(upbeat orchestral music) >> Hi I'm Peter Burris and welcome to another CUBE Conversation from our wonderful Palo Alto Studios. Great conversation today with Jeremy Werner who is the vice president of SSD Marketing at Toshiba Memory, Jeremy welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you Peter, great to be here. >> You know Jeremy, one of the reasons why I find you being here so intriguing interesting is there's a lot going on in the industry. We talk about new types of workloads: AI, cloud, deep learning, all these other things, all these technologies are-- all these applications and workloads are absolutely dependent on the idea that the infrastructure has to start focusing less on just persisting memory and focusing more on delivering memory-- delivering data to these very advanced applications. That's where flash comes in. Tell us a little bit about the role that flash has had in the industry. >> It's amazing, thank you for recognizing that. So, flash has a long history. 30 years ago actually Toshiba invented flash memory, and it's had a transformation on people's lives everywhere, on all kinds of products starting with the very first application for flash being-- for NAND flash being kind of removable memory cards. You had the digital camera revolution, then it found its way into cell phones, that enabled smart phones and people carrying around all their media etc. And now we're in kind of this large third phase adoption which is, like you mentioned, the transition from persistent storage with a hard drive where, your data was available but not really available to do a lot with. To now storage on an SSD, which allows artificial intelligence, business analytics, and all the new workloads that are changing business paradigms. >> So clearly flash adoption is increasing in the data center. Wikibon has been talking about this for quite some time. My colleague David Foyer was one of the first people out there to project the role that flash was going to play within the data center. How are you seeing as you talk to customers, as you talk to some of the big systems manufacturers and some of the hyperscalers. How are you hearing or what are they saying about how they are applying and will intend to apply flash in the market today? >> It's amazing when we talk to customers they really can't get enough flash. As an industry we just came out of a major shortage of flash memory, and now a lot of new technologies are coming online. So, we at Toshiba, just announced our 96 layer 3D flash, our QLC flash. This is all in an attempt to get more flash storage into the hands of these customers so that they can bring these new applications to market. And this transformation, it's happening quickly although maybe not as quickly as people think because there's a very long road ahead of us. Still you look out 10 years into the future, you're talking about 40 or 50% growth per year, at least for the next decade. >> So I want to get to that in a second, but I want to touch upon something that you said that many of the naysayers about flash predicted that there would be shortfalls and they were very Chicken Little like. Oh my gosh, the sky is going to fall, the prices are going to go out of control. We did have a shortage, and it was a pretty significant one, but we were able to moderate some of the price increases so it didn't lead to a whole bunch of design losses or a disruption in how we thought about new workloads, did it? >> True, no it didn't, and I think that's the value of flash memory. Basically what we saw was the traditional significant decline in pricing took a pause, and you look back 20 years ago, I mean flash was 1000 times more expensive. And as we move down that cost curve, it enables more and more applications to adopt it. Even in today's pricing, flash is an amazingly valuable tool to data centers and enterprise as they roll out new workloads and particularly around analytics, and artificial intelligence, machine learning, kind of all the interesting new technologies that you hear about. >> Yeah, and I think that's probably going to be the way that these kinds of blips in supply are going to be-- it'll perhaps lead to a temporary moderation in how fast the prices drop. >> That's right. >> It's not going to lead to massive disruption and craziness. And I will also say this, you mentioned 20 years ago stuff was really expensive and I cut my teeth on mainframe stuff. And I remember when disk drives on the mainframe were $3500 a megabyte, so it could be a lot worse. So, let's now-- flash is a great technology, SSD is a great technology, but it's made valuable by an overall ecosystem. >> That's right. >> There's a lot of other supporting technologies that are really crucial here. Disk has been dominated by interfaces like SATA for a long time. Done very well by us. Allowed for a fair amount of parallelism, a lot of pathing to mainly disk, but that's starting to change as we start thinking about flash coming on and being able to provide much much faster access times. What's going on with SATA and what's on the horizon? >> Yeah, so great question. Really what we saw with SATA in about 2010 was the introduction of a six gigabit SATA interface, and that was a doubling of the prior speed that was available, and then zero progress since then, and actually the SATA roadmap has nothing forward. So people have been stuck effectively with that SATA interface for the last eight years. Now they've had some choices. You look at the existing ecosystem, the existing infrastructure, SATA and SAS drives were both choices, and SAS is a faster interface today up to 12 gigabit. It's full duplex where SATA is half duplex, so you can read and write in parallel, so actually you can get four times the speed on a SAS drive that you would get on a SATA drive today. The challenge with SAS, why everyone went to SATA-- I won't say everyone went to SATA, but maybe three or four times the adoption rate of SATA versus SAS was the SAS products that were available on the market really didn't deliver the most economical deployment of-- >> They were more expensive. >> They were more expensive. >> Alright, but that's changing. >> That is changing, so what we've been trying to do is prepare and work with our customers for a life after SATA. And it's been a long time coming, like I said eight years on this current interface. Recently we introduced what we call a value SAS product line. The value SAS product line brings a lot of the benefits of SAS, so the faster performance, the better reliability, and the better manageability, into the existing infrastructure, but at SATA-like economics. And that I think is going to be critical as customers look at the long-term life after SATA, which is the transition to NVMe and a flash-only world without having to be fully dependent on changing everything that they've ever done to move from SATA to NVMe. So, the life after SATA preparation on customers is how do I make the most out of my existing knowledge, my existing infrastructure capabilities. What's readily available from a support perspective as I prepare for that eventual transition to NVMe. >> Yeah I want to pick up on that notion of higher performance at improving cost of SAS and just make sure that we're clear here that SATA is an electrical interface. It has certain performance characteristics, but these new systems are putting an enormous amount of stress on that interface. And that means you can't put more work on top of that, not only from an application standpoint, but as you said crucially also from a management standpoint. When you put more reporting or you put more automation or your put more AI on some of these devices, that creates new load on those drives. Going to SAS releases that headroom, so now we can bring more management workloads. That's important, and this is what I want to test. That's important because as we do these more complex applications, we're pushing more work down closer to the data, and we're using a lot more data, it's going to require more automation. Is SAS going to provide the headroom that we need to actually bring new levels of reliability to more complex work? >> I believe it will, absolutely. SAS is the world's most trusted interface. So, when it comes to reliability, our SAS drives in the field are the most reliable product that our customers purchase today. And we take that same core technology and package in a way to make it truly an economical replacement for SATA. >> So we at Wikibon now have observed NVMe, so I want to turn a little bit of attention to that. We have observed that NVMe is in fact going to have a significant impact. But when Toshiba Memory is looking at what kinds of things customers are looking for, you're saying not so much SATA, let's focus on SAS, and let's bring NVMe online as the system designs are there. Is that kind of what it's about? >> You know I think it's a complicated situation. Not everyone is ready for everything at the same time. Even today, there's some major cloud providers that have just about fully transitioned to NVMe SSDs. And that transition has been challenging. So what we see is customers over the course of the next four or five years, their readiness for that transition from today to five years from now, that's happening based on the complexity of what they need to manage from a physical infrastructure, a software ecosystem perspective. So some customers have already migrated, and other customers are years away. And that is really what we're trying to help customers with. We have a very broad NVMe offering. Actually we have more NVMe SSDs than any other product line, but for a lot of those customers who want to continue with the digital transformation in to data analytics, in to realizing the value of all the data that they have available and transforming that into improved business processes, improved business results. Those customers don't want to have to wait for their infrastructure to catch up for NVMe. Value SAS gives them a means to make that transition, while continuing on to take advantage of all the capabilities of flash. One of the things that we always talk about, one of my responsibilities is product planning product definition, and one of the things that we always talk about is our ideal SSD, the bottleneck is the flash. In other words if you look at a drive there's so many things that could bottleneck performance. It could be the interface, it could be the power that you can consume and dissipate, it could be the megahertz in your controller >> You sound like an electrical engineer. >> I am an electrical engineer, but I'm a marketing guy, right? So, there's all kinds of bottlenecks, and when we design an SSD we want the flash to be the bottleneck cause at the end of the day, that's fundamentally what people need and want. And so, you look at SATA, and it's like, not only is it a bottleneck, but it's clamping the performance at 50% or less than 50% of what's achievable in the same power footprint, in the same cost footprint, so it's just not practical I mean the thing's eight years old so-- >> Yeah. Yeah. >> In technology eight years is a lot of time. >> Especially these days, and so to simplify that perhaps, or say that a little bit differently, bottom line is SAS is a smaller step for existing customers who don't have the expertise necessary to re-engineer an entire system and infrastructure. >> That's right, it gives them that stepping stone. >> So you also mentioned that there' a difference between the flash and the SSD, and that difference is an enormous amount of value-wide engineering that leads to automation, reliability, types of things you can do down at the drive. Talk to us a little bit about Toshiba, Toshiba Memory, as a supplier of that differentiating engineering that's going to lead to even superior performance at better cost and greater manageability and time to value on some of these new flash-based workloads. >> So I'm amazed at the quality of our engineering team and the challenges that they face to constantly be bringing out new technologies that keep up with the flash memory curve. And I actually joke sometimes, I say it's like being on a hamster wheel. It never stops, the second that you release a product you're developing the next product. I mean it's one of the fastest product life cycles in the entire industry, and you're talking about extremely complicated, complex systems with tight firmware development. So what we do at Toshiba Memory, we actually engineer our own SOCs and controllers, develop the RTL, manage that from basically architecture to production. We write all our own firmware, we assemble our own drives, we put it all together. The process for actually defining a product to when we release it is about five years. So we have meetings now, we're talking about what are we going to release in 2023? And that is one of the big challenges, because these design cycles are very long so anticipating where innovation is going, and today's innovation is at the speed of software, right? Not the speed of hardware. So how do you build that kind of flexibility and capability into your product so that you can keep up with new innovations no one might have seen five years ago? That's where Toshiba Memory's engineering team really shows its mettle. >> So let's get your back in theCUBE in the not-to-distant future to talk about what 2023 is going to look like, but for right now Jeremy Werner, Vice President of SSD Marketing at Toshiba Memory, thank you very much for being on theCUBE. >> Thank you, Peter. >> And once again, thanks for watching this CUBE Conversation. (upbeat orchestral music)