Anne McClure, CTO of Global Database Technologies at EMC, discussed database virtualization with theCUBE co-hosts Dave Vellante and John Furrier, live at the 2013 edition of Oracle OpenWorld this week.

“We’ve been focused on the Vblock,” McClure said,  the specialized system for high performance database workloads. Mentioning she has been in the database world for over two decades, McClure explained that databases “have gotten very large and you have to deal with that.” The last thing to virtualize in the data center is the database. “We’ve worked with Oracle with our replication technology, and we also do tiering,” she added, referring to the fully automated storage tiering EMC offers.

Asked to comment on what had happened with Vblock, McClure said, “I think it’s beginning to address all of those particular customer venues.” There are still customers who want to run their own. Vblock puts the server, storage, and network into one unit. “As you deal with large amounts of data in the data center, you want to automatically procure” and manage that data. “Our special sauce is with our extreme software cache – XtremeFS.” which works quite nicely with Oracle RAC.

“Anybody that needs 3.7 million of sustained I/O per second” is the typical customer for EMC’s Vblock. “It really is quite a nice solution,” McClure stated.

On the changing role of DBAs

Commenting on the changing role of the database administrator, McClure said that, as with storage and system admins, DBAs have gone from a couple to a few hundred databases that they need to manage, and “they will have to virtualize. They are the last component of the stack to be virtualized,” she explained. “We’re focused on it, my customers is absolutely the DBA.”

Asked what the next level of virtualization would be, after databases, McClure said “your driver of that is the data scientist that is running the analytical query. That is the true driver of the next client for us, the data analyst.”