During yesterday’s live coverage of this year’s EMC World 2014 Conference from Las Vegas, SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE co-hosts Dave Vellante and John Furrier welcomed the Chief Architect for CMA Consulting Services, Brian Dougherty who stopped in to discuss the importance of the Flash revolution in the world of data warehousing as well as CMA’s embrace of EMC’s XtremIO and the benefit it has brought to his business.

CMA is a hosting data center/analytics company that boasts having the largest Medicaid data warehouse in the country. “We also deliver a products division,” stated Dougherty. “We deliver Oracle Rack Clusters and we host analytics in four locations around the country.” CMA sees their next play as finding a suitable way to monetize the copious amount of data they currently host.

“We are trying to find the best way to exploit the technology and the data that we have,” explained Dougherty. “We have massive amounts of data and the key is finding ways to exploit that data.”

At this point, Vellante asked if Dougherty could paint a picture of the IT environment employed by CMA. “We have a very heterogeneous environment,” Dougherty stated. That environment is comprised of Oracle Rack Clusters, Big Data Clusters, Hadoop and a suite of analytics applications.

Watch the interview in its entirety here:

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Dougherty acknowledged the introduction of SQL to Hadoop as facilitating the widening of its skill sets. “Real time for us is becoming microseconds,” he said. “It’s becoming a competitive strategic advantage because it is no longer ok for people to have to wait five seconds for a response to a query.”

EMC’s XtremIO has been instrumental in facilitating that competitive advantage Dougherty mentioned. CMA began looking at different Flash products over a year ago when they came across EMC’s offering. After several months testing on XtremIO, CMA is, according to Dougherty, very pleased with the results.

To further explain CMA’s satisfaction, Furrier asked Dougherty to detail some use cases and discuss some of the other value add they have experienced since adopting XtremIO.

XtremIO In The Real World

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“There were a couple things that are exciting to us,” Dougherty mentioned. “We have an Oracle Rack accelerator product. We were having a difficult time getting the IO throughput that we needed. It’s a Linux Rack-based cluster. We’d plug a VMAX or very large storage array in the backend and ship it to a customer.” He continued, “That was becoming difficult to do. We were looking at a much smaller form factor that we could quickly deploy and deliver.” In so doing, Dougherty claims CMA was essentially able to shrink wrap their clusters with the IO power and capability of a very large array.

Vellante then inquired if, as they struggled with VMAX, they also had issues with the stack. “Did that make you nervous,” he asked?

Dougherty admitted that yes, it was not easy moving to another platform. “But one reason we were pleased was because we knew EMC offered both great services and value,” he explained. “That was compelling to us up front. We saw the scale out performance we could get up front. We knew their technology and engineers would give us that same level of trust we had with VMAX.”

CMA was very performance minded when they switched to XtremIO. However, as they settled into it, they began to realize the value-add features the product offers. “Snapshots are crucial for us going forward,” Dougherty explained. “We might have 50 development projects going on at any one time and it’s difficult for us to support five to 10 different images of the production database and to serve that out to the different development groups that are there,” he stated. With snapshots, however, that task is now done easily and quickly. “We don’t have to compromise performance and latency. We can let a developer or QA tester run on an environment that is essentially a production environment.”

This, as Vellante pointed out, seems to run contrary to what a lot of people refer to copy creep and the added expense that drives. “You’re telling a different story. Help us double click on that a little bit,” he said.

“Well, it’s the metadata and the value add of the operating system itself,” Dougherty said. “With XtremIO, it’s possible to leverage a smaller set of core Flash data and to essentially multiply or project that very efficiently out to a heterogeneous group of users and environments.” This ability existed in the past, but it suffered time constraints as well as producing a higher overhead for the operation. “This is very efficient with low overhead and we can exploit this to many different groups at the same time,” he stated.

NoSQL Still Finding Its Place In The World

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Dougherty believes NoSQL may one day be able to play a bigger role in the CMA environment. “The industry spent 30-40 years developing optimizer technology,” he notes. “You can replace a lot in that relation environment. Thirty years of optimizer technology,” he points out, “is not something you can replace overnight.” NoSQL and lightweight SQL have their place but there are some aspects that will continue to require the depth provided by a strong optimizer. “That will continue to stay in the in-memory databases or the Oracle databases,” he stated.  To date, CMA is deploying NoSQL in a very judicious manner.

Answering Vellante’s query of where he could envision a good fit, Dougherty replied,” Something quick and dirty that doesn’t require a lot of elegance and complexity in the query task. It can be a good tool to pre-qualify data before you go down the path of analyzing it.”

“One of the most difficult things for us is to got through 100 Tb of data and pick out the 15 Kb that make sense,” Dougherty said. “You have so much noise in the system but you have to get to the value add of the data.” To do this, he states there are some good visualization technologies available to aid in this task. “There is still some work to be done in that environment,” he cautions. “We are still struggling with that ourselves.”

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