theCUBE co-hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante are broadcasting live from Oracle OpenWorld 2013 this week,  streaming from the floor of the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

Caitlin Gordon, Sr. Product Marketing Manager with EMC Backup was invited to theCUBE to discuss the state of data protection at Oracle.

“Oracle Backup is probably the biggest challenge that we ran into with our customers; it’s probably second to VMware… Because of the size of their databases, their fast rate of growing and their importance to the business, that has bubbled to the top as the biggest challenge from the data protection standpoint. The traditional backup solutions simply cannot meet the needs of backing up an Oracle database and protecting it in the time they have to do it,” replied Gordon.

“For many years data backup was just an afterthought,” noted Vellante. “And, just like security, if it’s not designed in from the start, there’s problems.” Vellante asked Gordon if the customers responded to that in any way, because certainly they noticed it too by now.

“More and more people understand that addressing data protection upfront is going to enable them on long term to have a solution that’s going to give them that protection going forward,” said Gordon. “They cannot leave it to an afterthought anymore, it needs to be addressed. With the size of the databases, the amount of growth, you have to address that upfront, to be able to grow and do what you do.”

As previously discussed in earlier segments, the average age of an application is 19 years. Velante highlighted that it has taken people awhile to respond to this, and asked Gordon why she thought the average age was.  “Part of it was because there wasn’t a choice,” thinks Gordon. “Ten years ago the only choice was either tape or expensive disk,” replied Gordon.

New at EMC?

Next Vellante asked Caitlin what has changed in the last 12 months in the EMC portfolio. “Right before Oracle OpenWorld 2012 we announced DD boost for Oracle RMAN (EMC Data Domain Boost for Oracle Recovery Manager). It works really great giving you faster backups, it offers more efficient DBA control (not only backup but also replication),” Gordon started.

“Back then it only supported 10G traditional database environments. This year we’ve extended that, supporting 12C, Exadata environments, and any SAP applications running on Oracle databases. We’ve got a lot of new enhancements there, and from the EMC Data Protection Suite and the Networker capabilities we have some new functionalities that enables the best of both worlds.”

Watch the full-interview with Caitlin Gordon, Sr. Product Marketing Manager with EMC Backup on theCUBE at #oow13 below: