 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. Welcome back everyone. We're here at the Cube at EMC World 2014 at the Sands Convention Center in lovely Las Vegas. It's our fifth year at EMC World, hard to believe. I'm joined here with my special guests. Steve Keniston, the storage alchemist. Jeff, this has been pretty exciting. We have two Cubes going here today. Double the fun, as you like to say. Double the number of our interesting guests. Speaking of which, we're joined with a guest here today, Daryl Smith. He is the Chief Database Architect for EMC. So what's interesting, I find, is that while Daryl is here from EMC, we like to talk about delivering great ideas to our industry practitioners. Daryl's in IT, he's actually doing the job inside of IT for EMC. So we're going to talk about a couple interesting topics. We talked about, we were just talking a little bit before database as a service, IT as a service. But before we do that, why don't you give us a little insight to kind of the environment that you're managing, kind of where you are today and the thought process of kind of where we want to take this. Sure. So we're a fairly good-sized IT shop. We have over 2,000 databases that were responsible for it. And you can imagine the day-to-day maintenance of all of those databases take up a lot of our time. At the same time, we have an IT budget that's just like pretty much everybody else last year, minus 7%. Very, very difficult to manage under those circumstances where I was shrinking IT budget, and I have more and more databases that I have to support. So we have to kind of try and change that here and on. You know, if we want to get to where we want to go and we want to get to where we can actually grow and get ourselves out of this rut, I think that we're in. Yeah, so I mean, you know, typical things we hear from all of our practitioners, budgets are flat. We need to be able to do more with less. You guys are in the same spot just because you're EMC. It doesn't really change the game, right? So why don't you tell us a little bit about what's the future state look like? What's the direction we want to try to get to? Sure, so, you know, like I said, one of the things that's kind of dragging us down is the maintenance and the day-to-day activities of all of these large number of databases that we have. And we have a number of different databases. We have Oracle, we have SQL Server, we have Postgres, we have MongoDB, we have HANA. You know, I could go on. And that requires a lot of very specific skill sets amongst a whole different array of databases. What I want to try and do is make it more of a database and provide that more of as a service, for instance. So, and this isn't a service for like end users, where the business unit would say, okay, well, I need a database, let me go ahead and order that database. Well, that can work in some scenarios and that's kind of what's happening on the cloud providers. But what ends up happening is they don't really understand what they need out of that database. So what we want to do is provide that same capability but through a service, I mean through a broker, if you will. So the business knows that they need a database, they don't need an application. They'll go to the database administrator and the DBA will then be able to just log on to a webpage and literally just order up a database. Put that database in their hands under an hour to let them very quickly turn that around to the business. But that's just day one. So provisioning the database, you know, even with 2000 databases, that's not a database a day. We've accumulated that over a number of years. It's really the day two operations that are the thing that takes a lot of our effort, the thing that we have to be designed for. And so we need to be able to provide that DBA the same capability for making those changes, right? That includes storage, right? I need to add more storage. This happens all the time. Data grows, we talk about big data. Big data, right? I mean, even in small data, data grows. So we're constantly adding new storage devices, storage loans to the database service. And literally, I mean, it's a project. I've got a creator request. That request has to get routed to a storage administrator, then to a virtual administrator, then to a system administrator. And finally the DBA gets that line and can have the data files. How about just log into the webpage, change your order, and have that storage immediately applied to that database server, right? Get rid of all of those layers. So talk a little bit about your challenge. And we go to a lot of shows. And one of the huge overarching trends is IT becoming really a business leader, delivering value, not just saving money and satisfying needs, but actually getting a little bit out in front of the curve, being a little bit strategic. Now as we know, shadow IT is a real threat, right? People will just go and throw the credit card down and spend some stuff up at Amazon. So talk about how that's impacted your role and your team's role in the way that you deliver service and think about delivering services to your internal customers. So that's a great topic. One of the things that I become concerned about as a DBA in IT is our relevancy. If the business can simply go to the cloud, slap down that credit card, get something from cloud provider A or B, we'll mention any names, and have it right away. Or they can go to IT. They can fill out a justification. They can sit down with a bunch of solution architects and scope out the project. You're getting bored just listening to me, I can tell. And so does the business. He's already spun it up, right? Exactly. He's already running in AWS. So we need to be relevant. We're literally now competing with cloud providers. Because if we can't do it, and they can, the business is going to go out there. So we're not the monopoly that we used to be. We can't simply demand the business. You have to go through us. That's your only choice, because it's not. And that's clear today. Well, I always think back to, from the people point of view, right? Because we always talk about people, technology and process, right? It's all three, and depending on what you're talking about, you could argue which is more important or relative scale. But when you've got people that have been doing something a certain way, and their delivery methods were based on a certain paradigm, and now that changes, that's a big shift. And either it seems you're going to have someone who's really excited, who wanted to be in the business side of the house, and now really can run their own little business. And they see in our notes IT as a service. And then you've got other guys that are probably like, no, I just want to fulfill. You know, I'm a fulfilled guy. I'm not a strategic guy. So within your organization, pretty big organization, how is that transformation happening? How are the people taking to it? And are you getting kind of this bifurcation of people that are excited about competing with Amazon to deliver service to a customer, versus guys that's like, you know, I just like to fulfill. So I'd like to start out by saying, I don't think anyone's really excited that we have to compete now. You know, that means there's less surfing than that, and more work working. But you know, on the other hand, you know, people really don't hope that their whole career is I'm going to add another storage line, and tomorrow I'm willing to add more storage lines. So this is really a great opportunity for people to grow. So, you know, we have database administrators, system administrators, storage administrators, et cetera. We have all these silos of infrastructure type folks that specialize in various areas. Well, as I start to automate those areas, or I should say as we, the world, start to automate those areas, that frees us up from having to add that storage line, add that storage line, add that storage line. And really, let's just focus more on what can we do to enhance our offering, our service offering. You know, can I automate some more, or can I write something new that lets me better and more efficiently manage the infrastructure? Or can I proactively, proactively something in IT, go out there and say, tune a database or tune an application so that there isn't a problem that gets generated. There isn't a service request because of a problem, because we've already remediated before the business even knew. So there's really a lot of opportunity, not just to learn more across the infrastructure spectrum. Right, I don't need to just be a DB and that's all I know. It'd be good if I knew networking and storage, that might help. So let's merge some of those technologies together, spread that knowledge around a little bit more, and I think it's a great opportunity for everybody to grow and change. So under these conversations of databases of service and IT as a service, Joe put up an interesting fact this morning from the IDC chart that says by 2020, we're going to need another 8 million IT practitioners. But we talk in the IT as a service about the ability to save on resources and automate things and that kind of thing. And so I'm not saying the IDC study is wrong, I'm just trying to think about where's that shift of speciality tend to go and how do you see that transform inside IT itself? Well, I think it goes in a lot of different places. I don't know that it's entirely focused just on the infrastructure piece, which I think what we're kind of thinking of, we need X amount of storage administrators and X amount of database administrators. Those positions aren't going to go away, those specialties aren't going to go away. We really need people to be able to deep dive into those. But there's also going to be an explosion of more of service type offers where we have people who specialize simply in being able to work between the business and IT, understanding what the business needs and what services are available. You can think of them like a service type broker. We're going to need more people that are managing more of what services we can offer as well as people that are more focused on the line of business. So that they understand the business and so when it comes time to develop an application for that business, they can really lead up that team from a technical point of view versus business processes and business analysts and that kind of thing. And then there's also going to be some very specialized people that are going to have to deal with the fact that this data is just exploding. Traditional databases aren't going to be able to handle that kind of scale. We need to think outside the box, maybe we need to mix some of in-memory database with some traditional RDBMS with some column store and kind of merge those technologies together to get something that can work and scale very, very large, both in performance as well as size. I think that's a very helpful insight as folks start to listen and try to think about how their IT environment is going to evolve. I do definitely agree that we've talked a lot on theCUBE about this tie between the business and IT, right? And the closer you can bring them together, I believe, the closer you can actually deliver better services and better service level agreements because now you're both speaking the same language and I do think it is going to take a number of practitioners to be able to learn the business side and the same with the business folks to learn about IT, maybe not run off to Amazon with their credit card to learn IT, but to help figure it out so that they can actually, again, drive more value as you were talking about Jeff. Yeah, so you're treating them more like customers now, right? As they should be. Right, as they should be. I mean, literally, and if we're freed up from having to deal with all of the restrictive, inflexible policies of managing to a fixed budget and we focus more on the needs of the business, not only are we going to become more relevant and easier to deal with, but we're really going to help push the business forward, let them get their time to market out much faster than they can in traditional IT, or even in going out to the cloud providers and having to figure it out on their own. Right, it's good insight going from being worried about relevance to actually trying to get ahead of the curve a little bit, proactively making changes, proactively improving systems, proactively figuring out ways that you can help the business. And one of my favorite quotes is, the best way to predict the future is to invent it. There you go. I think we got to leave it at that, so Daryl, thanks for coming on theCUBE, so hopefully everybody will run out and invent the future and really get ahead of the curve because it's a consistent trend that we see over and over and over where IT's got to get out of their own way and get a little bit more strategic in the way they think, the way they operate, the way they deliver value to their customers who are the people that happen to work at the same company, get the same name on their paycheck as opposed to a different name on their paycheck. So we are at theCUBE, we've got dose cubes going on here on Seco de Mayo, which I think is appropriate, it's also my anniversary, so it's a day I keep in my mind, hi, hun. So we'll be right back with our next guest after this short break, you're on theCUBE.