 Hello everyone and welcome to this CUBE video exclusive. This is Dave Vellante. Now I've said many times what people sometimes forget is Oracle's chairman is also its CTO and he understands and appreciates the importance of engineering. It's the lifeblood of tech innovation and Oracle continues to spend money on R&D. Over the past decade, the company has evolved its Exadata platform by investing in core infrastructure technology. For example, Oracle initially used InfiniBand which in and of itself was a technical challenge to exploit for higher performance. That was an engineering innovation and now it's moving to Rocky to try and deliver best of breed performance by today's standards. We've seen Oracle invest in machine intelligence for analytics. It's converged OLTP in mixed workloads. It's driving automation functions into its Exadata platform for things like indexing. The point is we've seen a consistent cadence of improvements with each generation of Exadata. And it's no secret that Oracle likes to brag about the results of its investments. At its heart, Oracle develops database software and databases have to run fast and be rock solid. So Oracle loves to throw around impressive numbers like 27 million AKI ops, more than a terabyte per second for analytics scans, running it more than a terabyte per second. Look, Oracle's objective is to build the best database platform and convinces customers to run on Oracle instead of doing it themselves or in some other cloud. And because the company owns the full stack, Oracle has a high degree of control over how to optimize the stack for its database. So this is how Oracle intends to compete with Exadata, Exadata Cloud at customer and other products like ZDLRA against AWS Outposts, Azure Arc and do-it-yourself solutions. And with me to talk about Oracle's latest innovation with its Exadata X9M announcement is Juan Loiza who's the executive vice president of Mission Critical Database Technologies at Oracle. Juan, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Always good to see you, Matt. Thanks for having me, Dave. It's great to be here. All right, let's get right into it. Let's start with the news. Can you give us a quick overview of the X9M announcement today? Yeah, glad to. So we've had Exadata on the market for a little over a dozen years. And every year, as you mentioned, we make it better and better. And so this year we're introducing our X9M family of products. And as usual, we're making it better. We're making it better across all the different dimensions for OTP, for analytics, lower costs, higher IOPS, higher throughputs, more capacity. So it's better all around and we're introducing a lot of new software features as well that make it easier to use, more manageable, more highly available, more options for customers, more isolation, more workload consolidation. So it's our usual better and better every year. We're already way ahead of the competition and pretty much every metric you can name, but we're not sitting back. We have the pedal of the metal and we're keeping it there. Okay, so as always, you announced some big numbers, you're referencing them. I did in my upfront narrative. You've claimed double to triple digit performance improvements. Tell us what's the secret sauce that allows you to achieve that magnitude of performance gain? Yeah, there's a lot of secret sauce in exadata. I mean, first of all, we have a custom designed hardware. So we design the systems from the top down. So it's not a generic system. It's designed to run database with a specific and sole focus of running database. And so we have a lot of technologies in there. Persistent memory is a really big one that we've introduced that enables super low response times for OTP, the Rocky, the remote convert, RDMA over converts the ethernet with 100 gigabit network is a big thing. Offload to storage servers is a big thing. The columnar processing of the storage is a huge thing. So there's a lot of secret sauce. Most of it is software and hardware related. And interesting about it's very unique. So we've been introducing more and more technologies and actually advancing our lead by introducing very unique, very effective technologies like the ones I mentioned. And we're continuing that with our X9 generation. So that persistent memory allows you to do a right directly atomic right directly to memory. And then what you update asynchronously to the backend at some point. Can you double click on that a little bit? Yeah, so we use persistent memory as kind of the first tier of storage. And the thing about persistent memory, it's persistent unlike normal memory, it doesn't lose its contents when you lose power. So it's just as good as flash or traditional spending this in terms of storing data. And the integration that we do is we do what's called remote direct memory access. That means the hardware sends the new data directly into persistent memory and storage with no software getting rid of all the software layers in between. And that's what enables us to achieve this extremely low latency. Once it's in persistent memory, it's stored. It's as good as being in flash or disk. So there's nothing else that we need to do. We do age things out of persistent memory to keep only hot data in there. That's one of the tricks that we do to make sure this persistent memory is more expensive than flash or disk. So we tear it. So we age data in and out as it becomes hot, age it out as it becomes cold. But once it's in persistent memory, it's as good as being stored. It is stored. I love it. Flash is a slow tier now. So let's talk about what this is. Right. And memory is about an order of magnitude faster. It's, you know, and, you know, flashes more than an order of magnitude faster than disk drive. So it is a new technology that provides big benefits, particularly for latency on OLTP. Great. Thank you for that. Okay. Let's, let's, we'll get out of the plumbing. Let's talk about what this announcement needs needs to customers. How does all this performance, and you got a lot of scale here, how does it translate into tangible results save for a bank? Yeah. So there's a lot of ways. So, you know, I mentioned performance is a big thing always with exit data. We're increasing the performance significantly for OLTP analytics. So OLTP, you know, 50, 60% performance improvements, analytics, 80% performance improvements in terms of costs, you know, effectiveness, you know, 30 to 60% improvement. So all these things are big benefits. You know, one of the differences between a server product like Exadata and a consumer product is performance translates in the cost also. If I get a new smartphone that's faster, it doesn't actually reduce my cost. It just, you know, makes my experience a little better. But with a server product like Exadata, if I have 50% faster, I can translate that into, I can serve 50% more users, 50% more workload, 50% more data, or I can buy a 50% smaller system to run the same workload. So, so when we talk about performance, it also means lower cost. So big customers of ours like banks, telecoms, retailers, et cetera, they can take that performance and turn it into better response times. They can also take that performance and turn it into lower cost. And everybody loves both of those things. So both of those are big benefits for our customers. Got it, thank you. Now, in a move that was maybe a little bit controversial, you stated flat out that you're not going to bother to compare Exadata, Cloud, customer performance against AWS Outposts and Azure Stack. Rather you chose to compare to RDS, Redshift, Azure SQL, why? Why was that? Yeah, so, you know, we have our Exadata runs in the public cloud. We have Exadata runs in Cloud of Customer and we have Exadata runs on-prem. And Azure and Azure Stack, they have something a little similar to Cloud of Customer. Where they take their cloud solutions and put them in the customer data center. So when we came out with our new X8, 9M, Cloud of Customer, we looked at those technologies and honestly, we couldn't even come up with a good comparison with their equivalent, for example, AWS Outposts because those products really just don't really run. For example, the two database products that Outposts promote or the Amazon promotes is Aurora for OLTP and Redshift for analytics. Well, those two can't even run it at all on their Outposts product. So, you know, it's kind of like beating up on a child or something, it doesn't make sense. You know, they're out of our weight class. So we're not even going to compare against them. So we compared what we run both in public cloud and cloud of customer against their best product, which is the Redshifts and the Aurora's in their public cloud, which is the most scalable available products. What their equivalent of cloud of customer, not only does it not perform, it doesn't run at all. Their premier products don't run at all on those platforms. Okay, but RDS does, right? I think, and Redshift or Azure SQL, right? We'll run on their version. So you compared against those. What were the results of the benchmarks when you made those comparisons? Yeah, so compared against their public cloud or cloud of customer, we generally get results that are something like 50 times lower latency and close to 100 times higher analytic throughput. So it's orders of magnitude. We're not talking 50%. We're talking 50 times. So, you know, compared to those products, there really is kind of, we're in a different league. It's kind of like they're, you know, the middle school little league and we're the professional team. So it's really dramatically different. It's not even in the same league. All right, now you also chose to compare the X9M performance against on-premises storage systems. Why and what were those results? Yeah, so with on-premises, traditionally customers bought conventional storage and that kind of stuff in that, those products have advanced quite a bit. And again, those aren't optimized. Those aren't designed to run database. But, you know, some customers have traditionally deployed those, you know, there's less and less these days. But we do get many times faster, both on OLTP and analytic performance there. I mean, in the analytics, it can be up to 80 times faster. So again, dramatically better. But yeah, there's still a lot of on-premises systems. So we want to ignore that fact and compare only to cloud products. So these are like to like in the sense that they're running the same level of database, right? You're not playing games in terms of the versioning obviously, right? Actually, we're giving them a lot of the benefits. So we're taking their published numbers that aren't even running a database. And they use these low level benchmarking tools to generate these numbers. So we're comparing our full end-to-end database to storage numbers against their, you know, low level IO tool that they published in their datasheet. So again, we're, you know, we're trying to give them the benefit of the doubt, we're still, you know, orders of magnitude better. Okay, now another claim that sort of caught our attention was you said that 87% of Fortune 100 organizations run Exadata and you're claiming many thousands of other organizations globally. Can you paint a picture of the ICP, the ideal customer profile for Exadata? What's a typical customer look like and why do they use Exadata one? Yeah, so the ideal customer is pretty straightforward. Customers that care about data, that's pretty much it. If you care about data, if you care about performance of data, if you care about availability of data, if you care about manageability, if you care about security, those are the customers that should be looking strongly at Exadata. And those are the customers that are adopting Exadata. That's why you mentioned 87% of the global Fortune 100, I've already adopted Exadata. If you look at a lot of industries, for example, pretty much every major bank almost in the entire world is running Exadata and they're running it for their mission critical workloads. Things like bank, like financial trading, regulatory compliance, user interfaces, the stuff that really matters. But in addition to the biggest companies, we also have thousands of smaller companies that run it for the same reason, because their data matters to them. And it's frankly the best platform, which is why we get chosen by these very, very sophisticated customers over and over again and why this product has grown to encompass most of the major corporations in the world and governments also. Now I know Deutsche Bank is a customer and I guess now an engineering partner from the announcement that I saw earlier this summer, they're using a cloud of customer and they're collaborating on things like security, blockchain, machine intelligence. And my inference is Deutsche Bank is looking to build new products and services that are powered by your platforms. What can you tell us about that? Can you share any insights? Are they going to be using X9M, for example? Yes, Deutsche Bank is a partnership that we announced a few months ago. It's a major partnership. Deutsche Bank is one of the biggest banks in the world. They traditionally are an on-premises customer and what they've announced is they're going to move almost the entire database estate to our Exadata cloud at customer platform. So they want to go with a cloud platform, but they're big enough that they want to run it in their own data center for certain regulatory reasons. And so the announcement that we make with them is they're moving the vast bulk of their data estate to this platform, including their core banking regulatory application. So they're most critical applications. So obviously they've done a lot of testing, they've done a lot of trials and they have the confidence to make this major transition to a cloud model with the Exadata cloud at customer solution. And we're also working with them to enhance that product and to work in various other fields, like you mentioned, machine learning, blockchain, that kind of project also. So it's a big deal. When one of the biggest, most conservative, best-respected financial institution in the world says, we're going all in on this product, that's a big deal. Now outside of banking, I know a number of years ago, I stumbled upon an installation or a series of installations at Samsung, found out about them as a customer, I believe it's not public, but they have something like 300 Exadata's. So help us understand, is this, is it common that customers are building these kind of Exadata farms? Is this an outlier? Yeah, so we have many large customers that have dozens to hundreds of Exadata's and it's pretty simple. They start with one or two and then they see the benefits of themselves and then it grows and Samsung is probably the biggest, most successful and most respected electronics company in the world. They're a giant company. They have a lot of different subunits. They do their own manufacturing. So, manufacturing is one of their most critical applications but they have lots of other things they run their Exadata for. So we're very happy to have them as one of our major customers that run Exadata. And by the way, Exadata again, very huge in electronics and manufacturing. It's not just banking and that kind of stuff. I mean, manufacturing is incredibly critical. If you're a company like Samsung, that's your bread and butter. If your factory stops working, you have huge problems. You can't produce products and you wanna improve the quality. You wanna improve the tracking. You wanna improve the customer service. All that requires a huge amount of data. Customers like Samsung are generating terabytes and terabytes of data per day from their manufacturing system. They track every single piece, everything that happens. So again, big deal. They care about data. They care deeply about data. They're a huge Exadata customer. That's kind of the way it works. And they've used it for many years and their use is growing and growing and growing. And now they're moving to the cloud model as well. All right, so we talked about some big customers and Juan, as you know, we've covered Exadata since its inception. We were there at the announcement. We've always stressed the fit in our research with mission critical workloads which especially resonates with these big customers. My question is how does Exadata resonate with the smaller customer base? Yeah, so we talk a lot about the biggest customers because honestly, they have the most critical requirements. But I mean, at some level, they have worldwide requirements. So if one of the major financial institutions goes down, it's not just them that's affected. That reverberates through the entire world. There's many other customers that use Exadata. Maybe their application doesn't stop the world, but it stops them. So it's very important to them. And so one of the things that we've introduced in our cloud of customer and public cloud Exadata platforms is the ability for Oracle to manage all the infrastructure which enables smaller customers that don't have as much IT sophistication to adopt these very mission critical technology. So that's one of the big advancements. Now we've always had smaller customers, but now we're getting more and more. We're getting universities, governments, smaller businesses adopting Exadata because the cloud model for adopting is dramatically simpler. Oracle does all the kind of administration, all the low level stuff. They don't have to get involved in it at all. They can just use the data. And on top of that comes our autonomous database which makes it even easier for smaller customers to adopt. So Exadata, which some people think of as a very high-end platform in this cloud model and particularly with autonomous databases is very accessible and very useful for any size customer really. Yeah, by all accounts, I mean, if I wouldn't debate Exadata has been a tremendous success. But you know, a lot of customers, they still prefer to roll their own, do it themselves. And when I talk to them and ask them, okay, why is that? They feel it limits their reliance on a single vendor and it gives them better ability to build what I call a horizontal infrastructure that can support, say, non-Oracle workload. So why, what do you tell those customers? Why should those customers run Oracle database on Exadata instead of a DIY infrastructure? Yeah, so that debate has gone on for a lot of years. And actually what I see there's less and less of that debate these days. You know, initially customers, many customers, you know, they were used to building their own. That's kind of what they did. They were pretty good at it. What we have shown customers, and when we talk about these major banks, those are the kind of people that are really good at it. They have giant IT departments. If you look at a major bank in the world, they have tens of thousands of people in their IT departments. These are gigantic multi-billion dollar organizations. So they were pretty good at this kind of stuff. And what we've shown them is you can't build this yourself. There's so much software that we've written to integrate with the database that you just can't build yourself. It's not possible. It's kind of trying to build, like trying to build your own smartphone. You really can't do it. The scale, the complexity of the problem. And now as the cloud model comes in, customers are realizing, hey, all this attention to building my own infrastructure, it's kind of last decade, last century. We need to move on to more of an as-a-service model so we can focus on our business, let enterprises that are specialized in infrastructure, like Oracle, that are really, really good at it, take care of the low-level details and let me focus on things that differentiate me as a business. It's not going to differentiate them to kind of establish their own storage for database. That's not a differentiating. They can't do it nearly as well as we can. And a lot of that is because we write a lot of special technology and software that they just can't do themselves. It's not possible. Just like you can't build your own smartphone. It's just really not possible. Now another area that we've covered extensively we're there at the unveiling as well, ZDLRA, the Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance. We've always liked this product, especially for mission critical workloads where near zero data loss, where you can justify that. But while we always saw it as somewhat of a niche market, first of all, is that fair and what's new with ZDLRA? Yeah, ZDLRA. I'm eating the best of it. Has been in the market for a number of years. We have some of the biggest corporations in the world running on that. And one of the big benefits has been zero data loss. So again, if you care about data, you can't lose data, right? You can't restore the last night's backup if something happens, right? So if you're a bank, you can't restore everybody's data to last night. Suppose you made a deposit during the day. They're like, hey, sorry, Mr. Customer, your deposit, well, we don't have any record anymore because we had to restore the last night backup. It doesn't work for airlines. It doesn't work for manufacturing. That whole model is obsolete. So you need zero data loss. And that's why we introduce zero data loss recovery appliance. And it's been very successful in the market. In addition to zero data loss, it actually provides much faster restore, much more reliable restores. It's more scalable. So it has a lot of advantages. With our X9M generation, we're introducing several new capabilities. First of all, it has higher capacity so we can store more backups, keep data for longer. Another thing is we're actually dropping the price of the entry level configuration of CDLRA. So it makes it more affordable and more usable by smaller businesses. So that's a big deal. And then the other thing that we're hearing a lot about, if you read the news at all, you hear a lot about ransomware. This is a major problem for the world. You know, cyber criminals breaking into your network and taking the data ransom. And so we've introduced some, we call cyber vault capabilities in CDLRA. They help address this ransomware issue that's kind of rampant throughout the world. So everybody's worried about that. There's now regulatory compliance for ransomware that particularly financial institutions have to conform to. And so we're introducing new capabilities in that area as well, which is a big deal. In addition, we now have the ability to have multiple CDLRAs in a large enterprise. And if something happens to one, we automatically fail over backups to another. We can replicate across them. So it makes it again, much more resilient with replication across different recovery appliances. So a lot of new improvements there as well. You know, is an air gap part of that solution for ransomware? No, air gap, you really can't have your back. If you're continuously streaming changes to it, you really can't have an air gap there, but you can protect the data. There's a number of technologies to protect the data. For example, you know, one of the things that a cybercruel wants to do is they want to take control of your data and then get rid of your backup so you can't restore them. So for, you know, as a simple example of one thing we're doing is we're saying, hey, once we have the data, you can't delete it for a certain amount of days. You might say, for the 30 days, I don't care who you are. I don't care what privileges you have. I don't care anything. I'm holding on to that data for at least 30 days. So for example, a cybercriminal can't come in and say, hey, I'm going to get into the system and delete that stuff or encrypt it or something like that. So that's a simple example of one of the things that the cyber vault does. So even as an administrator, I can't change that policy? That's right. That's kind of one of the goals is what doesn't matter what privileges you have, you can't change that policy. Does that eliminate the need for an air gap or would you not necessarily recommend, would you just sort of have another layer of protection? What's your recommendation on that to customers? We always recommend multiple layers of protection. So for example, in our ZDLRA, we support, we offload tape backups directly from the appliance. So a great way to protect the data from any kind of thing is you put on a tape, you guess what? Once that tape drive is filed away, I don't care what cybercriminal you are. If you're remote, you can't access that data. So we always promote multiple layers, multiple technologies to protect the data. And tape is a great way to do that. We can also now archive, in addition to tape, we can now archive to the public cloud, to our object storage servers. We can archive to what we call our ZFS appliance, which is a very low cost storage appliance. So there's a number of secondary archive copies that we offload and implement for customers. We make it very easy to do that. So yeah, you want multiple layers of protection. Got it, okay. Your tape is your ultimate air gap. ZDLRA is your low RPO device. You got cloud kind of in the middle. Maybe that's your cheap and deep solution. So you have some options. Yes. Okay, last question. Summarize the announcement. If you had us mention two or three takeaways from the X9M announcement for our audience today, what would you choose to share? I mean, it's pretty straightforward. It's the new generation. It's significantly faster for OLTP, for analytics, significantly better consolidation, more cost effective. That's the big picture. Also, there's a lot of software enhancements to make it, improve the management, make it more usable, make it better disaster recovery. I talked about some of these cyber vault capabilities. So it's improved across all the dimensions and not in small ways, in big ways. We're talking 50% improvement, 80% improvements. That's a big change. And also we're keeping the price the same. So when you get a 50 or 80% improvement, we're not increasing the price to match that. So you're getting much better value as well. And that's pretty much what it is. It's the same product, even better. Well, I love this cadence that we're on. We love having you in these video exclusives. We have a lot of Oracle customers in our community. So we appreciate you giving us sort of the inside scoop on these announcements. Always a pleasure having you on theCUBE. Thanks for having me. It's always fun to be with you, Dave. All right, and thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and we'll see you next time.