 The Cube at EMC World 2014 is brought to you by EMC. Redefine, VCE, innovating the world's first converged infrastructure solution for private cloud computing. Brocade, say goodbye to the status quo and hello to Brocade. Welcome back, Jeff Frick here at EMC World 2014. We're here for our fifth year in a row of the Cube being at EMC World. We're doing something a little special this year. We've actually got two Cubes. So double the fun, double the pleasure, double the great guests that we're going to have on over the next three days. We invite you to stop on by. We're right next to the social lounge, the alumni lounge, this big giant TV with more beanbags than I've ever seen. So stop on by the Cube and we'll be here for the next three days. I'm joined here with my special guest host, Steve Keniston. Thank you, Jeff. Thanks for passing that over. Steve Keniston, the storage alchemist. Again, as Jeff said, we're here live in Las Vegas at the Cube, beautiful setup here and EMC is doing a great job. But enough about us. Let's get to our guests. Joined here by Bart Scherz, who's some pretty interesting background, principal engineer for EMC out of EMEA and gave us a little interesting piece of information. He has a blog. Let's see if we can help up your blog count here. Yeah, that's cool. Dirty cash. Dirty cash, yes. Give us a little bit about what is dirty cash? So dirty cash actually started as a bit of a joke. I was looking for a name for my blog and because I like to help my customer saving money, so there is some cash involved. And in the late nineties, there was a song called Dirty Cash with the different spelling. I said, hey, I like that team and dirty cash is also basically, technically it means data that is in memory. It hasn't been written to disk yet, but it's, I like the dual- The double on time? Yeah, double on time. I like the sound. Very interesting, maybe getting her to here on the Cube will up your hits and drive some counts. So you were telling us a little bit, you're an Oracle specialist. Why don't you give us a little bit of insight as to what's going on with Oracle? You talked about Oracle and the clouds and Oracle in Europe in general. Why don't you give us some insight? Okay, so one of the things that I have been doing over the last probably five years or so, is talk to customers about the benefits of moving Oracle to private clouds. And I would say probably five years ago, this was kind of like a no-go area. You could talk to DBAs and they would say, oh, yeah, but it's not supported and there's performance overhead and help break loose if you try to do that, right? So I would say probably three years ago, it started changing a little bit. So now what I see now in my customer base is that customers are actually virtualizing their databases. They are conservative and I don't blame them. So what they do is they start with test and development and then slowly move it on a virtual platform, mostly VMware, but others too. And they just try to get a grip on it, get the tools in place, get some confidence and then slowly move on. I also have a few customers. I was hoping for more going onwards in the future that would go all the way. So some of our customers are putting mission critical production database on VMware. That's interesting. And they solve all the issues around support and certification and what we have to do if Oracle finds an issue, do you have to put it back on a physical system? They have figured it out completely. We have, this show is really about the users, the industry practitioners, some great insight, helping us to understand what can you help us dive into? What are some either best practices that you've learned along the way or some of the right first steps to try to start to take as you're thinking about putting your Oracle database into the cloud? So like I said, the first thing you have to do is start conservative and be very slow moving, just test it out, make sure the tools are in place. If you would go like migrate the whole thing at once, then you probably had some issues down the road. So that's one. Second thing, make sure that, and this is a very important one, Oracle is very keen on licensing. They have audit policies and stuff like that. So I always tell my customers before even consider to virtualize database, make sure that your licensors are in place, that you're compliant with your Oracle license policy and all that, that's critical. If you're not in compliance, then you might have some severe issues later. Suddenly you have to license the whole farm if you make the wrong choices. Very good, very good. Any, if you happen to see, especially in Europe, any particular industry verticals that have chosen to do this first over another one? So one of the first customers, and it's actually a reference customer in Luxembourg, which was a financial, one of the banks, and they probably three or four years ago, and they completely virtualized everything, including the financial transaction processing systems. So this was pretty innovative, I would say. Yeah, yeah, definitely. So what are you seeing with hybrid clouds and public clouds and interacting with their own cloud? How's that working? So the public cloud is an interesting one. I mean, everybody talks about it, so of course it's very interesting to see how that goes with the cost savings and all that. On the other hand, Oracle applications are typically the core values of a company. I mean, if something goes wrong with that Oracle database and the applications on top of it, I mean, then worst case, company could go out of business. So customers are very conservative. So they will probably deploy on a private cloud, maybe hybrid, if the hybrid partner is an outsourcer that they trust. I don't see them, not one of my customers going to the public cloud, except maybe for test and development and some small stuff. But the real core, mission critical database processing, it's all either on private or maybe on hybrid clouds. And then what about some of the other kind of new age databases? Is any of that workload being passed on or they really keep it locked in on Oracle for those core assets? You mean the non-Oracle databases or? Yeah, yeah. I don't know. My SQLs and the Mongos and, you know, we go to a lot of shows, we hear about all kind of crazy databases. And I know a lot of them are kind of different, they're coming at it from more web scale and kind of not core financials and those kind of things. But I'm just wondering if those are getting any traction in what has traditionally been an Oracle space in your world. I couldn't really comment on that because the customers I talk to, and especially the groups within my customers, those are the guys who manage the hardcore mission critical legacy applications. And they are doing innovative things, but they, you know, other groups are probably doing the MongoDB and the Hadoop stuff. Okay, but then on the licensing piece, which you mentioned, are they finding that to be a relatively neutral transaction cost-wise when they move from the regular licenses to the virtualized? Or how's that kind of working out in practice? Well, that's an interesting thing. And this is one of the main reasons why I talk to my customers about virtualization. Many databases that are physically deployed have a very low CPU utilization. Now Oracle is, I would say 90% of the cases is licensed by CPU core. And it's pretty expensive, and probably as you know, 70 to 80% of a database stack, the cost of it is made out of licensing and support on those licenses. So if my database stack is expensive and 80% of that cost is in Oracle licensing, and that 80% is only utilized for 20%, you can see how many dollars I'm basically wasting at that point. And why do customers have to do it? They have to do it because they, you know, in a physical world, you have to size for peak loads and for future growth. So you have to oversize your server, therefore the average utilization is low. Now, one of the things you can do with virtualization is basically glue all those CPU resources together. And now you have kind of like a cloud, if you will. Right, right. That cloud allows you to move workloads and set CPU shares and all of that stuff. So now every database can use all of the CPUs in the form. And by doing that, and using some specific workload management techniques, you can drive up utilization from, and I'm always conservative, I said, well, best case in the physical environment, you can do 20% virtual, 50%. Well, that means you can throw away more than half of your CPU costs. Right, right. Mr. Customer, what can you say if I... We're reinvested in something else, right? EMC. Larry doesn't want us to throw it away. We're gonna have you invested in something new. And that's a tension, and that's also why Oracle is pushing back a little bit. And I can understand it, I mean, that's how it goes. Yeah. So Bart, tell us a little bit, is this your first EMC world? How many times you've been to EMC? I have been actually to the very first one that was still called Wizards Conference in 2001. Wow. And actually, there was one before, which was kind of like an internal dry run in the late 2000, I believe, in Orlando, with a group called the Speed Geeks, who were kind of like the performance wizards in EMC. So I was part of that too. And in all those years, I probably missed two or three, but I was at most of them. That's an excellent history. So tell us a little bit about, what do you think of the show so far, and primarily, what are you here to come find out? Also, the first thing, you know, if I look over all these years, how enormously it has been growing. I mean, that first Wizards Conference was like, I don't know, maybe less than a thousand people. I don't know how much it was. Oh, wow. And now you look at this, wow. We could fit a thousand people. We have more than a thousand beanbag chairs, I think, over there. Yeah, that whole thing could fit easily in there. So that's, and it's also, I mean, the social media has influenced a lot back then. Well, he had a mobile phone, and that's about it. And everybody was closed down, talking to each other, and now everybody's publishing it out to the world. So that has been a pretty big difference over the last few years. Yeah, many more different focal groups. So you have people dealing with documenter, with content management, you have people doing the new database stuff, and there's so much more different technology and application. Back in those days, it was all about one storage box and driving as much as performance out of it as possible. That was it. And now look at, you know, how big the portfolio has gone, how many, even storage arrays, not even talking about application, how many different platforms we have, and how hard it must be for customers to select the right one, and then you talk about applications. And did you come here with any customers? Anything specific you came to learn or share with them, or help them understand to your point? There's a lot of different things EMC has. So well, so in my role, I don't have my own customers anymore. So I used to do that in the past. And now I'm just helping my colleague EMC guys to help their customers with Oracle. So, what did I learn? Good point. So, well, to start with, the acquisition was pretty impressive today. It was kind of like, wow. Another acquisition. Yeah, I thought we had the whole portfolio covered. And so, yay, there's another one, that's cool. So, and what's interesting to see, and I mean, I've been with EMC for about 14 years, so I've seen a long track record. And EMC is always interesting in that sometimes they do an acquisition of a company you might have never heard of. And then it stays silent for a few years, and then suddenly boom, they come up with a new product based on that acquisition, and it rocks the market. And that's something that's very impressive. Before we let you go, I want to, you know, we usually don't go super deep into the weeds here. But I'm curious, because you said before we went on that you like to go deep into topics, and you really like to explore them, and it's not just the light coverage on your blog. So, not so much that we want to get super deep in the weeds, but what are a couple of the one or two things that you are covering on your blog from a real deep technical perspective that people need to be aware of, or should seek more information, or that are a point of interest for you right now? I would say the number one topic that my customers ask for is performance, on databases, and so I have a specific tab on my blog. If you click on it, you get all my Oracle database performance related blogs. Last year I did a, I was actually co-presenter at Oracle OpenWild, so I presented on best practices and real world experiences. I don't want to talk about, you know, the million eye option, what's going on the customer data center floor, and you know what happens over there, and how do you set it up correctly? How do you deal with misbehaving applications? Stuff like that. So that's one of them. There is a couple of blog posts dealing with some Linux stuff, so real hands-on stuff. I did a post on, well actually some things on file systems. What's the best file system for Oracle? It was the worst maybe. So stuff like that. And then I go, I just don't make a statement, hey this is a good one, this is a bad one. I try to explain with real world, you know examples. I do a test on my own server and I show them the output and say hey this is going on. That's great. So a lot of people get in there, I mean what's the biggest screw up on a config that people use that just bogs your system down? This is should be no bread, you know, what are you doing? Clearly. Well if you want to go real big technical, I had one customer once who migrated to EMC from my competitor and then complained about lousy performance. And then of course we got blamed as EMC, so I was flew in at the evening before and just hop on a plane and tried to solve some issues. And you know, long story short, I found that there were two components in their database stack that happened during the migration. They went to a different file system and they went to a different way of doing IO load balancing. And both of these components were breaking large IOs, we have a like 128K IO. Both of these components were breaking the IOs in very small 4K pieces. Now from Oracle, the response time goes up because you basically have to wait for all of these individual IOs to finish before IO completely send back to the database. And on the storage level, you have 25 times as much of the IOs and all of the IOs complete within half a millisecond. So database guys have a complaint and the Oracle guys say, yeah, but we're doing lots of IO and everything is low latency, so we're all cool. And that is a typical problem in the communication between the database guys and the others. So make sure that you know what you're talking about, what's going on, is there any translation going on? Is there any layer that is messing up your performance? That's what I often talk about. Good, good. Well, Bart, thanks for stopping by. Not a problem, you're welcome. Everybody jump on board, read dirty cache, give Bart some feedback, give him a hard problem and we like to solve it. If it's hard enough, he'll jump on a plane and he'll come out to visit you. So we are getting the worst case, hopefully not, but that's all right. That's job security for Bart. We like that. So we're here at VMworld 2014 and we're here at the Sands Convention Center, Las Vegas, fifth year for theCUBE, two cubes at one time. We've got a full slate of guests lined up for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. So keep it tuned here. We'll be back after the short break with our next guest.