 I'm Dave Vellante, and I'm with Wikibon.org, one of its co-founders, and this is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE.tv's continuous coverage of Oracle Open World. We're live here at the Moscone Center. This is the third year we've been at Oracle Open World, as John Furrier, my co-host, mentioned. We kind of have to go gorilla at Oracle Open World. And we're here at the Q-Logic booth. Q-Logic has been great. When we first approached Q-Logic a couple years ago with the idea, they said, hey, why not? Let's try it. And it's really been a great success, so Q-Logic has become a major sponsor of theCUBE at Oracle Open World, and so we're here inside the booth, and this is a segment we just heard from Lee Doyle, IDCs, formerly IDCs, number one networking analyst. We're going to focus now on the intersection of networking and storage and networking and flash. And I'm here with Cameron Brett and Ryan Klein with Q-Logic. Cameron's the director of solutions marketing at Q-Logic, and Ryan is the senior director at Q-Logic. Q-Logic, if you don't know Q-Logic, they're a leader in fiber channel and ethernet adapters, a real innovator in that space, and gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks, Dave. Thanks for having us. Thank you, and let's get right into it. Oracle Open World, like I said, this is our third year here. Q-Logic and Oracle have had a decade plus long relationship, and your job is really to improve IO. Absolutely. Why don't you talk about your presence here at Oracle Open World, what's new with you guys? Well, we've had many, many years here at Oracle Open World, and it's a great show. We've had a long relationship with Oracle at the application level, trying to solve problems, accelerating the data from the network into the servers. Yeah, you know, you're one of the hardware guys, they're not taking pot shots at, so that's a good thing, I think. Yeah, definitely. But we're inside the box, we just work. So, we've been a partner for Oracle for many, many years, and providing store-jerry network connectivity has been the focus, and a lot of new exciting technologies are coming on as well. It's been an amazing transformation of Oracle. I mean, obviously you work with the company, you know, prior to the Sun Acquisition, but the Sun Acquisition really even further solidified the importance, I would think, of Q-Logic to the Oracle community. What do you make of the transformation of Oracle? I mean, it's quite shocking. I personally never would have predicted that Oracle would have gone this hard after the software business. I mean, playing armchair quarterback now, hindsight is 20-20, it starts to come together and make sense. But did you guys see this coming, and what's your take on all that? Well, I see it as a good fit in a way, because with the database and the applications being very much more vertically integrated, it makes sense that tailor the hardware to the application. So in this instance, it does make sense. John Furrier talked about it as the iPhone of the enterprise, the integration of the hardware and software. You're seeing that come to fruition, it's sort of changing the way that companies compete with Oracle, and certainly you're an arms dealer, you sell all these guys, so you know all the inside baseball. But one of the big trends that we've been hearing for the last several years, and it started really four or five years ago with guys like Fusion I.O. and then all these other Flash players coming out, is that Flash trend? And it's so important to Oracle customers because it really drives performance, which can drive bottom line revenue for this customer base. So what are you guys seeing in Flash, and then we'll get into what you're talking about here at the event. Well, I mean generally there's been a trend that customers are trying to get their data closer to the CPU to make decisions. Run analytics on that data, be able to be more effective with the data. It's been interesting to see Flash and SSD come to market over the last few years, but it's been doing it in a very rudimentary sense. So most of the implementations that have been out there are implementing Flash inside of the server to meet those I.O. needs, but they're doing it in a DAS type of environment. Yeah, so DAS being direct attached storage, so not a SAN, which has obviously been the last 15 years of innovation here, but the observation I'd make, and I wonder if you guys can comment, is for the last 15 years you've seen function move out away from the host, further and further away into the SAN, and the SAN has become that point of control that obviously had impacts on your business. And the reasons were good, you had to persist the data, it had to go somewhere, that ware was spinning disk. So that's cool, you could keep it there for a long, long time and protect it and make sure it's reliable and recoverable. Problem is it's slow, it spins. Now you have the consumer device trend driving Flash prices down, now Flash starts to swing back closer to the server. Okay, so explain to our audience why, from a performance standpoint, that's a good thing and what some of the drawbacks of or challenges of that are. Go ahead, oh okay. Well, Flash has been trying to find its place in the storage network, in the servers, in the storage as well as the network. Sounds like it's found all those places, doesn't it? It has, but one of the things that we've seen is that in a larger enterprise, in the storage area network, the Flash is not necessarily optimal in any single one of those places. Each one has its pluses and minuses and when we came up with the concept of Mount Runeer, we figured it kind of takes the best of a few different worlds. So describe what Mount Runeer is. Mount Runeer is a technology that marries QLogix HBA technology, which could be fiber channel, 10 gig ethernet, CNA, combining it with caching intelligence and management of SSD connectivity in a single solution. Okay, so essentially you're bringing the best of JAS and SAN together to a Flash architecture? We're taking that capability, plugging it into one of our HBAs, it goes inside of a server. And so this is what we're referring to as server-based caching. And so that enables the ability to cache SAN data. Yeah, in other words, you bring SSD caching, server-side caching to storage area networks. So what is the OSC? The OS sees everything that it's seen before. So Mount Runeer to the operating system looks like the standard adapter, right? So if you look at some of the enterprise hurdles that large customers have had to get over with the existing Flash implementations, is they were very use case specific. They required additional management. And fundamentally that caching was captive to the server. So at the end of the day, they provide a lot of value, but didn't fit in the enterprise model. So if you look at Q-Logic, essentially we're bringing SSDs to SAN or bringing caching to the enterprise. So it's an asset utilization play. So it's great, you get the DAS-based cards that are the Flash cards that are in the server. It's fantastic, really fast, but you can't really share them, right? Across the portfolio of infrastructure. You can't deploy the common architectures that you're used to in the enterprise. So if we look at uptime and reliability and multipathing and all the resiliency needed in the enterprise, a lot of the current implementations on the market don't allow that. So how do customers address that? Do they just say, damn the torpedoes, the performance is so good, I'll go. With a little less protection, a little more risk, or do they have to do some kind of gymnastics to architect around that problem? Some gymnastics definitely incur, but a lot of times the application's specific. So things where they can accelerate I.O. in a single use case scenario, but don't have to have the reliability. So what that does, it presents a challenge in the enterprise of not being able to take advantage of shared networking and shared caching and getting to a situation where you're only able to deploy server-based cache in very specific situations. You're saying the use cases have been very selective. They limit the use cases. Can you give some examples as to where they're narrow and how Mount Rainier will expand them? So we've been doing a lot of work with our end users. So a lot of what we do to develop products is sit down with our customers and understand what they're doing. And what we started to see is a lot of specific use case implementation of server-side cache. And what we kept hearing is I can't vMotion. I can't deploy VMware clusters. I can't run Microsoft cluster. I can't install Oracle Rack. So all the enterprise applications that require multi-node communications were a limitation. And if you look at Qlogic Heritage, we were able to then build storage area network into what their requirements were. A lot of database environments use clustering, right? I mean, so talk about that a little bit and why that's important to Oracle customers. Fundamentally, it's uptime. Well, one of the benefits in a cluster environment of Mount Rainier is that it does have what you referred to before as a shared cache. If you have multiple servers with Mount Rainier's in them, every cache knows what's on the other cache is attached to Mount Rainier cards. So you have a very scalable transparent and this cache itself is OS independent. And so it becomes a very large shared cache for all the lungs. So it sounds like software is a key innovation here. Can you talk about the software content of Mount Rainier? So software is key, but also the other key is transparency, right? We want to be non-disruptive to the application layer and the network layer. So administrators know how to deploy standard connectivity and fiber channel today. So how do you achieve that transparency? So we provide the same driver architecture and same management infrastructure that they use today. And we manage that cache pool and those clusters independently so that they don't have to know they're there. So when you say you manage that, that is a software layer that- It's done in the drivers and the firmware of the product itself. Yeah, okay, so it's- Behind the scenes. It's software. Yeah. Part of the- It's code. Fast code. Micro code. Part of the value though is in its simplicity. And since it is a single driver, it appears to the host as it always has. People see it as a fiber channel HBA or a 10 gig HBA. And all the caching and all the management happens underneath. And today, is it FC only or- Initially it's going to be eight gigabit fiber channel. And then beyond that, you'll see options for a 10 gig, a 16 gig. The technology and the architecture itself lends it to be a protocol neutral. So what types of flash and SSD drives are associated with it? And what the protocol is on the front end is largely independent of the technology itself. Are you, I mean, you and your competitors are becoming increasingly, I mean you come from a fiber channel background obviously. Fiber channel is very hard to do. You've got a very hard fiber channel stack. But increasingly, the marketing and the messaging in the community is, it's not about the protocol. It's about the capabilities and the value that we're bringing. So what are you seeing in the marketplace in terms of the adoption of your various technologies? And is that sort of protocol agnostic attitude really permeating the customer base or do you still see, hey, we're fiber channel bigots or hey, I want Ethernet and that's it? Can you talk about that a little bit? Sure, so our customers do have opinions about the different technologies. You know, our view is that we build a core set of products that are based on very storage protocols or networking protocols. And we try to do it in a way that allows the customers to deploy one or all, manage the same, which is much commonality as they can. Fundamentally what'll occur in the marketplace is the technologies will find their way based on use case. You know, there's lots of discussions around where iSCSI fits versus FCOE, where fiber channel fits and what the roadmaps look like. And our fundamental goal is to enable all those technologies and let the customers make the ultimate decisions. Okay, and so I mean, you guys have obviously promoted the convergence trend, you know, for a number of years now that's happened. It's kind of happened independent of FCOE, but I wonder if you could give us an FCOE update. What's happening there? So we're seeing a lot of customers adopt fiber channel over Ethernet. Fundamentally, Ethernet's a very strong platform and leveraging the fiber channel stack that we have to sit on top of it is doing really well. I would tell you a lot of customers are still on proof of concept deployment phase and just starting to decide how it fits in their environments. I mean, we've always thought it's inevitable. It's going to take a long time, but it's inevitable just because it's going to cut your cable bulk in half and it's going to have your connection costs. But at the same time, there's a lot of resistance from customers that don't like change. Especially the fiber channel customers, right? Why is that? Well, storage inherently is very difficult. And there's a reason why there's very few key customers, whether it's in the fiber channel HBA space or SCSI, SAS, RAID, because it is very difficult. There's lots of corner cases. And I think that's one of the reasons why QLogic has been successful is just that it's a very difficult business to be in. Excellent. All right, we just got the sign, we're out of time. But stop by the QLogic booth, check out, you got a demo going on Mount Rainier. What's the, how's the feedback been so far? Feedback's been wonderful. Yeah, what kind of questions are you getting? So the folks that walk up want to know how it's going to make their life different, how it's going to help them. And fundamentally, we're showing significant performance improvements and a new way to architect a data center. And your shipping. So these units will ship early next year. Excellent. All right, gentlemen, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate you sharing your knowledge and sharing your booth and hope you have you back at the next event. Thank you, appreciate it. All right, keep it right there. We'll be right back with our next guest. This is SiliconAngle.tv's theCUBE, live from Oracle Open World in Moscone in San Francisco. We're right back.