 From Seattle, Washington extracting the signal from the noise. It's the Cube on the ground at Linux con North America 2015 Now here's your host Jeff Frick. Hi Jeff Rick here with the Cube We are on the ground in Seattle Washington at Linux con North America It's a three-day show. There's a lot of stuff going on and obviously with all the stuff going on in an open source Linux is the granddaddy of them all so we're pretty excited to be here And I think Linux was actually here this morning. So we're joined in our next segment by Alan Samuels an engineering fellow and Also software architect enterprise solutions at Sandisk welcome. Thank you. I'm really excited to be here So you're excited to be here. You've had a good couple of days But it's been fabulous here just to see all the different people all the different things that are going on with Linux It's just stunning to me all the different corners of the industry the Linux has gotten into So I don't know that everyone would put the Sandisk together with kind of open-source software So kind of what's the connection? Why are you guys here? You're a sponsor had some presentations What's the tie between the two? Well, if you look at the way our business is evolving both You know as due to where flash is going these days you see us investing in data center and in the consumer space and in mobile and in actually all of these areas Open-source and Linux are playing increasingly critical roles. So that's what our customers want. That's why we're doing that Right, and it's also the increasing importance of software right software is eating the world software to find everything You guys are making flash components and hardware components But still a software that's kind of driving the functionality of those things. Well, it's a synergy between the two You know hardware as it advances creates new capability, but you need software to unlock it Yeah, now I think you said you had a panel earlier so for the folks that missed the panel that weren't up here in Seattle What did you guys cover? Well, we've had several presentations here at Linux con. I gave a talk on How hard drives and flash are evolving different architectures for the way you store data in a data center We had a couple of our lawyers here talking about the relationships of licensing issues We just gave a keynote on how open-source is building new ecosystems for the industry and how important that is to our business Yeah, it's pretty amazing to saw the software play, but let's also talk about flash I mean we talk about flash all the time we were HP discover all flash arrays You know people are really pumping all flash talk about the impact of moving from disk to flash in the way that Applications operate and how it really unlocks a whole different level of ways to think about application application functionality Well, you know, I think it's really easy for people to understand if you give them a computer with a hard drive And then you give them a computer with flash within one minute. They say God, this is so much better. I'm never going back I want to see a show of hands of people who haven't done that everybody's done that and it's flash that drives that Okay, flash is pervasive in all the storage applications It creates enormous new business value simply by our ability to process data You know thousands of times faster at much larger scales, right? And it seems to me too, you know, I'm not going to put you on the hook to give a financial Anticipated financial results, which I would never do but it does seem like you know at the early days of flash everyone was so concerned about It's got to be a low latency application only it's got to behave this super high value application only But it seems the adoption is really accelerating because as you said once you once you get a taste of it The prices are coming down pretty rapidly. It seems that the Perforation of flash is really accelerating over the last little while. Yes You know in some ways when you know I'm old enough to remember the transition from tape-based computing to hard drive based computing We went through the same exercise the learning curve happens Moore's law is continuing to march on we have 3d flash now Just hitting the market, you know all across the industry There are many years to come of decreasing flash prices and as that happens You're going to see flash increasingly be the center of computing For all the reasons that you mentioned. Okay, so I'm from Palo Alto. You're from San Jose We got to get a little plug out to the Seattle Chamber of Commerce He said something before we went on camera. He toured around in your last couple days. Give us a little What should people see while they're here in Seattle go to the Chihuly Gardens. It's right next to the Space Needle It was one of the most fabulous exhibitions of blown glass that I have ever seen in my life I was completely blown away and that's a bad pun All right, Alan. Well, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your busy day to stop by. It's great to talk to you Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. Absolutely Alan Samuels Jeff Frick We are LinuxCon North America in Seattle, Washington. You're watching the Cube. Thanks for watching