With more apps moving to the cloud, Cisco Systems Inc.’s Raghunath Nambiar, Distinguished Engineer with the company’s Data Center Business Group, thinks that Oracle Corp.’s commitment to cloud makes sense. So while Oracle has been touting it benchmark leadership, Cisco has been a key part of Oracle’s move towards the cloud, and its Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) also compares well when benchmarked. Nambiar stopped by theCUBE at Oracle’s Open World conference to talk with Jeff Frick and John Furrier about UCS benchmarks and his predictions for the future of the data center.

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Why benchmarks are significant

People care about benchmarks, said Nambiar, because they enable comparison based on performance, price, and efficiency in a vendor-neutral way. The numbers are important for customers, vendors, and the organization itself. In terms of setting benchmarks, Nambiar said, Cisco has been doing extremely well. In fact, in the past five years, the company has achieved more than 95 industry benchmark reports.

Many members of the benchmarking community, Nambiar said, are employed by major vendors. It’s their task, he explained, to remain neutral so consumers can accurately assess their options. When companies compare against each other, it creates an exciting, competitive environment, Nambiar said, and one from which customers benefit because prices go down while performance goes up.

Oracle-Cisco customer use cases for performance applications

Nambiar went on to discuss Cisco’s relationship with Oracle, touching on Cisco customer use cases for Oracle and detailing that the modern enterprise applications fit into “three buckets.” These include:

1. Traditional, like transaction processing and enterprise data warehousing, for which Nambiar says Cisco’s UCS is a great fit.

2. Emerging, like big data management, in which tools like Hadoop play an important role. Nambiar says that UCS is a good fit for this type of application, and is especially ideal if customers want to combine traditional and emerging applications.

3. Analytics and computing at the edge applications, like the Internet of Things (IoT). Cisco, he said, is also working with this market and recently announced a new generation of platform that incorporates an IoT gateway and processing at the edge through the “UCS mini platform.”

Much recent data center transformation has been driven by power, and “energy efficiency is a top consideration for every IT manager,” said Nambiar. UCS offers, he emphasized, a 30 to 40 percent performance improvement while maintaining the same power footprint. He shared that Cisco compares well to other companies in energy efficiency benchmarks.

Nambiar said that Cisco intends to keep pushing when it comes to compute capability. They want to create a “next generation machine” for custom deployment, scalability, and price performance.

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The impact of flash

Flash, Nambiar observed, “is becoming standard,” especially for transaction processing databases.The IOPS per second capabilities that flash offers, he said, makes Flash much more “energy efficient.” In five years from now, he predicts that 75 percent of truncation processing databases will be running on flash.

Looking to the future of Big Data

Nambiar said that Cisco values the functionality that Oracle offers to move data sets outside of databases and over to Hadoop. Data on Hadoop then can become part of the “database table.” He’s excited that clients will be able to access data stored on both their data base and the one on Oracle and sees a lot of potential in this capability.

Describing the focus of the Oracle Open World conference to be on “database as a service” and the cloud multi-tenant environment, Nambiar added that he is excited to see how the database changes affect particular industries, especially healthcare, as effective management can bring down costs and spur significant changes.