>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its Ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with David Floyer, and Dave and I are here, day three, David, of our VMworld 2018 coverage, if you can believe it. We're excited to welcome to theCUBE, for the first time, a couple of gentlemen from Micron. We have Eric Caward, business development manager, and Greg Kincaid, ecosystem enablement program manager. Welcome guys. >> Thank you, good to be here. >> Thank you very much. >> So day three, you still have voices, that's impressive, your feet are doing okay? >> Yes, yeah. >> Pretty good, pretty good. >> Good, so Greg, tell us a little bit about your role and specifically what some of the new exciting announcements from Micron with respect to flash. >> So my role is to find deployments where SSDs can improve the performance significantly. Also, any case where you can have simplicity for the system administrator. So, with the new version of VMware 6.7, we've got, we've implemented, using NVMe as our cache layer, and set as our capacity layer to get tremendous performance across the spectrum of reads and writes. >> So can you give us some examples of how good that performance is? What sort of impact have you had? >> So, take for instance using NVMe as the cache layer and as data and a capacity layer, you can get small block random reads of 500,000 for a new cluster. >> That's very impressive. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. So can you make some savings in terms of the improvements in the VM density and things like that that you can achieve-- >> Absolutely, so almost all of these, well, all of the SSDs are in a two and a half form factor, and so you can get much better density per U with those kinds of SSDs, as opposed to a hard drive where you have to go to a three-inch to get that kind of density. >> So performance density, tons of data, what are some of the things in your opinion, Greg, that differentiate Micron Solution here, versus all those other guys out there? >> Well, we don't just put together a solution. We actually do considerable amount of testing, both in benchmarking, we also do a quite a bit of application testing as well. And we publish a very thorough reference architecture that's available on our website to act as a pragmatic blueprint for those who want to implement those kinds of solutions. >> Excellent, excellent. So, Eric, you're a part of the NVDIMM brigades. >> Yes. >> Tell us what is NVDIMM. Why is it important? >> Well, NVDIMM is very exciting. It's basically a memory that doesn't forget. So it's on the memory bus, it's comprised of DRAM, a controller, and NAND, and when the power is catastrophically lost, all your data is retained. >> So you go up to, what is it, 32 gigabytes on the DIMM? >> Actually, yes we're releasing our 32 gig NVDIMM in production next month, which is right around the corner. >> Wow, and and how many DIMMs can you have in a? >> You can have up to, typically in a 24 socket system, you can have up to 22 of those can be NVDIMM should you wish to. >> That's a lot of memory. >> It is a lot, and it's very, very fast. >> Very, very fast OK, so, tell us some of the changes that need to be made in order to exploit this. This is this is different, isn't it? So, can you give some examples of how you're working with the ISVs, for example? >> Certainly, certainly. From the operating system standpoint, Microsoft Windows Server 2016 supports, natively supports persistent memory. So does the Linux kernel version 4.2 and newer. Along with that, not only that, but you also have applications that are written from the ground up to support to be persistent memory aware. You have Exchange Server, you have SQL Server 2016, and with those applications they can actually access the persistent memory in byte mode, which is much faster than block mode, but you also can more legacy applications can get benefit from block mode, also. >> Wasn't, sorry Dave, I was just going to say let's dig into a customer example. I always love to hear how are these technologies, one, being co-developed as in collaboration with the end-users, right? And two, how are you seeing them in the, in the field actually helping customers transform their businesses from the inside out? >> Well, so one example that comes to mind, actually VMware just did a study with Oracle licensing, and they took a 12 core solution, and they put the redo log onto traditional storage, and they were able to get a certain amount of performance. Let's just call it a hundred units of performance. They did the same thing with the same workload, but they only used nine cores. So, that's actually a reduction in 25% course, but because the redo log was actually put on persistent memory, which again you're accessing that storage at DRAM like speeds, it kept the CPU much, much more busy, much more active, and they actually saw about a 2% increase in performance, but because the licensing costs are tied to your core count; actually, you could potentially save on licensing cost, even though you purchased a NVDIMM to have faster persistent storage. >> What about other benefits like to a data center in terms of energy efficiency? One of the things that Pat Gelsinger said on Monday was that VMware and their Green Charter, if you will, has saved 540 million, I think, tons of CO2 emissions. What I'm hearing Eric, what you're saying, are customers seeing pretty significant like power savings, and that were like roll into cost savings with the performance in this speed that you're able to deliver? >> Yes, if you look at it one of the other use cases for the NVDIMM, persistent memory, is that they used to NAND storage to write these logs, but because of the endurance, it ends up that they would have to replace the SSDs on a three month cadence. Because of the NVDIMM, the endurance it has just natively comes with DRAM, they were able to replace the SSDs with the NVDIMM, and then continue to use that for many, many quarters. >> It's a big cost savings. >> Definitely. >> So, can I go back to the what we were talking about before in terms of implementation of this? >> Yes. >> So, what's necessary? You need the software, the ISV software. You obviously need the Micron and the DIMM. >> That is correct. >> Anything else that you need? >> Yes, the actual, the hardware that you have to have, you have to have, not necessarily a specific CPU, but if you have to have the BIOS that basically goes in and is aware of NVDIMM. >> Right. >> And, one of the reasons why is when a system boots up, that supports NVDIMM, it goes out and looks and sees, is there a valid image set to true? If so, it will load that image from the NAND, through the controller, into the DRAM. Then when it's completed, it will go on to booting up the OS. The OS is none the wiser that that data wasn't sitting in DRAM the entire time, but as you can see if your, if your bios support isn't there from the start with that, that process would never happen. >> But, you can have that BIOS is available on most, most system. >> On multiple, multiple OEM systems. Yes, that is supported. >> Great. So, that there's no requirement for anything special with other than that? >> Other than that, correct. >> That's amazing. So, you've got a pretty, are you going through other ISVs as well? Are you. >> Yes, there are multiple ISVs that we're working with to enable that, basically the performance benefit and the endurance and the low latency of NVDIMMs. >> And people like SAP, for example? >> Yes. >> Perfect. Okay, that's very excited, very, very exciting indeed. Are you doing the same thing with your, class? >> Yes, we actually work with many partners. We work with not just Vmware, but all of the enterprise partners. We do case studies, and we do cost analysis as well. So, for instance we found that if you statistically, strategically add an SSD to a 200 node cluster for Hadoop, you can get the same performance there that if you had added 80 additional nodes for the entire cluster. So, that's quite a bit of a savings of 80 nodes versus an additional 200 NVMe SSDs. >> Yeah, that's great. >> What's some of the feedback on these new advancements that you're hearing from some of the people that are coming by to visit the Micron booth here at VMworld? >> Well, I think people are a little surprised that we are so focused on systems, and making sure that they work on the performance with SSDs. I think people, sometimes they think of Micron in the early days when we were just simply a commodities broker with DRAM, but we're much, much more than that. >> So, customers are reacting to what sounds like an evolution of Micron? >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> Eric, what are some of your-- >> And to be honest, my favorite is when people come by, and they look at the numbers, and they're just like oh my gosh. (laughing) The performance is really outstanding when you look at an NVDIMM, and it's just, it's simply because it is DRAM acting as a storage device. It's sitting on the memory bus. It's sitting on the memory channel, right next to the CPU. The latency is absolutely fantastic. There are certain workloads that are really, really gain a lot of benefit by low latency for quality of service. Then you have just the raw bandwidth, and this is only with two NVDIMMs in this particular demo system. We could have, excuse me, we could have gone up to six in a CPU. So, we could have tripled our performance just with one CPU on one node. So, it's pretty exciting when when the people that are coming in the booth, they get excited too. It makes, it makes this show really fun. >> I think people also don't understand that there's more than one kind of SSD, and we just announced that QLC, a NAND based SSD, that for write once read many could actually supplant many of the hard drives that are used in secondary storage or archives. >> So, it also must be kind of fun to educate people on, hey guess what? There's not just different flavors, but look what Micron is doing. >> Right. >> Evolving our technologies and enabling them to you know, learn about things that they didn't know about. I imagine that must also be a pretty cool. >> I'm working with a software developers as well, so closely, so this is exciting. >> I mean the applications are just innumerable. I mean we're working with artificial intelligence. We're working on machine learning. Applications are other than just the standard database that most people think of accelerating with SSDs. >> Excellent. >> And, to be honest, I'm very passionate about technology, just, I love to geek out, if you will. >> I can tell. >> And, I love seeing the light bulbs come on in people that I'm talking about. It's just very rewarding. >> So we're gone, more than halfway through 2018, scary. September 1st is Saturday. (laughing) So, going towards the end of the of the calendar year, this excitement that I'm getting from both of you, what are you excited about Micron, you know going into early part of 2019, being able to surprise and delight your customers with? >> All right. >> Well, we're going to continue to, to do all of the performance testings that were done. We're going to, as we bring new SSDs to the market, we're going to continue to add tuning advice, and detailed deployment instructions for our customers. We're going continue to partner with the major players to make sure that our SSDs, their performance and their applications. >> And I think with the fact that we're releasing our 32 gig NVDIMM, actually in September. The ecosystem, as it solidifies, it becomes more robust. There's just going to be use cases that our engineers and our team haven't thought of yet. And, so it's going to be really exciting to see what new use cases are out there for super, very fast NVDIMMs. >> Well guys, thanks so much for stopping by and talking with David and me about-- >> Thanks for having us. >> The evolution of Micron, and the excitement that you get from from hearing that validation in the field, and we look forward to hearing what's coming out shortly. So, we'll have to have you back on. >> Sounds great, thanks Lisa, thanks David. >> Love to be back. >> Excellent. Greg, Eric, thanks for your time. For David Floyer my co-host, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE, live from Vmworld 2018. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guests. (electronic music)

>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE. Covering AWS re:Invent 2017, presented by AWS, Intel and our ecosystem of partners. >> Hey welcome back to AWS Reinvent 2017. I'm Lisa Martin, very well-caffeinated today, so is David Floyer, we're really excited to be joined by two newcomers to the CUBE. We have Ryan Baxter, the director of cloud and verticals from Micron, welcome. >> Thank you. And Mo Farhat, director of SSD business line management, a marketing guy, welcome guys. >> Ryan: Thank you. >> Mo: Thank you, thank you. >> So Micron, a 35-year-old business. You must have seen massive changes in the last 35 years, but tell us what you guys are doing with AWS. What's exciting you about the announcements coming out, how are you partnering with them? >> Well, as you're seeing around you today, the rise of hyper scale is the true story in IT. And we're closely engaged with AWS to support their storage, memory, and emerging memory technologies as well. And we're tremendously excited by the potential that AWS that can bring to the market and is bringing to the market today. >> So let's unwrap that a little bit more. One of the things that seems to be happening is that the traditional nexus of networking, storage, going all the through the central processor is breaking up. >> Mo: Right. >> And you've got some very interesting stuff with the NVDIMMS. Can you talk a little bit about that and what does it mean to architecture? >> Sure, so I don't know what line isn't blurring these days, when it comes to computing, so we are certainly developing and pushing and product today called NVDIMM. It is the first example of persistent memory which we believe will really usher in a completely new model, and really a way of thinking about, the way folks do compute. It really requires some change on the system side, but the advantages are significant. With just a little bit of investment in terms of adjustments and software, and the way you use hardware, what you can gain from a performance perspective is enormous. >> By having large amounts of D-RAM and behind it, a large amount of Nand storage, and that combination of the two together on the same piece that goes in the computer suddenly multiplies by, how many, 10 times? >> Oh gosh, at least an order of magnitude. We're pretty excited about where this can go, and obviously it doesn't come for free. There will be some investment as far as the application stack, and how things need to change from a hardware enablement perspective, but yeah, things are changing very quickly. The traditional model of really memory and storage is very much at risk and very much blurring these days, and we're excited about where it's going. >> So let's talk about the SSDs. I've been following the flash market for a long time, and saying what a difference it makes to applications in the amount of data that they can get into them, both from the memory side and the storage side. So what's happening on the SSD side? What are you focusing on? >> Well what's most exciting about the developments in SSD today isn't just that they're accelerating existing workloads, but they're enabling all new workloads. Things like real-time analytics to drive our AI engines have revolutionary potential for our daily lives, and not just in the data center. And so when we take a look at what's happening in the SSD market today, the big story is the ramp in adoption in PCIE-connected or NVME SSDs. And we believe that we're at a turning point right now you know, led by AWS and other hyperscalers, and truly driving this adoption. And what NVME allows you to do is really harness the inherent parallelism of solid memory technology, solid state memory technology, and enable better control, enable lower latency, higher throughput and really move away from the legacy IO stack that was built for the hard drive era. Or as we like to call it at Micron, spinning rust. >> Ryan: Yeah. (laughs) >> And that's really amazing, isn't it? If you can have real-time analytics connecting to systems of record at the same time, that ushers in a complete, what we call at Wikibon, systems of intelligence, a completely new way of being able to provide much, much more data to those systems and drive productivity by an order, again, really very high level's difference of the type of applications that you can have. So let me ask you, this is a lot of change that we talked about, where we're taking out the network side, we're taking out the storage side, and the memory side. What's some of the most important things about getting this to happen over the next few years? >> Right, well I think, I'll start I guess. One of the most important things in our minds is paying attention to the customers, and really what drives them, what provides the most value for their deployments in the cloud. We have the privilege of working with folks like AWS because these customers, at the end of the day, challenge us to be better. They challenge us to maintain or improve our quality levels. They challenge us to be more flexible from a go-to-market and business model perspective. And frankly, a lot of the features that they're looking at incorporating into otherwise standard products today, actually end up finding their way into the next generation products that we design tomorrow. So it informs a lot of the way we need to think about traditional memory and storage models in the future. >> What about the standards that are required? >> The standards? >> Yeah. >> Yeah so, the standards bodies are alive and well, and are absolutely necessary for what we need to do to push our products into the market on a daily basis. Oftentimes those standards are too rigid, or not feature-laden enough to be able to get enough benefit for the particular end customer. So in those cases, we're sort of having to bend the model a little bit. Our products are based on a relatively straightforward set of foundational standards, but from there, we listen to the customer to enable new features, new capability of our otherwise standard products. >> Absolutely and in fact, Micron today is really working with our customers up front in helping drive the standards, with deep technical engagement on next generation, NVME features, as well as next generation form factors. You know, really our technology leadership in D-RAM, Nand, everything in between really positions Micron very strongly to shape the future here, and we can't do it without strong customer engagement, and we're really very excited about the potential for a future here. >> Yeah. >> Fantastic. >> How does the standards focus that you guys have, how does that set Micron apart from your competition? >> Well it helps us be a good player in the industry. It helps cement leadership. It allows us to have a playing field that goes to the benefit of our customers, our partners, and delivering predictability to the market, delivering overall lower cost to the market, and all the other ancillary benefits, that agreement our standards provide. >> I loved what you talked about with respect to working together in partnership with your customers. We hear a lot about that from AWS. They're very customer-centric. There was an article on siliconangle.com this morning, it was the third installation of John Furrier's exclusive with Andy Jassy. And I love their kind of backwards approach to product development. Which is really is surprisingly still revolutionary. The customer is such a driving force into what Amazon has become, and it sounds like what you're both saying, that's really very much paralleled at Micron. >> Absolutely, you know leading is hard. When you're firmly looking forward and really blazing new trails in technology, in our product set here, and really driving the revolution towards the solid state data center. You can't do it looking in the rear view mirror. You've got to go in collaboration. It's really some of the most exciting things that we do here is really enabling our customers to succeed. >> And your focus at the moment, I'm putting words in your mouth, I presume that's really weird that cloud providers, the hyperscale people like AWS, like Microsoft, like Google, are those sort of where you're starting the conversations and then that will come down into the enterprise as well after that. Is that the model? >> You know, we provide solutions to a broad range of customers. >> Okay, yeah. >> There is no doubt that hyperscale is in the driver's seat in terms of demand now and into the future for IT technology of all stripes. So we're very focused on it. >> Yeah and there are cloud models that obviously are heavily supported by our OEM customers as well. So maintaining engagement and really being best in class in their eyes is also extremely important for us. >> So this event, I actually heard this morning, 44,000 people here across the entire Strip. Last year, it was around 30,000 or so. How does this massive momentum that AWS has, how does that inspire Micron, and what can people see, feel, touch and experience at your booth here in the expo? >> Again, the growth in the number of attendees is nothing compared to the growth in AWS's business overall. These numbers are truly inspiring. They're changing the landscape of IT today, and so you know, encourage everybody to come by our booth and look at the variety of solutions that we have, both on the SSD side, memory side, as well as the all-popular NVDIMMs. >> And I think what events like this help to do is mobilize 44,000 of the brightest people in the world that come from all different walks of life, not just from a technical perspective, but software, hardware, application-oriented marketing to really have a meeting of the minds, if you will. And it really does, it challenges the traditional way of thinking of how we design our solutions, and how we support customers like AWS. >> Well guys, thank you so much for stopping by and chatting with David and me. >> Thank you very much. >> Really exciting to hear what you guys are doing, and we wish you continued success. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you, Lisa. (crosstalk) >> For Mo and Ryan, and my co-host David Floyer, I am Lisa Martin, you're watching the CUBE live on Day 2 at SWA 2017 re:Invent. Stick around, we'll be right back. (electronic music)