afternoon, and they did some really cutting-edge stuff about virtualizing Oracle. Where are we with virtualizing Oracle these days? I feel like it's pretty much mainstreamed. I mean, House of Brick's been fantastic, and we've seen a great evolution where it started in test and development, get some comfort level, moved into production. Today, we see, if you look at all the research and surveys that have been done with the I.O.G. and others, well over two-thirds or three-fourths of customers today virtualize Oracle in production. In pre-production, I would say it's in the high 90s. I mean, EMC ourselves, we've virtualized pretty much 100% of all of our Oracle databases, regardless of what workload is running on it. So, we feel like it's pretty mainstream. All right, so, we've virtualized it. How does cloud fit into Oracle database? I guess, you know, you hear Oracle's message, and there's one cloud, it's the enterprise cloud, and it's Oracle's cloud. And on the one hand, I say, look, they're spending years and a lot of hard work. I look at Microsoft, and after, you know, how long have we all been deploying exchange servers in customers' environments, and there's an attraction to say, hey, let me change my licensing, let me buy it a certain way, and Microsoft will just take care of that. I trust them, it's going to work. Oracle going to do the same thing with their applications? What are you seeing, what are you hearing, and how does EMC see cloud fitting into the Oracle database? Yeah, I really liked hearing Larry Ellison talk about how they moved into where they are with cloud, moving from the application as a service, platform as a service, and infrastructure. It was a nice way to tell the story. If you look at EMC's hybrid cloud strategy today, our focus is very, very heavily focused on the DBA. So if you look at the EMC hybrid cloud solution, what we've tried to do is, and we have a great new solution that we just announced on this, you can take the EMC hybrid cloud solution as an Oracle DBA, this becomes your central portal for platform as a service and infrastructure as a service. All the things you do today with Enterprise Manager, you can do through the EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, provisioning, performance, backup, protection. So we're really focused on that infrastructure and platform piece, the database and the infrastructure underneath it. And we feel that, not just for Oracle DBAs, but SAP, Microsoft, and other workloads, I think that's where our strategy and Oracle's differ and complement a little bit. They're obviously very focused on the Oracle apps. So Jason, I'm curious, we've seen pushes to get people to migrate off of databases. Amazon made a big announcement last year with their Aurora solution, and they've got a new solution that they're like, I think they said they've got 10,000 customers that signed up since AWS to convert, not just Oracle, but a number of databases onto more free databases. But of course that's a free tool, we don't know what they're actually doing with it. What do you see? What's the conversation you're having with customers? How sticky is the Oracle database and does EMC have a dog in that race? I mean, you don't own the application stack, you want to provide the best solutions for them overall, but what do you take of this? So it's a two-part question. I think you're right on the EMC side, it's our focus is on the platform and the database and the infrastructure for sure when it comes to Oracle. Talking to customers, I was actually in a briefing with a customer last week, one of the world's largest banks, I can't use their name, but they were actually talking to Amazon and one of the interesting points about that conversation was, beyond the technical practicality, we as IT vendors were so enamored with the technology and how our technology is better than the competition's technology, but there are practical limitations to moving to certain types of cloud models, for example, Amazon. I mean, there are compliance issues, there are regulatory issues, there are things, how often can I be audited and will the cloud provider that I go to be able to handle those audits if I'm in financial services. These were the topics we were spending most of our time talking about, not necessarily who can run the Oracle database faster and back it up and protect it. So I think in the case of companies like Amazon, and Oracle, and customers running Oracle today, depending on the vertical, depending on the size and the scope and the database, that'll determine what cloud solution they go to and when. Yeah, so Jason, the EMC Oracle dynamics is pretty interesting. I think back, hey to say, 15 years ago, I remember there was a program called ECO, it was EMC Cisco Oracle to build those environments. When Oracle bought Sun, there was a ripple through EMC. And I know you can't comment on the definitive agreement of Dell buying EMC, but Dell and Oracle are partners. So can you talk a little bit about from the EMC standpoint, what's the state of the Oracle relationship? How committed does EMC do it? What's kind of the wood behind the arrow from the EMC standpoint? Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, like any partnership over time, it changes and grows. I've been lucky to be part of the EMC relationship with Oracle basically since it started about 19 years ago, all at EMC. And I can tell you today we work really closely with a lot of parts of Oracle engineering. Do we work with as many as we did 15, 19 years ago? No, but we work with new ones and different ones, particularly the enterprise manager team, fantastic relationship there to open up our technology to enterprise manager for the DBAs. And we have a very healthy engineering to engineering relationship right now. That's really important to our customers. I mean, even though we compete in the infrastructure space, and we're not alone, Oracle competes with other infrastructure providers, at the end of the day, when you talk to the Oracle engineers and you talk to our engineers, they know that we have to build good Oracle software and EMC solutions. And we're really focused on that. So that relationship can and will continue. And yeah, certainly Dell, as you mentioned, seems like a great relationship with Oracle as well. All right, so Jason, final question is, you kind of look at us pulling away from Oracle Open World 2015. What do you hope are some of the key takeaways that people have as it comes to the space that you look at? Sure, I mean, I think it's an exciting time to be an Oracle customer for sure. I was really, this was probably one of the more innovative keynotes I saw last night, less about database speeds and feeds and competition, although there was a little bit of that, but it was really about the cloud and forward-looking architectures. And I think it's great to see Oracle getting in that direction, because as they go that direction, so does the industry. And I think it's good for all of us. So I think their focus and the evolution to the cloud will hopefully prompt those conversations with our customers. We can introduce the EMC hybrid cloud solution and start to talk a little bit above speeds and feeds of technology. So yeah, it's an exciting time to be an Oracle customer. All right, well, Jason Kosoffus, really appreciate you coming, sharing what's going on with EMC, the transformation with Flash, what's happening in the database. Lots more coverage here from Oracle Open World. By the way, if you haven't checked out Wikibon Launch, wikibon.com earlier this year, check out all the cutting-edge research on there. You have a question for our team. At the top of the website is a contact button to ask an analyst. You can talk to the specific analyst, let us know, or of course, reach out to us through Twitter, easy to find us. So thanks for watching theCUBE. We'll be right back with more coverage here right after this quick break.