 From San Francisco extracting the signal from the noise. It's the Q covering oracle open world 2015 Brought to you by Oracle Now your hosts John Furrier and Stu Miniman Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in San Francisco for Silicon angles the cube This is our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal noise I'm John Furrier the founder of Silicon Island showing Stu Miniman our big our systems analysts at wikibon.com Our next is a John Fowler executive vice president of the systems group within Oracle the head honcho for the engineering systems former cube alum Engineering legend in the industry been following your career for a long time. Welcome back to the cube All right, thanks for having me guys on the big stage So so obviously the big thing right now in our mind is cloud end of the client server era You've been a big engineering part of that era the cloud is here. It's all about going to the next generation So there's a lot of systems being discussed systems systems conversations. What's the next operating system? But yet you got cloud mobile social you got a transformation on the database side big data analytics all this stuff pointing to the Integrated cloud of which engineered systems is a big part of it So as someone who's been in the industry for so many years I mean, how do you make sense of this because you've got a good perspective you've got a historical perspective But you're also on the front lines of Oracle's leadership team building out the engineering Yeah, so I mean it's interesting because I think a cloud in a lot of ways is the same thing again Right, which is how do you have great programming interfaces? How do you make sure that applications can run? How do you then solve business problems? But then express in a different way which is instead of the classical way where you just buy all your own stuff and And develop and run it yourself. You have other people helping you do that The interesting thing is in the cloud is then the problems are the same for the people who run it where they care about they got to have Security they got to have performance. They got to have reliability. They've got to have Efficiency so they have cost so in a way it's a kind of a twist on The same technical problems we've been trying to solve for years and years the business side of it is expressed differently So it feels different to people because the business side is expressed differently, but the technical problems are very much the same Security's top of mind this year. I see in the engineering systems security's been around for a while encryption specifically And now we talked last at Oracle's cloud announcement Redwood shores and we were talking about silicon, right? Putting software on silicon me and Dave a lot they would you want Dean were like man This is the holy grail if you can abstract down to the chip level. Yeah, you can do encapsulate and abstract away a lot of the Pain in the butt kind of things that that bother people around security audits these things So what what is going on in silicon right now and relatively with respect to security? Yeah, so thanks We've we've had a you know a direction for a while now where we take hardware and software engineers and put them together And you've seen that next to data and our storage products and others The thing that we've been working on now for several years is how do we take that knowledge and take it all the way to Processor development, which I believe is really what the next decades about it's not just about cores and threads anymore It's gonna be putting functions in silicon and so this week We will be making major announcement of new hardware incorporating that new silicon which includes we tackle two big problems Besides performance is how do we improve security and then how do we prove the database and and and database performance and efficiency So in security encryption's funny old technology But people suddenly care and that's because there's a lot going on in the world right and It's important. So we got Java one going on today, right? I'll see there's a database transformation going on. You're seeing it now in cloud I'm gonna on-prem. I got hybrid cloud got public cloud. You guys are the number one database out there You got Java going on now and people want end-to-end security without without performance sacrifices Absolutely everyone would always optimize around performance because of the database Overhead and the overhead involved in Java now if you take the overhead away, that's cool I get that yeah, but now security again encryption pretty intensive Yeah, what is yeah So my vision is a fully encrypted data center and by that I mean is nothing coming in nothing getting stored Nothing going out is unencrypted. There is no clear clear is gone Okay, and by building this into processors it scales with everybody's infrastructure, right? You don't have the SSL terminator you have it built into every application process So what we'll be talking about this week and announcing products around is products that can do exactly that You can turn on and use encryption at all tiers of your application And you can have nothing in the clear and still accomplish the kind of performance and latency that customers want to expect But better yet it's built in so you don't have to be a total we need to go use it, right? It's just built in you go use it so that is absolutely a goal And what about performance what about performance great performance will announce world record benchmarks and we're submitting Encrypted which is not in a requirement of the benchmarks because our passion is we believe that you should be able to turn on encryption And still have outstanding business performance, so we'll announce World records in computational style benchmarks where we've turned on encryption even though that's not a requirement of the benchmark Just to show off and core up it's on cores I'll see it's Moore's law more smaller faster cheaper That's been a big thing of the industry any updates on Cores that you guys going to be announcing. Yeah, so we'll have the world's highest core count at 32 We're going to have a huge clock rate We're going to have all the usual things to give you a world record benchmark But the other thing we've done is we've integrated some capabilities specifically for data analytics So we work with the Oracle database team and we've integrated co processors that understand data And it's called the data analytics accelerator and we've made the Oracle database work with this to tremendously Accelerate the common data manipulation well if you don't realize sort of like encryption is Today most applications are doing a huge amount of work just to take a bite put it over here take a bite put it over here Compare it. We're making those accelerated action by co processors So we're using silicon in more clever ways than just cores and threads John first of all congratulations five years ago Steve mill said that spark was dead and obviously it's not dead Yeah, can you talk a little bit about how from an engineering standpoint you keep, you know pushing and pushing the ball forward And you know differentiating against x86 How do you fight that you know beating drum of Moore's law? Yeah, I mean, let me be very candid You know when we came into Oracle is kind of a tough fight and you know the conversation Larry and I had was We're gonna go partner really hard with Intel But let's look at some things we can do differentiate because we want all the customers to come to us So regardless whether you like Intel or you want to look at our differentiation So security and database acceleration with two of the early areas we looked at which is how do we do those now? The interesting thing is it's very hard to actually do technically So we put together engineering teams. We built simulation models. We designed chips We ran workloads before we made the chips So we know that we're on the right track because in one place we're able to design it empirically understand whether it would work So, you know, it's been an exciting journey We have come out now. This will be our Sixth processor in five years is joining Oracle, which is a tremendous pace of processor development So earlier this year at the engineered systems launch you talked to Dave Vellante about how not only you're building kind of the integration into The hardware, but you also have to support an ecosystem Can you talk a little bit to the kind of the balance that you have there? I mean I look at tonight's keynote the CEO of Intel is gonna be there. So obviously there's that tension Yeah, so obviously a company like Oracle has to both both partner as well as compete on many levels And so we want to make sure our software runs on everything as optimized as possible And we're not afraid to innovate the hardware layer because at the end of the day What we're thinking about is we're not as much thinking about all these different vendors as we are as one of the customer wants Right and their customers are gonna want extra security in their silicon They're gonna want to have the high performance data analytics and their customers that want some of the economic Open capabilities of Intel. That's okay. Right. That's okay. It's good for us people want more They want more they want more they want more cash. They want more performance. They want more cores. They want lower latency And particularly you mentioned big data analytics Sequel on silicon is something that we've been seeing Teasing out the last time. What is the sequel on silicon? Is that Oracle only environment or how do you look beyond Oracle on? Yeah, good question So so we evolved the original design with the Oracle database team But we designed it to be data analytics acceleration. Okay, and at this show this week, we'll be demonstrating Spark with a K There's an open-source project called spark with a K Which is about in-memory analytics on top of Hadoop and so we've integrated the software and silicon data analytics Accelerator in with spark and we'll be showing a demonstration here on the demo floor, which I hope you come see it's Sintolating I promise but it shows the performance capability you can get when you integrate some actual function I do that and we think there's going to be a number of other applications That take advantage of these so obviously first out of the gate is the Oracle database, but we're completely open It's an open interface. We provide the libraries will provide the programming tools other people will take advantage of these to build data rich Applications, yeah, so you bring up a great point We've been looking at wiki bond kind of the intersection of technologies like flash and how in-memory analytics applications Are going to affect things when you look out a couple of years What do you think the kind of data center of the next couple of years is going to look like what's kind of some of the Flash and I've always gone on record I'm a little counterculture of saying flash isn't that exciting because I actually want everything in memory So if you look at my last two things that I mean we just talked about right I've worked on security to protect memory better so that you can have these big emmer merries I've worked on co processors to actually operate on memory better So I think the data center of the future is going to be very very large in memory systems connected by 100 gig and beyond ethernet Or in finna band ethernet type rdma networks and then you're going to have flash really is a backing store Right, and you're never reading anymore You're only writing to storage because everything you use is always in memory and there's a number of advantages that is super efficient You know the footprint and capability is super efficient And so you're going to see that whole thing happen That's what we're working towards the all-in-memory encrypted data center So one of the attacks from the competition is that you do great at integrating for that red sack Yeah, you can control kind of the price on that. What about the other applications the other workloads? You know you bring somebody over like Dave Donatelli who has a you know strong history competing in that market Are we going to see Oracle, you know kind of branch out more and you know, what's the state of other applications? Yeah, I mean absolutely many of the things we do actually benefit other workloads including other database workloads, whether it's side base dv2 or so on But we also really focus in on things like database middleware and Java because so many applications are built on top of them So it's absolutely critical that we do great at all these workloads There's no Oracle monoculture in the world including here at Oracle, right? We all use and build our own applications. So that's an absolute focus area in memory. You brought that up So I'm going to bring up the the mainframe conversation is basically you're describing a mainframe everything's in memory How about multi-threaded apps as well as a single-threaded apps because you got OLTP stuff Which I get and you now got the integrated solutions and you got cloud, right? So couple things one is the cloud now the mainframe and how the customer is migrating it out if you've got encryption you got all these performance Performances are addressed. How do they do that? How do they take essentially a mainframe if you will or is it a mainframe like functionality just decentralized? And then what about migrating in and out of that securely? Yeah, so so one of the things we're doing John is we have worked to integrate our on-premises tools with our cloud So you can take for example database that you're running on-premise and just Migrate it to our on-premise our off-premise cloud database service And then you can also watch it with the same set of tools so you can see what's my performance and what's our capability These tools will continue to improve over time so this integration becomes more and more seamless We want to make that as easy as possible We know that we're unique in that we have a full suite of software and a full suite of hardware for on-premises computing And we build a super skill cloud so if you look at every other vendor in the business They don't have that ability right and we think that's what the next decade is about the next decade is about People picking and choosing where they want to run cloud services What do they want to run on-prem? Can I run this way or that way and we feel we're uniquely positioned to be able to do that and I'm wiring those tools together I love I love first of all. I love this being operating systems and undergraduate computer science back in the 80s But we hit you know units was the state of the art Linux then came after that But now what you've done at Oracle is you've taken spark right and you've integrated engine engines just to make the cloud Enabled and and compatible live make Rachel and Christian stuff. What is where does units go from here? I mean it's clearly not going away this concept of units systems Management systems architecture operating systems is the cloud. It's an operating system. Yeah, so what's the linker? Where's the loader with the compiler? How do you as a computer scientist and look at the future if you look at this the cloud of the 20 mile stair you say You know, what is out in the horizon? Yeah, I think there's one big difference then from the operating system days of old is we have a strong Abstraction and things like Java so you're not writing deposits anymore You're really running to Java and you have a standard abstraction with the operating system level We still have a huge number of problems to go solve right as we talked about before about embedding and making encryption and security completely made it Life cycle management update is huge in the cloud because you're running 24-7. You have zero downtime You got to constantly bring things up to date and deal with that because the the the requirements are you have shared multi-tenant environments Virtual machines as well complicated machines complicate things as well and then on the other side There's also efficiency, so what happens you want to run a cloud environment your margin Relates pretty directly to how efficiently you can run things and so I want to make the most efficient platforms in the world That's part of what these coprocessors about and built-in security and features in the operating system Is I want to make it so for a dollar we can deliver more capability than anyone else in the world because that relates that an operating System plays a huge role in that how about encryption? Why is it taking this long to have encryption on the chip? Is it is it just just the geopolitical landscape and business or is it just The timing of all the components and from a performance standpoint is it versus is it just timing? Yeah, so we've been working on this for a while So back at Sun we kind of led this bandwagon and I've joked about nobody cared and nobody used it Right, we didn't have very many users But the the thing that's actually changed is that is the is the landscape right is every time you turn around people are losing data and Encryption is only one part of a complete security story and we have a lot of other aspects of security story But because encryption is expensive and slow people choose not to use it now where we are going in the fully encrypted data centers I want to make it so that secure systems are the default So the way things have been for decades is you buy a system and it's very open to begin with You get to choose your root password, you know, which is a stupid idea to begin with right and then you go from there And then you got to go read a white paper and be an expert to turn on a bunch of things And so this week we're also announcing a new super cluster where we are Reversing the sense of that which is the default install is pretty damn secure And if you want to turn things off, you're gonna have to read a white paper And I think that's where we're all gonna have to go by building in encryption I make it much easier to do that which is to make secure a default attribute of the platform as opposed to an Optional attribute of the platform versus the old model of perimeter based security right now everything secure in your vision Absolutely, we move the perimeter to the servers and stores themselves right because you know You can't you can't depend on on just perimeter based security now security theory is you got to have defense in depth You do perimeter security use system level security store security, right? But we we up the game significantly one of the things we hear from customers when they look at cloud is you know Will they have portability? Can they own their data? Yeah, I guess a concern that would be bring up is if you do you know kind of security that way by default If I go somewhere else, I don't have that so can you talk about you know, how can I take my data? How do I play with other environments? Can I tie into AWS and Azure? Yeah, so so first of all we think that the security of our capability is one of our value ads, right? So of course we want you to come and stay with us but The way it works with your data is you always own and have access to your data and your data is always encrypted You manage your own private keys, so we don't have that, right? So you have your private key you get to have your data if you want to take your data off of us Decrypt it and put it in your storage service. You're absolutely free to go do that There's no no question that you you can't do that They'll fear for you to do that so mission critical your vision always secure from the start Yeah, and read a white paper to make it unsecure. Yes, do something medieval if you will. Okay, that's cool I get that I love that love that vision and encryption if you can crack the code on performance with that That's killer. So okay with that in mind. How do you define open? With with that. Okay. You mentioned earlier. You guys are open. What does open mean to you now in this new reality? Well, I mean open means obviously the database itself programming all those Application layers remain open and you mentioned the mainframe and and customers occasionally bring the DM question up to me Right as I call the M question right is the difference between today and the mainframe is in the mainframe You got a machine and then you got a programming manual for RPG 2 or PL 1 or whatever And you're programming to OS V tam or CICS and you can't move right with us You're programming to Java J2 EE the database tier and you can move wherever you want your applications are completely portable The tools are all the tools are open the whole tool chain You know that the runtimes are portable Java's portable So it's a completely open environment So if you don't like me and you want to take your application take it somewhere else You're completely free to do it, which you weren't in the mainframe, right? This is a huge difference in our current environment, right? So John We've seen a lot of changes in the industry recently mega acquisitions You know this year there's been over three and a half trillion dollars worth of M&A I'm curious what's lifelike at Oracle compared to some of these horizontal moves and changes that that we've been seeing Especially he seems to be picking up so I'm watching with some sort of bemusement right at all these different things But you know what we are at Oracle is we're very steady on the strategy and as you guys know I've interviewed you guys several times We invest in core engineering we invest Billions of dollars in core engineering and we're working on building out the world's best platform all the way the application tier both cloud Non-prem and so I look at a lot of the things going on in the industry What I see is smaller players that have much smaller portfolios Trying to figure out how to get together because they don't have enough asset base and the combination of hardware and software to actually build those kinds of engineered and integrated systems and and and I think that's going to be the The future of a lot of these kinds of things now that doesn't mean there's not gonna be a lot of innovation because it's all in open Interfaces you're gonna have lots of companies around this ecosystem, but some of these core technologies are very difficult And they're gonna come from a few players awesome John Fowler. Thanks for coming on the queue really appreciate you Chan your insight certainly I'll see your expertise and going way back and now in Oracle's phenomenal My final question for you is for the folks out there the customers And all the press and analysts who are looking at the sea of noise or just a lot of announcements come in Oracle What's the bombs are dropping everywhere? I mean a lot of amazing stuff Relative to the engineered systems and the stuff you're working on here with the silicon software and silicon security and whatnot What should they be paying attention to if you can focus their attention in a few key areas? Yeah Yeah, yeah, so I think you know from Oracle I think the biggest thing is to understand our breadth of being able to solve enterprise on-prem and cloud Right, so if you're taking your company over the next decade Who do you want to go partner with if you partner with Oracle? Whether you do want to do it on-premise or you want to do with cloud We can cover all those with the same applications Nobody else can do that the second thing we're working on and you'll see this in Larry on Tuesday Is we've got a maniacal focus on security? We want to go lead on security because we have the applications as well as the middleware in the database We have more tools to go tackle that particular problem than anyone else right it's kind of interesting because oracles always been about performance You'll see a big message there comprehensive portfolio on-premise and cloud huge focus on information security in the years to come I mean that you can nail the security thing that the game changer because customers want more right now They want they want more of everything. Yeah, but security seems to be the thing that stops the ball Absolutely, it's like the defense and in forward progress Congratulations, John. Thanks for coming. Thank you. We appreciate the cube live here in Howard Street Oracle of the World Day one kickoff Sunday Java one go by again open Java's open You know and now we got the cloud the cloud is one big mainframe But not technically a mainframe, but thanks for sharing engineered systems in the cloud and on-premise. This is the cube We'll be right back after this short break