 Hello and welcome to theCUBE here in our studio in Palo Alto, California. This is a CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder and co-CEO, SiliconANGLE Media and co-host of theCUBE. And our next guest here is Surya Varanasi, who's the co-founder and CTO of Vixota. Hot start up here in Silicon Valley. Also exhibiting this week at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco. It's our eighth year of coverage of Oracle OpenWorld. We will not be there on the ground with theCUBE. Not a lot of room as they're doing a lot of reconstruction up there, among other events happening. Great, great conversations happening around the world of cloud and certainly big data now called data generally because it's so hot. Sorry, welcome to theCUBE conversation. Thank you. So first of all, you guys are a hot new start up really coming out of stealth, but not really stealth. They've been stealthed technically, not with the general availability. You've been in business for a few years building out a great comprehensive storage slash data solution, I call it, with this data fabric concept. Congratulations. Thank you. Well-funded team, super technical. Tell us about the company. Tell us about the launch. You guys are out public at Oracle OpenWorld this week. What is Vixota? Yeah, Vixota, we started in 2014. And as you mentioned, a few years in development. We've been in trials for over a year and a half and shipping actually for eight or nine months. And what we're about is, we really wanted to design against three basic pillars. The first one being, there's digital businesses. They're all under pressure. How do we survive and how do we handle the transactions that are coming in? We wanted to build the highest performance storage system that we could build that really accelerates your apps, makes them super fast. The second thing we want to do is, the demanding enterprises. These are the ones that have the requirements. So we wanted to be super enterprise resilient. How do we deploy seamlessly? That was the third pillar we stood on. Meaning, no changes to your application or yours. How do we plug in and just simply work? So we simply work, we're enterprise resilient and we have the highest performance system that accelerates your apps with no changes. We're built around Flash and Intel's latest 3D Optane. And that's a big deal. Well, you guys are well funded, looking at the management team of the company. It's a startup that you can a couple years now, but you're now out in the wild. Launching, just a couple stats here. Over $50 million in funding, well funded. Great, with a lot of work on the front end with the product. But the venture capitalists are interesting. Lightspeed has been very, very successful in the enterprise. Just look at the list of success that they've had. Even in, they have Snapchat too. So they know a little bit about data. Mayfield, Intel Capital and Redline and International One. Really, really good pedigree there. And they know storage too. They see new tonics. They know what it looks like. They understand convergent mistress. They now get the data play. I have to ask you, in the market, everyone's kind of scratching their heads right now because real-time data is super important. What problem are you guys solving? Because certainly the performance is looking good. What's the problem you solve for customers? So the specific problem is when you have digital businesses, what happens is that you don't have a little bit of data that's hot and the rest that's cold. Everything is hot. So how do you serve all your data in real time? That's what we're about. And that's what we've built a transformative solution for. Well, the thing that's coming out from the feedback we've been getting and seeing online is, besides the new logo, looks great, by the way, is you guys are winning on the speeds and feeds. Now the market's going beyond speeds and feeds, which we'll get to in a second. So one, talk about the performance goals. You guys are saying exponential performance, but you're saying you're 10x the performance of anything else. But two, the challenge with data is the silos, right? And you're seeing a confluence of injection of open source coding, real-time performance data in the application level as app developers start to come on board with open source. At the same time, data, traditionally, has not been open and free, democratized, if you will. This is stuck in silos. So it's been a big challenge for architects and CXOs to say, how do we deploy a solution that gets us to value quickly, not do these science projects? So talk about the performance and then the market models around how do you free the data up. Yeah, so I think, for us, the simplest of value props is when you plug into your existing infrastructure, we show up to any OS just like a disk. We show up very simply like a disk. So any application that runs with Vexata, powering the disk, the virtual disk, if you will, runs enormously fast. That's the very simple value prop. We've done something very basic. So on the integration side, by deploying, it's easy? It's not only is it easy, there's no change to the OS. So you talk about democratization. What are you looking for? Can I simply plug and play? Will this just work? So that's the biggest thing of all. It just works. The second piece, and the most important thing is, it's not just our hero numbers that really work well. When you plug in Oracle and run OLTP or OLAP, you see this dramatic performance that, if you didn't know better, you'd think this was an engineered system from Oracle. It's really just amazing performance. We maximize the utilization of your servers. So any app that just plugs into an OS and looks at it as a disk will run great. Well, I mean, when you say that, not to trivialize this, because I know it's probably complicated when I dig into the tech in a second, but when I plug in a thumb drive or an external hard drive in my Mac, it just, boom, there it is. Similar, is that the kind of concept you guys are thinking? That's what we're talking about. Really, if you build a very complicated product that's complicated to use, nobody'd use it. So we want it really simple to consume. Complicated to build, maybe, but really simple to consume. All right, so I'm going to play the nace there. I don't believe you guys. There's smoke and mirrors in there. There's no one can do that. You're going to give me 10X performance. Okay, that's marketing. I'm skeptical, but I have a problem. I have IO bottlenecks. End of the day, I have all these bottlenecks. How do you do it? You know, I think a few core principles. The first of them being, you know, we use solid state media. How we read and write to that solid state media is actually under patent. It's very specific to keep the performance very high all the time. The second piece, of course, is our system itself is designed to separate control and data path. So we keep them isolated, and we've invested a lot in our software to keep it in user space and so on. A lot of jargon for. We keep our latency extremely low in the system so your applications don't have to worry about anything and change anything. So are you lower in the stack in terms of what the stack is, frankly speaking, but, you know, I start thinking about free data moving around, which by the way, people want. They want to have their data available at any given time, at any given moment, because you don't know what's going on in real time. All the data's got to be ready. But then it brings up the governance thing. And you go below the governance, is that a separate challenge on top? How do you deal with that dynamic? You know, I'd say we're in the governance of it. So, you know, for example, we provide full standards-based encryption. So, you know, should anybody say, hey, are you secure? Yes, absolutely, we are. It's a big deal. It's data. It's your active data. And so we protect it as well. One of the things that's coming out of Oracle Open World we're seeing, obviously, is they're comparing themselves to Amazon. Yeah. And I was commenting last night on Twitter, I've been covering Oracle since 1994, watching, comparing them against SAP back then, the ERP days and all the software mini computer days. But now they're comparing themselves, not to SAP or IBM anymore. It's Amazon. What does that tell you? Because that's also translating into the customer conversations, because cloud has become main stage. Oracle says we have the cloud. It's Oracle on Oracle. They're not really winning the cloud native battles. They kind of own IT. Yeah, yeah. Oracle does it. So you just really know debate that IT, information technology, CIOs, know all about Oracle. But people who are doing cloud native or DevOps, might not be interested in Oracle. So how do you balance those two markets that Oracle's trying to be more cloud native and we're still evaluating the progress there? But are you impacted by those trends at all? You know, as you mentioned, everybody talks about the cloud. A lot of apps do go to the native cloud, if you will. The data that's very critical to your business, be it your intensive transaction processing, your roll app, your machine learning, those seem to remain on-premise. That's what our experience has been. And that's where we want to play first. Now, Oracle for Oracle Cloud, you know, Oracle Cloud for Oracle may be a great thing, but, and we'll see how that kind of works. Oracle runs well, but I mean, they're still playing catch up to Amazon, clearly number one. Okay, let's get, you bring up the on-prem thing, this is important. Business model. So you guys are out there, share the business model for you guys. What's on-premise? Is it hardware, software, both? Is there a license? How do people engage with you? About it, what's your business? So today, we sell an appliance. You know, that's the product that you have today. And so we sell the appliance, all included, software and hardware, and we offer the services to plug it in and show you the transformative results on your applications. We don't stop with, hey, you plugged it in and you got your hero numbers, we show you. So I'm just want to buy it. Yeah. How do I engage? I buy a license? I buy, you buy the system. System, so it's hardware? Yeah. And all the software and analytics and property that you have is inside the box. And how do I just connect to the network? Pretty much. Like, all interfaces or? Pretty much. So today we have, you know, Fiber Channel and we have NVMeo Fabric, so both Ethernet and Fiber Channel. This is typically where you're on your highest performance of your data. So for us, very simple. It's very seamless to plug in, plug it in and it'll be recognized in your servers and off you go. Okay, so I'm an architect at a large enterprise. Take me through the conversation you have with those geeks because they're going to want to have the conversation to be, I need dashboarding. We're going to be moving high value applications, so I need analytics. I want to kill the memory bottlenecks. But I also want the future. I don't want to foreclose anything. So, you know, you guys are startup, so you got my attention. Right, right. I like what your story is. How do we move forward in the future? How do you talk through the, we got your back covered, you got the headroom available. How does an IT or tech guy say, you know, you guys are solid? Yeah, so here's how I start the conversation. I typically start the conversation with telling them, hey, you've got the highest performance servers, the latest servers, the Broadwells, the Perlis, what have you. The fastest networks are there, 100 gigi, 50 gigi, you know, whatever your Ethernet network looks like. And then typically you have a SAN and it's really fast, 16, 32 gig. And you run your applications. Let's pretend it's Oracle Rack. You run that application. And when you run it, what you notice in your servers is eventually, you see IO wait times, that slows down your application. And your servers, your really fast servers are underutilized because they're just not moving. Because of IO. That's right. And we say it's very simple. If you plug us into your network and run your application on us, we will eliminate your IO bottlenecks on your server. So your server is maximally utilized. So with no changes for you, you get 10X. And that's how easy we want to make it. That's really our value. So you guys are coming in and basically saying 10X performance right out of the gate. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so what are some of the challenges on the dynamics? Because, okay, you got my attention again. Now I say, how do I know I need you? Was there certain things that the smoke before the thing blows up? I mean, what are some of the tell signs if for the customers to call you guys, because they're going to just start hearing about you guys and just start marketing. Why should customers work with you? What's the indicators on their side where they go? I got a call up. You know, the classic indicator is you know, for us, for one is you're running an Oracle Rack. You know, you're running Oracle Rack for resiliency and for performance and you need both, right? The moment we see that, we say, okay, we have a clean end. But the second telltale sign is when you have in-memory databases running. When you're in memory, what you're trying to do is not write your storage because that's your bottleneck. So you just keep throwing memory at it. It's really expensive. And we know that's a classic sign. Okay, talk about Oracle Open World. You're going to be here this week up in the city. What are you guys showing? What's the pitch? Obviously you got the new logo. Oh yeah. Vixotic Corpus, the Twitter handle so people can watch and can check out your updates on Twitter. But what's the value purpose of it? What are people in the booth talking about? What's the demos? What's the thing? You know, it's Oracle Open World. So we're going to do a whole lot of Oracle demos. So we have a rack demo set up and we show with a four node dual socket server, our system seamlessly plug-in and you get the last I looked, it was four plus million old TP transactions. It's phenomenal for a four socket dual socket server. We're going to show our Optane based array, the first of its kind in the industry and show the same kind of results that we have with Optane. So it's all about Oracle and accelerating those apps. All right, so for Oracle customers out there, you know who you are. They're always evaluating stuff but it's always hard to kind of get out in the branch and you expose it, you try to go off Oracle. So people might be a little bit nervous. So what's your conversation to the Oracle customers are saying? There's no risk in looking at Vexota. What's the, because they're like, hey, why not just buy a lot more Exadata or the ZDLRA stuff or other things that they have? And all those are entirely possible. I think with us, the easiest way to get comfort is first try us, you know, even in your research and development org and get used to us because you'll be shocked at the performance you get. And eventually, yeah, you could go to Exadata but we're just, you know, so much more cost effective than any solution out there. Try us, get comfortable with us and then deploy when you're ready. And less price point, less price. Or does it differ by deployment? You know, honestly, it does differ by deployment but really we use standard NVMe flash and that's driven by the hyperscale guys. So we ride the curve of flash. We're on better road. You know how to see this guy, your CTO co-founder. So I don't want to put you on the spot there. Affordability relative to Oracle. Let's talk about the customer conversation. So I don't want to put you on the spot on the price and we'll hit the CEO and some of the other guys on that. But so I'm a customer, I'll play role play. Hey, I love this opportunity but what's wrong with Oracle storage? Why don't you just go with those guys? You can use us, not just for Oracle but all your application workloads that are demanding, like your machine learning, like your SQL server, if you're running SaaS analytics. So you have a general purpose platform, you're not siloed. That's the biggest deal with us. So you give them scope outside of Oracle? That's right. Any app really, I mean just the simplest of all. All right, so I got to ask you the secret sauce question. You got some patents. So your friend says, hey, what's going on? You guys are awesome. How do you get the tennis? What's the bottom line? How do you guys do it? How do you get all that performance? I think really the investment in the software to reduce the storage stack latencies to the absolute minimum, that's what really gives us the biggest bang for the buck. So a lot of low level engineering. Pretty much. All right, so benefits to customers. What are the benefits? How do you guys see the benefits in folding? Take us through some of the anecdotal data you've seen in the trials you've done with customers. What are some of the benefits that they've told you they've seen? You know, the simplest of them all. It's a very simple one. When we do a POC with a customer, the customer usually says, hey, this POC is going to take two months. And afterward we find out it's two months because it takes three weeks to tune the system and then the remainder of three weeks to do the POC. For us, those first three weeks collapse to one day. There's no tuning, it just plug it in, you all of a sudden get the performance and your POC is just shrunken massively. That's really our value. Don't try hard, just write to your data, embrace it and it'll run for you. So you guys are a potential bridge to the future with the data. You have this thing called Active Data Fabric, is that it? Yes. What is that about? You know, it's really about how you actually scale your data over a very large amount. Today, yes, we have an appliance and it scales to what our size, it scales to 150 terabytes and so on. But as data keeps growing and everything becomes hot, you really need to get into the many hundreds of terabytes, petabytes of active data. So how do we actually design that in using external open hardware? That's really what the principle is about. So this is the first realization and then we continue going with other. So you're great to have you on theCUBE, you guys have done a great job. So I got to ask the bigger question outside of Vixota. Data's been a challenge and as an industry participant and a technologist, what's been the big thing? If you could summarize it down from your perspective, data obviously needs to be free because applications never know when a piece of data will be needed in context to other things. You see things like metadata, active data is clearly a benefit there, but everyone's got these data lakes out there, we just came back from our big data NYC event and the whole Hadoop thing has been very batch. And storing a data lake, but you never know at any given time if a piece of data is going to be valuable until you put it to work. So you really can't put a valuation on data. What has been the inhibitor, the bottlenecks? Has it been the silos, has it been data architecture, has it been the software or now that the cloud's got compute power, all of the above, what's your thoughts? I think you netted it out, really data, you look at it as hot data or cold data and you decide data lake or active data and I hold it in memory. The biggest problem I see is how do you call something hot or cold? It's hard to tell. And I think the biggest challenge for us is how do you make it all at least warm so you can get to it when you need to? And that's the hardest challenge for the industry, I think. And I think people look at self-driving cars to bring up that because Larry Ellison said on stage autonomous database, which I kind of roll my eyes because Larry's so good at taking trends and making it look like Oracle has it. Autonomous cars being self-driving concept. The data is really critical because if a car is going to have telemetry data, real time is real time. It's not milliseconds, it's nanoseconds. You can't say one week, 10 days and a lot of times people say real time queries can come back but the data's a week old. So there's huge issues in what real time means. As well, yeah. And there's a second issue with, you know, you bring up self-driving cars. So the way self-driving cars, the test drives happen today, you plug in a lot of drives into the car, send it out for two weeks, and when it comes back to base, you have 200 terabytes in the car that you want to learn with. How long does it take to transfer 200 terabytes in a regular system? A few days. So until that data's off, this car doesn't move. With us it takes a few hours so you can get your car back on the road. So we actually, we not only do great on the transactions, we do great with this. You know, your basic data mobility problems. I mean, fix it. Yeah, you guys are fixing the data mobility problems. Okay, great, great conversation. One last final point, I want to get your thoughts and color on the internet of things because now you're seeing industrial really being the low hanging fruit right now on IoT. And IoT certainly is hot, it will always be hot, but it also increases the surface area for cyber attacks. So people are kind of taking baby steps there. First one is industrial. Plant equipment can be manufacturing. It could be, you know, edge of the network sensor or something along those lines. I can actually see the IP network. That's certainly going to create the need for active data. Absolutely, absolutely. You have thoughts on that. Very much so, you know, IoT is really the classic, you know, future growth model. Look at the amount of data you're trying to ingest and process, everything is active and you have to act on it in real time. Does IoT help you guys? You know, it does. It doesn't quite show up as IoT. It shows up as machine learning, you know, yet another signature of it. You know, you get all this data, you're trying to learn and figure out anomalies. You need to, you know, process your data and that's us. You know, I always said that a good business model is producing steps that takes to do something, making it easy to use and being high performance. You guys seem to do all three. Congratulations. We do, thank you. Sirya Varanasari, CTO and co-founder of Vexada. Hot new startup, check them out. Vexada Corp is the Twitter handle. Check out their updates at Oracle Open World this week. I'm John Furrier, you're watching CUBE Conversation here, live in our Palo Alto studios. Thanks for watching.