>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas it's the Cube covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live at Dell EMC World 2017. This is Cube's coverage of Dell EMC, the combination, the big news here. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE and my co-host Paul Gillin. And our next guest is Steve Fingerhut, senior vice president and general manager of storage product business unit at Toshiba and Ravi Pendekanti, ex-VP of service solutions and product management at Dell EMC. Guys, welcome to the Cube. Good to see you, Ravi. Steve nice to meet you. >> Thanks for having us. >> Steve, so tell us what's going on at Toshiba, 'cause I want to hear what you guys are doing and your role in the relationship with Dell EMC. And what is going on with your architecture because we've been hearing a ton about IoT of the edge, centralized pushing the intelligence to the edge, new architectures. The world is kind of moving to a new architecture. What's your pitch? >> Sure. Well Dell and Toshiba have a long history 20 plus years of working and both strong innovators. We're engaged both in our hard drive products as well as our SSD products, really across every aspect of Dell's portfolio, client server and storage. And we're really taking the architecture, both of those product categories are really popular as everyone, data explosion is happening. A lot of that is ending up on storage and our focus areas on hard drive are around the near line storage which are the high capacity eight terabyte and higher, really popular with the cloud architectures. We have a 14 and 16 terabyte helium-based drive coming out next year, which will put us in a strong leadership position. And then on the SSD side what we're highlighting at the show today is our latest generation NAND. And we've moved into 3-D NAND and we're showing our wafer with 64-layer, 3-D flash as well as the first public demonstration of any company of an SSD using that 64-layer, 3-D flash. So we're on that cutting edge and we see that really growing. And you mentioned IoT, that's really driving a lot of the big data growth. A lot of that data will reside on hard drives, right, for the long-term storage, but then you bring that into an SSD tier for the very rapid analytics work that you want to do to make decisions with that data. >> Steve, talk about the impact of the latest state-of-the-art, because to me it's, oh my God, it's speeds and feeds but storage, people always care about storage. Go back to the original iPod, then iPhone, things are in devices, you mentioned IoT, state-of-the-art has to get better, faster, cheaper. What's the impact to some of those specs that you guys just released in terms of the media, the SSD? What's the impact going to be for customers? Scenario-wise, what's some of the the impact going to look like? >> Sure, I think the number one impact as I talk to customers here at the event and it's no surprise but-- >> Give me more of that they say. (laughs) >> Every customer, every Dell executive says we need more. So really it's just the SSD adaption >> Ravi: Yes we do need more. >> Exactly, so that's exploding. So the number one thing this will do is it's the, each individual die on the wafer doubles in capacity and will soon double again and double again after that. So this 3-D technology really allows us to drive density. And that means lower cost, it means more capacity. It also means we can develop denser SSD. So more in the same space or smaller space. >> For the consumer it's obvious, it's all the devices, the wearables, but the business is really more fundamental than that, things that are going to be connected to the network, the microwave, the air conditioning, all the sensors in the world are going to be now digitally connected once analog, now digital. I mean, that's kind of where, does that kind of get that right? >> Absolutely, and those are, that same technology will be used in a a lot of end devices. It's in your smart phone, it's in your smart watch. It'll be in a lot of those smart devices capturing the temporary data. But then that all gets consolidated in a massive pool and companies are looking for how do they efficiently scale to capture and analyze that data and turn it into revenue and profit. And that's where the performance of SSDs and in the future the higher capacity levels will all efficient scaling at the data center. >> Ravi, in the hyper diverge market, now all the sudden you've got the storage coming back into the server-- >> Ravi: Yep. >> What are customers looking for in terms of performance on the storage side? Are they driving you for the same kind of constant drive for more capacity and better performance? >> Absolutely, Paul, I mean if you think about it the workloads of today are vastly different than the workloads of the past. Think about it. Today people are not looking for data to be just collected. It doesn't have the complete value or in my view it doesn't give you anything other than just lots of bits and bytes. What really gives you the power to act upon is information and so to create information you need to take the data, go process it and get you to the same, to the level of detail you can act upon right? So that's the analytic extension. So having said that, today when you look at any of the industries, whether it's genomics, whether you're looking at mission learning, deep learning, these require a sense of performance to be provided for our customers because they are looking at analyzing data quickly enough. That's when they can act on it. So our customers are absolutely asking for better performance and higher capacity and they need it now. >> So Toshiba's not a new player to you though, they've been a supplier to the Power Edge, right? >> Oh, absolutely true. They've been a fantastic supplier for the last 20 years. We look at them more as a partner. They've been with us through the journey. We've been, if you think about it, for the last couple of decades we've been shipping your product and they've been working through us. We've been working together, just not as, it's not just a supplier kind of relationship. We actually track their new technologies. Steve just talked about 3-D cross point and things of that kind. We are working on those technologies together to ensure that we give our customers just not the latest technology but also to to provide them with the right price performance. Again, I emphasize price performance because it's just not one of them on it's own that has merit to our customers. >> Is brand important to your customers in terms of a storage provider? Do they ask for Toshiba brand? Or does it matter? >> What they do ask for is they ask for reliability. Right, they want to make sure that they have a reliable product. And then if you think about it that really translates to them to certain vendors. So yeah, they could have a potential propensity for a certain vendor. But it all starts with reliability. If you really can't have a reliable component in the service that we sell, it really doesn't help our customers. And that's where, it goes back to the point I was making earlier, which is this long-standing relationship with the companies because we have built that reliable product that Toshiba's been providing for us. >> Steve, tell us about the relationship with SSD and the enterprise? Everybody knows people want more solid state, that's, everyone kind of sees the consumer product. Where's the progress bar in terms of adoption because we, I hear stories and we actually report them on SiliconANGLE, I'm buying capacity, I'm all flash drives. Server certainly has their share of flash as well. David Foyer and Wendy Bond have been covering that for years but now in the Enterprise and all the other mainstream products, where's the analogy here, what's the tipping point? Are we there or? >> Well, if you look at if from a dollars spent perspective, actually this year is the crossover where Enterprise's SSDs will consume a higher amount of the spin than Enterprise hard drives. So people are putting their money-- >> Spinning disc, you mean. >> Exactly. >> The old hard drive. >> And so that crossover will happen, has happened, if we had more supply, if the industry had more supply I'm sure it would have already happened. And now if you look at it from a gigabytes perspective of course hard drives are much, much, are still the vast majority of the bits shipped. And so, it really is about data, intelligent use of flash. It's fast, it's very reliable, it consumes less power but it is also more expensive, so you have to pick the right applications and the right ways of deploying those. And that's were Dell and Toshiba work together with partners like VMware. We're talking about a certified solution around Toshiba Dell, VMware V stand, as well as Nutanix. And both of those solutions in a converged architecture and hyper-converged architecture, they rely on SSDs in every mode to ensure you get the performance scaling. >> The SSD has been exciting because sort of hard disc performance peaked out about 10 years ago, and we've been jerry-rigging ways to make it faster but SSDs genuinely are getting faster and faster. What is the upper limit on speed right now? Are we looking at Moore's law type of growth in performance or does that top out at some point? >> We can, we get to saturating the interface with performance but I'll tell you the most customers aren't asking us for more IOPS performance or more bandwidth, certainly they'll take it but when you put several of these in a server or storage box, it's more than the interface can consume. So certainly there's been, if you look at the bi-segment type of growth rates, it's moving into how cheap can we make it, can we reduce the endurance. It's still plenty fast and kind of opening that up. That's a growing tier. And so we're really seeing that kind of good enough performance driving a lot of the expansion. >> Ravi, how about the architectural challenges? I was joking with Dave Vallant, a couple Cube things ago about Dell, oh Dell, their supply chain was their big innovation and everyone kind of knows that story of how they, I said data is the new supply chain. Data is now coming in and you got the form factor on storage memory, which everyone wants more SSD, give me more, we heard that. How are you guys going to build your server architecture to handle the tsunami of data coming in from stuff that this is going to enable. I mean, everything in the business will be instrumented with data. >> Absolutely. >> Devices and sensors are coming in. >> Yep. >> Is there a server for that and how do you >> Steve: It's called streaming. >> It's a moving train architecturally. >> Ravi: Yes it is. >> So what do you guys doing, give us an overview. >> It's interesting that you ask, John, because when you look at a server today it does have to deal with lots of data coming in. And it's just not data but if you look at it, there are, we used to talk about storage tiering, now I think we got to start looking at memory tiering. And what this means is we have to fundamentally change the way the architecture of the system is put in place and for example in 14G, we are now coming out with more of our important talent sets. It's all about scalable business architecture. Again, this goes into the whole premise of, we talk about work loads, as work loads change, you talk about IoT, you talked about how all the data is coming in, you got to synthesize it. You also need to have an architecture that essentially says I have to go get this data in. I get it the right time. It's not just getting data in. So we are working on things called MCA, which is memory centered architectures. 'Cause at the end of the day, it's analogous to, and I'm from California, we have in the Bay area, we have the 101, that kind of is the nerve of the entire Bay area. >> John: It's crowded, we need more. >> It's crowded. >> We need flying cars. >> A lot of bottlenecks. >> Absolutely right. >> Io problems. (laughs) >> Absolutely right. >> Yeah, right. >> That's your IOPS. >> Elon Musk is going to figure this out. >> Yeah, that's the goal right. >> Flying cars. >> We on the service side are trying to do the same thing, which is as more data, like more cars are on the road, we now have to go to ensure that the connectivity between the memories of system, your storage subsystem, and the CPU actually comes out to be a low latency, high bandwidth kind of a solution, which is what goes back into what I call memory centered architectures. So that's essentially what we're working on, to ensure that we have an optimal performance at the application level because that's what customers need. >> Cool, well what is tiered memory and is that actually a thing now in the 14G server? >> So tiered memory is something that, I mean, we are setting the stage for the future, right? So we talk about tiered storage. Were are tier one, tier two, tier three storage. If data was not being utilized you basically took the data but it on the tapes for example, right? In the current generation, a lot of people use hard drives as a way of putting data out. So likewise in memory, I mean, if you really think about it you have the registers, you bought the L one cache, the L two cache, those caches. Then we are coming into all kinds of NVMe drives. So that's what I mean by kind of clearing the air to deal with. There is normal memory, you've got persistent memory, right? So those are the new memory-- >> By the way, stateless cloud native really and microservices use state and stateless apps and, you differentiate between the two and SSD is great for that. >> Yes, so this is where I was going back to your question, Paul, is that's the way I think we are in the early stages of how we evolve. So that's where you'll see we're going to support no persistent memory for example, when people look at SAP HANA, they won't have memory. It's basically in memory database. So these are the kind of things we are doing. So with 14G for example we are working on things like that. We'll have 14, I mean about 19X, more NVMe than we had in the prior generation. I wish I could give you more specifics but we will do as we get into the formal shipment of the product, but-- >> John: Shipment's in the summer, though right? This summer is what I heard? >> Summer. >> Summer time frame, a few months away. >> Yeah. >> Okay, talk about the relationship between you guys. Obviously you're partners, this is a significant component, I would worry about as a customer, availability concerns, allocation of products. Are we good, supply solid? I didn't mean to put you on the spot. >> No, absolutely. >> Let's put him on the spot, we need more. >> It's a great question. >> Get the checkbook out, I get a commission. >> You know it's a great teamwork. You think about like the great teams in history, the Jordan-Pippin, they worked together. >> John: Bird and McHale. >> Exactly, and they can anticipate each other's next steps and that's really how we're operating. Ravi mentioned that we've worked hard to make sure we have product alignment up and down and the next is Dell technologies has massive scale so aligning the supply chains is key and we've done that to make sure we have the right products in the right place for Dell's customers. But in terms of supply, yeah, it really is about getting to that next generation where we can double our capacity per wafer or even more in some cases. So that will really allow us to open the spigots and we think 2018 is going to be a-- >> And the impact to the customers, guys, just comment on the relationship, what's going to be the impact to your customers? >> So, first and foremost, jokes apart, we know about the constraints in the industry on SSD drives. So that's an industry-wide thing. So one of the things we've been doing with Toshiba is we have regular interlock meetings. We discuss where the demand is, and we help forecast where we are headed. We actually worked through the process. We do anticipate that something that Steve's team and our teams will be doing together. >> John: This is not new for Dell, this is their wheelhouse. >> It is, it is. But I will tell you, John, given the constraints we have in industry, I must say that in the last couple of quarters, we had to put a lot more emphasis on how we go deal with this because, going back to the prior comments that gentlemen made, there's such a demand for the SSDs right now, that I wish the supply and demand were not out of balance. But they are, right? We got to work through and try to ensure that we don't surprise them as partners so we don't come back and say "Hey, give us a truckload tomorrow." So that's something that we are actually finishing. >> And they're shaping your strategy too. They're an indicator to where you can go based upon the tech, the state-of the-art. >> Absolutely, this is were our call is. It's a constant feedback mechanism we have built. I mean they know the SSD drive market, the NAND flash technologies better than we do. Right, they do. And we understand the overall customer side and what impact is from the computer for example in our case. And now we go back in and try and see how we can do a better mechanism of shaping the demand and ensuring that the right product is available at the right time. >> Is a relief in sight with the shortages? >> I think it's going to be linked to those next generation technologies. As we ramp those and get them into production, the SSDs and into Dell EMC systems, then you will see the balance come back in the industry. >> Paul: A year, two years, less? >> That's, I think most people are saying it's going to last through this year. We're obviously working very hard to get the right products in the right place but I think most people are saying it'll last through this year, but we'll see. It's hard to predict. >> I think that's the consistent message we get is at least three to four quarters before things stabilize. >> Well, Ravi, congratulations on this scale. I think it's a huge advantage and certainly you've got some great supplier relationships with the scale. Congratulations to Steve on the state-of-the-art new stuff coming. More, faster, come on, bring it on. >> Absolutely. >> John: Internet of things is waiting. >> It is. That market is waiting for you guys. Congratulations, thanks for coming on Cube. We appreciate you sharing insights. >> Thank you, I mean, we couldn't have found a better partner as we announce our 14G and we are excited about it. Thank you for having us both, John and Paul. >> Great stuff. >> Thank you for having us. >> Bringing you state-of-the-art content here in the Cube but more importantly faster, memory, SSDs and the Enterprise taking over the hard disc drive certainly a ton of data, a tsunami of data coming in from all angles, IoT and the Enterprise and everywhere else. It's the Cube sharing hard data with you. Be right back with more live coverage. Stay with us. (upbeat electronic music)