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>> The history of Exadata and the platform is really unique.
And from my vantage point, it started earlier this century
as a skunk works inside of Oracle called Project Sage
back when grid computing was the next big thing.
Oracle saw that betting on standard hardware
would put it on an industry curve that would rapidly evolve.
And I remember the Oracle HP database machine
which was announced that Oracle open world
almost 15 years ago and then Exadata kept evolving.
After the Sun acquisition, it became a platform
that had tightly integrated hardware and software.
And today Exadata it keeps evolving,
almost like a chameleon to address more workloads
and reach new performance levels.
Last April, for example, Oracle announced the availability
of Exadata X9M in OCI, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
And it introduced the ability to run the autonomous
database service or the Exadata database service.
You know, Oracle often talks about, they call it
stock exchange performance level,
kind of no description needed
and sort of related capabilities.
The company, as we know, is fond of putting out benchmarks
and comparisons with previous generations of product
and sometimes competitive products that underscore
the progress that's being made with Exadata
such as 87% more IOPS,
with metrics for latency measured in microseconds,
mics, instead of milliseconds
and many other numbers that are industry-leading
and compelling, especially for mission-critical workloads.
One thing that hasn't been as well publicized
is the Exadata on OCI is using AMD's EPYC processors
in the database service.
EPYC is not Eastern Pacific yacht club,
for all you sailing buffs.
Rather it stands for Extreme Performance Yield Computing,
the enterprise grade version of AMD's Zen architecture
which has been a linchpin of AMD's success
in terms of penetrating enterprise markets.
And to focus on the innovations that AMD and Oracle
are bringing to market, we have with us today,
Juan Loaiza, executive vice president
of mission-critical technologies at Oracle
and Mark Papermaster who's the CTO and EVP
of technology and engineering at AMD.
Juan, welcome back to the show.
Mark, great to have you in "theCUBE"
and your first appearance, thanks for coming on.
>> Yep, happy to be here.
>> Thank you.
>> All right, Juan, let's start with you.
You've been on "theCUBE" a number of times, as I said,
and you've talked about how ex data is a top platform
for Oracle database, we've covered that extensively.
What's different and unique, from your point of view,
about Exadata Cloud Infrastructure X9M on OCI?
>> Yeah, so as you know, Exadata, it's designed top down
to be the best possible platform for database.
And it has a lot of unique capabilities.
Like we make extensive use of RDMA, smart storage.
We take advantage of, you know, everything we can
in the leading hardware platforms.
And X9M is our next generation platform
and it does exactly that.
We're always wanting to get all the best that we can
from the available hardware that our partners
like AMD produce.
And so that's what X9M is.
It's faster, more capacity, lower latency,
more I/Os, pushing the limits of the hardware technology.
So we don't want to be the limit, the software,
database software should not be the limit.
It should be the actual physical limits of the hardware.
And that that's what X9M is all about.
>> Why, Juan, AMD chips in X9M?
>> Yeah, so we're introducing AMD chips.
We think they provide outstanding performance
both for OLTP and for analytic workloads.
And it's really that simple, we just think
that performance is outstanding in the product.
>> Yeah, Mark, your career is quite amazing.
I've been around long enough to remember the transition
to CMOS from emitter-coupled logic
and the mainframe era back when you were at IBM.
That was an epic technology call at the time.
I was, of course, steeped as an analyst at IDC
in the PC era and like many, witnessed the tectonic shift
at Apple's iPod and iPhone caused,
and the timing of you joining AMD is quite important,
in my view, because it coincided with the year
that PC volumes peaked and marked the beginning
of what I call a stagflation period for X86.
I could riff on history for hours,
but let's focus on the Oracle relationship.
Mark, what are the relevant capabilities
and key specs of the AMD chips that are used
in Exadata X9M on Oracle's cloud?
>> Well, thanks, and it it's really the basis
of I think the great partnership that we have
with Oracle on Exadata X9M.
And That is that the AMD technology
uses our third generation of Zen processors.
Zen was architected to really bring high performance
back at X86, a very, very strong roadmap
that we've executed on schedule to our commitments.
And this third generation does all of that.
It uses a seven-nanometer CPU that is a core
that was designed to really bring throughput,
bring really high efficiency
to computing and just deliver raw capabilities.
And so for Exadata X9M, it's really leveraging all of that.
It's implemented and up to 64 cores per socket,
it's got, you know, really anywhere from 128
to 168 PCIe Gen 4 I/O connectivity.
So you can really attach, you know,
all of the necessary infrastructure
and storage that's needed for Exadata performance
and also memory, you have to feed the beast
for those analytics and for the OLTP
that Juan was talking about.
And so it does have eight lanes of memory
for high performance DDR4.
So it really is a balanced processor and it's implemented
in a way to really optimize high performance.
That is our whole focus of AMD.
It's where we've reset the company focus on years ago.
And again, you know, great to see
the super smart database team at Oracle
really partner with us, understand those capabilities,
and it's been just great to partner with them to, you know,
enable Oracle to really leverage
the capabilities of the Zen processor.
>> Yeah, it's been a pretty amazing 10 or 11 years
for both companies, but Mark,
how specifically are you working with Oracle
at the engineering and product level
and what does that mean for your joint customers
in terms of what they can expect from the collaboration?
>> Well, here's where the collaboration really comes to play.
You think about a processor and I'll say,
you know, when Juan's team first looked at it,
there's general benchmarks.
And the benchmarks are impressive
but they're general benchmarks.
And, you know, it showed,
Ill say the base processing capability.
But the partnership comes to bear when it means
optimizing for the workloads that Exadata X9M
is really delivering to the end customers.
And that's where we dive down
and as we learn from the Oracle team.
We learn to understand where bottlenecks could be,
where is there cooning that we could in fact
really boost the performance above, I'll say, that baseline
that you get in the generic benchmarks.
And that's what the teams have done.
So for instance, you look at optimizing latency to RDMA,
you look at just throughput,
optimizing throughput on OLTP and database processing.
When you go through the workloads and you take the traces
and you break it down and you find the areas
that are bottlenecking and then you can adjust,
we have, you know, thousands of parameters
that can be adjusted for a given workload.
And again, that's the beauty of the partnership.
So we have the expertise on the CPU engineering.
Oracle Exadata team knows innately what the customers need
to get the most out of their platform.
And when the teams came together, we actually achieved
anywhere from 20% to 50% gains on specific workloads.
It was really exciting to see.
>> So, okay, so I want to follow up on that.
Is that different from the competition?
How are you driving customer value?
You mentioned some percentage improvements,
are you measuring primarily with latency?
How do you look at that?
>> Well, you know, we are differentiated
in the number of factors.
We bring a higher core density.
We bring the highest core density, certainly in X86.
And, moreover, what we've led the industry
is how to scale those cores.
We have a very high performance fabric
that connects those together.
So as a customer needs more cores,
again, we scale anywhere from eight to 64 cores.
But what the trick is that is you add more cores,
you want the scale to be as close to linear as possible.
And so that's a differentiation we have
and we enable that, again, with that balanced computer
of CPU, I/O and memory that we design.
But the key is, you know, we pride ourselves at AMD
of being able to partner in a very deep fashion
with our customers.
We listen very well,
I think that's what we've had the opportunity
to do with Juan and his team, we appreciate that.
And that is how we got the kind of performance benefits
that I described earlier.
It's working together almost like one team
and in bringing that best possible capability
to the end customers.
>> Great, thank you for that.
Juan, we're going to come back to you.
Can both the Exadata database service
and the autonomous database service,
can they take advantage of Exadata cloud X9M capabilities
that are in that platform?
>> Yeah, absolutely.
You know, autonomous is basically our self driving version
of the Oracle database but fundamentally,
it is the same database course.
So both of them will take advantage
of the tremendous performance that we're getting now.
You know, when Mark takes about 64 cores,
that's per chip, we have two chips, it's two sockets,
so it's 128-way processor.
And then from our point of view, there's two threads.
So from the database point, it's a 256-way processor.
And so there's a lot of raw performance there
and we've done a lot of work with the AMD team
to make sure that we deliver that to our customers
for all the different kinds of workload
including OLTP analytics
but also including for our autonomous database.
So yes, absolutely, all that takes advantage of it.
>> Now, Juan, you know I can't let you go
without asking you about the competition.
I've written extensively
about the big four hyperscale clouds
specifically AWS, Azure, Google and Alibaba.
And I know that, don't hate me, sometimes it angers
some of my friends at Oracle, IBM too,
that I don't include you in that list.
But I see Oracle specifically is different
and really the cloud for the most demanding applications
and top performance databases and not the commodity cloud,
which of course that angers all my friends
at those four companies.
So ticking everybody off.
So how does Exadata Cloud Infrastructure X9M compare
to the likes of AWS, Azure, Google,
and other database cloud services
in terms of OLTP and analytics and value,
performance, cost, however you want to frame it?
>> Yeah, so our architecture is fundamentally different.
We've architected our database
for the scale out environment.
So for example, we've moved intelligence in the storage.
We've put remote direct memory access,
we've put persistent memory into our product.
So we've done a lot of architectural changes that they have.
And you're starting to see a little bit of that.
Like if you look at some of the things that Amazon
and Google are doing, they're starting to realize that,
hey, if you're going to achieve good results,
you really need to push some database processing
into the storage.
So they're taking baby steps toward that,
you know, roughly 15 years after we've had our product.
And again, at some point they're going to realize
you really need RDMA,
you really need more direct access to those capabilities.
So they're slowly getting there but we're well ahead.
And the way this is delivered is, you know,
better availability, better performance,
lower latency, higher IOPS.
And this is why our customers love our product.
And if you look at the Global Fortune 100,
over 90% of them are running Exadata today.
And even in our cloud,
you know, over 60% of the Global 100 are running Exadata
in the Oracle cloud because of all the differentiated
benefits that they get from the product.
So, yeah, we're well ahead in the database space.
>> Mark, last question for you is how do you see
this relationship evolving in the future?
Can you share a little roadmap for the audience?
>> You bet, well, first off, you know,
given the deep partnership that we've had on Exadata X9M,
it's really allowed us to inform our future design.
So in our current third generation, EPYC
is really what we call our EPYC server offerings.
And it's a 7003 third gen and Exadata X9M.
So what about fourth gen?
Well, fourth gen is well underway, you know,
and ready for the future.
But it incorporates learning that we've done
in partnership with Oracle.
It's going to have even more throughput capabilities,
it's going to have expanded memory capabilities
because there's a CXL, connect express link
that'll expand even more memory opportunities,
and I could go on.
So, you know, that's the beauty of a deep partnership
as it enables us to really take that learning going forward,
it pays forward, and we're very excited
to fold all of that into our future generations
and provide even better capabilities
to Juan and his team moving forward.
>> Yeah, you guys have been obviously very forthcoming.
You have to be with Zen and EPYC.
Juan, anything you'd like to add as closing comments?
>> Yeah, I would say that in the processor market,
there's been a real acceleration in innovation
in the last few years.
There was, you know, a big move 10, 15 years ago
when multi-core processors came out.
And then we were on that for a while
and then things started stagnating.
But in the last two or three years,
and AMD has been leading this,
there's been been a dramatic acceleration in innovation
in this space.
So it's very exciting to be part of this
and customers are getting a big benefit from this.
>> All right, gents, hey, thanks for coming back
in "theCUBE" today, really appreciate your time.
>> Thanks, glad to be here.
>> All right, and thank you for watching
this exclusive Cube conversation.
This is Dave Vellante from "theCUBE"
and we'll see you next time.
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