After spending 10 years at Oracle Corp., Sam Lucido is the perfect person to bridge the gap between databases and storage in his new role as senior manager of Database Solutions Technical Marketing at EMC Corp. Fortunately, the two companies have a solid working relationship — a necessity given their 80,000+ shared customers. But this collaboration is set to turn into a friendly competition as XtremIO and FS1 go head-to-head in the flash storage market.

Different approaches in flash storage market

Interestingly, Lucido says, the two companies have taken quite different approaches to their systems. “[EMC’s] XtremeIO is going in a direction of simplicity. Just being able to provision storage very quickly, without much complexity, relying on the all-flash drives to drive performance,” Lucido said on theCUBE during EMC World 2015. And then it has the enterprise features like in-line deduplication, in-line compression, and then provisioning as well, not to mention copy services.”

Oracle’s FS1, however, bills itself as the “most intelligent” storage array on the market — but Lucido says it is actually more like the “most complex.” It comes with a lot of features, but it takes dozens of steps to set up and configure, whereas XtremIO is engineered to work almost straight out of the box.

Even though Oracle can help set things up, Lucido says, “Customers want to be able to use their solutions in hours, not days, not weeks, not months. They want to be able to quickly and easily provision storage for the Ooracle databases and not worry about whether they have it configured correctly for performance, capacity, reliability and recoverability. It’s that message that XtremeIO really hits on very well. I mean literally, it’s just three steps to provision storage, and once you provision storage, copy services and the inline deduplication and compression just kick in. It’s there.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s wall-to-wall coverage of EMC World 2015.