 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's the Cube covering EMC World 2015 brought to you by EMC Brocade and VCE. Senior Director of Database Solutions from EMC, Jason welcome back. Thank you. Good to be back. Alright, so we were talking a little bit with Don on the previous segment who's with VCE that now the entire solutions group from EMC now reports under Praveen who's VCE but you're still an EMC employee. Can you explain to us a little bit about what that means from your standpoint? You're a 20 year veteran of EMC. Solutions has moved around quite a few times. What does this mean? Yeah, sure, no problem. It makes a lot of sense. We've built solutions for a long time at EMC piecing together technologies. You pick your server, you pick your storage, you pick your database, your network and we've done design and architectural recommendations but what we're seeing a huge trend on is customers want to standardize their infrastructure. They want to converge infrastructure and they want to do it not just for one database but for multiple databases. So I think part of the organizational move that you mentioned is to help bring the expertise we've had traditionally in our group to synthesize solutions and marry that with the V block architecture. Yeah, it's interesting. I think back 10 years ago the gold standard of the industry was probably like the IBM Red Books. They got the solution, make this huge documentation and you say here you go, good luck. And IBM Global Services will be more than happy to help you deploy that. I think EMC with what they're doing with VCE you're almost trying to productize those solutions is a real successful way that you've been with V block and starting to take that through some of the other solutions steps. Yeah, it's been a good step and I think there's other options out there for standardizing but one of the advantages we see the V block is you get standardization but you still give them open flexibility at the database layer and the application layer. They can choose what they want to run. They get standardization at the server network storage, even the hypervisor but they have the option to deploy different applications, different workloads over time. So we try to give them a little bit of the best of the both worlds there. And to be clear, your solution doesn't only run on VCE products. You build it that might be preferred from your stand. I know if you have your druthers it's a V block with VMware and all EMC stuff but there is choice. Yes, yes. So if I'm a customer and I'm talking to you guys do I get a DBA expert, an infrastructure expert or is it an all-in-one package because we were talking yesterday at the DevOps day that there's a new breed of expert where they've got multiple talents and skills. Is that the kind of people in your organization? That's a great question. So at the infrastructure level, yes, it's one person, it's one standardized platform. The DBAs, when we've been talking to them about this, it's important for us to let them know what offloading the infrastructure to the V block does for them. They're not necessarily going to operate the V block, turn the knobs on the infrastructure. They might say, why are you talking to me about infrastructure? That's right. And you're saying because we want to take that away from you? Yeah, I mean, we've done a lot of studies and talked to a lot of DBAs about what they spend their time on. And you know, it's maintaining database performance, it's maintaining database availability, it's creating and maintaining copies. It's not really tuning and optimizing infrastructure. And in fact, when you ask DBAs where they should or they want to spend their time, it's really not doing that. So part of the beauty of the V block is to offload all of that worry from them. They get a single platform, they get great performance, they get all things standardized. And there is an effect there for the DBA. They might not feel it in their daily operations. You know, you take Oracle, they're running Enterprise Manager, they might not exactly feel that in their daily operations, but the side effects there and the residual benefits are great. We've also integrated the V block into some of the databases. So right now, if you're a Oracle DBA, through Enterprise Manager, you can discover the V block through system monitoring plugins that we've built with Oracle. So they can actually see all the way down into the V block architecture. From their paint a glass. From their paint a glass. Yeah, it's really great. And they can look at capacity, performance, availability, information, all through their native console. So it makes them much more efficient at what they do. When they call up the V block admin, they can be very prescriptive about what they're seeing and what they want to have happen. So we're trying to simplify that back and forth as well. So Jason, you know, talk to us about a little bit about the customers and how they think about this overall. Because I think in the old days, it was, you know, Oracle would try to get, you know, the entire red stack in there. EMC, of course, you have the solutions, you have the V blocks. And, you know, V blocks and V specs are also a piece of the cloud platforms that are on there. So, you know, there's the person that, you know, the line of business that does Oracle at the customer site, you know, are they interested in cloud? Are they, you know, can they make that gap? Or are we still kind of pulling them along that direction? Yeah, I think when you look at Oracle's vision and our vision, at some level, we're seeing the exact same thing. And then other levels, we're saying two different things. When it comes to the application owner, you made a great point. We have the exact same message in terms of, we want to standardize that infrastructure. You take a bank, for example, they're in the banking business. They're not, you know, the application owner for those banking applications does not want to have to worry about infrastructure. So whether you're looking at our standardization approach of Oracle's, the goal is the same, to take that off their shoulders. When you get down to implementation, though, we have two very, very different visuals. As you mentioned, Oracle's is designed for Oracle. It's really, you know, they have an appliance or a box for everything. You have a big data appliance, an exadata. It just goes on and on and on. The V block gives you the standardization, as I mentioned, but it's open, it's designed to run many, many different things. So our view of the data center, we think, is more aligned to what we see customers doing today. You know, 90% of our customers run more than Oracle, even if they run Oracle databases. So in a world where you only have Oracle, yeah, Oracle's vision does make a lot of sense. But if you run more than Oracle, if you run SQL, Exchange, SharePoint, other things, we think the VCE architecture is going to give you standardization, but also give you the flexibility you need. All right, so Jason, you know, last year when we interviewed you, my CTO, David Foyer, was the co-host here. He's actually doing a lot of things at the show here. He's going to be on a couple of the interviews, but, you know, he's been saying for the longest time, you know, flash is the biggest opportunity we have to really transform infrastructure for database specifically. So give us the update. You know, how is flash adoption happening? You know, some new products out there. Where are we with it? Sure. Yeah, flash is huge. I mean, it started years ago when we put flash drives in our storage platforms. And we saw great performance, low latency. You tiered your storage. You got more IOPS with less capacity, less footprint. That was great. All flash is different. And a lot of people get it confused. It's not just about putting all flash drives in a box. It's actually about a ground-up revolutionary new architecture. And Extreme IO has been fascinating to learn about there. To net it out, it's all about simplicity for databases. Everything is just so much more simple when you use an all-flash array. It's the same performance. It's the same configuration. It's the same layout every time, no matter what the workload is. So are you saying the age-old question of, you build it for capacity or performance is gone? Or is that still there? Yeah. I mean, you have to factor capacity with the flash. And you have to obviously look at, you know, your utilization rates and things like that. But yeah, we feel always used to be a trade-off, right? Absolutely. Yeah, you had a lot of trade-offs. Yeah. Think about snapshots and copies. Another thing that's, you know, transformational about all flashes with Extreme IO, you're doing your copies in memory. So you're not actually consuming and hitting disk. Everything's done in memory. You know, you have to consume capacity as you change and modify the data, but that's no different than any other traditional architecture. So we're just seeing, I don't know if the all-flash arrays were built for databases, but when we started applying them to databases, they've been a huge impact. Yeah. Yeah, especially if you even think about, like, how do we manage test dev rather than giving somebody, you know, just, oh, let's find the cheapest, oldest thing that we had sitting out there with the data services that we have with all-flash. We can really, you know, do some interesting things. Yeah, that's huge for DBAs. You're right. It's a great point. You know, everybody gets all-flash all the time. And I think people are starting to see the value of that and the effect in it, and it's catching on with the DBAs very well. It must change their role. I mean, you know, we saw yesterday talking to the developers how containers are changing the way that they develop software because it's just so fast to do testing. Build things up, knock them down. It must be the same with databases, right? Here's another huge copy of the database. There you go, really fast. Yeah, if I can create a test master and then recreate my copies on-demand in seconds. In our group, we build solutions. We've done a lot of testing on this on Xtreme I.O. You know, we've taken a one terabyte or a 20 terabyte database, snapped it 64 times, for example, and it's instantaneous, consumes no capacity. Yeah, so, I mean, we really stress test when we build solutions at EMC to make sure that when we write up the architecture and give it to a DBA, they know what it's going to do. It's not a marketing document, and we've had a lot of fun stress testing Xtreme I.O. It's been really impressive. Yeah, so, Jason, two solutions that you focus on the most when we talk about database. I mean, it's Oracle and it's Microsoft. They've had huge push in the cloud the last year or so. What impact is that having on what you're doing, what you're seeing in the customer base? Yeah, I mean, all of our customers are looking at the cloud in one fashion or another. A lot of them are starting on-premise. They're selectively looking at off-premise, so hybrid cloud is really what we focus on right now. We want to give them the flexibility to get to the cloud at the pace they want. And, you know, back to the DBAs, we want to make sure that we integrate deeply into Oracle and Microsoft. We have great relationships with both those companies now, so the DBAs will feel little impact. In fact, they'll still get to use all the things they love and they know today, even as they move to cloud architectures with databases. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. So the DM, so when you talk about hybrid cloud, are you talking about extending databases into the cloud or is it just a networking infrastructure? Because I think hybrid cloud is a kind of often-used term, isn't it? And, you know, we saw today on stage, it was about the enterprise cloud and we saw the federated. So what bits do you touch? What do you really see when you do that? We focus on the database. Yeah. Whether they're going to run the database on-premise or selectively off-site in the options there. So it's kind of stretching the application and data across the cloud. That's correct. And there's security issues that people worry about. And we've seen people be a little hesitant to move in that direction for some of their big mission critical databases, but it's growing and it's getting there. Yeah. And do you plug the databases into a lot of the... I mean, we saw this one on the keynote, the federated story. Do your teams spend much time plugging it into RSA or into any of the services? Because that's when it starts to get really big and... Yeah, we do. We make sure everything we do is supported with, you know, the federation technology, such as RSA and security, that's big. And also leveraging the native protection technologies you might get with your database. Yeah. You know, again, it's... We see a lot of customers, you know, we offer a lot of things at EMC that help the database, but are similar to what the database has with it natively. So we want to be sensitive to that investment they've made in Oracle or SQL and use some of those things as they want to. Can you commit to a timeline for... You know, we always use to say, we've been walking these early days, you know, purchase order, 30 days, it's yours, kind of thing. Which sometimes is too fast for customers, right? Because they're like, oh my gosh, I'm going to have this thing in. So is it 30 days plus five now? Or is it, you know... From purchase to deployment? With Oracle working and touching the cloud and all that greatness. It's hard to commit to that unless you really know the size and complexity of the database. And you know, what applications they're moving on and things like that. But we've seen, you know, very, very fast turnaround time from, you know, start initial deployment. But once they're live, then the huge value comes in on the next application. Can you come... I mean, did you... I think you said at the start that your team had done this without V-Box before, you know, putting the bits together. Can you give like an example, is it twice as fast now for a project? So, you know, any kind of... I mean, I think it's safe to say it's much faster. I don't know if it's twice as fast or three or four times as fast. But I mean, if you don't have to worry about designing the network and the storage and the operating system being destroyed and all these things together, that's going to save you a tremendous amount of time. And it depends on the expertise the customer has, too. You know, some of our customers have been running EMC a long time. You know, they know the stuff cold and they're very fast and efficient at it. But a lot of customers that haven't done this before or if it's new technology, the V-Box is just a great way to simplify and accelerate it for them. And again, for the DBAs, it's just huge value. And they want to stand up that next database just to have it done immediately, whether it's in a VM or the snapshot. Do you find maybe customers might lean on you quite a bit? You know, if you've got all the brains to do this, you know what it's like. When a customer realizes you've got some value, they want to spend more time with you, right? They do. Yeah, so in our company, we have what's called specialist organizations for databases. So we have an Oracle Specialist team, a Microsoft Specialist team. These are pre-sales experts. Many of them are from Oracle and Microsoft. And yeah, they're in high demand. And oftentimes, once they get meeting with a customer and they go through an implementation, that customer wants them, you know, attached for the future of the deployments. And, you know, we're really good about balancing and working with the customers. We learn a lot. You know, that's where a lot of our best ideas for solutions come from. When we meet with a customer and hear how they did it, we go, geez, you know, that might be something that other people could use. And we should try to roll that into a solution and standardize it. So we really want to make sure that our specialist teams are keeping up those relationships and we're learning as we go. So, Jason, they started talking a little bit in the keynote about some modern applications. If you look like the pivotal side of the Federation, they're trying to drive a lot of those, you know, cloud-native type things. It's probably still pretty early days from the database standpoint. But, you know, what are you seeing? What conversations are you having with customers about this? Well, open source is big in a couple of directions. Open source databases are getting big traction. You know, similar like we saw open source. Any specific ones you'd say are popping up more than others? Yeah, I mean, MongoDB we're seeing a lot of. And, you know, similar to when Linux came into our world, right, open source OS. And now, you know, you can get a lot of the same great functionality with open source. And people are looking at it for some of the smaller departmental, but we're going to see that accelerate. So we're definitely looking at solutions there. But also just, you know, if you look at Hadoop, Port & Works, Cloud Era, and Data Lakes, folding in unstructured data to traditional structured databases like Oracle and SQL. And how do I extract that data into one place, analyze it quickly, make decisions off of that? That's a new huge frontier for us for solutions. We're going to spend a lot of time on this year. That's kind of our next big thing. We'll keep up the standard solutions for Oracle and SQL. But, you know, Oracle SQL, Port & Works, Cloud Era, and other areas, Splunk, Analytics. We just did some work on that this quarter. Really fascinating stuff when you look at, you know, taking machine data, for example. And how do you analyze that? And what do you do with that information? These are really new transformational forms of applications and data. But it's always going to be related back to our world of traditional databases. So our goal is to build solutions that will encompass all of these things together. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's a renaissance in the application space. We've been at the Splunk.com for the last three years. Look at companies like Workday and Service Now and of course Salesforce. You know, drastically changing things. So, you know, Sam, what, I'm sorry, Jason. Sam's on next. You know, what's top of mind for you? What are really the biggest challenges that, you know, the DBAs are still facing that you're helping to address? I think their biggest struggle is just the gap between them and the infrastructure team. Every DBA team we talk to, and sometimes they're in the same room. You have your storage team and your DBA team. They might not even know who you're shooting. Should we have Nerf guns at each other? Yeah, Nerf guns. They might not even have met before. We meet with them in a briefing situation. Wow. I think part of their struggle is, like you said, what does storage mean to me? Why does infrastructure matter? But then once we kind of give them some of that, it gets to, well, how do I take advantage of it? Yeah. And how do I better collaborate with my storage teams? What can I do there? So, maintaining integration there is really important for us. We have deep integration into Oracle, believe it or not. Even though we're competitors in some spaces in SQL, we're going to maintain that. So, I think to answer your question, DBAs is a big, big focus for us. We're never going to take our eye off that in our world of solutions. But also the application owners are very, very important too. You know, we have to have them understand the value of infrastructure. Again, it's so separated from them, and it should be separated from them in their minds. So, we're trying to spend a lot of time with those people and really educate them. So, Jason, I want to give you the final word. I know we've got a bunch of customers that will be talking on the queue. What are some of the highlights of the show here? Customers in the database space that people should read the case studies? We've had some great customers. So, a couple of big ones. All Flash is huge. Obviously, Extreme.io, a lot of Extreme.io customers. But also, we've put Extreme.io, as you know, into the V-Block. So, now we have an all Flash V-Block. And we have a great customer coming on tomorrow, I think, of Ulrath who's going to talk about their experience moving from standard infrastructure to V-Block, and then V-Block to all Flash V-Block. So, they've seen kind of the whole evolution of simplicity of architecture and then the added simplicity of all Flash and what that can do. And they actually run mixed databases. They've got a little bit of Oracle, a little bit of SQL server. So, we're really looking forward to that. And we've tried to get as many customers here to talk to our other customers that are here. That's the most value they can get. And, yeah, so far it's been great. So, looking forward to... I'm looking forward to watching that one tomorrow. Yeah, absolutely. The biggest application piece is an area that Wikibon is deep into. Go to wikibon.com for all the research. Of course, you're watching The Cube on siliconangle.tv. We'll be right back with the next guest after a quick break.