Jay Cuthrell of the VCE Office of the CTO dropped by theCUBE at the recently concluded Oracle OpenWorld 2013 conference to share his take on databases, DBAs and the developer-driven data center.

Cuthrell begins the interview by highlighting that Oracle is a “workload of interest” for VCE, which made it a priority to help customers achieve greater returns on their database investments. The joint venture recently introduced a Vblock Specialized System for High Performance Databases that is geared specifically for Oracle deployments.

The purpose-built cloud appliance utilizes Cisco C-Series rack servers and XtremIO flash cache to address the performance, price-performance and latency requirements of DBAs. Cuthrell explains that the system is designed for organizations that are either particularly dependent on their databases for business operations, or offer database solutions to their clients. Asked why the specialized Vblock is priced identically to general-purpose configurations, the executive says that VCE’s main focus is driving enterprise adoption.

Unlike Oracle’s engineered systems, Vblocks can accommodate a wide range of mixed workloads. This gives VCE a technological edge that Cuthrell says is maintained through the more than $20 billion that backers EMC, VMware and Cisco invest in product development annually.

Besides being more versatile, the Vblock approach is also accommodating to DBAs. Historically the bottleneck in IT departments, database administrators can leverage the platform to easily allocate and consume resources on a self-service basis.

Cuthrell changes the topic to security, noting that pre-assembled solutions ship with default configurations that enforce best practices. He hopes to to see “more of that, not less” as the market continues to evolve.

See the video below for the full discussion, including more on VCE’s plans to simplify the data center.