 Live from the Mosconi 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. We're here live in San Francisco. We're on the ground. We're in the booth of Cisco Systems. This is The Cube, our flagship program from SiliconANGLE Media. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder with Jeff Frick, the general manager of our Cube Silicon Valley operations. Welcome you back to our live wall-to-wall three days of coverage, two cube operations here in the Cisco booth, one in the Cube Logic booth where Dave Vellante is, and our next guest is JT Von Starrer Dagon. Welcome to The Cube. Thanks for having me. I couldn't roll the R. I got the whole New Jersey R thing going on. I couldn't do it. Sorry. I don't know if it's New Jersey. It's New York. It's a hard R. So you're the senior director of engineering, civil engineering, global data centers, Cisco. I mean data centers, kind of new world for Cisco to play in the data center. You guys got a lock on the data center. I mean, going back to the internet, Cisco, huge incumbent, huge presence, massive customer base, Oracle, same 30-year history in databases. Larry Ellison laid that out yesterday. So really, you guys are birds of a feather in the industry leaders. The modernization is happening. What's your relationship like with Oracle? Obviously, you guys are strong at UCS, working well. It's playing to us the Cisco-Oracle relationship. Absolutely. So as you indicated earlier, right, so Cisco and Oracle have a relationship that goes back like 20 years. Initially, as a joint customer, they bought our networking switches and we bought their Oracle applications and databases. And of course, Cisco is one of Oracle's largest customers, right? We are running Oracle React. We're running Oracle EBS. And Oracle is also running Cisco switches, of course. And so we have been joint customers for a very long time and we've also done a lot of great engineering collaboration between the two companies. We test each other products. Initially, we did that. They tested our switches. We tested their applications on top of our switches and then as we introduced UCS, the whole game basically changed, right? How did it change? Well, you know, getting into the server business is a totally different game, right? You've got to make sure that the applications work really well on your servers, right? And what we have done with Oracle is really, you know, innovative. And it's the proof of that you can find in the fact that we have 37 world record performance benchmarks of Oracle applications on top of UCS. Why is that? First of all is UCS is a high-performing server, right? But secondly, we also work very closely with Oracle from an engineering perspective. We do joint benchmark testing and because of the high performance of UCS, we have been able to push the Oracle applications and the databases to their maximum capacity. They have to work at a scale for which they were not being tested initially. But with UCS, we were able to push that limit. And as such, we were able to identify challenges, bugs within the applications that otherwise they would not have found. So why were you pushing it to bounce where it hadn't been before? Because of our, you know, higher performance, whether it's from a processing perspective or from a networking perspective, we were really pushing the boundaries of the applications. We were able to scale it beyond a scale that they were normally testing their applications, right? And that was important also from an Oracle perspective, but also important, you know, if you look at it from an integrated infrastructure perspective, you know, it's not just an Oracle application running on a Cisco server, but usually the storage involved. So you got to look at the entire integrated infrastructure, right? So you test the application, you test the server, and you test the storage. And what we were able to do was basically prove that integrated infrastructure is based on Oracle applications, Cisco servers and third-party storage appliances work really well. Interesting. So talk about how that then evolves in terms of opportunities to use the apps and the infrastructure in ways and use cases that were formally not available, or did you just do that better? Or was there some new opportunities open up? Well, you know, basically what we were able to demonstrate is that, you know, customers can trust, you know, Oracle applications and databases to work really well on UCS. And not only by having these great performance results, but also we, as I said before, Cisco is one of Oracle's long-distance customers, and we basically migrated our entire infrastructure from, you know, running Oracle applications on risk to entirely running on x86 on UCS, right? That's probably one of our biggest use cases, because we can use that very effectively with our customers. We can more our customers to what we did at Cisco, and it can feel comfortable that, you know, this really works well. Very interesting point. I was just tweeting away there. I was telling me tweeting away about the joint customer since Cisco was founded, really, obviously speaks to the relationship. Right. So Tong and Chica said, oh, is Oracle easy to work with? Of course, it's easy to work with, as you said. But one of the trends that Larry pointed out that you guys have been talking about is the modernization of the data center. Certainly cloud is there, but the efficiency of the data center as an operating system, one monolithic entity seems to be the trend to the software-defined data center. Right. Could you tease out a little bit on how you guys see that playing out? Obviously, having high performance services one step in the direction, vertically integrated differentiated product, commodity gear. Right. How does this all tie together? Obviously, big data and software to play into that. Yeah, that's an interesting one. So, you know, I got to bring you back to what we really introduced with UCS. We innovated the server technology with things like service profiles, where basically we abstracted the hardware from the application and a lot of the information that was required to make a server work, like the firmware, the BIOS revisions, the boot sequences, and stuff like that. What we were able to do was to basically store that in software in what we call a service profile. So we had abstraction at the server level, right, which made it really easy for customers to deploy servers in the UCS environment to create a new server to support an Oracle workload and do it really quickly and really consistently. Right. How about in a virtualized environment? No. And same thing in a virtualized environment. There's no, you know, no difference there. But what I'm going to get to is that, you know, we did it for the server, now we're doing it for the entire network, not just the data center, but all the way from the data center over the wide area network to the end user device through the application-centric infrastructure solution, right? Think of it as, you know, abstracting the network and making it really easy to deploy Oracle applications and databases on the network, right? And not only that, but also troubleshooting. We're just having a really... Extracting the data center now. Now we're extracting the data center. It's not just the data center. It's actually the entire network. Right. We're going to put it on there. We're going to put it on a chip in your Fitbit so you can actually get a personalized service directly into your arteries. But we were just talking with Dan Hutchins for CTO and CSE. Right. And then we're going on all these service cataloging, all that stuff was great. And we're talking about the persona-level networking capabilities. With service profiles, do you see that extending out to unique services that are going to be deployed or is it at the individual basis or is it in the target network global? Well, you know, ACI actually enables a lot of different things, right? Because we have a northbound APIs that software developers can basically develop new services on top of it. And, you know, it's amazing the opportunities that it enables. There's probably too many examples to list as many examples as you have open source software developers. So what's the biggest disruption that you see that's fun that you look at? Say, I'm so excited about that trend in the data center. Technology trend could be an enabler, could be a cultural shift. What can you point to that's just kind of out there? You say, I love that trend. You know, the trend that I find really exciting is the, you know, the cloud trend, right? Where customers are basically going to access services that could be either in a data center on premises or could be hosted in a public cloud or, you know, could run one moment in the public cloud and then in the private cloud and enabling that and basically, you know, enabling the IT organization to become a service broker. That is, I believe, a trend that is really going to happen long term. And, you know, it's a great opportunity. It's a great, also a great challenge to make it happen for ourselves in the industry and for our customers. Okay, JT, we really appreciate you coming on. Kind of as a sub in for a cancellation, which is great. We'll be back on Wednesday going, doing a drill down on the personalization stuff. I've been a lot of fun. Thanks for coming by and sharing some quick commentary on the Oracle Cisco dynamic, very positive one. We are inside the Cisco booth on the ground, on the floor, here at Oracle World Live on Zero Scale 4. The Cube's three-day wall-to-wall coverage right back in for this short break. I'm John Furrier with Jeff Frick here live on the ground. We'll be right back.