 Live from San Jose, California. It's theCUBE, covering innovating to fuel the next decade of big data. Brought to you by Western Digital. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at Western Digital's headquarters in San Jose, California at the Olening campus. A lot of innovation's been going on here, especially in storage for decades. And we're excited to be at this special little press and analyst event that Western Digital put on today to announce some exciting new products. It's called Innovating to Fuel, the next decade of data. And I'm super happy to have a long-time industry veteran. He just told me 35 years. I don't know if I can tell it on air or not. He's Mark Grace. He's the Senior Vice President of Devices for Western Digital. Mark, great to have you on. Thanks, Jeff. Glad to be here. Absolutely. So you've seen this movie over and over and over. I mean, that's one of the cool things about being in the valleys. It's just relentless pace of innovation. So how does today's announcement stack up? As you kind of look at this versus kind of where we've come from. Oh, I think this is maybe one of the, as big as it comes, Jeff, to be honest. I think we've plotted a course now that I think was relatively uncertain for the hard drive industry in the data center and plotted a course that I think we can, we can speak clearly to the market and clearly to customers about the value proposition for rotating magnetic storage for decades to come. Which is pretty interesting because rotating drives have been taken a hit over the last couple of years, right? Flash has been kind of the sexy new kid on the block. So this is something new and- It is. A new S-curve, I think, as John said. I agree. We're jumping on to a, we're extending the S-curve. Let's call it that. I think there's actually plenty of other S-curve opportunities for us. But in this case, I think the industry's, and I would say our customer base, we have been less than clear with those guys about how we see the future of rotating storage in the cloud and enterprise space. And I think today's announcement clarifies that and gives some confidence about architectural decisions relative to rotating storage going forward for a long time. And I think it was pretty interesting because compared to the other technology that was highlighted, the other option, the hammer versus the mammor, this was a much more elegant, simpler way to add this new S-curve into an existing ecosystem. You know, elegance is probably a good word for it and it's always the best solution, I would say. Hammer's been a push for many years. I can't remember the first time I heard about hammer. Still something we're gonna continue to explore and invest in, but it has numerous hurdles compared to the simplicity and elegance, as you say, of mammor. Not the least of which is we're gonna, we're gonna operate at normally ambient temperatures versus apply tremendous heat to try and energize the recording and the technology. So any time you introduce extraordinary heat, you face all kinds of ancillary engineering challenges and this simplifies those challenges down to one critical innovation, which is the oscillator. Pretty interesting because it seems pretty obvious that heat's never a good thing. So it's curious that in the quest for this next S-curve that the hammer path was pursued for as long as it was, it sounds like because it sounds like that's a pretty tough thing to overcome. Yeah, I think it initially presented perhaps the most longevity perhaps in early exploration days. I would say that hammer has certainly received the most press as far as trying to assert it as the extending recording technology for enterprise HDDs. I would say we've invested for almost as long in mammor but we've been extremely quiet about it. This is kind of our nature. When we're ready to talk about something, you can kind of be sure we're ready to go with it and ready to think about productization. So we're quite confident in what we're doing here. I'm curious from your perspective, I haven't been in the business a long time. We who are not directly building these magical machines just now have come to expect that Moore's Law will continue has zero to do with semiconductor physics anymore. It's really an attitude and this relentless pace of innovation that now is expected and taken for granted. You're on the other side and have to face real physics and mechanical limitations of the media and the science and everything else. So as you, is that something that gets you up every day? It keeps me awake every night. Obviously keeps you awake at night and up every day. You can do it over 35 years. So there must be some appeal. But it's a unique challenge because at the same time, not only has it got to be better and faster and bigger, it's got to be cheaper and it has been. So when you look at that, how does that kind of motivate you, the teams here to deliver on that promise? Yeah, I mean, in this case, we are a little bit defensive in the sense of the flash expectations that you mentioned. And I think we've, as we digest our news today, we'll be level setting a little bit more in a more balanced way, the expectations for contribution from rotating magnetic storage and solid state storage to what I think is a more accurate picture of its future going forward in the enterprise and hyperscale space. To your point about just relentless innovation, few of us were talking the other day in advance to this announcement that this mammar adventure feels like the early days of PMR, perpendicular to the current recording technology. It feels like we understand a certain amount of distance ahead of us, and that's about this four terabit per inch kind of distance. But it feels like the early days where we could only see so far, but the road actually goes much further and we're going to find more and more ways to extend this technology and keep that order of magnitude cost advantage going from a hard drive standpoint versus flash. I wonder how this period compares to that, just to continue in terms of the on the demand side, because back in the day, the demand and the applications for these magical compute machines weren't near, I would presume as pervasive as now or am I missing the boat? Now clearly there is no shortage of demand for storage and compute. Depending on where you're coming from, you could take two different views of that. The engine that drove the scale of the hard drive industry to date has a big piece of it in the long history of the hard drive industry has been the PC space. So you see that industry converting to flash and solid state storage more aggressively, and we embrace that. We're invested in flash and we have great products in that space and we see that happening. The opportunity in the hyperscale and cloud space is we're only at the tip of the iceberg and therefore I think as we think about this generation, we think about it differently than those opportunities in terms of breadth of applications, PCs and all that kind of created the foundation for the hard drive. But what we see here is the virtuous cycle of more storage, more economical storage, begets more value proposition, more opportunities to integrate more data, more data collection, more storage. And that virtuous cycle seems to me that we're just getting started. Long live data, that's what we say. The other piece that I find interesting is before the PCs were the driver of scale relative to an enterprise data center. But with the hyperscale guys and the proliferation of cloud, and actually not as, you know, the growth of PCs is slowing down dramatically, that it's kind of flipped a bit. Now the data centers themselves have the scale to drive. The scale innovation that before was really limited to either a PC or a phone or some more consumer device. Absolutely the case. When you take that cross section of hard drive applications, that's 100% the case. And in fact, we look at the utilization as a vertically integrated company. We look at our media facilities for the disks. We look at our wafer facilities for heads. And those facilities as we look forward are going to be as busy or busier than they've ever been. I mean, the amount of data is relative to the density as well as disks and heads and how many you can employ. So I mean, we see this as, you know, in terms of fundamental technology and component construction manufacturing, busier than it's ever been. We'll make fewer units. I mean, there'll be fewer units as they become bigger and denser for this application space. But the fundamental consumption of magnetic recording technology and components is all time records. Right. And you even talked about the software defined piece that's driving the utilization of that data across multiple applications versus all the silos. And the economies that come in to help everybody there too, yeah. You got another 35 more years in you? I hope so. All right. But that would be the edge of it, I think. All right. We're going to take Mark Grace to the edge. Only 35 more years. Lord knows what it'll be working on. Well, Mark, thanks for taking a few minutes and sharing your perspective. That was fun. Thanks a lot. Absolutely. Mark Grace, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from Western Digital Headquarters in San Jose, California. Thanks for watching. All right.