 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada. It's the Cube covering EMC World 2015 brought to you by EMC Brocade and VCE Welcome back to Silicon Eagle TV's live continuous coverage wall-to-wall from EMC World 2015 here in the you know Venetian Sands Convention Center Las Vegas, Nevada Had a big fight over the weekend with you know, Pacquiao and Mayweather And you know getting into the meat of things here at EMC World our sixth year here at the show And we're focusing on the Oracle solutions and I bring up the fight analogy because we've got Sam Lucido here The senior manager of database solutions technical marketing at EMC here And in the last segment we talked about how EMC and Oracle are partnering together well from the storage standpoint There's a little bit of fighting so Sam welcome back to the queue. Well. Thank you very much You know my pleasure to be here obviously. It's great. Yeah, we really appreciate it So, you know that there's the age of co-optition and sometimes there's frenemies even in this industry Steve Chambers my co-host here for the segment laughing at some of this you've been on many sides of some of these wars So Sam, you know talk to me a little bit about that relationship between EMC and Oracle and where you play into it Well, you know, it is a very good relationship Let me just start out by saying that we have like over 80,000 common customers They use Oracle databases with EMC storage and solutions and we work very well together There's a lot of integration points between Oracle and EMC So, you know the two companies get together quite well, of course There's the collaboration side and then there's a little bit of the competition side as well Yeah, so I'm sure if we were to ask Larry Ellis in he has great respect for all of his competitors But want to crush them all so you know Absolutely, so, you know, you're heavily on the performance side Take us through a little bit about what you've been working on lately. Sure. Sure. Sure, you know So I've been recently doing some analysis between Extreme I.O. and for example the FS1 It's it's kind of an interesting comparison to look at those side-by-side And they go in totally different directions, which I find really easy To to CERN Extreme I.O. is going in a direction of simplicity You know just being able to provision storage very quickly Without much complexity Relying on the all-flash drives to drive performance And then it has the enterprise features of like inline De-duplication inline compression and thin provisioning as well not to mention copy services And I find you know the FS1 is just in the opposite direction. It's all about You know, they call it the most intelligent storage array out there I will substitute it and say the most complex storage array out there It's amazing the amount of features that that array truly has But you know, I was just looking at the instructions for provisioning storage before I joined you here There was at least 20 steps, you know, some of them required some of them optional in each one of those steps They had three to four steps involved in the selection of what you do is as far as storage as goes Is that why we have Oracle experts though so that they can just you know deal with this or Oracle Oracle I'm sure will for a fee help customers out through some of this. Well, you know, you raise a good point It's it's it's it's what direction do you want to go and do you want to go in the direction of simplicity? Simply getting it on your data center floor, you know a message right there in the keynote I thought was a really strong message is customers want to be able to use their solutions in hours not days not weeks You know months they want to be able to quickly and easily provision storage for the Oracle databases and not worry about whether they have it Configured correctly for performance capacity Reliability and recoverability right so it's it's that message that extreme my oh really hits on very well I mean literally it's just three steps to provision storage and once you provision storage You know copy services and the inline deduplication and compression just kick in it's there So you're talking about performance and I'm thinking I am but really you're saying the performance The time to deploy right you're saying the time to configure and use the thing that's a performance character Is that what you're saying as well? Yeah, that's right. It's twofold. It's operational simplicity and performance combined, right? So with extreme my oh just as I said three steps now I'll face it. Let's say the FS one does have this thing called application profiles and application profiles are the capability to overlay What storage should look like with predefined configurations? Okay, but Application profiles in other words mask the complexity Okay, and it gets you to where you want to be faster as long as your application or database fits the profile Right, if it doesn't fit the profile then you're back to tuning and trying to get things to work And of course there's all kinds of complexity there You have to determine whether the party level of queuing should be premium high medium or low or archive you have to figure out whether the Database or applications should be configured for read-ahead Right or or you know what rate volumes for example you have to figure so it's kind of interesting the direction they're going in I almost think they want storage to work like a database. You can have all these choices out there But you know it's it's not a database people are really looking for that simplicity Yeah, so it's interesting Sam when I hear you talking about this when I think of all flash rays in some ways It should be able to just take performance off the table I shouldn't have to worry about it for most applications It should just be more performance than we ever need as we know There's never elimination of bottlenecks, but it moves it There's other things you have to consider but for database it sounds like there's still some tuning and work that needs to be done Even in all flash ray configuration, you know, I think you hit upon something I gave a session this morning and you know it was interesting because a lot of customers were very vocal About what they want and interestingly enough a lot of customers said hey, we're using extreme oil right now We put the database on extreme oil. We got a media performance benefit I said, you know, they did ask me some questions in terms of configuration. What should I do? How can I improve performance and before I even address the questions? I asked them a question right back I said how's performance right now and all of them said great I said then why change it right why why full-arounded their database configuration or the storage Configuration to try to improve things a little bit further. It doesn't make sense If you're able to drive a hundred and fifty thousand IOPS from a couple of lungs on extreme oil storage array Well, great, and if that works for you, it's terrific, you know Leave it as it is because you're getting great performance So you sounds like you do quite a lot of work with workloads with customers What can we see all this great data that you must collect you know a day in the life of a performance expert, right? So do you share this on the community or is it you know very much one-to-one with customers? How do you yeah, I know it's your insights. I guess it's great. You know what I like to do is I like to tweet a lot I like the blog There's the everything Oracle community at EMC, which is kind of a fun community I'll watch your your stuff to not you know, so I enjoy reading your articles and your reports and things of that nature You know getting the message out. There's kind of difficult though. I mean It's challenging because On one side you have the simplicity operational ease of extreme I owe and then the DBAs do love that technical deep dive stuff, you know, you know, that's what makes us DBAs, right? So it's a little bit of a challenge to try to drive that to simplicity mess I love when they had on stage that keynote the 11 year old come on stage and actually provision storage on a VMAX 3 I mean that that was that was awesome. Yeah, I mean Sam it's sometimes really difficult when it's easy And it's just like you know press this button and you're done or plug it in and auto configures this It's like they're like what what do you mean? That's not the way I do things You know, yeah, that note. You're exactly right, you know Every storage array or every solution everybody wants that easy button to be able to press right and just get things up and running You know and the other thing about that is it's not just performance You know, you have every production database has clones and copies of production databases And the nice thing about extreme I owe is that every copy you make of a production database It takes absolutely no space. The copy services are all metadata related There's nothing written to disk until there's a a data difference between production and your copy And then when there's a data difference that gets compressed And there's just one way to do it's that easy button on extreme I owe that you need to press make copies Now let me contrast it for you a little bit our competitors have two types of copies They have a clone clone lung and they have a volume copy now clone lung is like a snapshot Okay, but the thing about a clone lung is is that you have to use the same QoS plus properties as the source database So if your production database is using flash you have to use flash for that snapshot The other alternative is what you call a volume copy That's a bite block-for-block copy in other words You're taking up twice the capacity making a copy of the database there you can change the priority settings for the QoS So that you can have a different Performance configuration with extreme L. Conversely, it's just simply make that copy get 100% of the performance No complex steps to remember. So are you more of a DBA or more of a storage guy? It sounds like you know a bit of both worlds actually I do I do I work for Oracle for 10 years on the delivery side of the business Really enjoyed my time at Oracle. It's a great company And then I was lucky enough to join EMC about five to six years ago So I know both databases and storage very well. Do you see that as a trend? You know, do you see more people like you out there who's got knowledge of an application and knowledge of some infrastructure? And that's a bit of a magic mix. It's interesting you mentioned that I do I really do it's interesting because I think databases and Storage are kind of converging. I mean look at what Oracle is doing They're doing some fantastic stuff like 12c multi-tenant databases the capability for a DBA to use a sequel command and instantly provision another copy of a database I mean pluggable databases are pretty awesome and that integrates with the emcee storage, right? So I do see the two kind of converging One thing I think emcee is doing very well is it making it very easy for DBAs to learn the storage Okay, I really do As they showed the Vmax 3 on stage, you know, you have those Service levels, you know premium diamond, but what have you? It's just so easy to provision the storage now that the DBA can do it The other thing I'll mention just really quickly is is that you have plugins and all of our plugins are free So if the DBA wants to work with emcee storage whether it be extremely old or something else They could do that for free now and it just plugs in right into Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c And you can start looking at the configuration of storage and seeing what the performance is like on the storage level No storage administrator required, right? No storage administrator required. That's absolutely right Don't take me wrong. I don't think the storage administrators gonna disappear anytime So I don't want anybody attacking me when I leave yeah, Samson. We're here It's kind of storage is a big deal at this show. I think that logo on your shirt, too So, you know Sam, we're running close to the end here, you know Oracle makes lots of statements earlier this year They they announced a new product and they said, you know our infrastructure is just gonna be you know I think 30 or 50 percent cheaper than like basically a V block is I think was their number one competitor out there There's obviously a lot of nuance as to how you measure things, you know How do you look at what you hear from Oracle? And you know, what misconceptions do you think are out there in the marketplace? That's a big question right there I'm gonna say this When you look at Oracle and the marketing message Sometimes it's more important what they don't say versus what they do say and and you know My advice generally to companies and the TVA's or anybody comparing storage types. It's look at the manuals I mean, honestly, it's one of the best ways to compare if you look at a extreme My old manual is about 40 50 pages. That's about it If you look at the manual for a competitor storage array and it's 200 pages or 300 pages It kind of gives you the idea of the simplicity and the operational ease Versus the complexity of the other so I don't look at the slides look at the manuals read the manuals that it's it tells the entire Store a good bit. All right. Well, Sam, we'll really appreciate you bringing the both the storage and the DBA viewpoint here We won't tell the storage administrators that maybe the applications are taking over the world Even though we know that the whole reason that infrastructure exists is to deliver the application Thanks so much for joining us Great to dig into really this database segment here Excited to have a customer on next to kind of wrap up this spotlight So stay with us. We'll be right back after this quick break