 Live from the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, California, it's The Cube at Oracle Open World 2014 brought to you by headline sponsor Cisco Systems with support from NetApp. And now here are your hosts, John Furrier and Jeff Frick. Okay, welcome back everyone. We're here live in San Francisco for Oracle Open World 2014. This is The Cube, our flagship program where we go out to the events that extract the significant noise. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Medium. Here on my coast, Jeff Frick, General Manager at Cube Silicon Valley Operation. Our next guest is Dave Wells, CTO, Chief Evangelist of House of Brick Technologies in Omaha, Nebraska. That's our member interviewing your colleague. Welcome to The Cube. Thank you. You guys have been on before. Dave Vellante was just here getting to watch the Patriots game but he did mention that you guys have been the granddaddy of Oracle Virtualization, or Virtualization of Oracle, been around for a while. Now it's the hottest trend. You guys are like the pioneers. What's the update? I mean, are they getting it right? I mean, what's your big picture? Well, Oracle spreads a little bit of fud around Oracle on VMware. Oracle might not be too enthusiastic about the idea that their workloads get virtualized because it hemorrhages that processor-based licensing revenue. That would be the only reason. But the fact of the matter is that the masses are so enthralled with the financial benefits and the operational benefits and the HA, the business continuity benefits of doing it, that they're tired of watching their competitors leave them in the dust. So the herd really is beginning to move through the chasm, across the chasm into tier one Oracle production on VMware. We're seeing a lot of it. Yeah, it just makes a lot of business sense. I mean, there's virtualization, there's a lot of innovations. What was the driver that you think really got things moving? Was it the competition pressure? Was it loss of customers, all the above? I don't think it's so much loss of customers, although the financial pressure indirectly can leave the loss of customers. But organizations, especially the software providers, they have to be efficient. They have to compete. They have to abbreviate their product development life cycles. And it's impossible to do that if you are tied back into the environment that we were in when I was a kid with native hardware. And it takes three and a half months to get something approved and provisioned. And you have this correlation of one to one between a developer and a dedicated piece of hardware. We can't do that anymore. Those days are gone. Yeah, certainly the DBA's role is changing. The role of the network is changing. Here we're inside the Cisco booth. Cisco's changing, right? So how do you rate Cisco on that spectrum of change? Well, I think Cisco is leading the way. House of Brick woke up a couple of years ago and realized that this Maverick, this network provider that suddenly in 2009 decided they wanted to build servers and we were like, what? This is crazy. And then they began to get our attention. Now we look across our tier one Oracle customer base, Oracle MVM or customer base. And the vast, vast majority of the shops are Cisco UCS shops. So Cisco's got the engineering. They've got the innovation. And the price points in the X86 market are cell homogenous that you might as well go with the leader. Yeah. And they've certainly put the pricing pressure down and maintain the performance. Hence the numbers. Jeff, we looked at, I do some at Cisco, show the North American numbers. But still, when you're number one that fast, the accounting issues aside, it's still a big number. Whether it's true or not, whether you say the number one or not, it's still big accomplishment with UCS. So what does that mean for the dudes who are in IT right now at the end of the day? With the vendors, the vendors are saying, hey, we're the vendors. We're number one M1 or whatever. Now the IT guys, you actually got to go do the work. They got to provision. They got to make the data center smaller and more effective with this footprint pressure and with cloud. So how does all this shoot forward for the customer? What's your take on it? What's your experience? Well, I'll talk to you about a couple of reference available accounts that we've been talking about at the show. First National Bank of Omaha, they've been doing VMware and they're very good at it. The United States largest privately held banking holding company. They've been doing it for nine years and they've been doing Oracle on VMware for part of that. And the DBAs, they were concerned. But once they got into the provisioning, once they saw the stability, they were sold. CEDA, another organization that we've been talking about at the show that fairly unknown here in the United States, but they provide services into the majority of the airline industry offshore for baggage, lost baggage handling and a lot of other things. And they used to make emotional hallway decisions based on their architectures. And you've heard it before, business units, they didn't even know how to pronounce HA 10 years ago and now they all want it. They want to be on rack. And so they were over provisioning rack where it wasn't necessary, whereas single instance Oracle on VMware HA may have been plenty good. So these organizations now are making strategic decisions as to which workloads get these more expensive architectures. And they're finding that tier one Oracle on VMware HA gives them plenty of HA, especially for those workloads that don't have formal service level agreements. Just a couple of examples. The developers at CEDA were very leery. And after they discovered they took their lost luggage tracking system live and CEDA's DBA manager, Chris Cook, got back with them and said, okay, so now what do you think? And they said, we love it. Very common. So the pressures come from outside. And it's not my presentation either. So the pressures also come from inside. So I got to ask you about the dockerization container model. Docker, getting a lot of buzz at VMworld, huge financing. You can follow the whole docker developer trend, the containerization. What's your duty take on that and the opinion of that, of that trend? I haven't been, I haven't been following the, the live stuff that's going on. So sorry, I can't help you with that one. No worries, no worries. So on OpenStack, I've been following the OpenStack stuff? Absolutely. What do you think about? What do you think about OpenStack? I think that the, we've got, when they made those announcements at VMworld, the fact of the matter is that the vast majority of the workloads are on vSphere. And we get very little pressure with our install base having to do with non-VMR virtualization platforms. They're all too hardware depreciation life cycles behind VMware. And so it's of interest, yes, but our customers just aren't worried, at least the people that we're talking to, the people that I'm talking to, aren't worried about OpenStack APIs. I understand why VMware is going there. It's a hedge. It's kind of a hedge. I mean, why not co-opt it? Our core technology is, and it's another reason why I really don't follow these other trends, and that is because it's core technology on vSphere. And to answer the question a different way, I used to refer to vSphere a couple of years ago as a premier virtualization platform. I don't anymore. For three years, I've been referring to it as the premier platform, period. So we're talking about vSphere 1 Oracle workloads getting off native hardware onto VMware, and that's where I spend the majority of my time. Yeah, and that's because a lot of the VMware customers are moving up the stack with functionality, and with virtualization exploding, that's the primary platform. That's what you're saying? All the investment dollars. I was there. I heard the keynote. Both issues discussed at length. And yet, for my particular customer base, and my emphasis, they're sidebars for me. What are the biggest IT trends that you see within your customer base? Because you have a premier customer base pretty elite. A lot of people do POCs with a dupe, and you have open stack tire kickers going on. So that's happening. It's an organic process, but it hasn't reached the tier that you're competing at. What are some of the biggest challenges right now? Is it transformation, or is that just a punchline? Is it really cloud? What are some of the things that you see? Well, what we see, and again, I'm going to address it very differently than the keynotes that VMware would have addressed it. The customer base that I'm dealing with has DVAs that understand that they have to go here into virtualization, but public cloud virtualization for them is way down the road. They're going to be insisting on seeing this virtualization within their own private clouds where they can hold their peer technical administrators accountable. So our customer base, these tier one Oracle production workloads are going to be a private cloud play largely for quite some time to come. The other thing associated with that is we see trends having to do a DR adoption. DR moving down in the stack, moving down from DataGuard, which is all we used to have as Oracle DVAs 10 years ago. Now moving down, the majority of these shops, including SMB shops, have array replication and host replication technologies licensed. And 10 years ago, they were too expensive. They didn't have them capitalized. So the DR protection is moving down in the stack that gives us, when we throw the virtual shroud around that, it gives us 100% reliable DR, something that these shops never would have dreamed of before. So I got to ask the Cisco question. How did Cisco and UCS help you guys help your customers? What did they do specifically? Well, two things that Cisco did for us that just dazzled us when we said, what are you doing with this 2009 initiative that they got into manufacturing? The first one was DVAs love memory. And they provided a box back in 2010 that would allow me using the old cheap four gig dims to scale beyond 128 gig installed up to 196 gig, 192 gig installed. Yeah, all that extra memory laying around. Yeah. And so we as DVAs were absolutely thrilled. R tier one work on VMware customers, they don't have pressure on CPU. They have pressure on memory. And so when you get into the eight gig dims, now we've got some pretty hefty footprints with two socket boxes. The other thing that they did, we are an HA shop. And they introduced these service profiles, which nobody in the industry can touch. For the entire soul of that box now is lifted up and becomes provisionable. Yeah, much more ably. Absolutely. I like that word soul. Yeah, it's the jewels and the soul. And then when we have an HA failure, how long it takes to lift that whole thing and reprovision it, there's far less work and far less time involved. So those are two keys for us that are very important. And one of the reasons now that we really push, even though we don't resell hardware, we really push the Cisco UCS platform, whether it be blades, whether it be rack or people need an engineered system for us, that's V block all the way. Yeah. And also the fans, they did some incremental upgrades on the footprint and energy gets good. They check in the boxes on those things. But this service profile seems to be getting a lot of traction. That's a good reason. Yeah. I mean, that pretty much you said the word soul, but pretty much all our top customers are saying same thing that abstraction take that and can put it up a layer almost, if you will, have that soul of the box portable. But more than that, the fact that they came out with these two pieces of engineering that really got our attention, the memory mapping, very inexpensive memory mapping, because with the memory at the at the scale that our customers install it, I'll just give you GE appliances and lighting, for example, running Cisco blades and their Oracle on VMware cabinets. They used to provision 512 gig per four socket box. They don't do that anymore. It's a minimum terabyte from the factory. Two socket blades, we encourage people are two socket racks, we encourage people to get those 768 gig installed. So at those memory footprints, the cost of the dims alone can shadow the cost of the rest of the box. And so when Cisco came out with the M2 that mapped using the old cheap dims into those scales of memory, yeah, it had our attention in a real hurry. Change. Awesome. Well, hey, really appreciate you come on theCUBE, sharing your perspective. House of brick technology sounds like blues club. How's the blues? It comes from my favorite fairy tale is the name came from love, love, love the name. Appreciate it. They've well come to study your CTO chief advantage. House of brick technologies in Nebraska. Welcome to welcome to a great week here. It's like that. Have you three days of wall to wall cover day one wrapping up and the cube. I'm John for Jeff Rick. We write back for the short break. Thank you.