 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 Howard, business development manager and Greg Kincaid, ecosystem enablement program manager. Welcome guys. Thank you. Thank you very much. So day three, you still have voices. That's impressive. Your feet are doing okay. 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 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 a SATA and a capacity layer, you can get small block random reads of a 500,000 for a four new cluster. That's very impressive, 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 you 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 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 NVDim Brigade. Tell us what is NVDim? Why is it important? Well, NVDim is very exciting. It's basically 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've got up to, what is it, 32 gigabytes? Actually, yes, we're releasing our 32 gig NVDim in production next month, which is just right around the corner. Wow. And how many DIMs 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 NVDim should you wish to. That's a lot of memory. It is a lot, and it's very, very fast. Very, very fast. Okay, so tell us some of the changes that need to be made in order to exploit this. This is different, isn't it? So can you give some examples of how you're working with the ISVs, for example? 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. Sorry, Dave, I was just going to say, let's dig into a customer example. As I always love to hear how are these technologies, one, being co-developed in collaboration with the end users, right? And two, how are you seeing them 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 100 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% cores. 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 costs, even though you purchased the NVDM 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. When I'm hearing, Eric, what you're saying, are customers seeing pretty significant power savings and rolling to cost savings with the performance and the speed that you're able to deliver? Yes, if you look at it, one of the other use cases for the NVDM persistent memory is that they used to use 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 NVDM, the endurance that has just natively comes with DRAM, they were able to replace the SSDs with the NVDM and then continue to use that for many, many quarters. It's a big cost savings. Definitely. So can I go back to what we were talking about before in terms of implementation of this? So what's necessary, you need the software, the ISV software, you obviously need the micro-on-NVDM. That is great. 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 NVDM. Right. And one of the reasons why is when a system boots up that supports NVDM, 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 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 systems. On multiple OEM systems, yes, that is supported. So there's no requirement for anything special with other than that, 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 the performance benefit and the endurance and the low latency of NVDMs. And people like SAP, for example. Yes. Okay, that's very exciting indeed. Are you doing the same thing with your... 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 add an SSD to a 200 node cluster for a 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? 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 commodity 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. The performance is really outstanding when you look at an NVDM. And 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 NVDMs in this particular demo system. We could have gone, 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 the people that are coming in the booth, they get excited too. It makes the show really fun. I think people also don't understand that there's more than one kind of SSD. We just announced a QLC NAND-based SSD that for right once, read many, could actually supplant many of the hard drives that are used in secondary storage or archives. It also must be kind of fun to educate people on, hey, guess what? There's not just different flavors, what Micron is doing, evolving our technologies and enabling them to learn about things that they didn't know about. I imagine that must also be a pretty cool- I'm working with the software developers as well, so closely, so this is exciting. 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 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 and people that I'm talking about. It's just very rewarding. So we're got more than halfway through 2018, scary, September versus Saturday. So going towards the end of the calendar, this excitement that I'm getting from both of you, what are you excited about Micron going into early part of 2019, being able to surprise and delight your customers with? Right, okay. Well, we're going to continue to do all of the performance testing that we've 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 to continue to partner with the major players to make sure that our SSDs are performing in their applications. And I think with the fact that we're releasing our 32 gig NVDM 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 NVDMs. Well guys, thanks so much for stopping by and talking with David and me about the evolution of Micron and the excitement that you get from hearing that validation in the field. 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. Great Eric, thanks for your time. For David Flurry, 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 guest.