 Live from the Mendeley Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2016. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. Now, here's your host, John Furrier. Hey, welcome back, everyone. We're here live at VMworld 2016. It's theCUBE's SiliconANGLE's flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, my ghost, Mark Farley, who's here, and now, good to see you again. Yeah, nice to see you, John. Scott Shanley, Principal Technologist at Micron. Welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you. Pleasure to be back. I always enjoy coming on the show, so. So day one is almost in the books. What's your thoughts? I mean, Micron here is doing some pretty interesting things. Flash, storage, again, continuing the conversation. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's a wonderful thing for us to have the opportunity to be here. VMworld is fairly new to the Micron 38 years of history that we have. We've been very OEM-centric historically. So, getting out and talking to the end users, understanding the real needs of our customers, not just what their suppliers say they need from us as a supplier. So, building those partnerships and relationships is great, and day one's been great for us. We've been having fun playing Jeopardy down in the booths, so, happy to meet you. How's the boot traffic? Good. As expected for when you're competing with sessions, we get, you know, the average traffic through there, but we get enough people to play Jeopardy, so it's fun. So, what's the evolution of the data center? You hear Pat Gowsen here talking about, and by the way, finally admitting public cloud is here, but acknowledging that on-premise will continue to be the dominant configuration. It's interesting, because you have all the different opportunities between the different platforms. You know, there's always going to be on-premise applications, but there's so much you can do with going public, with the cloud, and going off-premise for the stuff that makes sense to go there, and getting into the virtualized world that we're getting into with the opportunities that we can get with all the new connectivity technologies, and the speeds that we can get out of the local storage versus the external storage, if you will, out in the public space, it's great. So, it's probably fair to say that, you probably wouldn't be here at this show if it wasn't for your integration with vSAN. Exactly, one of our big focuses has been working on the all-flash vSAN. So, two years ago at this event, we launched the world's first vSAN. It was an unapproved product at the time, but we put it together, and we were able to showcase a 40X improvement out of the box, by having an all-flash over even a hybrid-based system, and it's just been creating an evolution of that ever since. So, we've got different iterations of that coming now. Yeah, so what's the status right now of official versions of VMware with your products? What's the right cauldron, if you will? So, with the vSAN 6.2 that we have available, we have an AF-8 and an AF-6 available nodes. We call them ready nodes that are available through our partner SuperMicro as a micron-accelerated solution. So, our goal was to put something out there that's available. We have a reference architecture for our end customers, because not everybody wants to work with a vendor that we chose, but they can get our products, our memory, our DRAM, get our flash products in there. 75% of that box is micron, so it makes sense to talk to us about it, not just to the vendor of the actual ready nodes. And so, we've rented those micron-accelerated solutions. So, as far as having a vSAN detailed solution, what kinds of things did you do, or what kinds of things did you have to solve to make it a perfect fit, or the best fit for vSANs? Exactly. There's a lot of things going on with the vSAN architecture today, where we have issues around performance matching and capacity matching. So, we know that NVMe, for example, is the big buzz in flash storage today, because it's the new interface, but the vSAN architecture that's existing today can't take true advantage of that because it wasn't designed around an NVMe architecture. So, we took a SATA drive that would normally be a one terabyte class of drive. That's more than that system can actually handle in the configurations that it can only max out with the vSAN implementation at 600 gigabytes. So, we actually custom-built a 600-gigabyte drive, totally focused on an all-flash vSAN implementation to tie in with the caching tier that we also have with SAS and PCIe drives. So, selling through SuperMicro and other outlets, it could be difficult to have contact with end-user customers. Are you getting any of that feedback? I mean, where do you see that yourself at Micron? We do. So, we have an actual sales force now that their sole job is to call on our customers' customers and bring that feedback through both to us internally so we know what to build for them, but also through our partners, whether it be SuperMicro or all the OEMs that we know and love, Dell Technologies, HPE, all that kind of good stuff. And what we've also done is put a reference architecture out. So, it tells you the exact configuration we put with the socket sizes, the number of DRAM dims, and the number of drives, and you can put it on any server that's out there available from your choice of vendor. Security comes up a lot. It does. Here at the show, especially here. Yeah, the world of PCI and HIPAA and TAPP and all those wonderful acronyms that I always forget, TAA, that's the one. It is interesting, and we've actually, so we're trying for another first this year, we created an unapproved, too soon to be certified VSAN box that's actually built on another partner of our Cisco UCS that utilizes FIPS certified SAS drives for security, as well as the only TCG-enabled SATA drive in that same VSAN architecture. When you say not approved, what does that mean? Like, not sanctioned, but I don't understand. It's not certified yet. It's in the certification loop with VMware right now, so it'll be on the AVL within the next couple of weeks. Okay, so that's just in motion process right now. Exactly, and it's utilizing actually the same drives we had before, but in their configuration that's security-enabled. And there's some hoops that we had to go through to make a virtual-SAN security-enabled. One of the big challenges that you're seeing with VMware right now, because you mentioned that process brings up some comments we hear in the hallway of the time, is that you want to move fast, customers want security, and Sanjay Poonan's expected to talk tomorrow about this endpoint concept where the apps are coming in. How does that affect the storage equation? It just means we need to be very efficient, very fast, and be able to make systems that are upgradable or in line upgradable for our customer. So if the vSAN 6.2 today has certain limitations, but 6.345 are coming out, the goal is to make sure that whatever we put in the box is able to actually migrate through that so you don't have to buy new hardware every single time a new iteration comes out to optimize around it. And we have the capability through our design center in Austin to work very closely with the VMware organization to solve those problems. Kind of off-color question is R&D, not related to the storage here at VMworld, but what are you guys working on? Micron always has a lot of like, very chip level, firmware stuff going on. But what's the R&D innovation that's in the pipeline? Can you talk about that? Yeah, so the latest thing that we've got going is the concept of 3D cross-point technologies. Cross-point was announced last year. It's part of our joint venture that we do with Intel at our IMFT facility out of Lehigh, Utah. We both work on the product as far as the R&D front. We co-develop the solution through the fabrication process, and then when it gets to the chip level form, we get our opportunities to enable the environments in different fashions. So last year, Intel branded their product Optane. This year, we announced a brand awareness for our version of the cross-point architectures, and it's called the Quantex technology. And Quantex is our way of putting a name to what's new in the world around this cross-point architecture. So there's a big crowd chat last week that Dave Vellante ran with a bunch of luminaries in the industry, kind of like an online panel discussion, if you will, on the crowd chat. And the question that I was fascinated with was, what will be more dominant in terms of cost and performance, flash or spinning disk? And surprisingly, it wasn't 100% towards flash. A lot of people kind of say, no, no, it's cost, still relevant on the disk side. It's not going to be dead anytime soon. What's your thoughts on that debate? I think the way to look at that is, spinning disk in certain applications and in certain use models or certain types of drives is going to die. There's not enough silicon in the world today for flash to take over 100% of the sockets. We're at 5% last year, 10% complete replacement of the storage architectures for 2016, so. There's a media standpoint, there's just not enough inventory. Yeah, we can't build enough of the media to do all 100% takeover today. Five and 15, 10 and 16, we're looking forward to double digits again in 17. So we're going to continue to replace those sockets. And when it comes to the cosplay, the hard part there is you don't want to, everybody likes the dollar per gig. We're all used to dollar per gig, so it's a 15K, 10K, whatever. We've been very open that flash media is never going to be a dollar per gig play. It's look at it from an IO perspective, look at it from a TCO model perspective. So a good example is we go even more into the public cloud. If you're going to a co-location facility, you're paying for floor tile and for power. That's all they care about as far as the metrics, how they bill you. If you have to put in four racks to get spinning media in that system, or you have to put in one rack because my flash media is so much faster, I saved you three floor tiles of space. That'll pay the discs back in less than six months. Hey Scott, so for people that aren't here, if they came to your booth, what would they see? What's the new hottest thing that you're showing off there? We're highlighting the Quantic's technology, of course. Those are products that are going to be coming out through partners and being announced by partners here in the next six months and really into the market after the Perley launch, because that's when we can truly take advantage of that architecture. The other big thing that we're having fun with down there is we've put a 24 terabyte NVMe drive and we have a live demo of that in our booth, so we're actually able to show off the speeds, feeds, slots and watts for all those people that like to see those numbers of a running 24 terabyte drive. So what kind of demo is it? Is it a database system or what, how's it? This particular operation is just a simple file script so that we can put some pretty graphics behind it, but it highlights, so a couple of weeks ago at the Flash Memory Summit, a whole bunch of people came out with, I've got the world's fastest this or I've got the largest density that, none of it was all live and running where we were able to put out a very high capacity drive, 24 terabytes is a lot of disk for someone to mess with and show that we can get concurrently five gigabytes per second read-write mix regardless of sequential or random. Yeah, with NVMe that must be screaming fast. Yes, exactly, and it is NVMe based absolutely because we want to take advantage of those speeds. Scott, for people that aren't here and I love that question, what are they, what's going on in VMworld this year? I mean, obviously they're, you know, a testing to the fact that public cloud's out there. That's obvious. What are the things that you share from your perspective that the folks couldn't make it? What's the vibe? What's the key trends that's coming out of this show? Well, we see that the VMworld shows, VMworld shows always having lots of fun. A lot of the talk was about what's going on with the whole merger stuff, which is just fun side conversation. As far as on the floor, we're seeing a lot of innovation in all of the different architectures that we're looking at. So, VSAN, of course, is still a big topic for a lot of people. It's also the consolidation of storage architectures to where we're getting a lot more hybrid versus solid state or is it, you know, we're not talking disk anymore. We're talking, is it flash and how much, which is really cool, regardless of what booth you go to, whether it's a Dell and HPE or to one of our partners like a Newtonix or a Pure Storage or any of those kinds of guys. And those guys are trying to figure out the ecosystem play. So I was just talking with the folks from HPE and it was clear that they like to see IBM, which is on stage for the folks who didn't see, big announcement with IBM Cloud, which is a testament to this open ecosystem. Exactly. What does that mean? I mean, does that mean more access to all the VMware technology? What does it mean for the ecosystem? Well, the ecosystem changes are really interesting right now. We've kind of started seeing the demise, if you will, of the big boxes. And all the guys that are building the big boxes know it's coming. That's why they've all branched out or bought or acquired startups that are building the new, latest and greatest thing. We're never going to get rid of them completely. It's kind of like the migration to Flash. It takes time and there's years and years of infrastructure sitting out there that we can't just rip out and replace. So seeing the ability to watch these different architectures move in that direction is really cool. And from an ecosystem point of view, there's a lot of new players that can play in this more server-based architecture that's taking over for the traditional Sand NAS architectures. So if someone asks you, Scott, tell me what's going on with VMware. Where have they settled in the stack? I mean, VMware has to find that spot. I was the hypervisor, you mentioned that earlier. Are they finding a nice, sweet spot that can settle into? I think they finally found that nice, comfortable spot. They're doing a good job of getting a broader spectrum of how they're putting everything through with the vSphere and all the different architectural implementations and getting those up into where customers can truly take advantage of it. One of the things they're working on now is licensing costs are always fun and you have to kind of deal with that. And when you put in something like an all Flash array, you reduce the number of required licenses by improving the efficiencies of systems. So watching them pay attention to that and architect around it is also helping keep them in that footprint. Great, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It's our director's set. I want you to give you the last word and spend a minute to just talk about real quick summary of what you said earlier about what's going on in the show and what's next for Micron. So for the show and for Micron, the VMware architectures are something that we're very keen to work with. We've got one of the only 35 people ever to be certified on VSAN as a VM expert that works at Micron. He's actually downstairs in our booth. Our focus is really talking about not only today, but what is next. That's where we get into things like a 24 terabyte drive or how do we enable context and the context architectures correctly so that they don't have a niche but they are able to actually proliferate themselves and grow very consistently within the market space. So that's Chad Lee with Micron here at the director's set at VMworld. This is theCUBE. I'm John Farrier with Mark Farley. This is theCUBE.