 Live from the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, California, it's theCUBE 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. Welcome back. You're watching theCUBE. I'm Jeff Frick. We're Moscone Center at Oracle Open World 2014. This is the fifth year that theCUBE has been at Oracle Open World and we have such a great demand that we actually have two cubes. So stop by, we're at the Cisco booth. Can't miss us, a lot of bright lights, a big giant line over there for some freebies I'm joining this segment by my co-host John Furrier and we're welcoming Aaron Newcomb, Solutions Marketing Manager from NetApp. Welcome to theCUBE. Yeah, thanks for having me. You've been on before, so it's good to have you back. Yeah, absolutely. So what's new with NetApp? I hear you got a lot of good announcements, so let's just jump right into it. Yeah, we do have a lot of good announcements. The biggest one, of course, that's drawing the most attention is the new FlexPod we announced today, specifically for Oracle Database Workloads. So the big news here is that we're delivering a million IOPS for customers that want to deploy Oracle Database specifically on top of Oracle Rack. A million IOPS. A million IOPS. And is this GA, is this coming soon? Is there any pilot customers out there? What's kind of the status there? Right, so this is coming soon. It'll be available in about a month or so. We anticipate that people will be able to actually get this. But you know, FlexPod is really a design. And I know you guys are going to be talking more about FlexPod a little bit later with Atom4, but FlexPod is more of a design. So for people that want to implement this now, they say, hey, a million IOPS, that's great. I want to do this tomorrow. We can actually jump in and help and make that happen today. But if you're waiting for the actual validated design to come out, that'll be towards the end of October. And who are the customers? What are the applications? What are the industries that are clamoring for this? Right, so these are anyone that's looking for high performance. So we talked about the IOPS, a million IOPS. And then the second part of that is the latency. So this isn't just a million IOPS a day, right? This is a million IOPS a second with sub millisecond latency. So this is for people that are running OLTP workloads, people that want to, maybe they have an online ordering system. They're taking, you know, the Amazons of the world essentially, they're taking millions of orders a day. And they need to be able to process these very quickly or they're doing shipments. They need to track all of this stuff. So it's really meant for that online transaction processing type of a workload because it delivers that super high performance at really fast response rate. So if you've got end users complaining, you know, this isn't going fast enough for me or you're losing customers because they're walking away before the transaction is complete, this is going to be something you want to take a look at. And is that a pretty common driver of this type of purchase? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is the number one thing that database administrators come to us asking about is performance. If it doesn't perform well, then you're pretty much out of the discussion right from the get go. There's other things too. So you have to be able to cover availability. You have to be able to cover speed of deployment, you know, because if you want to stay committed, you have to deploy very quickly and you have to be able to manage it easily. And we actually cover all of those aspects with FlexBot Select for high performance or correct. Okay. And what percentage of the customers do you think will be internal enterprise, you know, the person that buys is using it versus kind of cloud service providers? This would probably be more around the IT, around the data center, focused around that because it is for the specific workload that you're probably not going to be running in the cloud. We have a lot of other FlexBot solutions that are geared just for that. Either people deploying something for private cloud. We also have solutions that move data back and forth between say Amazon AWS and their private data center. But this is really geared towards those customers that have those applications where downtime is costly and losing transactions is also costly. They're going to want to look at this to stay competitive. Aaron, great to have you on theCUBE. Really appreciate your commentary. So Kim Stevenson is the CIO of Intel's on earlier. And she's very flamboyant. She's awesome. She's an awesome great guest of ours. Been on many times. But she kind of brought this concept of BG and AG before Google, after Google. And so I got to ask, you know, I see oracles change over the years. We've been in our fifth oracle open world and four years ago it was like, almost like dead. What is Oracle going to do? Are they going to go extinct? Or are they going to reinvent themselves? Obviously cloud's huge, right? So I want you to bring that perspective in. I know you cover the industry in a lot of other areas. This hacker culture meets after Google, everyone is seeing the mobile infrastructure. Everyone's seeing the cloud, everything as a service. How is that impacting the storage and the oracle environment? And can you break that apart for us? Sure. Well, I mean, one of the biggest areas that we see right now is that customers are struggling, our customers, right? So businesses are struggling with the, exactly what you said, right? But before Google, we have all our stuff running in our box in our data center, but there's some incredible economies of scale that can happen in the cloud. And the problem is their data is resonant, usually in the data center. And how do I get that over to the cloud to take advantage of all those economies of scale? And so one of the things that we've implemented is something called NetApp Private Storage for cloud services, right? So for Amazon AWS or for Azure, what that enables customers to do is really take the, leave their data there in their private data center. Maybe they've got some concerns around customer information or something they don't want to share. They can mask that out and then migrate that seamlessly over to a cloud environment. And maybe they're running a test dev, that's usually where people start. So I want to spin up, let's say, an Amazon web service environment to run my test dev infrastructure there. And I want to do it for a couple months, right? That's what the cloud really gives them is they can spin that up, run it for a little while. But how do they get their data over there? That's where we come in, right? So we enable that connectivity between their private data center and Amazon web services or Azure so that they can get that data there, run their tests, maybe run some reporting, whatever it is. At the end of the day, they can tear all that down, break it apart and they don't have to worry about a risk of their data going into somebody else's hands. So you're seeing data at the center of the architecture and moving the data to where the resource or moving the resource to where the data is. Yeah, absolutely. It's more moving the data to where the resources are. Yeah, so the only other way to do that really is very costly data connections between Amazon AWS and their own private data centers. And- But that issues risks as well, right? That issues risks as well. So what we're trying to do is eliminate those risks and really with the connection back into what we announced today in terms of the new FlexPod solution we announced. I mean, this is really the back end of someone's cloud, right? Infrastructure, right? This is the Oracle databases that are running on the back end that are enabling all of those, either mobile or cloud-enabled applications that are running. So it usually goes back to some place where you're going to collect a lot of information either to do some analytics on it or like I said, with an Amazon, it's an order entry kind of thing where you've got millions of customers a day coming and using these things. That's really what it enables. You know, we've been following that up for a while so you guys have a relation with Amazon. So that's well known in the industry, maybe not well known out in the customer base, which is good because everyone uses public cloud. A lot of stuff to use in there. And two, virtualization is a big part of the DNA at NetApp. So bring together that piece to us. The virtualization meets Oracle. We had one of your customers on earlier talking about their awesome environment with their NAS. I think it was the- Sounds like Tim Frazier with this. Yeah, Tim Frazier, phenomenal guest. Amazing dude, just kick ass. Just awesome. Absolutely. But that's the idea, right? I got virtualization. I might do a little bit here. Oracle's got a different twist than, say, VMware, which you guys also work at VMware. So how do you guys work with that virtualization ecosystem because now you got Oracle, VMware, and there's going to be a zillion hypervisors to board? Right, right. Well, we work with all the major hypervisors. You know, we work with VMware and we work with, we have a good partnership with the Oracle VM folks as well and Nif, who you talked to earlier, is an Oracle VM shop. So they're bought into that infrastructure. It's kind of nice. I'll be honest, I used to work for Oracle. It's nice being NetApp. We can be a little bit agnostic and we can work with everybody. So it's nice because we can enable, no matter what the customer chooses, whether it's VMware, Oracle VM, or Xen, or whatever it is, we can really enable their data no matter what they choose. And maybe they migrate. I mean, maybe they start with VMware and go to Oracle VM or vice versa. The great thing is they don't have to change their storage on the back end. We'll work with everybody. And in fact, we've even got a plug-in. One of the things that, the other things we announced today was increased support for Oracle plugins, Oracle database, and increased validation of our Flash portfolio for those environments. So for example, we've got an Oracle VM plug-in for there, it's called Storage Connect, that goes out and manages the storage. You explained this. That was when the announcement came up earlier. Yeah, sure. So Storage Connect is the way that virtualization architects or administrators can manage the storage layer from within the OVM environment, right? So you're in, it's kind of like Enterprise Manager for Database a little bit, but, and I'm not the expert on OVM, right? But I'll just tell you what our perspective is. It's a little bit like that. So it's the management layer that rides above the hypervisors, and it really allows the virtualization manager to come in and manage the storage directly. So instead of me sending a ticket to the storage group and saying, hey, I want to spin up 30 new VMs, OVM instances, can you give me the storage? And then you have to wait and wait and whatever. You can actually do that as a virtualization administrator. You can actually go ahead and spin those up with the OVM plug-in that we developed for OVM. So talk about the evolution of the Oracle. You mentioned working with Oracle in the past. Yep. The role of the DBA has changed. I mean, the old days, you know, managed your databases. Now with virtualization, it's just more than DBA role now. You're taking on a much more of a bigger role. You're standing up services, you're standing up new, you know, maybe non-NetApp stuff. I've got NetApp over here, I've got Whitman over here. So it's actually more of a command center. Yeah. So talk about the role of the DBA. In particular, the storage is still the center of the value because you've got to store it, you've got to manage that data, active data, passive data, back up on the one side, apps on the other, storage isn't going away. Nope. But the DBA role has significantly changed to be more like air traffic control. Yeah. So what do you guys see? What do you see there in your customer base around that DBA role? Is it going to be more elevated position? Now, see, virtualization creates more action. Right. How do you see that evolving as a position? So as you alluded to, it is becoming more and more complex. So one of the things that we're trying to do at NetApp is we're trying to simplify all of the complexity. And for Oracle, it really means developing all those integrations and plugins into their existing framework. So for example, I mentioned Oracle Enterprise Manager, right? That's something that DBAs use to try to make sense of their expanded role, try to get a handle, especially as people think of database administrators as just administering one database. Yeah, sit in front of a screen. Sit in front of a screen and type in SQL commands, right? It goes well beyond that. I mean, you could have hundreds and hundreds of databases that your database team has to administer. It becomes very, very complicated. So they turn to products like Oracle Enterprise Manager. Well, with scale-out architecture too, it's not only just databases. You're looking at other virtualization services that are workload-specific, policy. I mean, it's seriously complex. So how do they do it? What's their future look like? Exactly. Well, with Enterprise Manager specifically, we've developed a plugin that'll go and give the DBA the ability to see all of the data about their infrastructure from the database viewpoint. So they're looking, they click on, they don't look at, oh, there's this NetApp storage. I wonder what it's connected to. They look at it and say, okay, here's my database. I know what that is. Let me click on that. And it gives them a whole view of everything that that database is connected to. So it's very important as a partner in reaching out to DBAs to make it familiar to what they're used to. So if we try to familiarize it to them and give them exactly what their perspective would be on it. So for example, there's a lot of customers right now implementing or testing out 12C, Oracle Database 12C. So just now, even though it was announced that Oracle looked more last year, it's just now getting to the point where people are feeling comfortable doing proof of concepts. So what we've done recently is we've upgraded our plugin for Oracle Enterprise Manager to actually be compatible with 12C, both from a PDB and a CDB standpoint. And what those are is a pluggable database and container database. So that way you can take advantage of all the great cloud features that Oracle Database 12CS offer, but do it from a database view. So you click on a database, whether it's a PDB or a CDB, you'll be able to find all the storage that's connected to it and exactly where the pain points are along the way, if they're already. So you must have been like, did you watch the keynote, Larry? Did you hear what he was talking about? I heard about it, yeah. I mean, it was littered with storage, decompression, acceleration engines, zero downtime, I mean a ton of storage. In this, I mean, you see it's heavier than usual. You see it's all cloud. So what does that tell you of Oracle? What does that tell you of Oracle? Now the EMC is not at the show here, so. Yes, yeah, I mean, I think that the importance of data, so there's a couple of things, right? So Oracle spans the gamut from that, you know, their message is hardware and software, right? So they do everything. So, but I think that the, what the keynote shows you is that they realize that there is an importance in the data in the backend. Yes, it's cloud, cloud, cloud, but guess what, if your storage is slow, then it doesn't matter where it lives, your database is going to run slow. So I think they know that. I mean, they've been doing this a long time, right? So they realize the importance of the storage infrastructure. And, you know, quite frankly, they're very willing to work with us. We have a great relationship with the database folks. When it comes to deploying on NetApp Storage, they're really happy to work with us because we get the storage back in part and they understand that. We help them actually, you know, from a long time ago, when they started talking about DNFS for databases, how to run databases on the network, we started there with them and co-developing that technology. And now it's moved all the way out to the sand infrastructure. And that's how we're getting some of these great numbers on our new flood spot solution. So what's the update with, I know George is busy working away over there. Last time I talked to him, he's a total geek, love talking to Tom with Flash. And what's the update with Flash and NetApp? What do you guys got coming out? So it's interesting. I mean, NetApp really has one of the broadest Flash portfolios available today. And this announcement that we had today with the one million IOPS with sub millisecond latency is really all about our EF Flash portfolio. EF, the EF series is at the heart of that portfolio. And what we found is the great news there is that we can scale the performance linearly. So everybody, when I was a storage architect, I was always looking for the knee and the curve, you know? Where does the performance run out? And it's at that point where you say, okay, I got to get a new system, right? What we've been able to show with this is the benefit of Flash. At least our Flash portfolio is that we can scale this linearly. So we can add four rack nodes and two EF 550 storage devices and add an additional 500,000 IOPS. So you want to grow this thing? I mean, we've tested it up to a million IOPS. You could certainly grow it well beyond that because we've shown that the scalability is there. We also have other great Flash products in our portfolio too. The all Flash FAS unit, which builds upon our legacy FAS product line. We've just recently come out with that. And that delivers great consistent performance, especially for mixed workloads. So you run your Oracle database on there and maybe a different Oracle application. Maybe you also run your exchange, your Microsoft Exchange environment on there and get consistent high levels of performance out of that thing. And then recently we've announced the Flash Ray device as well. So we're continuing to expand on that portfolio. And really, I don't know any other company in the industry that has this broad of a portfolio and is able to offer the types of benefits we are. Yeah, and the other thing people might not know about NetApp, not that I want to jump on the NetApp fan boy wagon that I'm usually on anyway, because I have a big fan of NetApp. Is Software Defined is a big part of the culture. Can you give an insight into the folks out there? And I teed that up for you, but I really want people to know that it's a Software Defined world of NetApp. I mean, it's always been an innovative there. Share with us the internal ethos around Software Defined storage. Not storage, but that whole Software Defined vision. Right, in fact, we were just talking about this over at the Cisco booth right behind us here in terms of their UCS architecture, which is really at the heart of the FlexPod that we announced today. The fact that you can move things around behind the scenes, it used to take forever to get all the bits and pieces working back in the day when you had to talk to the network administrator, you had to talk to the storage administrator, you had to talk to all these people, and if something went wrong, you had to really go back to all those people and try to fix it. Now with Software Defined, you can actually have all that stuff predefined and move it around as you need to move around your data center. Similarly to NetApp Storage, we have something called Clustered Data on Tap. Probably doesn't mean anything to a lot of people, but what it gives you is the ability to move your workload around a clustered system. So for example, let's say you needed to do some upgrades, add some more storage, whatever. You can actually move your workload from one node in the cluster to another node in the cluster. No downtime involved. Come back, do your upgrades with no disruption to service, and then move that workload back transparently. It's all transparent to the end user, right? And that's what Software Defined is all about, making it easier and making it beneficial to the end user. And that brings a whole orchestration, automation piece to it, and that's interesting because the Clustered On Tap stuff, that is the DBA future because it's about managing workloads. These will be networking geeks that would get self-healing networks policy-based. So that's a networking geek thing, but now you're seeing policy, you're seeing automation. These are the new buzzwords in the app layer. Absolutely. Is that DevOps to you guys? You do that as part of the DevOps movement or more of the infrastructure movement? Well, we see it more from the DevOps, really, to be honest. I mean, that's what the application owners really want anyway. We see a lot of application owners that don't care about the infrastructure. They just want to know that it works, and that's what we're out there to try to provide, is, you know, look, you've got a business need to meet. Let's say you're paywall or something, you've got to send those checks out, right? If you don't, then you're gonna be in real problems, right? So that's what I want to make sure. I want to make sure that I send my checks out on time to all of my constituents, and I want an infrastructure that's going to support that. And so that's where NetApp comes in and says, look, if you implement cluster data on tap, for example, you won't have to worry about managing your payroll around the data center outages that you're going to have, even if it's planned. I mean, it might not be unplanned. This might be a planned outage. You don't want to have to worry about that. You know, one of the things we always talk about on theCUBE, Aaron, is big data and the impact of this first generation of business where you can actually instrument everything. So we always talk about two areas of impact. Advertising and IT spend, because both have huge ROI implications. You know, the old expression after ad budget is waste that you don't know which have. Now you can actually measure it all. On IT, now you have business outcomes of driving everything. And the iPhone generation has highlighted the fact that you're now connected to the edge of the network. So now you should be able to drive anything to the end. So IT isn't that island of that department that's getting stuff and where's the beef. It's really now data-driven and seamless advertising. So I see- It's a paradigm shift. Totally paradigm shift. So I see IT really being disrupted by big data. I see storage as a big part of that. So the last question I want to ask you with that in mind, what do you guys see in this trend towards active data? Huge internet of things. You got mobile devices. This notion of having data at the fingertips for analytics and for actionable insight and ROI. Yeah, let me give you an example of that. Without naming any names, there was a company out there that does a lot of online transactions. They're selling things on the internet. They have a website up that does that. And they were able to actually notice a change just like you were talking about. They were able to notice a change in the mobile platform and how it affected immediately their ability to sell things online. And what it was is it was a shift from one mobile platform to the next generation mobile platform. There was a problem there and they were able to take that immediately because they're capturing all of this data and they're able to go back and analyze that data. And they were able to see a shift in this and it was affecting sales and they were able to go out and correct it immediately. In the old world, that would have taken months and months to figure out. They wouldn't have been able to do it, but now they're collecting all that data on net app storage. They're actually able to go out and realize that change immediately and fix it before it becomes a big problem. Yeah, and see, this is the thing. That example highlights what we've talked about is that that is such a demonstrable benefit you just cannot argue with increased sales and happy customers. That's right. I mean, bottom line, everything else is going to, what are you designing for, right? What's the optimization point of the IT? And if I've got time, I'll give you one more example. Yeah, go ahead. So we've got another customer that's local to the Bay Area. Can't tell you their name. Very large customer. They were concerned about online transactions and they were specifically concerned about what happens over the holidays. When people start buying their products and start giving it to their friends and family and then everyone turns those devices on at the same time and they go into their store and start ordering stuff and they were really, really worried about that. We were able to come back and solve that problem with our EF-550, the flash devices. Number one, because they offer five nines plus of availability, so you don't have to worry about them going down. And then the super high performance, as I mentioned before, demonstrated with the new FlexPod that we announced, they're able to actually handle all of their Christmas transactions, right? And without having to worry about having any impact to their end users, because that's the worst thing that can happen for them is if their end users come back, start complaining in the new online age, it's going to go to Twitter, it's going to go to Facebook and it's going to look really bad for them. Before they even know it. Before they even know it. And so they want to prevent that and so they turn to us and they're running our platform and they've been able to do really well with it. All right, we're getting the hook here. We could go on forever, I love these use cases there. Thanks so much for coming on. NetApp here, inside the Cisco booth, this is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, Jeff Frick, live at San Francisco, on the ground, on the floor, getting all the data, sharing that with you. This is theCUBE, we're right back after this short break.