 From a pure software company into a pure systems company that comprises the software and the hardware, the applications, the middleware, the database, the entire stack, it was interesting on Sunday night hearing Larry Ellison talk so much about hardware as a software company, and one of the topics that he continuously has been hitting on this week is Flash. Flash, as we talked about in Wikibon and SiliconANGLE, is really changing things. It's changing the IO architecture. Our own David Floyer has laid out a future of data, led infrastructure, led by Flash, where all active data will be in Flash. And we're here with Jayman Bowen, who's a technical lead at LSI. LSI is a company that provides critical technologies to OEMs and sells through the distribution channel. It's made acquisitions to really step up its presence in Flash, made a lot of investments there. And first of all, Jayman, welcome to theCUBE. Dave, thanks for having me. Appreciate you being here. You guys got a good booth here, a lot of action going on. Tell us about what's happening at Oracle OpenWorld. Sure, so I'd say it's always a great show. There's a lot of people coming here that are looking for ways to accelerate applications. And having come here about nine times, I can see that every year the profile of Flash gets raised and raised and raised. And this year is no different. So you can see that it's definitely moving in that direction where Flash is being considered more of every server type of deployment, rather than just something special that you would look at for really the edge of the IT mainstream. Now you guys still, so let's talk about where you fit in the LSI organization. Many of you might be familiar with LSI and part of the company that was Ingenio. Ingenio was spun out last year or sold to NetApp. That's right. And Ingenio essentially sold OEM disk subsystems. So that leaves a really pure play focus on the systems and the core technology business at LSI. So it really was a move to get you guys more focused. And so talk about that a little bit and what the impact has been and really where you fit in the organization. Sure, so one of the nice kind of effects of having that separation between doing our components and doing the storage systems is there's not as much overlap with some of our customers where that was a little bit more difficult where you can see there's a lot of different pieces that LSI makes of different silicon pieces of SAS, RAID controllers. And now what we have is the flash controllers as well. So LSI's flash components division is a real leader in the space of the chips that allow the difficulties of dealing with flash at a media level to be handled so that it can be an enterprise level product. Can you talk about some of those difficulties and how you address them? Sure, so I think the top of mind of everyone when they hear about flash is worrying about endurance and wear out. Because that's something that people are aware of is that flash, well, it's very fast and has different price mechanisms. It also is a media that can wear out. And there's basically a few ways that that can be handled. It's either through wear leveling or buying more expensive types of flash where there's SLC, MLC, and EMLC. And each one of those has a different endurance. And one of the unique things that happens within LSI's flash controllers is this feature called Durarite, and that allows us to extend the life of the flash pretty dramatically by reducing the amount of rights that happen on the back end media. Okay, now, and you guys sell to OEMs, I mentioned up front, into the distribution channel. Can you talk about that a little bit? Can you share customers or even types of customers? So basically the division that we're representing here at Oracle World is the accelerated solutions division, and we focus on actually making the entire PCI product that is sold more towards end customers and more OEM than into different solutions. And so this is a full package of our silicon and flash controller and flash media into a product. So this is sold through OEMs and through like bar channel partners. You can look this up on CDW, for instance, and get a price. And this is a, it's a PCIe flash component. We also have the ability to use this as a cache device, because that's a big part of where people are seen using flash in general, is not just making it fast, but also making it smart so it can be used alongside of disk. So you have an online archive and accelerated performance. So we've seen, if we go back a few years, probably I guess 2008 timeframe, you had EMC with the enterprise flash drive into its symmetrics. And at the other end of the spectrum, you had at around the same time, interestingly, FusionIO with its PCIe card. Right. And since then you've seen an evolution of the flash stack or the flash hierarchy, if you will. And you're now seeing flash everywhere throughout that hierarchy. Can you talk about that evolution generally and specifically where LSI plays? Sure. So it's basically part of what I'd say is flash is becoming mainstream. And there's a couple steps to that. One is to get it to more than every server type of deployment rather than on the other edge. So a big part of enabling that where LSI is focused is on using standard drivers upstream into the Linux kernel, just freely downloadable, go and use this PCIe flash. And the other part of it has been the storage vendors themselves embracing different models. What I would say is, at the sand side, without flash devices, you are able to support a very large number of disks without a performance bottleneck. And when flash came onto the scene, it kind of changed that. Where one device can do hundreds of thousands of IOPS. And there's no longer this easy cut and dry ability to have capacity centralized management and performance. And so what we've seen is basically people are embracing, leveraging flash as a cache pretty generally, like EMC and also NetApp and others. And using it so that they're able to do high performance, local, not going across the network flash, and then also have an array on the backend that still has that centralized management. And I think that's kind of an important step in preserving the features that you get with the traditional models and the revolutionary performance you can get with flash. So essentially you guys participate in that entire hierarchy, right? So we're closely allied with our partners and we're looking at supplying multiple pieces of that solution set and not trying to force one way or the other. We're just trying to make sure that we're part of the flash solution as it moves forward on its own. So it's a crowded space and you've got companies popping up all over the place. Now you supply a lot of those companies, I realize as well, but talk about how you differentiate from that field. Sure, so the key premises that we look at from the accelerated solutions division is providing solutions that are fast, smart, and easy. Because table stakes is fast. If you're going to sell flash and it's not fast, then you're in the wrong line of business. So that's a given. And we have very powerful controllers that enable us to do that. The second part is smart, because we know you could throw everything on flash. It'd be very fast, but that wouldn't necessarily be that smart. And so we're looking at, either with partners in-house, ways to use flash alongside disk to have a more cost-effective solution. And the last part where I think LSI is uniquely positioned is easy. We're leveraging our existing driver stack the mega-rate investment, the SaaS investment, that allows us to be just deployed and using the same tool sets people are used to. It's a lot easier for OEMs to integrate our technology. And it's that easy part that really differentiates solution that you get from LSI. So what are you guys doing here at Oracle OpenWorld? What are you showing at the event? Maybe talk a little bit about the Oracle customers that you service, either directly or indirectly. Sure. So, at our booth, we're showing a number of ways that we're using flash in that fast, smart easy mode, where we have disk systems running TPCC, like OLTP database, and using either all disks or using flash to accelerate those disks. And in our booth, we're showing basically one demo. It's doing three times the number of transactions per second and that roughly equates the amount of users the database is able to support. And we're supporting end user response times that are as much as 30 times faster. And that's a very important metric in the Oracle community where you're deploying an application and what you care about is how many users you can support and what their end user experience is. And we're able to showcase that by adding flash intelligently to that deployment, you can support more users at a lower response time and have a very effective ROI. What kind of people come by your booth? Is it your OEM customers? Is it Oracle DVAs, a mix? Talk about that a little bit. At this show, it tends to be mainly DVAs who are interested in understanding how to use flash in general. And in the conversations that we have, we explain our products, but we also find out where it is that they're getting their infrastructure and it's often aligned with our OEM partners because we have a very close partnership with our OEMs and are trying to make sure that there's ways for people to use the equipment in whatever environment makes sense. Excellent. All right, Jamie, well listen, thanks very much for taking time out of your booth duty schedule to come by theCUBE. It was great to see you again. Dave, good seeing you, thank you. All right, keep it right there. We'll be right back. We've got some segments coming up this afternoon. We've got a demo to show you. We've got Pauline NIST coming up. Always a great guest from Intel. Keep it right there. This is Silicon Angles theCUBE, live from Oracle OpenWorld. We'll be right back.