 Intro, Moscone is red, and if Moscone is red, it's because Oracle Open World is here. And this is theCUBE, we go out, we extract the signal from the noise, we go to the events, we're going to talk about Flash. Brian Cox is here, he is the Director of Marketing at SandDisk, I'm here with my co-host Stu Miniman. Brian, welcome to theCUBE. Well, thank you very much, glad to be here, Dave. Stu, it's always a pleasure. So Brian, we were talking earlier in our intro about how important Flash is, and how much it relates to Oracle Open World, because in the database world, performance is everything. All the Flash vendors are here, the customers are really leading edge adopters of Flash. But I want to start with SandDisk. You guys are invisible to a lot of people, but even though you have a great brand name in the consumer side, but in the enterprise, a lot of people don't know about SandDisk. Tell us about SandDisk, let's start with the company in general. Yeah, so SandDisk helped pioneer Flash memory-based storage 25 years ago, and in that they've continued to innovate, people see their products that take the form of everyday use products, such as camera cards, right? The SD cards, or the thumb drives. So we've been able to help customers have a much richer experience with those devices. We also help out with a number of the smartphone manufacturers, the Ultrabooks, tablets, you know, if you pop the cover on those, many of those are using SandDisk technology to give you that very rapid performance in a very small, cost-effective, low-power form factor. Well, the same kind of challenges that we run up against about losing battery power and wanting our apps to run faster as consumers also applies to the data center. So we look at what we can do to further unleash the application performance, enhance the user experience, drop the cost of running the infrastructure that you have in your storage and servers. And so we're a key enabler of that performance and efficiency. So before we get at the enterprise, I just want to share with people. So I got some stats on SandDisk that I want to share with the audience. It's a $5.6 billion company in revenue. You got over $4 billion in cash on the balance sheet, nearly a billion dollars in R&D investment, 5,000 employees globally. You guys are a substantial organization. Right. We're now applying a lot of that prowess to the enterprise. So talk a little bit more about the enterprise play. Yeah, happy to do so. You know, it's a nice thing is I can go up to most any customer and mention SandDisk and they'll instantly recognize us from their experience as consumers. They love the product. It's a very positive halo for me to then discuss, you know that rich user experience that you get in using your, you know, your Ultrabook or using your smartphone. You know, that same kind of thing we're bringing to the data center. And to us it's really all about the applications. It's all about the apps and what can we do to help provide better service to end users by having those apps run not only more quickly but more predictably, but then also help the data center manager lower the infrastructure costs that they've been saddled with. And it's not just lowering the amount of the hardware costs and the cooling and the power but it's also the licensing costs, I think are very, very key. The more that we can unshackle the massive amounts of hardware that's needed to run the apps, it allows the IT managers to do more innovative things instead of just maintaining licenses and paying for those costs and go and invest in new deployments, new workflows to help the business run better. Well, we were talking about this off camera and Stu, we've done work on this. If you could go check out Wikibon's research on best practices in Oracle environments. If you invest a little bit more in optimizing your storage infrastructure and utilize Flash, what you're going to do is reduce the number of cores that you're required to deploy and support these applications. Of course, how does Oracle price and price by core? So, you're attacking the biggest problem of CapEx within an Oracle environment. Brian, what are some of the other problems that you see customers trying to solve that where Flash fits well? Well, so once again, I want to bring it back to the applications. What can I do to help that CFO run their Oracle apps financials more quickly so they can have their customers shave a day or two off of month-end clothes? That has meaningful business impact for the financial reporting of a company or I can help in the operation side run the ERP application. So you can get in another batch run or two per day and get much more optimized in regards to your production. That reduces costs. It helps you be much more efficient in delivering product to your end customers. A lot of that's enabled by the underlying infrastructure and what can I do with using Flash technology to do that? And so that's what SanDisk is doing is being a key enabler for the enterprise in helping with application performance and the overall cost of that hardware software infrastructure. No, what was that? You're just holding up. Hold that up. So I have a number of products. This is actually a prototype. Pull it right up to your face. This is a prototype of something that was just announced a few months ago. So I'll put it here on the table where it might be able to be seen easier. This is what we call our ultra-gim. This is basically putting Flash technology onto a memory module, a dim. So where it used to be very expensive, expensive RAM plugged into the memory channel, we can now plug in relatively an inexpensive Flash storage compared to RAM and be able to get much larger footprints at a much lower cost. So for example, if you want to run, yeah, and if you want to run in-memory databases, you can plug these into dozens of dim slots where you couldn't afford to do that with traditional RAM and now you can do things with in-memory databases that you couldn't do before because you couldn't afford to and now you can. That unleashes a whole new level of application performance. So everybody knows about the Flash technologies that you see on the SD cards, you see on the thumb drives. And so you think, conceptually, about how this all builds up. This is a drive, it looks like a hard drive, but what it is, it's really a bunch of the Flash chips that you would normally, if you popped open a SD card, and you just stack those up, put it in through the same form- Where's the skinny disk in there? There is not. And so it's more reliable. I can drop this thing and not worry about crashing the drive, it runs more quickly. Open it up again. Let's show the audience there. Right, so you can see how all the Flash memory chips- Amazing packaging. Yeah, stack up. Now what's the capacity of that? Well, you can get, depending on if it's SaaS or SATA, we're already up to terabyte drives and that's going to grow even more rapidly. So I came from the system vendor side, worked at the leading storage companies, we worked at leading server companies, and what we're seeing is the technology of Flash is quickly catching up to where we've seen things like hard drives, more traditional technologies, which max out now at four terabytes, we'll be soon seeing that reached with Flash drives. So it plugs in to the exact same spot as a traditional hard drive, one for one, easy swap in. In fact, my college-aged son said, Dad, can you get me a SanDisk drive? Because I got to swap out this old hard drive in my laptop. He's a mechanical engineer. He's running SOLIDWORKS. He can't run it fast enough. So he wants Flash himself. So Stu, you know this well. Used to work at a large storage company. And how did you solve performance bottleneck problems? You'd throw more spindles at it, and you had the high speed, which is sort of an oxymoron, disk drives, 15,000 RPM disk drives, that you'd throw at the problem. Yeah, absolutely. So Brian, I'm wondering if we can talk a little bit about differentiation, because there are a lot of Flash companies that came out, and I think SanDisk was one of the first that really made an acquisition in the space to make a splash of the Flash off acquisition. Because it's not only the hardware, it's the software piece of it that's really going to differentiate, because just as we saw in the disk drive manufacturers, you know, back when we worked in some of the system vendors, we went down to two or three vendors. The expectation is over the next 12 to 18 months, there will be some consolidation. We've already seen acquisitions, not only Flash off, but Viridint was just acquired. Violins going IPO, Fusion IOs in the space, but you know, so can you walk through, you know, where does SanDisk differentiate itself in the enterprise, and what does your kind of stack compare to others out there? Sure, so I think it starts with the orientation. So, you know, we can talk about the lower level technologies, but really, as I was saying at the beginning, it's all just an enabler for the applications. But if you're going to look to have a full stack, a full ecosystem to unleash that, it's a combination of what you do as enablers in hardware, but also in the software. So we've made a number of acquisitions at SanDisk to do that specific thing. So one, as you mentioned, was Flash off, and that is a server-side caching software. And what it does is it helps to optimize, you know, putting that hot data onto the fastest storage that you can get, and thus unleashes new levels of application performance that you never saw before. But you need some intelligence to make sure that you're always hitting the hot data to really the fast storage. And that's what Flash off helps to do, is to maximize the return that you're getting on this investment. And we also bought a company called Schooner, which helps with in-memory databases. It provides the intelligence to effectively have an extension to your DRAM, but put it onto Flash. And so we're looking at ways to potentially marry that technology with what we have with our Flash dims called the Ultra dim that'll be coming out this next year. So. So I wonder if I could come back to your college-age son, right? He's dying to get the Flash, because he doesn't want to use the disk. You sell to all the major, you know, system manufacturers and storage manufacturers. Yes, six of the top seven. And you were talking about the economics before, you talked about the capacities. Really, it looks like Flash capacity is accelerating faster than disk capacity. So do you see that within the next couple of years that all active data is going to reside on Flash, and then the role of spinning disk will just be largely more like a bit bucket? Well, you know, these transitions all take time, right? There's a lot of infrastructure that does have to get paid off for a full ROI, but we do see the trends inevitably heading that direction. You know, where I worked previously at EMC, previously at NetApp, we were always predicting this bathtub effect. And so what you have on one end for the really active data is that's moving to Flash. And then on the other end, it's for the cold data, we're seeing some of the technologies, such as tape, actually getting a bit of a resurgence, maybe some SATA hard drives. But the stuff that's in between the fiber channel drives or the SAS drives, it's going to be a very difficult environment going forward when Flash has the capacities with superior speed and lower cost than what a fast hard drive does. So when you look at your market opportunity, do you see the opportunity as simply, you know, take it over for where the spinning disks were or is there incremental value that you're able to drive because of application performance, maybe rewriting the way applications are written that will actually, in your view, will that accelerate IT spending? Well, I think there's going to be new ways that we look at it. So, you know, when Flash Storage and SSDs first came out, people did a one for one about how you manage a hard drive and tried to manage the Flash storage the same way. But it doesn't have to be that way. And so there's a new thinking that's coming about is saying, let's not design for how we manage hard drives, let's design for the advantages of Flash. As I said, just in very simply, you know, the stability of these, you don't have set and failures like you do on a hard drive. You know, you get the boot sector error. You tend not to have that frequency of, oh my God, the whole thing just died, what's going to happen to my data. Flash is much more resilient, you know, in regards to failures. You know, you may see it where over time, but that's actually very predictable. But it's predictable, it's measurable, and you can just do it just like, you know, changing the role in your car. It's very predictable, versus a hard drive, it's a sudden failure, it's a blowout, right? It's a little, Now who do you guys sell to? Can you share with us some of your customers? Yeah, so we have a number of customers that we're selling to you. Basically, we work very closely with the leading server and storage vendors who OEM our product. This would be Dell, HP, IBM, NetApp, and there's others that we haven't necessarily gone public with all the design wins, but we're in six of the top seven. Plus, we're picking up every day a number of the fast-emerging all-flash array vendors, for example. So Whiptale just acquired and process being acquired by Cisco. Tejil has a partnership with us, you know, and we'll be talking also with some others. News may even hit and go public this week. So we're seeing an attraction to the vision that Sandisk has about unleashing application performance and taking that really to a different level of discussion than what they're hearing from a lot of the other flash storage vendors who tend to talk about PE cycles, or IOPS, or over-provisioning, but not really talking about the applications like the Oracle apps or the ERP. It's all about the apps. We're here at Oracle, open world, Brian. Thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. How are you having you? Thank you, David. I'll keep it right there, everybody. Stay on this theme of flash. We'll be right back with our next guest from violin. This is theCUBE, but we'll be right back. This is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. All right.