 from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Cover EMC World 2016, brought to you by EMC. And welcome back inside theCUBE as we continue our coverage here from EMC World 2016 live in Las Vegas at the Sands Expo. We're joined now by a dynamic duo here, a couple of presenters that have spent some time together here this past week. Sam Lucido, who's the director of technical applications marketing at EMC. And Don Sullivan, who's the product line marketing manager for business critical apps at VMware. So gentlemen, thanks for being with us. We appreciate that. Hey, thanks for the opportunity to talk to you today. Absolutely. So as I said, you've spent a little bit of time together. You've been presenting together and individually. If you would tell us about just your feeling on the vibe of the show, what you've been hearing from customers and folks with whom you've been interacting here and just your thoughts about the first three days. Don, Sam, if you would. First I'd like to mention that I think there's a lot of energy at the show. A lot of customers talking to a lot of customers in terms of the cloud. Cloud seems to be very important, particularly how the cloud relates to mission critical applications and database workloads. The conversation, pretty much everybody accepts virtualization these days, especially VMware virtualization. But they want to know how to extend virtualization, the virtual infrastructure into the cloud, right? So the cloud seems like it's the next step in terms of how I get my mission critical databases to the cloud. So we talk a lot about the cloud. It's been a conversation for me at the show that people have really been truly interested in. How about you, Don? Don? Well this show, EMC World, that is, is always the kickoff for the conference season that goes through early May and into the VMworld conferences and VMware and into Oracle Open World and so on. And as you were saying, Sam, the technology itself has taken such a leap forward in regards to the cloud. But I would add the idea of the hybrid cloud more than just any other particular cloud form. And in particular, we know that all of that involves a common denominator of vSphere and VMware. And what we really are seeing, and the reason you and I here and what we presented on yesterday had to do with how to properly architect both in terms of the entire engineered system and the sub-capacity architectures of the engineered systems and how to use those engineered systems as they are right now with the incredible technology advancements including what's now the new norm, which is Flash a couple of years ago at this conference and one of these interviews, I was asked how, what I thought the bumper sticker would be to take forward in this show and I said, well, Flash into the future. Well, the future is here, it is now and it's Flash and it's Flash in these engineered systems. So, Sam, when we talk about the journey to cloud as it were, when we talk to users, it's really an application focus. People need to understand what applications go where, how they make that decision, the various architectures. How does that fit into the discussions you're having? Well, you know, I think a lot of the DBAs particularly are concerned about where their databases go in the cloud and they have two primary concerns. You know, what infrastructure do I use for my databases in the cloud? And what does that do for me, the DBA as well? They have a concern about, it's my skill set going to disappear if I put my database in the cloud, right? So we talk a lot about the enterprise hybrid cloud and the on-prem story of the cloud. So for example, using a V realized orchestration and automation as part of the on-prem cloud and the capability then to essentially create a self-service catalog in which people could order databases very easily. Yet the DBA still remains controlled. They create the automation blueprints. They create all the standards that go into that. So they still have all that ownership that they're used to. So they feel like the security issues are no longer a concern because it remains on-prem. They're building their skill set instead of giving away part of their skill set. So they really like the enterprise hybrid cloud and what it can do. And then, you know, the capability of using VMware to attach to other clouds, for example, and being able to push maybe your test and development environments as needed to public clouds is something that the DBAs are really, I think, embracing in terms of messaging. Yeah, so, Don, you know, those of us that have been in the industry watched the journey of virtualization to go from, you know, a certain subset of applications to, you know, basically any application that did, I'm running on x86. I can run in a virtualized environment. Bring us up to speed on the hybrid cloud solutions you've been talking about. You know, is it the same? You know, are we there? Can I run all applications? We are there. We are there, Stu. One of the mottos that we sort of tied into last season in VMworld was this idea of no application left behind. And with vSphere 6 and the capabilities of a single VM going up to 128 virtual CPUs and four terabytes of memory, it is truly a fact that every application and database and existence is a candidate for virtualized infrastructure. And then when combining that with the various different forms of the hybrid cloud to include what I was saying before in terms of the engineered systems, it becomes a totally compelling solution overall that can't be ignored. And in fact, one of the projects that Sam and I have, jointly funded from EMC and VMware, is to focus on the individual user groups such as IUG and SQL Pass and do scientific studies with them to ascertain the actual adoption rate and infer the actual accelerations of the adoption rates of vSphere, virtualization in general, but vSphere in particular, in regards to the entire broad community of in those very, very specialized groups. And we're seeing incredible numbers. We first started this project in 2014. We're redoing it all this year. And although we don't have the data yet, we think we know what we're going to get already. So what do you think, I mean, because anecdotally you've been hearing from people for the past year or so, I'm sure. So what are you going to see? Where's the shift? Or what's happening, you think? I have things to change. So two years ago, we actually saw conservative numbers that said somewhere around 65% of the IUG membership, which is the most sophisticated group of Oracle users that exists, or had at least one of their production systems in virtualized infrastructure. And more than half of that was using vSphere, which meant that vSphere was being used more than twice every other possible solution combined. And we could see that the acceleration of that, because we tested and we surveyed how much adoption went on for the previous two years from then, in other words, 2012 and 2013. So we inferred the acceleration and we're expecting to see those numbers go up. I'm not going to necessarily speculate on the exact numbers, but I do know what, for instance, Oracle sees in term. I'm really not even supposed to talk about those things necessarily. But we do know that Oracle certainly sees internally in a massive adoption rate for all of its non-engineered systems in regards to the individual implementations, in the 50 plus percent range as an example, and I think that's very well known. So it's all happening and it's happening very fast and it's a really powerful, compelling solution that again, nobody can ignore. So when Sam and I would come to these types of events five years ago and we would ask in general, who out there is virtualizing any database at all? We'd get one hand out of 50. And then we would ask two years, three years ago, anybody virtualizing and you get a few hands and then you'd ask if they were production, you'd get less, what happened yesterday, Sam? How many people raised their hands? Yeah, we had a session yesterday about Oracle licensing and some of the rules and guidelines for Oracle licensing. But one of the first questions we asked the audience is how many people have virtualized their Oracle databases? I will say a healthy majority of the people raised their hands. Healthy majority. I couldn't see anybody who hadn't, but I wasn't looking that hard. Right, right. So, you know, and that's really quite interesting because you're right, five years ago, it was a difficult discussion to actually get people to virtualize Oracle databases. Now, virtualizations are given. It's that next dimension of the cloud. Go ahead, Sam. Basically we win. So I'm curious because, you know, if you listen to Oracle, you know, Oracle understands virtualization, that seems to be there. Oracle's also has a big push towards cloud. So does Microsoft, so does IBM, the folks that own some of those applications and hope to have kind of affinity to be able to take theirs and, you know, build that whole stack. How does that impact what you're doing and what do you see from some of those competitive cloud environments? Yeah, you know, it's definitely got competitive, but one of the things I think I really like is Oracle's actually embraced virtualization in the cloud. That's a big change from just a few years ago, right? So that's really helped us in terms of messaging as well, because a lot of DBAs are saying, okay, wait a minute, hold up. Now Oracle's talking all about the cloud. They're not talking to me about keeping my database as physical anymore. They're really trying to push the cloud. So what they're seriously doing now is looking at their options, right? And looking at the cloud options and seeing which cloud option fits best for that particular business. And I have to say, because we've been doing the cloud, working on the cloud for such a long time, we have one of the most mature options out there in terms of what customers can use on-prem or off-prem in terms of the cloud. So I really like the fact that Oracle's switched the conversation to the cloud because it's really helped us out quite a bit. I think we can be as very bit competitive with Oracle. You know, Oracle claims they have these optimizations for the cloud. But it's, you know, I call the Oracle cloud kind of the silo cloud. It only works with Oracle. But, you know, a lot of databases and applications attach to that database. So you got to look at the cloud more holistically than just simply putting a database in the cloud, right? So I think that's where we have an advantage and a better story than Oracle does. You know, you were mentioning about virtualization being given today. I mean, can you say the same about Flash? I mean, is that just, that comes with the territory now? I think Flash is the new norm. I think when you talk to any of the Flash companies, most prominently, EMC, you'll see that the actual cost per gigabyte is reaching a level, a usable gigabyte certainly, is reaching almost a level of classical mechanical storage. The flexibility that you have from a critical applications perspective is an order of magnitude different. I don't want to insult any of my friends who are storage administrators, but from a perspective of, say, an Oracle database, the actual ease of implementing that Oracle database on Flash storage is an order of magnitude different to the point where it's really simple for your average database administrator to actually implement and utilize the storage rather than having to worry about a plethora of different lungs and different locations based on various different RAID configurations. The philosophy of Flash is put it all here and the array will take care of it. You don't really need all the sophisticated, the sophisticated architectures from a storage perspective unless you're trying to absolutely get the absolute nth degree of performance out of it. When you're looking at sub one millisecond response times from a RAID perspective, you're just feeling there's an entirely different realm of storage performance than when we had even three, four years ago. That's right. I'm really kind of excited about the announcement of the dual DSSD together. Double the capacity, double the performance, one-third the latency. I think we're going to be a little bit more competitive with folks like Oracle in terms of pure performance as it relates to the database. Sam, if you could help us unpack, that's really an application-specific need when we get to kind of some of those hyper-performance needs. Can you give some examples, tell us what customers would be a great use case for that DSSD solution? Yeah, DSSD is the extreme in terms of performance, right? And customers really have to weigh what they need, right? Is it a performance or is it more of the enterprise data services, for example, right? With DSSD, I think what we really have is a pure performance play in which a sub millisecond performance is given, right? And it's the capability to scan thousands if not millions of rows inside of seconds or minutes. So it's very, very powerful, but you have to weigh your options here too, because DSSD doesn't have the capability like ExtremeIO might where you could simply push a button and copy a database quite easily and have no initial capacity used in creating a database like you have on ExtremeIO. So ExtremeIO comes with deduplication and compression whereas DSSD is just pure performance at the moment, right? But the idea is that, you know, I think them stacking the performance, 22 DSSDs together for double the performance, a double capacity really is going to give us the capability to be very competitive with workloads, particular workloads like data warehouses, OLAP, DSSD, those types of workloads, I think will really excel in that type of platform right there. Well, Sam had done, I think you have a pretty good road show. I think you should keep the act together. I'm sure that you said it's a busy time of year for you, so we appreciate the time here today and best of luck down the road. Thanks, nice to talk to you, gentlemen. Good to see you. All right, back with more here on theCUBE from EMC World 2016 in Las Vegas right after this.