>>Live from San Francisco. It's the cube covering my groin. Insight 2019 brought to you by micron. >>Welcome back to pier 27 in San Francisco. I'm your host Dave Vellante with my cohost David foyer and this is the cube, the leader in live tech coverage. This is our live coverage of micron insight 2019 we were here last year talking about some of the big picture trends. Derek ticker is here, he's the general manager and vice president of the storage business unit at micro and great to see you again. Thank you so much for having me here. Welcome. So you know we talk about the super powers a lot, you know, cloud data, AI and these new workloads that are coming in. And this, this, I was talking to David earlier in our kickoff like how real is AI? And it feels like it's real. It's not just a bunch of vendor industry hype and it comes in a lot of different forms. Derek, what are you seeing in terms of the new workloads and the big trends in artificial intelligence? >>I think just on the, on the front end, you guys are absolutely right. The, the role of artificial intelligence in the world is, uh, is absolutely transformational. I was sitting in a meeting in the last couple of days and somebody was walking through a storyline that I have to share with you. That's a perfect example of why this is becoming mainstream. In Southern California at a children's hospital, there were a set of parents that had a few days old baby and this baby was going through seizures and no one could figure out what it was. And during the periods of time of the seizure, the child's brain activity was zero. There was no brain activity whatsoever. And what they did is they performed a CT scan, found nothing, check for infections, found nothing. And can you imagine a parent just sitting there dealing with their child and that situation, you feel hopeless. >>This particular institution is so much on the bleeding edge. They've been investing in personalized medicine and essentially what they were able to do was extract a sample of blood from that sample of blood within a matter of minutes. They were able to run an algorithm that could sift through 5 million genetic variants to go find a potential match for a genetic variant that existed within this child. They found one that was 0.01% of the population found a tiny, tiny, call it a less than a needle in the haystack. And what they were able to do is translate that actual insight into a treatment. And that treatment wasn't invasive. It didn't involve surgery. It involves supplements and providing this shower, just the nutrients that he needed to combat this genetic variant. But all of this was enabled through technology and through artificial intelligence in general. And a big part of the show that we're here at today is to talk about the industry coming together and discussing what are the great advances that are happening in that domain. >>It's just, it's super exciting to see something that touches that close to our life. I love that story and that's, that's why I love this event. I mean, well, obviously micron memories, you know, DRAM, NAND, et cetera, et cetera. But this event is all about connecting to the impacts on our lives. You take, you take that, I used to ask this question a lot of when will machines be able to make better diagnoses than, than doctors. And I think, you know, a lot people say, well they already can, but the real answer is it's really about the augmentation. Yeah. You know, machines helping doctors get to that, you know, very, you know, uh, a small probability 0.1001% yes. And it'd be able to act on it. That's really how AI is affecting our lives every day. >> Wholeheartedly agree. And actually that's a, that's a big part of our mission. >>Our mission is to transform how the world uses information to enrich life. That's the heart and soul of what you just described. Yeah. And we're actually, we're super excited about what we see happening in storage as a result of this. Um, one of the, one of the things that we've noticed as we've gotten engaged with a broad host of customers in the industry is that there's a lot of focus on artificial intelligence workloads being handled based on memory and memory bandwidth and larger amounts of memory being required. If you look at systems of today versus systems of tomorrow, based on the types of workloads that are evolving from machine learning, the need for DRAM is growing dramatically. Multiple factors, we see that, but what nobody ever talks about or rarely talks about is what's going on in the storage subsystem and one of the biggest issues that we've found over time or challenges that exist is as you look at the AI workloads going back to 2014 the storage bandwidth required was a few megabytes per second and called tens of, but if you just look every year, over time we're exceeding at gigabyte, two gigabytes of bandwidth required out of the storage subsystem. >>Forget the memory. The storage is being used as a cash in it flushes, but once you get into a case where you actually want to do more work on a given asset, which of course everybody wants to do from a TCO perspective, you need super high performance and capability. One of the things that that we uncovered was by delivering an SSD. This is our 9,300 drive. We actually balanced both the read IOPS and the ride IOPS at three gigs per second. And what we allow to have happened is not just what you can imagine as almost sequential work. You load up a bunch of data into a, into a training machine, the machine goes and processes on it, comes back with a result, load more data in by actually having a balanced read and write a model. Your ingest times go faster. So while you're working on a sequence, you can actually ingest more data into the system and it creates this overall efficiency. And it's these types of things that I think provided a great opportunity for innovation in the storage domain for these types of that's working >> requiring new architectures in storage, right? I mean, yeah, >>I mean, th th so one of the things that's happened in, in bringing SSDs in is that the old protocols were very slow, etc. And now we all the new protocols within in Vme and potentially even more new protocols coming in, uh, into this area. What's micron? What, how is micron making this thing happen? This speed that's gonna provide these insights? >>It's a fan fan. Fantastic question and you're absolutely right. The, the world of standards is something that we found over the course of time. If you can get a group of industry players wrapped around a given set of standards, you can create a large enough market and then people can innovate on top of that. And for us in the, in the storage domain, the big transitions had been in Sada and NBME. You see that happening today when we talked a little bit about maybe a teaser for what's coming a little later at, at our event, um, in some of the broader areas in the market, we're talking about how fabrics attach storage and infrastructure. And interestingly enough, where people are innovating quite a bit right now is around using the NBME infrastructure over fabrics themselves, which allows for shared storage across a network as opposed to just within a given server there. >>There's some fantastic companies that are out there that are actually delivering both software stacks and hardware accelerators to take advantage of existing NBME SSDs. But the protocol itself gets preserved. But then they can share these SSDs over a network, which takes a scenario where before you were locked with your storage stranded within a server and now you can actually distribute more broad. It's amazing difference, isn't it at that potential of looking at data over as broad an area as you want to. Absolutely. And being able to address it directly and having it done with standards and then having it done with low enough latency such that you aren't feeling severely disadvantaged, taking that SSD out of a box and making it available across a broad network. So you guys have a huge observation space. Uh, you sell storage to the enterprise, you sell storage to the cloud everywhere. >>I want to ask you about the macro because when you look at the traditional storage suppliers, you know, some of them are struggling right now. There aren't many guys that are really growing and gaining share because the cloud is eating away at that. You guys sell to the cloud. So that's fine. Moving, you know, arms dealer, whoever wins it may the best man win. Um, but, but at the same time, customers have ingested so much all flash. It's giving them head room and so they're like, Hey, I'm good for awhile. I used to have this spinning disc. I'd throw spinning disc at it at the problem till I said, give me performance headroom. That has changed. Now we certainly expect a couple of things that that will catch up and there'll be another step function. But there's also elasticity. Yes. Uh, you saw for instance, pure storage last quarter said, wow, hit the price dropped so fast, it actually hurt our revenues. >>And you'd say, well, wait a minute. If the price drops, we want people to buy more. There's no question that they will. It just didn't happen fast enough from the quarter. All of these interesting rip currents going on. I wonder what you're seeing in terms of the overall macro. Yeah. It's actually a fantastic question. If you go back in time and you look at the number of sequential quarters, when we had ASP decreases across the industry, it was more than six. And the duration from peak to trough on the spot markets was high double digit percentages. Not many markets go through that type of a transition. But as you suggested, there's this notion of elasticity that exists, which is once the price gets below a certain threshold, all of a sudden new markets open up. And we're seeing that happen today. We're seeing that happen in the client space. >>So, so these devices actually, they're going through this transition where companies are actually saying, you know what, we're going to design out the hard drive cages for all platforms across our portfolio going into the future. That's happening now. And it's happening largely because these price points are enabling that, that situation and the enterprise a similar nature in terms of average capacities and drives being deployed over time. So it's, I told you, I think the last time we saw John, I told just one of the most exciting times to be in the memory and storage industry. I'll hold true to that today. I, I'm super excited about it, but I just bought a new laptop and, and you know, I have, you know, a half a half a terabyte today and they said for 200 bucks you can get a terabyte. Yes. And so I said, Oh wow, I could take everything from 1983 and bring it, bring it over. >>Yeah. Interestingly, it was back ordered, you know, so I think, wow, it am I the only one, but this is going to happen. I mean, everybody's going to have, you know, make the price lower. Boom. They'll buy more. We, we, we believe that to be the case for the foreseeable future. Okay. Do you see yourself going in more into the capacity market as well with SSTs and I mean, this, this, this drop, let's do big opportunity or, yeah. Actually, you know, one of the areas that we feel particularly privileged to be able to, to engage in is the, the use of QLC technology, right. You know, quad level solar for bits per cell technology. We've integrated this into a family of, uh, of SSDs for the enterprise, or interestingly enough, we have an opportunity to displace hard drives at an even faster rate because the core capability of the products are more power efficient. >>They've got equal to, or better performance than existing hard drives. And when you look at the TCO across a Reed intensive workloads, it's actually, it's a no brainer to go replace those HDD workloads in the client space. There's segments of the market where we're seeing QLC to play today for higher, higher capacity value segments. And then there's another segment for performance. So it's actually each segment is opening up in a more dramatic way. So the last question, I know you got some announcements today. They haven't hit the wire yet, but what, can you show us a little leg, Derrick? What can you tell us? So I, I'll, I'll give you this much. The, um, the market today, if you go look in the enterprise segment is essentially NBME and SATA and SAS. And if you look at MDME in 20 2019 essential wearing crossover on a gigabyte basis, right? >>And it's gonna grow. It's gonna continue to grow. I mentioned earlier the 9,300 product that we use for machine learning, AI workloads, super high performance. There's a segment of the market that we haven't announced products in today that is a, a a mainstream portion of that market that looks very, very interesting to us. In addition, we can never forget that transitions in the enterprise take a really long time, right, and Sada is going to be around for a long time. It may be 15% of the market and 10% out a few years, but our customers are being very clear. We're going to continue to ship Satta for an extended period of time. The beautiful thing about about micron is we have wonderful 96 layer technology. There's a need in the market and both of the segments I described, and that's about as much as I can give you, I don't bet against data. Derek, thanks very much for coming on. Thank you guys so much. You're welcome. There's a lot of facts. Keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back at micron insight 2019 from San Francisco. You're watching the cube.