 Okay, welcome back to Oracle Open World's coverage of theCUBE, which is the line we used earlier today, which is kind of ironic. But this is theCUBE's coverage of Oracle Open World. Dave and I are joking. It's our fourth year now. This is SiliconANGLE's theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, they start to see it from the noise. We're live in San Francisco, California. Larry Ellison did not make the keynote. He's out winning the America's Cup, tied 8-8. Biggest comeback, maybe Austin at all time, if they could pull it off tomorrow. This is a special edition of Oracle Open World, because a lot of action here, obviously going on with the America's Cup, but also in the infrastructure industry. I'm John Furrier, I'm close. Dave Vellante here for this segment. Stan Lucido, technical marketing lead for EMC, Oracle relationship. You were on stage earlier with Joe Tucci, who gave him an amazing keynote, the typical captain of the industry. Joe is a class act, thanking the customers, 80,000 joint customers, and the relationship between Oracle and EMC, just in the past four years that's really pivoted into an amazing direction of collaboration. Jeremy Burton comes on stage and gives a great demo and you are driving. Yeah, absolutely. Welcome to theCUBE again. Thank you, thank you very much. Nice meeting you again, John. All right. So, you know, yeah, actually, it was my first time demoing on stage at a keynote, so I've really enjoyed the opportunity. I'll tell you what, Jeremy makes you feel pretty comfortable on stage, so he's a great person to work with. Oh, a huge audience. I mean, that's, it could be intimidating up there, I mean. Oh, I'll tell you what, I was nervous getting up there, but you know, once I did that first few sentences, I got into it and it was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed it. So, what were your objectives today in the keynote? What were you trying to accomplish? Well, you know what? I think we're really turning the ship. EMC is recognizing that we really have to enable DVAs and application owners, okay? So, it's not about just the storage administrator anymore. Not that we're forgetting about the storage administrator or anything like that, but we have to enable the DBA to go into storage and take a view into storage, whether it be performance, configuration, or something of that nature. We got to take the black box and actually make it something that's useful and meaningful to the Oracle DBAs. So, talk a little bit more about why a DBA or an application head should care about what EMC has to say. Why would they spend time with you guys, with your salespeople, with your technical people, with, you know, strategy folks, service people? What's in it for them? You know, I really like what Joe had to say today on the keynote. It's an open infrastructure strategy where EMC applies to everything, whether it be Oracle databases or the enterprise applications that sit on those Oracle databases. You can have that software-defined data center and you have your pools of storage, pools of compute and pools of memory all out there for the Oracle DBA to use and it's all an open infrastructure in which you can drive your databases very quickly. In addition, because we're steering in terms of doing plug-ins with OEM12C, we're giving the DBAs the capability to actually look inside of storage, whether it be performance or configuration. For example, the Oracle DBA can see whether we're actually, whether the storage administrator's actually applying fast cache or fast VP technologies to their database. They used to have to go to the storage administrator and get that information from the storage administrator. So that's why it's so important because now the collaboration's there, the finger-pointing's gone, okay? Now the Oracle DBA can really get down to the storage and see what's going on. Yeah, so in your demo today, you actually, actually before your demo, I think it was Jeremy gave some stats on how DBAs spend their time. Can you talk about that a little bit? Are you familiar with that data? Yeah, absolutely. I looked at the study too. You know, most Oracle DBAs still spend their time doing performance tuning of Oracle databases. That's one of the top things that they do. And then the other parts is patching and maintenance type of work, right? So what we want to be able to do is enable the Oracle DBA using OEM Enterprise Manager to go in and get all those statistics that they're really driving after. Let's face it, you can go into AWR reports and look at the automated workload repository reports, see what the top five weight events are. But those top five weight events don't relate very well down to storage. It's very difficult to make that connection. So now if you can go into the OEM 12C plugin and actually view a BNX storage array or a VMAX storage array for the Oracle DBA, that's brand new. So one of the interesting things I want to shout out to you about is that there's a big conversation about integration into Oracle. Oracle obviously is a big player as is EMC. Absolutely. Both throughout point products, data, relational databases and storage. Now big data cloud, it's all right around, orbiting around both companies. What things are going on around the collaboration between Oracle and EMC that people don't necessarily know about or might not have top of mind that you could share some insight into? Well, absolutely. One thing I want to touch on is Vplex. Vplex is a great story between Oracle and EMC because with Vplex you can take Oracle RAC and extend it across multiple sites. And we've actually worked very hard with Oracle engineering teams to make sure that that works. The capability to have your Oracle stretch rack cluster stretch across 100 kilometers or something of that type of distance and have that fall tolerance across geographical distances is something that Oracle and EMC had to work together on. So it's collaborative efforts like that that are really coming to bear. And I got to say this, at EMC, we're really adding people to our Oracle alliances team. So what we're going to do is really work closely with the Oracle in the upcoming years to add more integrations like that. So Sam, I want to get to the heart of something you said before. You talked about two things that the DBA spending time on patching and maintenance and performance tuning. So Oracle might say, you know what, DBA, we're going to eliminate that patching and maintenance by dropping in a converged, you know, we could call an engineered system and that performance tuning, stick it all in our hybrid flash, you know, whizzy wig, whatever it is, you know, and all that performance problems are going to go away. How would you respond to that? How would you communicate to the Oracle DBA? And what does EMC bring to the table that Oracle doesn't? So you know, that's a pretty easy message. I've been a DBA for over 10 years myself and I was actually working at Oracle for about 10 years. I know as a DBA that you're always going to have to patch the database. I don't care what kind of database it really is, right? You have security-based patches that you have to apply sometimes on a monthly basis and you have other patches like performance-based patches that you're always going to have to apply. You can't modify that SQL yourself. So you're always going to have that type of maintenance that you're going to have to do with the Oracle database. Now here's the problem, right? When you come out with a converged architecture or engineered architecture, the DBA is now responsible for the database, the networking, the disk, and all the configuration within that converged architecture, right? So it's no longer just patching the database, it's passing everything else in that converged architecture, right? So the idea is, is that actually patching goes up with those engineer systems versus going down. Now the performance is great. Oracle's done some great things with performance, smart scan at HCC and things of that nature, no doubt, some secret sauce in there. But you know what, most customers can only run a certain version of Oracle within those engineered systems. So an open enterprise system in which you can run multiple versions of Oracle databases and still get similar performance. Did you see Joe Tucci had a slide up there that said 3.7 million IOPS for the new VBlock that was released? That's absolutely fantastic. Yeah, so, well let's talk about that a little bit. You mentioned HCC, Oracle's like keeping that to themselves, right? You can only plug it into Oracle-only storage. So you guys have to compete differently. You have to drive IOPS up and latency down in other ways. So it's through your own version of engineered systems. It's through your own software-led infrastructure, your integration, your flash strategies. So I want you to talk about that a little bit. How are you responding to the hand that you're being dealt? Because Oracle's stacking the deck, saying HCC only works on Oracle storage. Ergo, buy our stuff because we're better. How do you guys respond to that? Well, you know what we're trying to do is with the release of our Xtreme SF cards and our Xtreme SW cards, what we're really trying to do is take those PCIe cards with those flash and the cards themselves, plug them into the servers, and bring the actual storage right into the server. So in-server memory for our storage arrays. Now, what's really powerful about that is, you know, when you do a SQL query down to a storage array, it's going to take the order of milliseconds, right? Soon as you put one of those cards inside the server, then we're talking microseconds in terms of response time, exponentially faster than having to go down to the storage array. So that's an open architecture that, by the way, works with 8i, 9i, 10g, 11g, R2, all those different versions. So that's how we're competing. So I have another idea. So because Safra and Joe are such good buddies, what you should do is have Joe ask really nicely, Safra, we open up, create an API for that HCC so we can take advantage of it. I mean, mask nicely, I mean, this is such good buddies. You know, I think Oracle has a great licensing opportunity to drive additional revenue if they just open that up where people just simply have to license that technology and then use it literally on any storage array or server that they want to. What a great idea. I think, you know, I'll tell you, I think my opinion is Oracle eventually will do that. They're going to use it right now as a competitive advantage, because their share in the infrastructure business within their own base is, you know, not where they want it to be. Sure. You guys have 80,000 customers. Oracles get 40,000 hardware customers, you know, when you include all the old sun stuff. So they got a long way to go and I think ultimately your customers are going to put pressure on them. I think the ecosystem will belly up to Microsoft and also put pressure on Oracle. So I think it's inevitable over time, but we'll see. Sim, I also wanted you to juxtapose the horizontal strategy that Joe Tucci talked about. That's our stack. We got a horizontal stack. That's right. He didn't say anything about Oracle stack. He didn't say that's their stack. You notice it, huh? He just, you know, let it go. He's very respectful, you know, and so that was cool. I like that. But I want you to talk about the differences. So, you know, what are the differences and why do they matter to customers? Well, you know, what we're finding with customers is that, you know, the strategy of integrated systems like the iPhone and all the mobile phones come out work great for mobile phones, but they don't necessarily work great for big enterprise databases, right? It's great for some systems. Some customers may have just a few versions of the database. What customers are truly interested in is being able to take their entire enterprise applications and putting on a big storage array with plenty of flash in there or something like our new storage array, the ExtremeIO storage array, and which is an off-lash storage array, right? So that in case if you have bursty traffic or something of that nature, you don't have to worry about a cache catching up to that traffic. In fact, it's all flash and the performance is absolutely phenomenal. So, as a former DBA, I want to ask you, or current DBA, right? Once a DBA, always a DBA. Yeah, yeah. Talk about 12C. What is it about 12C that you think is exciting for DBAs? What are the things that if you were, you know, on the practitioner side, you'd be really pumped about? And what do you think is not really there, you know, needs work? Yeah, absolutely. Well, you know, I think, and I may be in the minority here, I actually think 12C is actually collaborative with virtualization, to be honest with you. If you look at that PDB, CDB architecture, right? The database ministry now has the capability of moving PDB databases from one server to another server to one container database to another container database. But that's a manual thing, right? So now what I'm seeing is a trend in the industry where people are going to consider virtualizing 12C because they need to move the entire CDB, PDB architecture at one time versus doing all these unplugged and plugging them back into another server. There's a lot of considerations in that regard. I wrote a great blog about the... If you do say so yourself. What's that? If you do say so yourself. Yeah, if you do say so. I think what we're doing is we're going towards what I call the monster VM, to be honest with you. I think 12C is going to make it that you can do great consolidation on servers with all those PDBs, but you're still going to have to virtualize that. You're going to need very large virtual machines to do it. Oracle puts a huge emphasis on security. I want to talk about security a little bit. You guys have a rubric of trust. Obviously, RSA is a sister company or one of the divisions or whatever you call it. Big, big emphasis in investment in security. Oracle puts a big emphasis there as well. You guys talk about trust. So what's your angle on security? What does EMC bring to the table? How do you complement Oracle and where do you add value where they leave off? You know, first of all, let me say, I think Oracle does security very well. You know, of most databases that I know of, it's, you know, there's rarely any problems with break-ins to the database itself. So Oracle does great in terms of security. I think we just simply add value, right? With our plugins, for example, RSA with VMware, we can secure that virtual machine that's running your mission-critical database. And if you should move that virtual machine to another server, RSA security will follow with that virtual machine so that you have better security no matter what happens with your database. I want to also ask you, again, as a practitioner, put your DBA hat on again, what do you make of the no-sequel movement here, right? You saw, you know, the whole Hadoop movement took off. A lot of people we're going to have, Mike Olson's going to be on after you. We're going to have Max Shireson on. He's the CEO of what's now called MongoDB. They used to be called Tenjan. We had, you know, data stacks on before. We've had Billy Bosworth on before. They talk a lot about, you know, replacing Oracle, replacing traditional RDBMS. What's your take on the whole no-sequel movement? You see Oracle has announced it's, you know, the Oracle no-sequel. Yeah. So what's your angle as a, you know, practitioner? He has a practitioner. I think this no-sequel trend is a very strong trend. And I see it only gaining market share, to be honest with you. You know, the traditional oil-TP-style databases will be around forever. No doubt about it. And Oracle's still going to dominate that particular market area. But with the no-sequel databases, they're a fantastic trend. In fact, I've got to be honest with you. I've got to catch up with that a little bit because I've been, I've been heads down on Oracle for way too long. So I do have to catch up on it. But, you know, we have a big group at EMC devoted to that. And EMC definitely embraces the no-sequel trend. Excellent. Well, Sam, we really appreciate you coming on, John. You know, EMC obviously, you know, very supportive of theCUBE. We've got a great relationship with you guys. I thought you did a great job today. So congratulations. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thank you for having me on theCUBE. Okay, it's theCUBE live coverage in San Francisco. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante here inside theCUBE. Live from San Francisco. This is our coverage of Oracle Open World Exclusive, SiliconANGLE, Wikibon, theCUBE. Oracle Open World 2013. Day two of three days of live coverage where we extract the ceiling from the noise. Stay tuned for our next guest after this short break.