 Live from San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE, covering Oracle OpenWorld 2015 from Studio C, brought to you by Cisco. Now your hosts, Stu Miniman and Brian Graceley. Welcome back to Oracle OpenWorld 2015. This is theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman with Wikibon.com. My co-host for this segment is Brian Graceley. We are in the home stretch. One of those expansive coverages, we've done any show, lots of interviews, talking to Oracle people, talking to practitioners and talking to the ecosystem. Happy to bring back onto the program. Rob Cummins with Tage Isle Systems, the VP of Marketing. Rob, welcome back to the program. Hey now, how you doing, Stu? All right, hey now. That's right. So Rob, we were talking, it's interesting, where we're located here and the booths around us, there's been like $100 billion worth of storage acquisitions, oh, in the last couple of weeks. I mean, you know, we always say in IT, it's almost to try to say that, you know, the only thing constant is change, but I mean, things are changing big time. You've been around the storage industry for a little bit now. You know, what's your take on all the craziness? Yeah, I've been doing storage since 1984 when Steve Jobs came out with the first Macintosh. It didn't have a hard drive in it. My friends and I thought that was a little crazy, so that's how I got in this business. I've been in it ever since and I'll tell you, like you said, it's as crazy as it's ever been in terms of acquisitions or just the flash industry as a whole, it's just throwing Moore's Law right out the window. The capacity gains and the performance gains we're seeing out of flash is fully transformational. Amazing. All right, so, you know, I saw an article on the Tejal site, you know, some of the winds have changed sometimes, tend to be opportunities for some of the small guys, so not to say that you guys are super small, but you've been around, you've got some pieces going on there, so, you know, what does all this mean to Tejal? Yeah, so this is actually a really good time to be an upstart in this market because there's so many moving parts between the massive acquisitions we've seen, both on the supply side as well as the system side, that makes holes for guys like us to go plug and fill for other firms to pick up, so, you know, just super happy to be in this spot right now in the market the way it's changing. All right, can you give us kind of, you know, what's the latest with Tejal? Any specific Oracle news that you guys have this week or that solution set and any other kind of update you want to give us on the company? Yeah, we've got lots to talk about with Oracle customers and users in our booth and we've actually got our solutions architects, they're actually inviting customers to bring in what they call their automatic repository, performance repositories, where we can actually assess database performance right here in the booth and make recommendations. And we've been known to be an all flash and a hybrid company, but we're changing the rules in hybrid, whereas the last few years, we've actually been in the market for about five years and we've used solid state disk as a performance layer and a spinning disk as a capacity layer to break that tension between capacity and performance. Now we're pulling that disk out in putting very, very high density flash in what I like to call now a multi-tier flash system. So we can get actually 10 times faster than what I'll call, it's amazing, it's going to call a traditional all flash array already, you know, 10 times faster than that and a third of the cost. So breaking the rules once again. Yeah, so we've seen a lot of stuff go on, even just in the last few years in storage, right? Automatic tiering, we've seen a mix of, you know, flash and disk, we've seen some folks say we're going to the all flash data center. What do you hear from customers? I mean, they don't love a million, they like choice, but when they've got to decide on choice, it's, well, which one should I use? Am I getting a good deal? What do you hear from them? How well are they understanding this transition, you know, hybrids and all flash and everything in between? So we're very unique in which we offer both and no other upstart offers both all flash and hybrid. So it allows us to enter the discussion, let's get you to an all flash data center. But if the economics, they're just their raw budget or the application they're using, does it, it's not that close to the income statement, like Rob's PowerPoint file doesn't really need to be on all flash, we can come down and offer a hybrid or we'll put an all flash array in the production database environment. Well, what are your DBAs doing for test dev? Do you really want to pay for all flash there? No, let's put a hybrid system there, or DR, what do you do with DR? I'll put a hybrid system as a second tier in a colo offset to offset the cost of that all flash array in production. Right, we, you know, essentially here at Oracle Open World, database performance is key, that's sort of king. And then we've got things like archival and we've got other tiers. How do you think about sort of the premium sometimes you pay that people now go, okay, that's going to drive business agility versus what I pay for keeping data and wanting to keep data. Give us a sense of numbers there if you can. Yeah, we've got some customers, I'll give you a great, great story. We've got a hedge fund customer that was running their analytics on what happened on the New York Stock Exchange during the day, and they were running their analytics job and was taking them 22 hours to do that. So they were literally running a day late and a billion dollars short running on traditional storage. We came in and took that 22 hours and shrunk it down to four hours. So they were able to get that much smarter, that much faster from the next day's open. And that translates us to billions of dollars for them. So when I come in and say, hey, here's a $200,000, I'll take five. That's easy. Now, down in the non-production environments, that's where you get a little tougher discussion about the economics. But having that alternative where you can get a flash like performance, let's say 90, 95% of the time, but a third of the cost of all flash, that becomes a very what I'll call disarming discussion. Yeah, more and more we're seeing simpler flash systems. They're easier to manage, simpler to set up. A lot of times it used to be, well, if I can take that burden off of storage admin, they can go work on other things. What do you see it and work on? Are they doing analytics around what's going on? Are they taking on new projects? Any sense of where that time now goes for a storage admin? Yeah, it's typically moving away from managing performance. We've got a customer, he spent 60% of his time managing storage performance on old traditional storage. Now he spends less than a minute. He's got a dashboard up in his knock. He just looks up, performance is in check, capacity reduction is in check. He just looks at it as he's passing the screen. So he's able to reallocate his time to optimizing other portions of the stack. Got you. So Rob, you talk about stack. Yeah. Here at the Oracle show, I mean, there's the red stack. I mean, all came out here, updates to the Exadata, talking about putting in things down to the Silicon and how software and that go together. And everything down from the hardware all the way up through the application. Right. Wikibon have been talking a lot about conversion systems. And even when you talk about cloud, I want customers have said they want a similar architecture kind of here and there. What does systems mean to Tejal? How do you guys play? I mean, you guys have a storage piece, but how much your business is sold in kind of fully baked solution stacks and the like? We are actually partnered with Cisco in building what we call IntelliStack. And that's a converged system that's built for things like Oracle, virtualization, VDI. And what they are, they're proven out well known, I like to call small, medium and large configurations that we understand, Cisco understands, Oracle understands. We all have support agreements with each other, so well known entities. And it makes it very, very simple for customers as well as our resellers to specify, configure in order. That entire stack of IT is audible in a single line item. So you just boom, it's very easy to cut a PO for a single system and have confidence that you've got a well operating stack. So are those stacks, are they a meaningful part of Tejal's business today? Any metrics or kind of momentum that you can share? I'd say a good, probably 20, 30% of our business is built as that fixed stack, but lots of our customers use that stack as a reference architecture and maybe they'll put a little English on the ball based on their specific requirements. So it's used in a lot of our business, whether it be buying the stack or leveraging the stack as a reference architecture. So what about service providers, cloud providers? What are you hearing from customers and what's the Tejal story for cloud? Yep, because again we have both all flash and hybrid, we're able to hit a wide range of price performance points that the cloud providers love. You can have a platinum, gold, silver, bronze on our systems that have maybe 100%, 20%, 10%, 5% of the total capacity in flash. And then they leverage de-duplication to further, and compression to further drop their cost to good sold. So it goes right to their gross margin line or lets them get more aggressive in pricing against their competition. So they love what's going on with flash and some of the software value addery bring. Yeah, this audience, because they're running mission critical applications, maybe not the most wanting to move fast. They want to make conservative decisions, they don't want to make mistakes. How much does it help you that now Oracle is saying, all these databases should run on all flash, we're comfortable with flash. Dave Donatelli was talking about, we've got an industry shift. How much does that help you not have to convince the application guys that this might be shaky? Yeah, when it first moved into the flash type market about five, six years ago, everyone was afraid of endurance and things like that. That's pretty much gone away. So when we've got the big, what I like to call oligarchs saying, yep, going all flash is okay, but we have a superior solution. I love them blaze in the trail for us, it's fantastic. I don't have to come in and fight the good fight for flash first. Marketing guy, that's got to save you a bunch of money in terms of having to define performance or what it really means. Yeah, I'll take Oracle and HP's flash marketing all day long. It offsets my meagre's marketing budget that I work with as an upstart. I love it, so thanks big guys. So one of the other big things that we, beginning to be talked about more and more is in-memory databases, in-memory. What does that mean to the storage arrays? Because now my reads and writes or a lot of it is done in-memory. What's the role of an array now in memory environment? Yeah, I think the biggest thing is a few things. There's resiliency. If you have an in-memory database and that server goes down, your data's gone as well. That's of course very, very risky. You've got, can you maintain performance integrity if the size of that database breaches the memory footprint? So having high performance storage underneath that is still absolutely crucial. So while we see some of the data moving up to in-memory, we're still seeing a lot of people, how do I protect this? How do I move it? I've got VMs and I'm trying to bounce between production and test and dev and things like that. So still a huge opportunity for both in-memory as well as shared storage in today's environment. All right, so Rob, not sure how much you've had a chance to kind of check out the show, talk to customers. Any key things that you've heard so far or customer stories you want to share? I think you hit the nail on the head, Brian, when you said that customers have made that mental leap that they've got to figure out how to go to a flash-based data center. It's how do you do it most economically as well as maintain that rich set of data services that they've been used to with 20, 30-year-old traditional storage systems over the years. So being able to offer a very rich set of data management tools and have a blend of hybrid and flash gives them that flexibility of choice based on how aggressive they want to get into this right now or over the next few years. So we're very excited about the tone here at the show. So one of the biggest challenges we've seen in the storage industry, David Fleurer, our CTO at Wikibon, talking about quite a bit, there's migration costs. It's so tough standing it up, moving stuff over when I've got updates and things like that. Have we solved this problem yet? How does Tejal look at that whole challenge? As our customers get more and more virtualized, it becomes easier and easier because we can use the hypervisors or the Oracle virtualization platform to move things a lot more gracefully. I call it changing your tire while you're still driving the car. 10 years ago, that was extremely complex and that professional service engagement would take months and maybe cost as much if not more than the array itself. Now those barriers to move data are a lot easier and again, as an upstart, it makes it a lot easier for us to get into an environment because we can, don't tell the professional service engineers I said this but you can almost drag and drop that tire in the car while you're still driving it. Yeah, it's a double-edged sword. It almost makes it a little bit easy to migrate. So solutions aren't as sticky as they are before. That's right. What do you see out there? I mean, customers tended to be like, well, these are the servers I bought. These are the storage I bought. I have my refresh cycles. I mean, convergences change things. Clouds change things. And boy, as we said at the beginning of the thing, it just changes happening a lot faster. What's the customer's mindset when it comes to storage today? I think it's right now. It's figuring out how to most cost-effectively and aggressively get into flash, knowing that you've got these opposing forces between in-memory databases and clouds, on-prem, off-prem, security, performance integrity and control, lots of different moving forces. So every one of those components has a place in the enterprise. It's figuring out how to essentially put those parts in the right order, at the right scale for their environment. And it's funny. Every environment's a little bit different. Be it the technology or the politics and the company culture makes every different engagement a completely new experience for us. Yeah, we talk a lot. The application teams don't really want to care about infrastructure. Probably not the thing to spend their time on. But do you ever find that as you go into an account, you're working with a customer that first couple of applications all of a sudden got a lot faster? Do you find they end up becoming your evangelists to go, hey, we want whatever the heck they got under the covers? Back in the day when we're just shifting from, let's say, a 10,000 RPM drive to 15,000 RPM drive, it's kind of an oh-hom. The application guys would tell the storage guys, go back in the boiler room, I don't care. But now you've got 10x, 100x improvements in performance. Storage is kind of cool again. And the app guys are understanding and appreciating the material impact that Flash can have. And they're like gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme. So we are getting that polling effect from the application guys, even the DBAs. Whereas before it was, ah, go back to the boiler room. Yeah, some of the storage comes, especially the all-Flash ones have had some campaigns that say, well, your applications will run faster, less IO, faster IO, potentially reduces some of your licensing from an Oracle perspective. Are you seeing that in reality for your customers? Yeah, and actually what triggered it was actually Mr. Floyd's report talking about licensing costs. We, our sales teams use that report almost daily. And I've got one particular instance, I was involved in the sales campaign. The customer bought a $100,000 all-Flash array from us and it moved away $300,000 of licensing costs. So, 3x payback in less than 90 days. That was a really fun phone call to take. So we see it all the time. Yeah, that's great. And we love to provide that perspective for end users to be able to help them run their IT better. Yep, absolutely, yep. So the other big cost savings when it comes to storage, of course, it's not just the capital, it's the operational piece of it. You know, what do you see in your customer base when you put your environment in? You know, have you guys been able to measure or you know, what changes are made, kind of who manages it, how that whole works? Yep, absolutely. I'll give you the easiest little metaphor I love to use is that high density flash system we're using. It's got a 3U chassis that has a half a petabyte of capacity raw. And that thing pulls less power than my wife's hairdryer. I mean, it's so easy when you just put it that way. It's an order of magnitude drop in both space. I mean, with disk, how much would a half a petabyte take? Racks and racks and racks and gears. Now I can do that in 3U and that's raw. If I can get a three to one data reduction rate, you know, I've got tons and tons of capacity in a single 3U package, it's fantastic. So space, power, cooling, the whole, the whole kit and cabalos. And I guess, you know, if you look, you know, the poor storage people used to have all those geek knobs that they had to do. Oh yeah. I really do think tiering we talked about used to be, oh, I need to do that or I need to kind of care and feed it now. You know, if you went to the average person that has a table box, they know where the box is, you know, are they touching it pretty regularly? Or, you know, what do you find? They probably don't physically know where it is. It just happens. And like I said, our customers, we asked them about, do you use the reporting a lot? They go, no, it just works. This is fantastic. I don't have to worry about storage anymore. It's huge, huge management and operational difference that way as well. And just the orchestration we've done with Oracle and Cisco and the stack we talked about, it makes the entire data center easier to manage because you're not wrestling with storage performance anymore. Okay, so Rob, I want to give you the last word. You know, what would you say are kind of the top of the reasons why, you know, customers are calling up Tejal. It kind of the big business challenge that you're helping to solve. Sure thing. So I like to call Tejal's a flash storage, be it flash or hybrid, the best storage platform for the indecisive IT manager. And the reason I say that is we've got lots of flexibility of choice in our offering, be it all flash or hybrid. We're also one of the only upstarts that does both block and file. So you can get at the system concurrently over a whole set of protocols. And you know, you might know what's going on in 90 days in your ITs shop. Do you know what's going on over that full three or five year service life? Probably not. So if you want to dial up or dial down the amount of flash, you've got your data center based on performance versus economics, or you know, let's say the VMware guys that come rolling through with some NFS and you're running a fiber channel today, that's perfectly okay. So if you want something that's super flexible that can change with you over time, we're the guys to call. I like that. So often flexibility and simplicity were kind of opposite into the spectrums. Great to see IT solutions that are pulling those both back together. Absolutely. So we're coming with Tejal Systems. Always great to catch up with you. We'll be right back with lots more coverage here from Oracle Open World 2015. This is theCUBE. Thanks for watching.