 Okay, we're back. This is Dave Vellante and we're live at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. This is theCUBE. We're at Oracle Open World. This is our third year here and this is the Oracle Backup and Recovery spotlight. We're going to drill into some of the trends that are going on in the industry. We just set up the overall sort of market angle and the technical angle. Some of the things that Oracle practitioners should think about. And to have this next conversation, I'm here with Shane Jackson and Mel Schum of EMC's BRS division. Shane is the vice president of the division and Mel is a database expert. Mel has been on theCUBE before. We had him on last year at Oracle Open World and we can drill into some of the technical aspects. So gentlemen, welcome. Thank you, Dave. Good to be here. So good to see you guys again. You know, we're here at Oracle Open World. It's amazing just to see the transformation of Oracle. I know Shane, you live out in the valley and you've seen Oracle. You knew Sun Microsystems as well. I don't know, Mel, if you're out here as well. But to predict that Oracle would be here as a hardware company, talking about all this cool hardware. Really a software company doing that. I never could have predicted that, but it's quite amazing transformation, isn't it? They've definitely transformed in that way. Yeah. So at the same time, it's become a different animal to compete with. I mean, we're at VMworld last month. It's all about the ecosystem. There's a big ecosystem here, but there's a different vibe. But let's talk about backup specifically. It's a critical topic for Oracle DBAs. It's a complicated one. And if you mess up your backup in Oracle, you're in deep trouble because you're running your business on it. So Shane, I wonder if you could start just by talking about some of the trends that you're seeing in your business and how things have evolved over the last couple of years. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's an interesting point you make about Oracle and the competitive nature, but they're a very close partner in the sense that our top use case for our backup and recovery solutions is for databases. And it points right back to the criticality that you just talked about, where if you mess up the backup of that, it makes an impact on your business, right? Not just your ability to get a backup done or recovery done from the previous night, but it actually has a downstream effect on the ability for people to do work and for the company to make revenue. And so that's really where we've been focused in EMC's backup and recovery systems division is on things around recoverability, right? And I think that's the old adage of about backup. It's not about backup, it's about the recovery. So obviously, recoverability is important. Doing that efficiently, so you need to bring some efficiencies into the mix in order to advance the cost and reduce the cost that it takes to get this done. When you contrast that against how quickly data is growing, it's like a tractor pull. The further you go down the track, the more the data weighs down on you, the harder it is to get the job done around backup. So efficiency has to be in the mix. And the third part of it is agility. So it's not good enough to just have a backup plan for what you need to do today. What's going to happen next in the step after that and the step after that? So you have to come to the table with those three things and that's where we've really been putting our focus in terms of the EMC's backup and recovery systems division. To do that, we really look on a couple of dimensions, which we all get into as we go through the conversation around database backups in terms of performance. So you have to bring the performance to the table that's needed. You need to have simplicity. If one of the key trends that we're seeing is that not only is it about the backup team wanting to understand and know what's going on with backup data, but the application owner themselves needs to know. The database administrator wants to understand, it's my job on the line. If my database doesn't work, if I can't get that data back, I want to have control and know where that backup is. So for him to be able to do that simply is important. And then the final thing is to be predictable. So you want predictable processes around your backup and recovery. So if you have those three things as a DBA, you start to feel pretty comfortable with your backup solution. So Mel, last month at VMworld we were talking about, we talk about backup and recovery everywhere we go because it's an important topic, but the discourse is really around virtualization and the resource allocation and the physical resources that you have available and techniques to sort of architect around that. What's different in the Oracle world about backup? What makes it unique and challenging? So yeah, that's actually an interesting topic because it's very unlike just plain old files because if you have 99% of the files for a restore of the database, you actually have a zero successful restore. You're in trouble. Yeah. And I've heard this actually in a customer environment where literally the backup administrator says, yes, we are 99% successful because we have 99 files out of 100. The DBA turned to the backup administrator says, you've got 0% success rate because I need all the files to do a restore. And that's the critical criticality of is being able to understand what files are relevant and what files are not relevant. I've seen a lot of customers wanting to tune the performance and not necessarily in terms of the throughput, but reducing the number of people required to do a restore. I don't have to have my DBA, storage administrator, standard administrator, server administrator, backup administrator, all coming together to figure out where is the backup and how do I get it back to where it's supposed to be and all the pieces are there. I've seen a lot of customers say, let's streamline this thing, make it almost self-service where the DBA is the only one woken up at 2 a.m. and Sunday. The DBA knows exactly where it is, kicks off the restore and then it off it goes. Because no matter how fast it is, getting five different people in five different areas to speak the same language to try to do a restore as quickly as possible, it's restoring by committee. And that's where a lot of people realize restoring by committee does not work. No matter how fast your networks are, you can't get the committee to agree to exactly where everything is at that time. And the DBA, because like Shane said, they are vested in making sure that the database backup is correct. They're the ones that actually get to do it. Enabling the DBAs to back up the database properly so that they know how to restore it properly. And those are the things that I've seen coming through as a trend where we're trying to streamline the process, not necessarily through the throughput, because you can only tune that to a certain point, but streamline the literally project and bring it down to one person so there's no critical path or no mishandling of handing off things. Having it all down to just one person, just do the restore as quickly as possible. It reminds me of that old bromide. It's people processing technology and oftentimes people say technology is the easiest part. If you ever doubt that statement, go look it back up in Oracle Worlds. It's really about the people and the process, isn't it? Exactly, exactly. If you can get the process down to just one guy who knows exactly what he's doing or Gal, they can actually get it done a lot faster and more efficiently. Now having said that, technology has evolved and we've seen the days of tape and then VTL and obviously today we're in this world of purpose-built backup appliances. We've looked heavily, we've often cited the IDC report. It's been amazing to see EMC's progress there. For those of you who don't know, EMC actually acquired data domain and has the assets of data domain, a previous acquisition of Avamar and a previous acquisition of Legata which has turned into network or software and the combination of those has led to a really dominant market position. You can't find a lot of markets where a company has as much share, maybe networking, Cisco and networking, but you've got about a two thirds of that marketplace in the purpose-built backup appliance. How were you able to achieve that? How important is Oracle markets to that dominance and can you maintain it? I think the way we achieved that is that EMC at the time of the data domain acquisition made a strategic decision to break out a business unit focused wholly on backup and recovery. So that division has grown over time. We're over three years in now and we've got over 4,000 people in that division that wake up every day thinking about only backup and recovery. So if you look across other industry players, probably hard press to find anybody else that's that mask stacked up against this problem which as you look at the different data from IDC and you guys have talked about it, backup is showing up more and more as a top priority for even the executive IT members of companies. Back when I got into backup, I was in the tape business and you bought your servers, you bought your storage and whatever money left over, you bought some tape drives and some robotics. It's completely changed because they're now seeing that the backup process can stall things like virtualization, it can stall what you're doing and your business objectives around Oracle and databases and whatnot. So it's much more at the forefront on how companies are looking at where they're going to make their investments. So the combination of having the focus with any EMC on backup and recovery and the industry changes such that the old method of just having backup software pointed to a tape drive is far from adequate and has been well proven. How have you changed? Because Shane, you came through the acquisition of data domain and you guys did a great job of really focusing on cutting costs, the de-dupe rates that you were going to achieve, predicting those de-dupe rates and really essentially replacing tape as the primary backup medium. How has your messaging and conversations with customers changed over the last couple of years? Yeah, interesting question. We were actually just joking as we're preparing for the show, one of our sessions where we're talking a lot about data demand and Oracle backup. Some of the slides in that deck were around in 2004 because of some of the key value propositions we bring like data and vulnerability architecture which is the way we cycle through the data on a data domain system to make sure that it's always recoverable. That's nothing's has happened during the course of the retention period. Our stream informed segment layout technology which makes us very fast in the way that we interoperate with the disk which gives us our performance advantages. Those are key advantages that we've had throughout and that still remain unmatched. What has changed over time is the interaction with the users of the ultimate users of the backup. So if you go back to data domain days it was purely about the partner ecosystem. So how do we work with Symantec and the rest of the backup partners? And now the focus has shifted much more to the application owners. So what is the Oracle DBA? How do they do their backup? What does that mean in interfacing with EMC backup and recovery products through something like Oracle R-Man? How does the VMware administrator interact with our products? The storage administrator and right on down the line. So if you look at where we're going with our products it's less about just the backup administrator's use of the technology but the whole application users interaction with it and their ability to see and understand what's going on in the environment. Now your CTO of your division Steven Manley has been on the queue and he at EMC World this year laid out this new vision of sort of essentially taking space efficient snapshots locally and then asynchronously moving the data offsite for disaster recovery. A new way of thinking about backup, we call it the time machine for the enterprise, the Apple time machine, sort of idea. You know being able to dial up or dial down your RPO and different approach. So Shayna I want you to sort of talk about that vision just briefly you know where you're at, you know what your thoughts are there and then Mel I want to ask you how it plays in the Oracle environment. So briefly it maps basically right back into what I just said and the ultimate goal is to have a consolidated layer of protection storage. So what happens when you have the different application owners starting to care about how they do backup? They start creating silos of storage where they're directing those backups and all of a sudden from the top of the organization looking down you don't have visibility into where the backups and my end compliance you know the things that a CIO would worry about. So the goal of what Stephen Manley was talking about is getting to that protection storage where all of those different interfaces right to that single consolidated back end. Once you have that and the capabilities for those application owners and their applications to be aware of that storage, then you can start to do the things like the snapshotting technology that Stephen was referring to in his keynote. But so Mel what's your prognosis for how that's going to play in the Oracle environment and where does it fit? So from an Oracle DBA's point of view, what we do is provide a facility for self-service. You'd be able to do your own backups and own recoveries without any intervention. But there still needs to be an element of a back administrator there to monitor to make sure things don't fill up, things, jobs actually run well. So there's ability for them to oversee all the DBAs, VMware administrators and all the other ones to make sure jobs are done successfully. There's another piece also where DBAs care more about the backups until it's too old that they don't care about it. So it's a point where it's an archive point of view. So the backup ministry will still need to make sure that they manage the archive and maybe save it off to another location or another place. But once the DBAs are pretty much through with a backup, it's let's say it's 30 days, 60 days, 90 days old, they don't really care too much about the backup at that point. The backup administrator still needs to care about that. So we allow the decentralization of the backup restoring for the DBAs but not necessarily to worry about is my data domain filling up, did all my backup jobs run successfully for compliance reasons, to make sure that everything is done correctly. So that job is more facilitated for the backup administrator, but we're facilitating that by making products that changes the dynamics in the customer environment that way. Do you guys still see a lot of tape in Oracle environments and does that surprise you? Occasionally, yeah, and it's funny because there's some countries actually where the law says you have to use tape for compliance and it literally spells out tape and the customers will follow to the letter saying, I will use tape. No matter even if it's virtual tape, they want to use physical tape just because the letter of the law says you use tape and it's surprising to me. And it's fair to say that increasingly that's in an archive or compliance role. Exactly. Now, you've sort of taken some action in that archive market, you've got some solutions there. You've essentially, in my mind, effectively creamed tape as a primary backup medium. Do you think that you'll see the day where disk, you know, in our lifetime where disk is the primary archive medium? I think so. You know, if you look at the rest of our lives outside of this show, does tape exist anywhere? The only place I have tape is in my fire safe where I've got my kids' tapes from 12 years ago and I'm scared to be able to duct tape. That's another one I used some of that last weekend. But no, we're building a lot of work with data domain for example, which originally was optimized for fast streams of data like you would find in a backup, not necessarily the shorter segments that you would find in an archive kind of workload but over time that's shifting so that we can do those workloads as well because if you can get your data where you need it to be, get it replicated off-site for protection, you've taken care of all of the needs of either the archive or the backup. Not much room for tape left in that equation. So now that cloud has moved beyond the hype cycle, you've seen Oracle dive right in and essentially put forth its version of cloud, which the messaging's pretty tight and fairly compelling. I would think that the number of customers that are going to hop on it, we still haven't seen the uptake in cloud for backup but maybe we can expect to see that more if Oracle's going to push it. So Mel, what are you seeing in terms of cloud as a backup target? And I'll ask you guys what you expect going forward. Yeah, I see three plays here. One is more like a remote backup where customers want to keep their production in-house or want to outsource the backup so there's remote backups. There's also where they outsource the servers as well as the backup so that would be more of a local backup. Also replication services. Hey, I've got my backups here but I don't have any facilities to replicate it to another location. So I've seen three different plays in terms of how backups would play into this market. And with EMC, we do have services or products that can facilitate those three types of services whether it's local, remote, or replication backups in that environment. Do you see that, Shane, as something that's going to increase or is it just the recovery issues are still too problematic to make that widespread? Oh no, it's already started. Of the three use cases that Mel just referred to it's that the customers that have the local backup say a data domain or an AMMR system maybe they don't have another facility that they can replicate to so they look to a service provider to provide that disaster recovery capability so that's already well on its way. Excellent. All right gentlemen, well thanks very much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your experiences to what you're hearing in the Oracle customer base specifically and generally in the market. So good luck and enjoy the rest of the event. Thanks for having us. All right, keep it right there. We'll be right back with another segment on the Oracle Backup and Recovery Spotlight here at Oracle OpenWorld Live from the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Keep it right there.