 Okay, we're back live here at Oracle OpenWorld 2012, day three, this is SiliconANGLE.com's theCUBE, our flagship telecast, we go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. We go where the action is and the action this week is in San Francisco at Oracle OpenWorld. We're Larry Ellison, the CEO, longstanding tech, Titan CEO, tremendous keynote on Sunday night and yesterday really announcing Oracle, walking into the modern era of cloud computing and big data, as we say, co-opting innovation from others and putting their wrapper around a big red box. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com and I'm joined by co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org and John, it was interesting listening to Larry last night. He talked a couple years ago about multi-tenancy, how it was a bad thing and then this week announced the multi-tenancy database and the nuance there is Oracle has a different philosophy on things, John. They don't believe that doing multi-tenancy at the application level is the right way to do it. They want to do it at the database level. What a surprise. You know Dave, we were on this morning in our news program we're launching, commenting on the results of Larry and Oracle and certainly a different vibe this year, a mood of, wow, we now have some clarity. Oracle is so powerful, people are nervous. You know, if there's any kind of inconsistency or direction change, it affects millions and millions of dollars. So what's happening this year is the packaging of the messaging is tight. They're clearly going into cloud in a big way. They don't care what you call cloud. As long as you're running Oracle. And now big data with analytics and Exadata and DECA, the demo yesterday, clearly a direct strike using cloud computing and big data mega trends, owning those trends and using that against the competitors like SAP, like Salesforce and clearly Oracle saying we will have better products and solutions, not some mishmash of solutions. So Larry Ellison, again, that's his messaging, whether that's true or not, it's a whole nother story, but a little bit more clarity and I think people are comfortable with that. Well, I think you're right. I think people are nervous about Oracle and a lot of people criticize that sun acquisition, but if you think about pre-sun, what that demo yesterday would have looked like, they would have probably had Oracle and perhaps some HP hardware in there. They might have talked about that a little bit. Whatever hardware allowed them to run the applications fastest is the one they would use, not anymore. They'll claim it's the fastest and it's all theirs. The other big story I think you and I were talking about yesterday, you brought this up and I think it's a legit storyline. That is, the hardware companies becoming software companies and the software companies becoming hardware companies and Oracle, a software company, is becoming much more hardware-centric and integrated approaches, as I said, trying to be the Steve Jobs of the enterprise. That's Larry's vision. He wants a fully integrated data center solution. That's all Oracle all the time and then you got guys like EMC and others who are differentiating with software because with Flash, with this new technology, the performance gains of tweaks in the infrastructure hardware are driven by massive advancements in hardware like Flash and others, but it's the software that drives the value. So it's very interesting to see that take place. Yeah, I think you're right. I mean, that software has always been where the differentiation is. That's how you exploit hardware, but hardware is still critical. Ever since I've been in this business, people have been saying that hardware is going to get commoditized. Hardware price has continued to come down on a cost per performance basis, but it's still a critical aspect and I think Oracle's strategy, like Apple's in the consumer market of integrating hardware and software is one that the industry is now having to contend with. So, John, let's turn our attention to our next guest. We're here at the Q-Logic booth. It's been great all week. Dave, if it wasn't for Q-Logic, we would not be here. Q-Logic has supported us now three years in a row at Oracle Open World and this is really what it's all about. We are allowed to come in, extract the signal from the noise thanks to Q-Logic. So go to Q-Logic site, call the Q-Logic folks. They have the best solutions in the business. We totally love these guys. If it wasn't for them, we would not be able to bring you this great independent coverage and so I just want to put a shout out to Q-Logic to see the logos behind us and it's the Q-Logic Cube this week. So I'm really excited. Yeah, so I'd like to second that. And one of our favorite guests, Rob Davis, who's the CTO of Q-Logic is on now. Rob, welcome back to the Cube. Thank you guys. Thanks John, thanks Dave. Thanks for saying nice things about us. Awesome, thanks for hosting us. So good to see you again. We're here, as John said, Third Oracle Open World. So first of all, tell us what's new with Q? What's new with Q? Well, we're focused, I'm in the futures business at Q and we're focused on cloud and flash. Those are areas of exploration and new products. Well, it's interesting. We've been hearing a lot from Oracle this week on both of those topics, cloud and flash. So what's your take on cloud and flash and specifically what's different about the Oracle environment? What's different about the Oracle environment at the show here? Just in general. It seems like they're much more focused like you were saying earlier on integrating the sun acquisition. If you walk around their hardware demonstrations or boosts, they have a lot more spark. Spark is being used everywhere instead of X86 and Solaris is being used almost everywhere except the Oracle Linux. So I think they're really focused on integrating that sun product line. Yeah, we used to joke that the X and X data and X analytics stood for Xeon. I think Oracle's taking that to heart and really pushing Spark a lot more. It's very different than last year, that's for sure. Oh, so we'll talk from a technology standpoint, Rob. What, how do you have to approach the futures, the technology perspective in an Oracle environment versus say some of the other environments like a VMware or other general purpose environments? What's different about that? Well, their main focus there from our perspective is the database. And so our new product, the Montrenier product is focused on accelerating the performance of database. Yeah, so performance is critical. So from a cloud standpoint, what can you tell us about what you guys are doing and where you fit? On the cloud side, we're really trying to figure out how to integrate cloud storage with enterprise storage. We think that cloud storage has got a great future but there's a big disconnect right now between enterprise storage, which has a whole set of different characteristics and cloud storage. Obviously the price difference is dramatic and so we feel that that's going to be driving the cloud storage market. And we're in the connectivity business and we think connecting that enterprise to that cloud is a great opportunity going forward for us. So when you say cloud storage, can you tell us what you mean by that? You know, it's basically instead of the storage being in a subsystem in the enterprise, it's out on the cloud, you know, in a data center, you know, Amazon, Azure, Google, you name it. So technically in terms of how you approach designing products, that's a networking issue, it's a balance, it's a distance issue, it's a latency issue, it's just a mindset issue too because in the enterprise, they're thinking about high availability, they're thinking about high performance and in the cloud space, they're thinking about price and scalability and it's, you know, I've heard it said a few times, I don't remember exactly who said it, the problem is taking a watermelon, putting it through a straw and then recreating a watermelon at the other end. So, well, so now you guys got out of the InfiniBand business last year, you sold that business. True. So what's your fit in this new world? What's the fit of, say, Fiber Channel and Ethernet in this new world? Well, we've had a product doing distance connectivity between enterprise data centers and on the storage side for years. Back in the 90s, there was a protocol, kind of the first IP, Fiber Channel protocol called FCIP and that allowed you to connect two sands across the wide area network and so we have a storage router product, the 6200 product line in that space. We've continued to add features to that over the years. When Ice-Cuzzy came along, we added Fiber Channel to Ice-Cuzzy bridging, when FCLE came along, we added that bridging, we've added data migration software to it and that's a product that we're starting to put into the space connecting enterprise storage because it has all the right interfaces, it's high availability to cloud storage, which is wide area. So let's go back to Flash. We've been hearing a lot about that this week. Certainly Larry Ellison's talked about it. We had some other folks on and the Flash Refusion IO came on. Aerospyke was here talking about the benefits of Flash. They're a new type of database company. So what's so cool about Flash? Well, Flash is very interesting technology because it removes the mechanical aspects of storage, right? Distries have had mechanical pieces in them since they were invented, right? 50 years ago, probably almost. Spinning rust, exactly. And Flash has no moving parts, right? So you can really totally rethink how you design computers because for those 50 years, computers have been designed around the inadequacies or the deficiencies of those moving parts, whether it's availability, whether it's performance, whether it's power. And with Flash, most of those are eliminated. So you can look at designs on, especially on storage and networking completely differently and that's where our Mount Rainier product fits. So let's talk about that in some more detail. So can you talk about specifically how you change your thinking as a technologist as to how you design products with Flash in mind? Sure, so the interesting thing about Flash is that it's high performance and it's persistent. And so you can put it in the case of a database right in the server and you can put whatever part of that database is maybe even the whole database right in that server locally and it's persistent, right? And that's a great technology. There's lots of companies doing that. What we're doing that's different, which is enabled with Flash is we're adding the IO interface to that Flash storage. And that gives you all the aspects of sand because if you take a standard Flash drive and you put it in a server or you take a PCI Express Flash drive and you put it in a server, you're giving up all the sand aspects that you get, the management of the storage, the mobility, all those aspects. You're kind of going back to the days of early DAS. By connecting the IO to it, which we do with Mount Rainier, you're getting back all the sand aspects of that Flash storage along with the performance of putting it in the server. Rob, for the guys, the IT pros out there who have a lot of sands, they're like, might not be in the weeds and inside the ropes with Q-Logic, what's your message to those guys that have all these large sands? How does the new Mount Rainier product, what does it mean to them? Does it make your life better? Does it move things around? Does it enhance it, scale it back? I think it makes their life better because they can take advantage of Flash without giving up the advantages of their sands. I mean, just in a nutshell. So it's leveraging sand investments. Yeah, and those Flash cards are complicated beasts because you've got to have the right set of drivers for the OS. You've got to have the right connection to the application. You've got to make sure you've got enough memory, enough CPU power. So there's been a lot of talk with Hadoop and these other technologies that, hey, replace your sands. Let's get some Flash and let's kind of replace those sands, but people scratch their heads that I've talked to, like, hey, that sounds all great. Maybe I might want to take some EMC, new sands off the table, maybe experiment, but I can't just replace the sands. And this product allows them to keep their sands and add Flash technology without a lot of complexity. And so what's the performance going to look like for them? So just going to order a magnitude. What's going to change in the performance side? So we're running a demo here in our booth at Oracle OpenWorld and we're showing a 5x performance improvement over a standard Oracle Rack solution. With spinning disk, obviously. The spinning disk versus the Flash card. But you still get all those sand aspects with the Flash. Awesome. I have to ask you, so Stu had texted me the night, said that he read an article about one terabyte ethernet being not feasible. And just again, from a technology perspective, and I know you're not familiar with the article, so I'm going to put you on the spot, but just conceptually, one terabyte ethernet, what are your, I mean, I know it's way out there. What are your thoughts on that? My thoughts are that when I started in this industry, which was a long time ago, one gigabit ethernet wasn't feasible. And two, four gigabit fiber channel, and eight gigabit firetellin, 16, and 100 ethernet. I mean, they're always not feasible at this point in time. But somehow we figure out how to do it, don't we? Excellent. All right, Rob. Well, listen, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Rob Davis, CTO of Q-Logic. Always a good guest. I really appreciate your time. Thank you. And good seeing you again. Okay, this is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE.com's coverage of Oracle Open World. So those are brought to you by Q-Logic, and wasn't for them, we wouldn't be here thanks to the shout-out to Q-Logic. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.