 The Cube at EMC World 2014 is brought to you by EMC. Redefine VCE, innovating the world's first converged infrastructure solution for private cloud computing. Brocade, say goodbye to the status quo and hello to brocade. Okay, we're back, this is Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick. Sam Lucido is here, he's the Oracle Solutions technical market expert for EMC. Spends a lot of time in the database world. Sam, welcome to the Cube, good to see you again. Yeah, good to see you, thanks for having me again. Yeah, you're welcome. So, we've been talking off camera, you've been doing a lot of talks, of course. What's the vibe like out there? What have you been talking to people about? Yeah, you know, it's really pretty interesting. A lot of the Oracle DABAs out there in storage administrators are very interested about the off-layer storage arrays right now. We had a lot of great questions some of the presentations recently and kind of how Oracle databases work on all-flash storage arrays. So, in terms of trending topics, it really seems to be the interest of storage administrators at HEP to support databases. So, what are they concerned about these days? The DBA, obviously they want visibility. We were talking to Nancy Majors earlier, she was talking about the organizational, she didn't use the word tension, I did, between the DBA and the storage admin and how the DBA wants more visibility. It's been tough historically for the storage team to do that. It's been somewhat of a black box. Is that still a concern amongst DBAs and how is EMC addressing that? You know, that's kind of an interesting question because it's almost the lack of people not knowing about the tools that we have out there. It's interestingly enough, we have three tools. We have a DB Classify, we have the OEM12C plugin and we have the MyTrend Report that people can use. Two of those free tools, two of those tools are free, absolutely free to the storage administrator and the DBA. And what's really nice about that is they can use them at any time. The only tool that you have to pay for is the DB Classify tool and then that's about it. It's interesting though, people don't know about these tools so that stress that you were mentioning between this storage administrator and the DBA is there because they're not using the tools. So, it's kind of interesting. So how, we actually did a study recently. We looked at how, well it was an independent Oracle user group who did a study and then we pivoted off of that study, looking at how DBAs spend their time. So it was kind of interesting, the IOUG study, assist application development, there were a lot of little things, data sharing and dispartitioning, managed data storage, documentation, security, database performance, capacity planning, on and on and on. A lot of little things that they do, which has got to be really frustrating. Of course the biggest thing was other, which probably breaks down into 20 more things. What are you seeing in terms of database administrators, how they're spending their time and how their productivity is being impacted by some of the new technologies that are coming out? You know, it's kind of interesting. I really like the study you guys did showing about 50% savings in terms of DBA time spent. The two trends of virtualization coming together with performance, storage optimized for databases, those two trends really are coming together and they're really saving a lot of time for both the Oracle DBA and the storage administrator. Case in point, I was just at a customer in Scotland recently and up on the big screen, they had the Extreme IOUG storage array. I've never seen this before, I went into the data center and a 72 inch screen, there's the Extreme IOUG storage array, showing the performance of the storage array to everybody in the data center, including the DBAs. So it's totally transparent in terms of storage performance and it kind of speaks really well to the study that you guys put out there in that. It simplifies the performance and configuration to a point where you can display it to the entire data center and it really reduces a lot of those routine tasks that you mentioned, that storage administrators and DBAs find, you know, they're doing on a day-to-day basis, so it's great stuff. We talked to Darrell about EMCIT just now and he was saying that they created the databases service, we were talking about that off camera and they automated the workflow, which was, it sounded hellish, right? He said they, by just virtualizing, they went down from four to six months down to two to four weeks and now by delivering databases as a service, they get down to an hour to deploy database. But that leaves the question, what do you do with all those people? Now Darrell had a great answer, he said we redefined them. What are you seeing within organizations? Is there tension about this automation process? Are they resisting it? Because they're afraid they're going to lose their jobs and a lot of IT people are nervous about automation. Yeah, you know what? You bring up an excellent point because it's that, like you mentioned, in the blending of roles as well, right? You know, the capability of the storage administrator and the Oracle TV essentially do the same thing almost. So it is creating a little bit of tension, but then again, what businesses are finding is, they can redirect now those efforts that were usually were taken by routine tasks into more growth related activities, right? Spinning up that new application or tuning the existing enterprise applications, which is very important because, you know, a DBA who's locked in in terms of provisioning databases doesn't have time to improve the production database. So it's those activities that further grow the business and improve the application performance. I think that's really the payoff in terms of automating those activities. Are those individuals, do they have to be reskilled, retrained, redefined, as Darrell says? Is there a lot of adjacent skills that they have today already? Talk about that a little bit. Yeah, you know, I actually think Darrell is kind of a good role model for that. Darrell is a very core DBA, but the guy knows virtualization inside and out as well. So I definitely think that Oracle DBAs are going to have to learn more than just the database now, right? It's going to be the database and virtualization. It's going to be the database and the new replication technology, whatever that might be. The database, the DBA simply can't know the database anymore. They really do have to stretch beyond that and learn virtualization. Well, the most interesting thing I think that we found in our study was that the big uptake on activity prior to before and after, and the after was really sort of optimizing your storage infrastructure, utilizing sort of modern technologies, converged infrastructure, maybe some flash, et cetera, that the time saved that was now allocated to assisting application development was enormous. It was about 50% of the time savings went toward application development, which I presume is where you want it to go. That's absolutely right. I mean, it said application development that enables new functionality, that enables improvement in the applications in terms of performance, things of that nature. It's much better for the business to invest in that and take the routine tasks, provisioning databases and administrating the OS underneath the databases and things of that nature. Take those routine tasks, add the automation tool, like Darrell probably talked to you about, and essentially move that to the side, right? And focus on those growth activities that you mentioned. Absolutely. So EMC World is pretty diverse. You're talking to a lot of DBAs. You're probably talking to a lot of storage guys who want to interact with their DBAs. That's changed. I mean, EMC World five, seven years ago, there weren't a lot of DBAs here. No, there wasn't. Talk about how that's changing and why you think it's changing. Yeah, it's a great question. In fact, I just had a session and I asked, the first question I asked is how many storage administrators were in the audience? Lots of hands went up. But then I asked the question how many Oracle DBAs are in the audience. Believe it or not, about 30% of the audience was Oracle DBAs. What I'm really finding is that Oracle DBAs want to know what they don't know, interestingly enough, right? So that's why they're attending these sessions, is that they need to learn how the new technologies could really be utilized for their databases in terms of performance. And so they're exploring these sessions, learning from these sessions. And the nice thing about this is I found I talked to several DBAs this week. It allows them to collaborate a little bit better with the storage administrators. So it's that collaboration that's paying all kinds of values. The other piece that makes you just call people's attention to it. So the piece on Wikibon is, it's called duplicating public cloud economics for Oracle DBAs. So if you just go to Wikibon or Google, duplicating public cloud economics, you'll find this. There's a pie chart in there that I love. It's the contribution of Oracle infrastructure, best practice. This is using best practice to the overall DBA productivity. You can see the big ones are actually converging infrastructure into a database like appliance. Converged infrastructure itself, virtualization, flash, and then offloading the backup and then array-based replication and then integration with Oracle Enterprise Manager. How are you seeing these technologies come to market and what impact are you seeing on the DBA? Is this sort of a reasonable picture in your view? Oh, it's a reasonable picture and I'll tell you what. I just wrote a Oracle virtualization best practices paper and I actually quoted from that study that you just mentioned because it's such a fantastic study. What I'm really seeing is that Oracle DBAs and storage administrators want to know the guidelines of best practices for each part of the stack. Like you just mentioned, you mentioned several pieces of the stack. So they really want to know what that is and then they're coming to learn and learn to how tos of how that could be really implemented. So I think that's really the new interest level that Oracle DBAs and virtualization people know. Another thing we talked to Darryl about was sort of best-of-breed versus integrated suite. Right. And it's been an age-old discussion in IT. So you guys are trying to take this best-of-breed approach and your main competition here and your quasi-partner, Oracle. Right. You know, once they bought Sun that sort of changed the relationship a little bit. What are you seeing in terms of DBAs affinity to your mindset? There's a lot of them really loyal to Oracle, of course. Oracle makes just the unbelievable database software. And of course, Oracle's now in pushing the red stack. Right. A lot of older Sun, not older, but Sun technology that they've updated and the like, but really pushing that red stack, pushing that integrated systems. Is your message resonating with them? And where does it resonate, where doesn't it resonate? What are you seeing in the marketplace? You know, that's a really good question. When I see Oracle and the way Oracle works with customers, they usually talk to customers about the software features. So for example, features unique to their converged solutions and things of that nature, they don't talk about the hardware too terribly much, which I find extremely interesting. And to compare that with EMC, what we do is we talk about the hardware side of it, right? So there's this whole dichotomy between Oracle and EMC, Oracle talking about the software, EMC talking about the hardware, right? And the messages are completely different because of that, which is really quite interesting. So where do you want your performance? Do you want your performance in the software? Or do you want your performance in the hardware? So DBAs are actually having to weigh where they want their performance. And the interesting thing is that, do I want to do all the patching and maintain it in the software? Or do I want to transparent and built into the hardware and no additional complexities or management load on me, the DBA? So it's kind of interesting. They have to pick between those two worlds. And I'll be honest with you, some DBAs go with the RedStack, absolutely. And they're very successful with that. Other DBAs go with the EMC stack and they're very happy too. So I'm not going to say one way or the other, once better. I prefer the EMC, but I think there's good solutions out there for everybody. Sam, I really appreciate you coming on theCUBE. Last question. So what's your big message that you're taking away from EMC World 2014? Maybe put it on a bumper sticker on the back of the car as it's leaving Las Vegas. What's it say? I think the big bumper sticker on the back of cars is just flash everywhere. And the key to flash everywhere message is what type of flash can you use to really tune and get your database off the ground in terms of performance? Sam, I'll see you out then. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. It was always great to have you. Thank you very much. Awesome. Okay, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back. We are winding down day three EMC World. We've been here all week. We had two Cubes earlier. We shut down one Cube. They're going to sweep us out of here at five o'clock. But we're going to go right up until then. So keep it right there, everybody. We'll be right back. This is theCUBE. We're live from EMC World 2014.