 Okay, we're back, this is Dave Vellante, we're live, wikibond.org and siliconangle.com's continuous coverage of Oracle Open World 2011. And I'm here with Sam Lucido of EMC. Sam is the, his official title is director, everything Oracle at EMC, welcome Sam. Thank you very much, thanks for having me. So it's good to have you here. Everything Oracle, that's a lot. I'm walking around the event here, it's just amazing how much stuff Oracle sells. I know you guys are a big Oracle shop, but really your role is to develop reference architectures and proven solutions for customers. Can you talk a little bit more specifically about what that role is? Yeah, absolutely. I work with our great team, the Oracle Global Solutions Team, and we develop reference architecture use cases around Oracle, in particular on EMC hardware. So what we try to do is provide solutions for the Oracle customers running on EMC hardware. For example, Fast VP is one of the big solutions that we have available for Oracle customers. It stands for fully automated storage tiering and virtual provisioning. And it provides amazing performance for Oracle databases. In particular, with Oracle databases, you know you have a very small active data set. And what you could do is you can have that auto tier to enterprise flash drives for outstanding performance. For example, just 5% of the database sometimes can return to you 44% performance just by moving it to enterprise flash drives. So I want to talk a little bit more about the whole solutions group. I've said a number of times that this is one of the best freebies that customers can take advantage of. You're not a revenue producing unit inside of EMC. Is that correct? Yeah, that's absolutely correct. So you can go out to emc.com and slash everything Oracle. You'll see our community website out there. What we're all about is getting feedback from everybody out there that uses Oracle and getting feedback about how they feel EMC solutions are working for them. And what we do is we take that feedback, work with our Oracle Global Solutions Group, and define more reference architecture and use cases upon what they're interested in. So you're absolutely right. Yeah, so I always encourage customers to find out what proven solutions are available, what reference architecture is, because what you do and others, I mean, I think IBM Red Books is, I learned a lot when I was a young analyst just reading IBM Red Books. And I think the difference here is that you're really focused on the EMC products, the storage integration with other pieces of the puzzle. But it's really a new dimension in that technical reference architectures. And so you can learn a lot by reading these things. But more importantly, it helps you not make mistakes that you guys made when you probably put this stuff together, right? So talk about that a little bit. Sure, sure. So what we were able to do is take feedback from the community and also educate the community. So it's a two-way street. We work together very nicely. For example, a lot of people are interested in virtualization of Oracle. So can I virtualize Oracle? If I go about virtualizing Oracle, how do I do it? Is there a use case out there that shows me step by step how you can implement Oracle? So what we like to do is provide that feedback to customers, show them how it can get done, and, of course, make them happy customers along the way. So step by step guide, best practices. Don't do this, do this. Because I think it's fair to say Oracle is not simple. If you don't have a lot of Oracle experience, you can make a lot of mistakes and get a lot of trouble. So if I understand it, you've got two recent reference architectures, one on VNX and one on VMAX around virtualizing Oracle. Is that right? Yeah, you make a great point, by the way. Oracle is not always easy to implement. Easy to get running. So what our reference architectures do is provide that step by step how we did it and how we made it work. Yeah, with our VNX series, which just came out a little while ago, we have something in there called Fast Cache. Fast Cache is very nice, because what it is, is essentially enterprise flash drives that supplement the memory within our VNX arrays so that supplementing the memory within our VNX arrays makes us the ability to add a lot of memory in terms of improving the performance of your databases. So the idea here is simply by adding an enterprise flash drive or two to the VNX box, we can improve the performance of your Oracle databases sometimes two to three times what it was without that Fast Cache. And I've already mentioned Fast VP on the VMAX and Symmetric series as well. So excellent solutions out there for customers considering the VNX and the VMAX. So a lot of customers that I talked to are concerned about virtualizing Oracle apps largely because Oracle doesn't want them to use VMware and because they don't want to use OVM. They want to use VMware because everybody's using VMware. Not everybody, but many are. Many in the Oracle environment. Now, as you know, many customers are moving in that direction despite Oracle's positioning. What are you seeing in the field with regard to that? What are customers doing and what are you advising them in terms of virtualizing Oracle? You know, that's a good question. And it's usually one of the top questions on customers' minds. So you hit the nail on the head right there. You know, with VMware and Oracle, there's definitely areas where they can come together and work quite nicely together. In fact, I was out in Luxembourg about a year ago. I was working with Oracle's Red Storm architecture team. And I asked them a question, you know, have you implemented Oracle with VMware and all of them, 40 of them in the room, Ray Sirhanna said, absolutely we have. So Oracle definitely works with VMware. Now, the nice thing is, though, you have to do some education. What are the best practices in terms of implementing Oracle on VMware? Because there's some things you gotta be careful of. In particular, licensing is one of those things you have to be very careful of when you implement Oracle on VMware. So what we typically recommend in terms of licensing is when you put Oracle within a VM virtual machine, you don't put it in a larger cluster. You keep that cluster very narrow and Oracle-centric so that you don't have a large licensing impact. Those are just a few of the things that we do. I gotta say this, Oracle sometimes is confusing, but they work with customers and I've seen them work very well with customers who have virtualized using VMware. Yeah, so, I mean, the trend is clear. I say I have a lot of clients within the Wikibon community that are virtualizing Oracle. A lot of test and dev, obviously. And even plenty in production environments, we have those who say, you know, I'm not doing it, unless Oracle supports it. Now they do support it, of course, in certain niches. They support RAC, they support, they will certify in the pharmaceutical industry for FDA testing. You got to pay them through the nose, but they will certify it. So there are proof points that it works, certainly in the customer base anecdotally, certainly within Oracle. You got to sort of find it behind the firewall, but it's there, there's documentation. But nonetheless, we're going to see that market tension go forward because Oracle wants to sell its own stuff. We know that. What else did you learn in these reference architectures that maybe surprised you? Well, you know, one of the things that I learned in reference architectures is that you have to implement things a certain way, or there's certainly a set of best practices in terms of implementing and virtualizing Oracle. You know, I worked with Oracle Corporation on the delivery side of the business for about 10 years. And one thing I can say about Oracle is their key strength is they work across everything. And that includes virtualization. And one of the things that I usually like to call out is that when you're working with Oracle and trying to improve the performance, whether it's virtualized or not, you really have to focus on where your active data is. That's very important because that's where you're going to have problems in bottlenecks if you don't architect that correctly. So the idea is, is try to zero in on your active data set and move that to your enterprise flash drives. We automate it through fast VP, as I had mentioned earlier. But you know, you can also do this manually if you need to. So the idea is, is that focus on that active data set and move that to the right tier. And we have several practices around different components of the database and what tiers they should go on. So what's the, when we talk about, we're talking generically about virtualizing Oracle. Specifically, what are you virtualizing? We've virtualized everything. I mean, we've tested virtualization of the database. We've shown roughen architectures with Rack, which is very interesting once you virtualize Rack. And there's several different ways you can virtualize it. And a lot goes into how you virtualize Rack. For example, a very technical point is with Rack, you can use RDM, which stands for Raw Device Mapping. Raw Device Mapping provides the capability to run both virtual and physical nodes together with VMware and Rack. So the idea here is that if you ever did have a problem with Oracle support, what you could do is you could reference the physical nodes in your Rack architecture, taking the virtualization out of the equation and get the support you need right away. So there's a lot of those solutions within our roughen architectures that really help customers along in the virtualization journey. So how do you decide where to put your resources? A big company, but you don't have unlimited resources. How do you decide what projects to run? Well, you know what we do is this, we typically like to look at the customers and get the customer's feedback on what we should invest in next. You know, for example, what we do with the community is that we ask them, hey, we'll put a poll out there. What technology are you interested in today? What technology are you interested in the future? And what we try to do is take that feedback, roll it into our use cases and our reference architectures moving forward, and then that way, customers have an interest in what we're producing. So we really look for the community to provide us that insight. All right, Sam, like I said, the customer's out there. This is a great service that you guys provide. It's free, find out if there's a solution that you're considering that has already been proven out. There's great documentation. I wish more companies would do it. You know, I'm glad you guys do and appreciate you coming on theCUBE and sharing your insights in this high performance data center spotlight. Thank you, Sam. Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity. Thank you very much. Okay, you're welcome. This is Dave Vellante. We're live at Oracle Open World and we'll be right back.