 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE covering EMC World 2015. Brought to you by EMC, Brocade, and VCE. Experience that VCE has done for the B-Block and helping to, and some might say, you know, taking solutions almost productizing it some. So it's only appropriate that we have Don Norbeck who's Senior Director with the VCE Solutions Foundation joining us for this first segment. Don, welcome back to theCUBE. Great, thank you. Great to be here and see some good friends that haven't talked to in a long time. Yeah, so you're our first guest that we have on for VCE this week, you know, Praveen, your CEO was prominent in the keynote. And tell us a little bit, you know, what's it like being back at VCE, being inside of EMC? It's been great. It's been a great experience with the acquisition towards the end of last year. It's really kind of clarified our purpose. So if you think about what we've been doing over the last couple of years is converging the infrastructure space. This movement allows us to do that and extend that even further beyond the four walls of what was known as a V-Block. You certainly saw a lot of the announcements. We'll see more of them this week. But it also allows us to extend convergence up into the solution space by taking the practices that we've done of understanding the articulation of the infrastructure four corners and applying that to the solution space by looking at how the solutions need to work together and interact. So it's been a great transition into EMC. Yeah, so, Don, maybe we can talk about how does VCE go up the stack into the applications because we want to talk about databases specifically. You know, why is the various solutions that EMC and VCE, you know, what makes them special for or what kind of effort goes into, you know, making the database work better, the infrastructure manage that? That's a great question. If you look at where we were in the past, we really had two models. The first model was either you do an appliance where you go top to bottom, integrate the stack all the way up, and... You know, Oracle's red stack. They bake the entire thing. They bake the whole thing. I buy it from one vendor. I know that they're going to say nothing works better for Oracle than Oracle. Unless you need Oracle to work with anything else. And then on the other side, the other side of the options in the past were to go full general purpose and try and assemble it yourself. Now, we've all in VCE and EMC have done a great, a great amount of solutions work and a lot of efforts to ensure that Oracle runs best on EMC. Now, what we're trying to do at VCE is to take the best of those both worlds. Instead of having a pure appliance or pure do-it-yourself stack, we're converging the infrastructure pieces to make sure that we can determine which elements of those are appropriate for Oracle or for any database for that matter. And then extend out into the solution space to make sure that the solution stack itself has its own interoperability matrix seats. Then we can test that interoperability matrix with our infrastructure and interoperability matrix and give it a golden alignment between the two. It's like the sphere of convergence is getting bigger and bigger, right? That's what you're doing. Absolutely. It's moving across different stacks when inside the infrastructure. You saw the announcements of the VX racks and it's moving up the stack. Now, that doesn't mean we're just going to create a bunch of new appliances. It's a lot more than that. It's making sure that we have great knowledge around the appropriateness for each of those endpoints, each of those different systems have different purposes, different configurations, different special bits that make them appropriate for different solutions. So we have that full articulation. We know how the solutions work and we combine the two in a way that gives you guidance on which endpoints are best for which applications. Just, I mean, when VC started live through the VBlock, one of the strengths and sometimes people said a weakness was the fact that it was quite uniform and there were limited configurations and I always thought that was a good thing because variances are not about, right? And I guess, you know, one fear I'd love you to explore is if you're adding more and more software, it's getting more and more complex. So do you, I mean, is it going to be even harder for you to do this? Do you see any risks in doing that approach? Well, I think we've learned over the last five years of how to make the systems work within a bounded set. What type of interoperability matrices we have to do, what type of non-reoccurring engineering investments we need to do to make it work. Now we're taking that example that proved the set and expanding it to a broader set of infrastructure. So it's still the same quality-assured, kind of. It's still the same quality-assured. But when the customer gets it, it does more from day one kind of thing. It does more. It has more options from day one. Got you, all right. So it's not just different options of different hardware types or hardware configurations. It's also more options once you establish a system. So we're not in the appliance space where you sell a box and then you can't add anything to it and you can't use it for anything else than what the purpose you bought was. I think sometimes people think that, right? I buy this box that sits in the corner of the center and I don't touch it. I don't think that's the case, is it? That's the case. We've actually swung the pendulum almost to the other side. When we first started out, when you and I were out there talking about these things, customers used to say, I want this to be a V-block. Right. And we'd say, oh, yeah, we can do that. Remember those days? Now customers are coming to us and say, you know the infrastructure. You know the solution space. I want the best infrastructure for these purposes. Can you do that for me? Rather than telling me what DEA's I want. Which is an outcome. And you, right, yes. I mean, that was one of the key messages this morning. Did you hear that loud and cloud today? Absolutely. We always say, you know, we're tired of hearing some of the speeds and feeds on that. How do I move my business faster? How do I turn IT into an enabler for business? So there were a bunch of new announcements. Don, can you walk us through what, you know, the new announcement means specifically for the database environment? I'll focus it back on the database. For database, really what it means is now we have a great line of systems from the 300 series based on VNX, the 500 series based on Xtreme.io, to the 700 series based on VMAX. We also have a new scale out architecture that will be applicable for certain database environments. And those databases environments, you know, databases are going to go through this transformation too, where you can have more scale out than monolithic architectures. And we are well positioned for that. So we're talking about some of the, like, the SQL databases or what can you dig into us a little bit? So it's, I'll take it from where we are today. Over 50% of our Vblocks that we go out to market with and our customers environments, are you use Oracle as a database workload. Now, many of them are in a mixed workload environment where you have Oracle next to a SQL application, next to Exchange, next to something else. But there are some that it is a dedicated environment where we are building the super car. And we're building that infrastructure that hums at millions of IOPS. And we have balanced the two of them. These new announcements that we have gives us more starting points from smaller sized infrastructure to more feature capabilities that wouldn't paint you into a corner that you could only use it for a database or only use it for a flavor of the database in the future. You'd be able to, because we know what the end points look like, we can give you guidance on what other solutions it would be appropriate for. How's that going to affect things like vision? Because vision, I remember being so excited about that when I was at VCE because, is that the old adage, if you've still got 13 element managers, it doesn't look like a block, right? If you can get that one view, that's brilliant. If you're expanding that by adding more and more software, I guess that problem gets more difficult as well, doesn't it? It doesn't, it doesn't. It is some brute force to make sure that you can have the depth of information on all the different components and all the different systems. That's something that we will continue to invest in and continue to expand upon. But where it makes a difference for us is, it gives you that data center view across all the infrastructures that you have. So whether it's a VX rack or a VX block or a V block, you get to get the visibility from an inventory of health and compliance perspective. So, Don, a good question I have for you. When I think back to database, one of the questions we've had for many years is, do I virtualize or do I do bare metal? And I remember talking with VCE in the early days, people forget that even though VMware, of course, is on every V block that ships, you can do physical with the people. And now even with the VX rack, it was one of the key differentiators that I see is as far as I know, it's the only hyperconverged platform built with ScaleIO that can do bare metal. All the rest of them, it's either in the hypervisor or on the hypervisor, but you've got to have a hypervisor. Where are we with kind of the database discussion? How much is physical? How much is virtual? What's that playing out in the customer scene? Excellent question. I still think that physical has a huge play in the database space. And having infrastructures that have the options to support it from a physical, as you make the investments to modernize your applications, some databases will just run better physically and don't have the compelling event to virtualize. Now, we would strongly encourage, because you do get other benefits in terms of operational benefits as well as availability benefits. But the value of VCE and our CI is the ability to support both of them. The loud customers mature at their own pace rather than forcing them to virtualize upfront or forcing them into a stay with the physical approach. So done, we're running low on time here. What I want to ask you is, what about the kind of the operational side of things? Is the DBA still driving a lot of the infrastructure for there? And how has that role been changing over the last couple of years? Well, if you can remember, I think EMC and VCE sponsored a study with Wikibon late last year, where that, and keep me honest with the numbers, but about 50% of the time of a DBA was spent mucking around in the plumbing. Now, why they had to do it is because every time they adjusted something up in the application, it caused a hold down on the plumbing that needed to be adjusted. Data sets needed to move from one class of storage to another class of storage. What if you can get the plumbing right? Day one, that can free up a substantial amount of time from an operation perspective for that DBA to go and really deliver the value to the business, which is in the data sets, which is a new organization of the development of the applications and making sure that those two things work together. You don't want DBAs playing in command lines of the infrastructure. You want them playing in inside their application space. And I think that what we bring to the table from VCE helps minimize the time that they have to spend making the infrastructure appropriate. Comes out of the factory appropriate for that application. All right, well, Don, appreciate so much. All the updates you brought. We will be covering lots more of the Oracle space and lots of the other applications. So stay with us. We'll be right back. Great. Thank you. Thanks, Don. Go good stuff. Hey, great job. Yeah, thank you. Pips around the shop.