 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 and Brian Grace Lee. Welcome back to Oracle OpenWorld 2015. You're watching theCUBE SiliconANGLE Media's flagship program. We go out to all the big industry shows, help extract the signal from the noise. I'm Stu Miniman and joined with me is Brian Grace with wikibon.com. Happy to have on the program first-time guest, Wim Coker, who's the SVP of virtualization and Linux and Oracle. Wim, welcome to the program. Thank you, glad to be here. All right, so Wim, we've been talking a bit about Oracle, a lot of infrastructure discussion this week, talking about the cloud, Linux open stacks going on this week in Tokyo. To start off, can you tell us a little bit about what your role on Oracle, how long you've been there and what does your organization do? So personally I've been at Oracle just over 20 years, nearly 21 years, first job out of college. My background's database and Linux was my hobby which then turned into being my job and my hobby today. So it's kind of great. My team at Oracle is responsible for Oracle Linux, so both support and development, Oracle VM, X86 and Spark Hypervisor, OpenStack is a part of that stack, K-Splice, which we talked about a lot at the conference to do online patching for kernel and user spaces in my group. There's a product called Secure Global Desktop which is, people know as Tarantella. It's a remote app display technology, so those are the pieces in my team directly. So we're a little bit separate in the company from an organizational point of view. I report to Edward Scraven, who reports to Larry and we're primarily focused on open source technologies but not necessarily exclusive to that. So last week you guys made an announcement regarding OpenStack, can you just bring us up to speed? You know, what's Oracle's participation in OpenStack and what was the news? Sure, so we have our own product called Oracle OpenStack for Oracle Linux and we launched the first version a year ago, last September, and that version was based on Icehouse. You know, OpenStack has all these milestone release names and we set out to do one release per year. Following every OpenStack release is a little bit too much for us and for customers, you don't want to be upgrading every three to six months, right? So we decided that for a while we'll do one release a year. Last week we announced Kilo, so OpenStack release two is based on the Kilo release and the primary focus we have is install configuration and upgrade, which is still everyone's pain point, right? BT had a public blog just a week ago saying how, you know, their concerns around OpenStack is installation configuration issues and all that. And so we spend a lot of time in packaging OpenStack as a Docker container, so instead of giving you packages you install on top of Linux, we just say download this Docker instance. It contains all the OS pieces needed and all the OpenStack Python code that just completely packaged for you. All you do is Docker pull the version and you start it up, right? So no more installation needed. It gives you flexibility on servers because you can say I want to run Horizon on this machine, I want to run Nova compute on these servers, I want to run Cinder here, and so forth, or Keystone there, and so it makes it really easy to separate out services on different servers and upgrades will be update your Docker image and restart the service. So that's a big part of what we did. The second part is another pain point is the scalability aspect, right? And there's a central database repository used for authentication, HEAT uses it, Horizon uses it, Cinder uses it to put stuff in. That's where the tenants are created and the networks and all that. And that uses a MySQL database, right? And the current OpenStack code is basically going towards one MySQL instance. You know quite a bit about MySQL at Oracle, right? And we have a version called MySQL cluster. So that lets you install multiple database instances on one database, one repository, and that gives you HA and it gives you scalability. So we've integrated MySQL cluster into OpenStack. That's all going upstream, so we've made all the modifications into Python code and we're submitting that up to mainline so that it becomes part of the product. And that allows you to say, I want three, four, five cluster instances for HA purposes, for scalability purposes, so it's all integrated into the product, all with Docker instances, so very easy to use. So those are the two main things that we've done. So it's updated to Kilo, it runs on OL7, but you don't have to worry about it because it's all packaged together and I think it's a really cool solution. So we've had a chance to talk to a lot of Oracle executives this week. Most of them are buttoned up suit and tie. You've got very much that sort of open source look. What's the open source culture inside of Oracle? You know, what's the overall kind of mindset about open source, about you talked about pushing things back upstream? Help us understand what that's like inside of Oracle. Well, you know, open source is a development strategy. It's not philosophical to us. We have lots of products that use open source components and we have lots of stuff that are using components that we write internally, right? So we don't really, there's nothing at Oracle that says you can or can do something like that. If it makes sense from a business point of view, you participate and you know, we follow the license. You have something that needs to contribute back, we contribute back and we've obviously been doing that for many years with Linux and we do that with Zen, right? Because Oracle VM is Zen based, we do that with MySQL for instance. So there's a lot of open source at Oracle across the company, not just my team. And it works just fine. It's just a development model and we make use of it. Yeah, we heard, you know, a number of things this week about, you know, private cloud appliances, private cloud machines, you know, OpenStack in general, folks would typically say, well, it's more for sort of modern applications, you know, fail fast kind of design. Oracle obviously has a ton of experience in HA, highly available. What have you been doing around OpenStack to maybe deal with both of those environments or do you sort of tailor it towards one, one type of application or another? You know, it's a very good question. So one of the things, so when you look at containers and Docker, it's becoming very popular, right? But one of the drawbacks is that it's sort of done by, you know, many small startups that are seeing this as an opportunity, but you end up with a solution that's completely green field again. So you have your entire infrastructure, oh, if you want to do this, buy whole new stuff and build something out, that's different management, different interfaces. And we're very much worried about making sure that traditional apps can run into this modern way of doing provisioning as well. We just announced certification for EBITS suite and JD AdWords and PeopleSoft Oracle Database Linux containers for instance and Docker already certified WebLogic. Anyway, to go back to OpenStack, the apps don't actually run in OpenStack, right? OpenStack is a management product. You still have a hypervisor. That's where the actual products run. So we work with OpenStack with Oracle VM. Every product that we have certified on Oracle VM in the past is technically certified with OpenStack with Oracle VM. That's where you run on. So our focus is really making sure that the OpenStack management pieces make it easy to deploy more complex applications, larger VMs and larger volumes and have more locality so that if you have a rack cluster with three or four nodes that they run in the same rack and not in different places in the data center and stuff like that. So we're trying to blend the more bigger enterprise applications that they run into this environment. So it's not one or the other exposure. So, Wim, you've been at Oracle quite a while now and involved in Linux. You know, I'd say most people, if they kind of listed off, you know, big Linux players and big contributors to open source, I think Oracle wouldn't come up, you know, in many of the conversations. Do you have any kind of, you know, data you could share with us as to, you know, why Oracle should be considered more in the conversation there? So I would disagree. Two things. In the Linux kernel community, we're definitely seen as a big contributor. A lot of the folks on my team are maintainers like James Morris, he's the maintainer of Linux security for Linux. He's in my group. Conrad Wilt maintains the Zen components for Linux for Linux. He's in my team. So we actually have a lot of folks in my group that contribute directly to upstream kernel. So the core kernel community, they know us very well, we work really well with everyone else. And you'll see obviously a lot more of that. In terms of more commercial enterprise support, the Oracle Linux, we are the number two vendor. Number two. Number two. So when you look at revenue generated for Linux support, whether it's Red Hat or SUSE or us, we're comfortably the number two today. Yeah, it's one of those challenging things we talk about. You know, it's open source, you know, do we make money on it? Red Hat of course gets, you know, they're due for what they've done. How about for OpenStack? You know, where does this fit kind of into the portfolio? Some of the cloud announcements, kind of the enterprise cloud side. Most of the OpenStack discussions we've heard are more kind of on-premises environments. You know, where does Oracle use OpenStack and where are you packaging OpenStack today? It's definitely on-premise, right? So what we want to make sure of is both in some of the appliance work that we do, but also as part of Oracle Linux, there's a huge world out there where, you know, customers run obviously on Cisco UCS hardware and storage from multiple vendors, and they want to have a, you know, standardized normal deployment for cloud environments on-premise. So we want to make sure that both Oracle Linux, Oracle VM, and our OpenStack solution works on everyone's hardware, everyone's platform, and it's a good model for that. So in Oracle Public Cloud, that's a whole different scale. You need a different kind of product with different types of integrations. So that's our own code, that's not OpenStack. We have OpenStack compatible components in there, but what we do is mostly focused on-premise, yeah. Oracle this week, a lot of talk about being open, obviously, OpenStack Linux, big pieces of those things. But we've also heard a lot about engineered systems. How do you guys think about interoperability? I mean, obviously there's Oracle networking, Oracle storage, but do you guys also do interoperability with, I mean, obviously partner with Cisco, but third-party storage, does that come into play for what you offer your customers? We certainly do where it makes sense. So in terms of engineered systems, one product is called the Private Cloud Appliance, and we support all third-party storage with it, right? So there's, on the engineered systems side, it kind of depends on whether it's something that's an isolated environment that does one task, or something that's more generic, where we support third-party hardware. But when you look at Oracle Linux and Oracle VM, many of our customers, you know, I mean, in particular, you Cisco UCS platforms, and we work, obviously, very closely together and make sure everything's certified and tested, and customers can be happy with that. So we want to run everywhere, right? And we will be the number one Linux vendor. In order to do that, we have to be completely open on everyone's platform. But what's very important is, and I hope that came out in the keynotes and everything, is the version of Oracle Linux in Oracle Public Cloud and on engineered systems is the exact same version of Oracle Linux that we give to customers that runs on Cisco hardware. The same with Oracle VM, the same with all the other pieces that we ship, is the identical version, and that's really interesting. What can you tell us about kind of customer's adoption of these open platforms? I mean, a few years ago, eight, 10 years ago, people would have said, well, I'm not sure I'm into Linux. You were at OSCON this year, they were saying, hey, look, open is one, Linux is one. What are you seeing in terms of the shift of people being comfortable with more open type of technologies? Linux is obviously there, right? So there are very few customers that are still cautious on, are we going to run a production environment on Linux? There still exists some. I'm not sure how many, but there's a few left. But for the most part, it's a main platform for enterprise applications. And of course, we use a lot of it too. I think OpenStack is something that's up and coming. The vast majority of production use is really test and dev use. And it's just used in a, you know, they call it production that's test and dev. And I think over the next few years, you'll see that more turn into running production applications rather than test and dev apps. And it just takes a little bit of time, right? And it's the same with technologies like Docker. They are very exciting and people think it's going to solve a lot of problems, but it still needs to settle, and we still need to figure out what problem exactly it would solve and which problems it won't. And what we will contribute is the ability to say, you can use Docker for this, you use Linux containers for this, you use VMs for that. We give you management infrastructure across the stack. You can run it all different kinds of hardware, and that will solve a problem, right? And it's much better than saying, this is it, because it's not. Customers want choice, and they need choice for different types of applications. Yeah, we had some people that stopped by the booth that we were talking about different things from the keynote and Docker had come up and we had some people say, well, how do I run Oracle Database in Docker, and am I supposed to do those things together? How much do your team have to go off and educate customers? Because a lot of this new technology is coming really fast, and it's hard for them to keep up. Are you guys involved with those customer conversations as well? Oh, we are, and I hate to say this, sometimes we have to do something just to have a checkbox so that we're relevant. Not necessarily that works, just you have to have it on the list, and that's unfortunate. I think it's education, and a lot of it also is based on experience with, running a database, it's a very big, complex application. It's very important. Doing that in Docker is not necessarily something that makes sense, because Docker is a technology that's good to run a binary, or one executable, not something that's thousands of processes and you have listeners and storage engines and stuff like that. Containers are better for that, so what our goal is, is to come up with a list of certifications for products where it makes sense, like WebLogic makes total sense in Docker, MySQL makes total sense in Docker, Oracle Database, eBusiness Suite, you really need a complete operating environment, Linux containers, or VMs, right? And so our certifications will kind of guide people into what we think makes sense to do. Yeah, no, that's important. What do you get? You guys, obviously, you're in a lot of open spaces now that the cloud's being announced, lots more services in the Oracle public cloud. How much do you hear customers say, well you guys, you know, you're learning a lot, how to operationally do that, how many of them do you hear them say, bring that operational expertise back to my private cloud? Is that another part of education that you guys feel like needs work? I think this week that's pretty obvious in the keynotes, right? Because we're very, I think the message has very much been, you can run what we run. You really don't need to run something else, you don't really need to go and do your own research on which operating system will work well with which product version that we have. Like, we publish the stack that we run. This version of Oracle Database, this version of Oracle Linux, run the same thing, right? And I think that's helping a lot, because in the past, without public cloud, we would compete with other vendors like Oracle VM versus VMware, for instance. And now it's like, well, you're already running your business or part of it on OPC, that's not VMware. So, you're already running a different hypervisor, you can run that here, full stack. And I think this week it's very obvious that we're doing that, I hope, and we'll do more publications on what we're doing and that will help set the record straight. So, Wim, one of the questions we got coming into the show is there's some assets that Oracle has with Nebula and Nimbula, are those in your organization, are they still involved in the open stack stuff, or what can you share with us? So, most of these groups are working on Oracle Public Cloud, right? So, we're doing open stack and sort of more just traditional open stack packaging for our customers. And a lot of these folks in terms of knowledge and teams are more focused on helping with the Oracle Private Cloud machine and Oracle Public Cloud. Okay, I guess that begs the question. When I look at, I mean, HP kind of got out of the public cloud piece, they're saying, but IBM and HP, huge open stack contribution that they're doing and it's kind of critical. Is open stack across all of the cloud pieces? Do, does Oracle look at it just as the on-prem piece? What are the ties between your team and the cloud stuff? Public cloud stuff, I should say. Well, open stack's important and we contribute quite a bit. We've spent more time on packaging and installation initially because you need a good product to provide to customers. But there's a lot of contribution happening and there will be a lot more. So, we are very much focused on on-premise and again, you can run the same version of the hypervisor, the same version of Oracle Linux as we run an OPC. So, I think what will make more sense is to say, a public cloud is a completely different infrastructure, a completely different scale, potentially custom hardware deployments and setups and in a private cloud environment, it's more working with different technologies and be more generic. So, we're more focused on that side, but we want to make sure that we have compatibility from a product point of view across the two. So, that if you run an app, an OPC, that you can also run that locally, right? That's where we interact the most. Yeah, and I think that aligns very much with what we hear from service providers. OpenStack, it's harder to scale, it's maybe not what they initially expect, but it's a great technology for private clouds and so forth. How much do your customers care that OpenStack is in there? I mean, as long as I can get a virtual machine or I can get my application running, does that really even matter to them? You know, for traditional applications, virtualization as is, it's not going away anytime soon, right, a traditional management product. You know which VM runs on which server, how much memory is allocated to it. So, when you run a big database in production, a big ERP system in production, the admins want full control over what runs where. And for them, an OpenStack solution is not necessarily something they're jumping up and down to do. And, you know, it'll take some time for those folks to move over. OpenStack is very much test and death where you have development teams that want agility and this is perfect. I want a quick little database instance with my little Java app and I want to run them and do some tests and then it goes away, it's perfect for that. And so you'll see that evolve into more enterprise stuff, but that's kind of where we are today though, makes sense. So, Wim, you've been at Oracle for quite a while. Can you give us a little bit of insight, you know, kind of how does open source play inside the company? Culturally, one of the things we've said, I guess maybe not culturally, but just organizationally, we've seen some shifts in Oracle. I mean, there's a lot of changes going on. Of course, there's the big sun acquisition quite a few years back. How does your group play into the organization and what kind of changes do you see with inside Oracle over the last few years? Yeah, so the way to answer that is we're a company, we're in the business of providing services and products to customers, right? And we compete with lots of other companies. And in some cases, we ride around software and we know we can do a great job and better job at it. And in some cases, if there's an open source alternative, we'll use that, but it's not required either way. So, like I said in the beginning, open source for us is a development model. It's not strategic. It's just, for some things, it's good. For others, we do our own. And it just depends on each product where it fits. It's across the board. Wim, really appreciate you stopping by. I know you've got a busy schedule here. We'll be right back with wrapping up our coverage here at Oracle Open World 2015. This is theCUBE. Thanks for watching. All right, thank you.