 Okay, we're back here live at Oracle OpenWorld. This is SiliconANGLE.com, it's theCUBE, our flagship program where we go out to the events and extract the ceiling from the noise. I'm John Furrier, joining with my co-host, Dave Vellante, co-founder of Wikibon.org. And we're joined by Lee Katzwell, CUBE alumni, who's now the VP of virtualization, product group of Fusion IO. Welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you. It's great to see you. It's always good to be here. I see performance is a big buzzword here at Oracle. I mean, everyone's throwing out IOPS and, you know, Oracle obviously pushing the numbers. I know, right? It's great. Storage everywhere. Well, Fusion IO set the standard in with Flash. Obviously now everything's all Flash. Pure storage, doing great on their side as a startup. You guys got some competition. What's the update on your end? And give us a scoop on what's going on at Oracle here. Yeah, it's just fascinating. I mean, as we go and track the applications that people run on Fusion IO, so databases that we have here, people run on Fusion IO, so databases is number one. And if you look at Oracle, right? I mean, it's right up there. We have high performance users, right? 40% of our customers are seeing 10x performance improvements or better running on Fusion IO. I mean, when's the last time you saw 10x of anything, right? So 10x performance changes the game for customers today. So whether they're large customers, small customers, we're seeing that across the board. Some of the interesting announcements of the show this week, the Times 10 in-memory database, if you go and run that, take the log files, put those on Fusion IO, you're seeing a 30 to 70% increase in performance. Fantastic results, right? Out of the box, really immediate results. So Dave, I want to get your opinion on what's going on with Fusion and virtualization in Oracle because now you have the intersection of the emerging players, the pioneers like Fusion, Oracle coming in with Flash, everyone wants all Flash, he's aggressively going in there. As an analyst, what's your take on what's going on in the market? Well, first a quick aside, I was talking to somebody on the floor today. Michael Dell, of course, their early investor in Fusion IO and Michael Dell made the comment, if I could change two things in my life, I would have come back and been born in China. And the second, I would have been in the storage business. There you go. I think back to 2008, 2009, you guys had this idea. Right, exactly. It was a good one. But I think, John, at the end of the day, it's really about the application performance and that performance has been constrained by spinning disk. We all know this story. But the real opportunity here is that the chance to really change the way in which applications are designed, develop, written, driving business value. I think that's what we're seeing now. We've sort of gone through this, it's too expensive and where does it fit? Should it be all Flash? Should it be hybrid, PCIe, blah, blah, blah? And now it's about, okay, Flash everywhere, we all know that's happening, but it's really about the business value of the applications. And I presume you're seeing that in the customer base, right? You're not having those discussions that you had two or three years ago. The news, Flash, right, is that the economic ROI is instant and people understand it now. Yeah, there's not even a question anymore, right? Yeah, so if you looked at, you know, a disk delivers maybe 150 IOPS. Flash delivers 10,000 times that. And so all of a sudden the idea that I can go and put, like, hundreds of drives, hundreds of those in a simple, you know, consumable form factor, you know, the news, Flash, for us, right, is that we're taking Flash whether you want to deploy it in a server, if you want to deploy it on the storage side, or if you want to deploy it as an integration between servers and storage, we're covering the whole breadth of the product portfolio now, and that's what customers are asking, am I a server deployment? Am I a storage deployment? It's those types of questions, right, as to how do I have the breadth of application support. So you have virtualization in your title. Talk about virtualizations, but specifically in terms of what's happening in Oracle environments, because initially, of course VMware is, you know, the king of the hill in virtualization. Initially, when customers started to adopt VMware specifically, and even virtualization generally, non-OVM virtualization inside Oracle, Oracle sales reps would, you know, get the customer to headlock. We're not going to support that. You're going to have to go back to physical if you have a problem. We might change your licensing on you. I don't do that. A lot of fun. The reality is that Oracle has, you know, serviced those customers very well. But so what's going on with virtualization inside Oracle from your standpoint? Yeah, we see a mix right now. So, you know, the press towards virtualization is that if I can virtualize, even if I have just one database on there, all of a sudden I get some really nice benefits, particularly maintenance. So how do I maintain an underlying physical server without virtualization? It's a tough problem. Well, you can solve that with virtualization. So virtualization and databases are coming together. Now, the hard part in the past has been, if I wanted to virtualize, they basically say, well, I'm going to have to pay more licenses, and I'll get less performance. That's a tough story, right? And so the clank rate in the sales channel is around that. Well, now through some of the virtualization software, so Fusion IO, we call this caching software or IO turbine software, now I can go and basically deploy virtualization on the server, and I can get better performance, and I can offload the sand. So I've got a very simple way to go deploy server-side flash or store-side flash, not take the performance hit. Now I've got a better ROI message, and that's what customers respond to. So what are you seeing as a result, as to the adoption of virtualization within the Oracle environments? Is it slow uptake? Is it starting to steep in the curve? It's a mix. It's a mix right now. So one thing we're seeing is that, particularly when you get into Oracle environments, they're heterogeneous by nature. You've got servers that are virtual. I never know that hanging out here. Exactly. It is though, right? Customers have different servers. Some of them are running virtualized, some of them are running in bare metal. Who's got Oracle every hand in the room? Who's got only Oracle every hand goes down, right? Well, so the idea basically is, I need to go and support virtual environments, bare metal environments, and put it all together. How do I do that with a common support path? So that's one of the things we've been focusing on is I can go and take a bare metal server running Oracle, or I can run a virtual server running Oracle and other things, and I can have a common way to go and manage those and deploy Flash across both of those. The Flash benefits are so compelling. I want to do that. The question is, how do I minimize the support so I don't get taken down by all this complexity? Lee, I want to talk to you about virtualization. Obviously, you've been in the business for a long time. Virtualization has been falling from the beginning, going back to VMware, and obviously, you know the storage business. We had an EMC executive on earlier. She was awesome, and she was talking about virtualized storage, virtualized the database, and almost as if, I mean, she wasn't using her hand gesture, but like, I'm moving up the stack, right? So at the end of the day, developers and DevOps are driving a big hyperscale market right now. It's going to proliferate the enterprise. That's the big forecast, right? So okay. It's going to take some time, but developers need to just stay away from the operations side of the infrastructure. So that's the promise of virtualization. How do you look at virtualization moving up the stack? And I'll see with VDI and things like that at the edge of the network, what's relevant right now at the edge in terms of mobile and getting containerization of applications? What's the key trend that's baked out and where is it evolving? You can talk about how virtualization is moving to the edge. Yeah, so, you know, one thing we're seeing is let's talk about VDI for a minute, or more appropriately, desktop as a service, right? So I think VDI, everyone says VDI really again. You can tell me about VDI one more time. It's year of the VDI. Yeah, so. No, this time, really. But that's important, because the edge is ultimately the consumer touch point and the enterprise BYOD. What hasn't changed, right? The amount of tablets that we've got. The number of tablets that are going is exploding. We've got Windows legacy architectures. Those aren't going away anytime. And what we're seeing right now is, you know, for the first time you can get a virtual desktop that is as fast or better than an SSD laptop and cost less. But I continue to have both of those. The only people who deploy this at the edge are guys who are really worried about security. So financial services, government, right? The high-end, HIPAA requirements. Hardened end-to-end end points. Complete, high-end government and financial. But now you take the mobile, right? I mean, you start looking at it. You see what happens just getting more and more devices, right? More and more types of ways that you want to access this. It's actually pretty easy now with VMware, for example, right? To go and run Windows legacy apps on an iPad. Well, that's new. And the ability that you can do it faster and do it cheaper than a physical desktop, all of a sudden you're going to see a massive move to, how do I go and put this into a centralized cloud architecture? And hosting it? So what's baked out in this area? So what is working in your standpoint and what's Fusion doing there? Because obviously that's an area that you're focused on. Yeah, we have a new technology that I thought was interesting. If you looked at about 20% of our customers today run VDI. And the VDI that they run, most of it was deployed as, I'm going to drop a server-side flash card into a server and accelerate that locally. Now what's happening is we have a new technology called IOVDI. And a lot of our emphasis now is in putting quality of service tied to performance. You know, it's not enough just to have fast performance. It's how do I know that I'm going to have consistent performance across applications? So in IOVDI what we're doing is we're intelligently directing read and write traffic, whether it's going to happen accelerated on a server or be sent off persistently to a storage device. That intelligent movement, that value, that's a lot of where the software value happens. And to be frank in a cloud environment, that's what customers are looking for. They don't want to manage any of this. They want you intelligently looking and saying, hey, what data am I presenting? And you tell me where I'm going to put it. You go and manage that, do it on a policy basis, do it with quality of service. That's a really interesting problem to solve. Lots of value there. You're talking about consistent performance. And that's always been what application heads want is consistent performance, right? Give me that. There's some interesting studies that show that you give somebody fast performance or slow performance or performance in the middle where they don't know what's going on. It turns out the unknown user, the guy who doesn't know whether he's going to get faster slow performance, he's the most unhappy of the lot. Predictable performance is actually the most important. Look at your kids now. How long does it take them to go and switch to a new website if they're not getting predictable performance? So that's kind of what I wanted to talk about is because that's been the accepted thinking. How does Flash change that where it's not just predictable but it's really fast and predictable? Yeah. So we basically look at it this way, right? So there's absolute performance which says, hey, how can I make sure that I'm going to get the lowest number, right? The lowest response time. And that performance gets broken down pretty quickly into bandwidth or latency, right? Or IOPS. Now what we look at is something called bounded latency or bounded IOPS, right? What does the variation look like over time? Here's where it becomes very interesting. Flash, as you deploy it across not just a server but across a fabric and into storage, now I have to look holistically across the whole environment and say can I give you a predictable performance across a fabric? Can I give it predictable performance based on an application? So we've got some very interesting technology. IO Control is our latest policy-driven volume-based performance solution. That storage solution allows you to go and give you predictable performance across application areas. It's that type of investment that we've got that says that you have to take out variations in what the fabric latencies look like or what happens during raid rebuilds. Very interesting software value add on that. So you guys have been in this business for a while now. The pioneer of the model. It's a great face to be. Certainly EMC announced when they put Flash into their subsystem. Good for them. We gave them props when they did that and that sort of started but there was this little company called FusionIO actually doing some more interesting things at the time which have shown us the way that the industry is going. So I want to play a little word association. Please. I'm going to throw a word at you and then I just want you to talk about it. So your perspectives and what your take is on this. Quality of service. Application aware. My response is you have to know what the application needs. Most storage companies don't really know much about what the application is presenting. Where did the application run? The application ran on the servers. FusionIO's legacy is we came from the server side and now we're deploying across the storage side as well. A company like EMC, they're coming this way. In their world, right, they started out at the storage side and came back into the server side. Well, turns out the closer you are to the application, the more you know about the workload. In fact, if you think about caching for a minute, as you're doing caching inside of a server, all that data, all of that activity, storage array never knows anything about it. They don't even see it. It's too slow to manage it. Next one. Open source. Ah. Well, hyperscale. That's my response. We have hyperscale customers who are excited about taking open source, taking and marrying that up with the benefits of our, in our case, our IO scale products. That is a very, very nice fit. Enterprise customers care a little bit more about endurance, like five-year endurance versus three-year endurance. We've got products that fit both. Competition. Bring it on. We love competition. Here's the thing that's interesting. We won early on by saying, we're the fastest every time, all the time. And that was great. Life was good, right? The orders rolled in on that. Now the world's a little different because everybody can go and take a performance number from a spec sheet and say, hey, we might be faster in this one little case, right? So what we're taking is all the application and solution experience that we have. So if you've got an Oracle RAC system, for example, and you want to basically get less than 150 microsecond response time we can tell you how to do that. We've got a reference architecture along with that. We've done it. We have customers who've gone in. So we've got that level of application experience which says, we're going to make you successful in the field. That's different than just having a specified, you know, IOP number on a data sheet somewhere. And that's what customers are coming to Fusion.io for. They pay a little bit more, but what they get is the idea that I'm actually going to speed the time to getting the application successful in the field. That's different. That's what customers value, enterprise customers, especially Oracle customers. Okay, Lee Kesswell, thanks for coming inside the Cube Fusion.io. Again, public company now. We remember when you guys were private, great doing great, pioneering flash, performances, everything. But in the day, the applications matter. That's the future of computer science and software, the software-defined world we're living in. It's being powered by you guys. Congratulations. We're live here in San Francisco. Just basking in the glory of America's Cup victory, already the tweets are coming in. Larry came from behind to win. That's a quote I saw the 1% come back of the year. Right. On the day of the show, right? Already the tweets are coming in with great one-liners. This is the Cube, always interesting, and riveting here on the Cube. Right back after the short break.