 Okay, we're back live at Oracle OpenWorld 2011. This is SiliconANGLE.tv's continuous coverage of Oracle OpenWorld, and we're here with Steven Manley, who's the CTO of EMC's BRS group. Steven, welcome. Thanks, good to see you again. Appreciate you participating in this spotlight on Oracle Backup and Recovery. We were at VMworld with you. Quite a different event. I mean, we just sort of rolled into town. Anna, when did you get in? I actually live out in the East Bay, so I got in about 12 minutes ago in the bar. Okay, so today's your first day, so you really don't have a sense of the vibe yet, but when we were at VMworld, we were talking about the pressures of virtualization and how that stresses backup and what customers can do about it. Talk about what's different in Oracle. So it's interesting, in terms of when we talk about things that are changing the backup industry, there really are usually three workloads that we see most often. One, which we did talk about last month, that VMworld is VMware. Another one, which we're not going to talk about here, is NAS environments, NAS servers. The third one really is large application environments of which Oracle is probably the most prominent, where, again, it's almost the same problem. You have this vast amount of data in a large database that is under heavy load, and getting a backup done efficiently, quickly, and reliably is a real problem for customers using the traditional methods. So how about virtualization in Oracle shops? I mean, talk about what you're seeing there. I mean, we heard Tucci and Gelsinger on stage today, talking about EMC strategy around virtualization generally, but VMware specifically. What are you seeing in Oracle environments? So I think there's still a split. So there are lower end Oracle deployments that we see. So a database that might be important for a customer, but maybe isn't their most performance-sensitive. And we see them putting those into virtual machines to try to really create that same virtual backup infrastructure that we talked about in Vegas. On more of the high-end database applications, the business critical where performance is absolutely sensitive, they're still usually running those standalone and separate, and they're looking for backup techniques that are going to fit in that environment. So there's still a split. So what are you seeing as far as adoption? I mean, is VMware taking the Oracle world by storm like it is the rest of the world, or is Oracle successfully holding the market off until it can get its own virtualization platform act together? I'm seeing it very much taken by storm. Again, especially on those lower end, when you get into things like, I want to do a test and development environment with Oracle, I see it very heavily when someone wants to be able to create, again, to be able to leverage some of the VMware disaster recovery techniques, some of the high availability techniques, some of the distance mirroring type of things, where, again, they might not be able to afford to do it on the physical servers, but on the virtual servers, they're seeing that that's really a nice play for them. Yeah, I've seen, well, we've done our own statistics. According to Wikibon, about half the Oracle shops have some type of virtualization going on. I saw an IOUG user survey that confirmed that recently, about 50%, and we've stated that 90% over time are going to be virtualized, and the vast majority of those are going to be VMware, which is not what Oracle wants, necessarily, but that's the reality of the marketplace today, isn't it? Well, when it comes down to it, you can get efficiency, you can get simplicity, you get cost savings, and again, one of the more important things for us, obviously, is it can really simplify the way you protect the environment, and protection is an important part, especially of Oracle environments, where that data is so critical to be able to keep, to protect, and to recover, and so having one mechanism to be able to do that for the vast majority of your data is just too attractive not to take. So, here at Open World, what are you actually doing at Open World? What's the integration strategy with Oracle? They're like, you guys are like frenemies. You know, you had Joe up on the stage, and it was very respectful, but at the same time, you guys compete in certain markets, and backup is an area that is actually pretty complimentary. You can pick up where they leave off. So, talk about what you're doing with integration, where you add value as an ecosystem partner. Yeah, so that's a good one, and I actually think that that cooperation is exactly the right mechanism. Like we talked at VMworld, one of the hardest things that comes in for a backup company for a backup application is, how do I get the backup done quickly enough, and efficiently enough to be able to hit your backup window, and how am I going to be able to recover it? And the amount of data is usually so vast in some of these bigger Oracle deployments that a traditional backup technique alone probably won't get you there. And so, Oracle is really, frankly, helping a lot with things like block change tracking, with things like applied incrementals, that really lets you dramatically reduce your backup window. And then, on our side, what we leverage is, we leverage our deduplication technologies to be able to allow people to keep those highly efficient incremental backups as full backups, so you can have the rapid recovery. So, it really is the marriage of the best of both worlds. You have EMC bringing the disk into play to enable fast backups and fast recoveries, and then Oracle providing techniques that we leverage to make them even faster and lighter weight in the production environment. You know, we're going to dig into the technical details a little later, but there's a shift going on toward what's in the Oracle backup parlance, what's known as RMAN. That's sort of the mainstream preferred best practice approach. And is that really where your integration focus is, or is it different? So, no, that's absolutely right. I think that really there's two pieces to look at when you look at protection, and I think you'll hear about this a little bit more later as well. One is, you need something to enable you to get rapid recoveries done, and that's where, again, something like RMAN can help in terms of putting the database in a QIES state, and then leveraging storage techniques to be able to get a consistent version that you can back up and recover quickly. And then the second piece is being able to then take that off to another type of media so you have that reliability and that security. And again, RMAN is absolutely crucial there because it allows you to track those backups. And the last part where RMAN is really a key focus area for us is, more and more we find DBAs wanting to be able to protect their own data. After all, it's their application. It's their neck on the line if things aren't available. And so they really want to have a little bit more active role. And RMAN, which Oracle has created, really lets the DBA have that degree of control, that degree of influence. So, yeah, RMAN is absolutely a focus area for us because it puts the hands in the control of the DBA so we can work with them. In the spotlight intro, I talked about the three Oracle sanctioned approaches. I don't know if you could hear, but it was user managed, which is essentially script driven. You're in charge as the user. So you really want to be in charge, wow. That's taking, that's putting your neck out there. But RMAN, much more automated, clearly the preferred approach of it, if you talk to the practitioners in an import-export, which really isn't backup. What about, and we talked about this at VMworld, and I'll be interested in your response vis-a-vis Oracle, what about things like CDP? Where does that fit? Is that a viable backup methodology or is that a different use case? So I think it's viable within certain parts of an Oracle environment. So again, one of the things I've always liked about Oracle is, with the Oracle log, as long as you're protecting your log and you're keeping that somewhere safe, you can take really any point in time backup that I can create and roll forward and roll back. Now where CDP can be useful is to be able to get you those more frequent points in time to roll back and roll forward from, because the last thing you want is you don't want to restore from 48 hours ago and then replay 36 hours of logs. That's not really the best way to spend your life. What you'd like to be able to do is roll back to an hour ago. You might do that once. Yeah, that's one of those things where you go, huh, I'm never doing that again. So you want to be able to get it to a more close point in time and then do the roll forward and roll back from there. So I think CDP has a role as long as it can get you to those more frequent consistent points in time that Oracle can then work from to roll forward and roll back to. So Stephen, we talked about your Oracle integration strategy. Can you talk about the integration strategy inside EMC? Sometimes those are even harder. You've got a portfolio that grows over time, right? You got AVMR, you got data domain, you got networker. How are you guys organizing all that and what's your integration strategy and your vision? Right, so at a high level, the first part of any strategy that we work with on customers is you really want to start moving to disk as your infrastructure because it really does enable more efficient backups, more reliable backups, sort of lower TCO backups. And so that's really where it's all about you want to find a disk platform that you can centralize on. And that's, again, if you look, the core disk platform that we sell is the data domain platform that plugs in with everything from RMAN via NFS all the way through multiple backup applications and a bunch of other techniques. When you move beyond that, then you start to say, okay, I've got my data on disk, how do I manage that? And that really starts to come into play the backup software, which is the AVMR networker combination that allows you to manage that backend disk infrastructure and the set of versions you have. And then the last piece is, how do I get the backup data from where it is on the primary all the way back to that secondary storage? And that, again, is where you have multiple techniques, AVMR deduplication, networker with its more traditional agents that plug into applications. And so if you look at the way we're organized, it's all around first, get it onto disk and build that to work with anybody. And then second, build backup software that's really optimized for disk that plugs in both traditionally as well as next generation techniques. And then I have another co-op petition question because networker obviously doesn't have 100% market share, so you got to work with other backup packages. And there's an emerging set of backup packages that are very interesting. So what's going on there and how do you work through that whole co-op petition matrix, if you will? So the simple answer there is, no matter what you have, no matter what data you've got, we want to be able to bring it onto the data domain and we will remain an open platform, again, regardless of whether it's NFS, SIFS, VTL, Boost, we make those open protocols that plug in with anybody. In terms of our backup software, now obviously our backup software wants to tune itself to work as well as possible with that data domain disk system or the AVMR grid. But in terms of the actual storage piece, the goal is to be completely open there and not to play favorites. Okay, so your sales guys will argue that the combination is better and if the customer says, I don't care, I'm sticking with it, you know, backup vendor A. No problem, that's been a lot of, of course, data domain's heritage. And then it's on our backup software team to be able to deliver a product that shows the customer that it is in fact better with their data domain infrastructure, but that's on the backup software team to be able to deliver that. But as a disk target, you don't care. As a disk target, we really want to be open and again, open to any technique, again, whether it's our man or something else, we don't want to play favorites there. Excellent. All right, Stephen, well, thank you very much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to have you at VMworld. Appreciate you being at Oracle OpenWorld and sharing your vision and congratulations on getting to this point and I'm sure you're not done. A lot more to do together, right? There's always more fun to be had in the backup space. A lot more to do, so thank you very much for the time.