Looking to help customers move to the cloud at their own comfortable pace is Oracle Corp. and storage partner NetApp, Inc. A business outcome-focused approach has helped NetApp maintain it’s vendor-agnostic policies while encouraging the company to work with Oracle to innovate useful new products. NetApp’s Aaron Newcomb, Manager of Solutions Product Marketing, stopped by theCUBE at Oracle’s Open World 2014 conference to talk with Jeff Frick and John Furrier about the Oracle-NetApp relationship.

With the newly launched FlexPod, which functions specifically for Oracle Database workloads, NetApp is “delivering a million for customers for customers that want to deploy Oracle Database, specifically,” he added, “on top of Oracle Rack.” The FlexPod will be available at the end of October.

Newcomb observed that customers for which the FlexPod is in highest demand are those looking for high performance and low latency when processing online transaction workloads. The sub-second latency, he said, would help prevent customers from abandoning their cart due to wait times. This FlexPod solution, he said, is mainly “around IT and the datacenter, because it is for the specific workload that you’re probably not going to be running in the cloud.”

As Oracle moves towards cloud, so do customers

As Oracle reinvents itself, Newcomb pointed out that many customers are able to undergo a similar transformation. Some businesses have yet to take advantage of the economies of scale that come with migrating the datacenter the cloud offers, sometimes because customers don’t put much stock in cloud security. New products like NetApp’s Nano-private storage product enables apprehensive companies to keep their data in their private datacenter. Then, Newcomb explained, customers “mask that out, and then migrate that seamlessly to a cloud environment,” so they can still take advantage of cloud functionality.

NetApp’s philosophy involves “moving the data to where the resources are,” which, Newcomb pointed out, eliminates the risks of having Amazon.com Inc.’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) connect directly to the customer’s data center.

Why it’s “nice being agnostic”

Newcomb explained that for NetApp, customer choice comes first: it’s why they “work with everybody” to enable customer data. Yesterday, he added, NetApp announced increased support for Oracle and Database via an Oracle-VM plugin for Storage Connect, a management layer that “rides above the hypervisors.”

Making Database Administrators lives easier

As database administrators (DBAs) become more like “air traffic controllers,” Newcomb said that NetApp tries to “simplify all the complexity.” For Oracle, NetApp integrates plugins into the existing network. Their newest plugin is the Oracle Enterprise Manager, which enables DBAs to “look at infrastructure from the database standpoint.”

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Oracle knows storage is key

“If your storage is slow, then everything is slow,” said Newcomb. Oracle “understands the importance of the storage infrastructure,” he explained, because it’s integral to their business to run databases effectively on their network.

Since speed is essential, Newcomb called out that NetApp has “one of the broadest flash portfolios available today.” The aforementioned IOPS announcement, he added, “is really all about [NetApp’s] EF Flash portfolio. The EF series, he said, enables NetApp to “scale performance linearly.” NetApp also offers a FaaS product line, which offers consistent performance for mixed workloads.

Software-defined makes things easier

Because it helps cut down on complexity, Newcomb agreed that “Software-defined is a big part of the NetApp culture.” Unified Computing Systems (UCS) architecture is “at the heart of the Flex Pod” because it make it simple to “move things around behind the scenes.” NetApp also offers the “Cluster data on tap,” which allows customers to move workloads from one node to another without disruption.

For Newcomb, the bottom line is that “a lot of application owners, they don’t care about infrastructure, they just want to know that it works. And that’s what we’re out there to try and provide.” NetApp’s focus, he stressed, it supporting business processes.

IT is not an island

IT, Newcomb observed, is permeating the rest of the organization, driven by Big Data. He exemplified this paradigm shift by citing the experience of a NetApp client that was able to revamp their mobile platform and start capturing data. That change “affected immediately their ability to sell things online,” because they were able to make changes quickly. Demonstrable business outcomes, he communicated, are key to NetApp’s success.

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