 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 are at the Western Digital headquarters in San Jose, California. It's the Almanac campus, a historic campus that's had a lot of great innovation, especially in hard drives for years and years and years. This event's called innovating to fuel the next day of big data and we're excited to have a big brain on like you get smart people who's been watching this story for a while and will give us a little bit of historical perspective. It's John Ridney, he is the research vice president for hard drives for IDC. John, welcome. Hey, thank you, Jeff. Absolutely. So what is your take on today's announcement? I think it's a very meaningful announcement, especially when you consider that the, you know, the previous big technology announcement for the industry was helium about four or five years ago, but really the last big technology announcement prior to that was back in 2005, 2006, when the industry announced making this transition to what they called at that time perpendicular magnetic recording. And when that was announced, it was kind of a similar problem at that time in the industry that we have today where the industry was just having a difficult time putting more data on each disk inside that drive. And so they kind of hit this technology wall and they announced perpendicular magnetic recording and it really put them on a new S-curve in terms of their ability to pack more data on each disk and, you know, just kind of put it in some perspective. So after they announced perpendicular magnetic recording, the capacity per disk increased about 30% a year for about five years and then over really a 10-year period increased about an average of about 20% a year. And so today's announcement is, I see a lot of parallels to that, you know, back when perpendicular magnetic recording was announced, you know, really the ability to increase the capacity per platter was growing very slowly. That's where we are today. And with this announcement of MAMR technology, the direction that Western Digital's choosing, you know, it really could put the industry on a new S-curve in terms of putting more capacity, storage capacity on each one of those disks. It's interesting, it always reminds me kind of back to the OS and Microsoft and Intel battles, right? Intel would come out with a new chip and then Microsoft would make a bigger OS and they would go back and forth and back and forth. And we're seeing that here, right? Because the demands for the data are growing exponentially. I think one of the numbers that was thrown out earlier today that the data thrown off by people and the data thrown off by machines is so exponentially larger than the data thrown off by business, which has been kind of a big driver of IT spin and it's really changing. So it's a huge fundamental shift. They had to do something, right? Yeah, the demand for storage capacity by these large data centers is just phenomenal. And yet at the same time, they don't want to just keep building new data center buildings and putting more and more racks. They want to put more storage density in that footprint inside that building. So that's what's really pushing the demand for these higher capacity storage devices. They want to really increase the storage capacity for cubic meter inside these data centers. It's also just fascinating that our expectation is that they're going to somehow pull it off, right? Our expectation that Moore's laws continue, things are going to get better, faster, cheaper and bigger. But at the back in the back room, somebody's actually got to figure out how to do it. And as you said, we hit these kind of seminal moments where you do get on a new S curve. And without that, it does flatten out over time. You know what's interesting though, Jeff, is really about the time that perpendicular magnetic recording was announced way back in 2005, 2006. The industry was really already at that time talking about these thermal assist technologies like MAMR that Western Digital announced today. And it's always been a little bit of a question for those folks that are either in the industry or watching the industry like IDC and maybe even more importantly for some of the HGD industry customers. They're kind of wondering, so what's really going to be the next technology race horse that takes us to that next capacity point? And it's always been a bit of a horse race between Hammer and MAMR. And there's been this lack of clarity or kind of a huge question mark hanging over the industry about which one is it going to be? And Western Digital certainly put a stake in the ground today that they see MAMR as that next technology for the future. Since you just read a quote today, Sargillai Keeble alumni just took a new job and he's got a pin tweet at the top of his thing and he says a smart man looks for ways to solve the problem or looks at new solutions. The wise man really spends his time studying the problem. And it's really interesting here because I don't know, it seems kind of obvious there. He's never necessarily a good thing with electronics and data centers. As you mentioned, we're trying to get efficiency up. There's pressure as these things have become huge, energy consumption machines. That said, they're relatively efficient based on other means that we've been doing to compute and the demand for this compute continues to increase, increase, increase, increase. So as you kind of look forward, I mean, is there anything kind of any gems in the numbers that maybe those of us at the layman level are kind of a first reader missing that we should really be paying attention to give us a little bit of a clue of what the future looks like? Well, you know, there's a couple of major trends going on. One is that, you know, at least for the hard drive industry, if you kind of look back the last 10 years or so, you know, a pretty significant percentage of the revenue that they've generated, a pretty good, you know, percentage of the petabytes that they ship, they've really gone into the PC market and that's fundamentally shifting. And so now it's really the data center so that, you know, by the time you get to 2020, 2021, about 60 plus percent of the petabytes that the industry shipping is going into data centers where, you know, if you look back a few years ago, 60 percent was going into PCs. That's a big, big change for the industry. And it's really that kind of change that's pushing the need for these higher capacity hard drives. Right. So that's, I think, one of the biggest shifts that's taking place. Well, the other thing that's interesting in that comment because we know scale drives innovation better than anything. And clearly, you know, Intel and microprocessors rode the PC boom to get on scale to drive the innovation. And so if you're saying now that, you know, the biggest scale is happening in the data center, then, you know, that's a tremendous force for innovation in there versus, you know, flash, which is really piggybacking on the growth of these jobs because that's where it's getting its scale. So when you look at kind of the flash hard drive comparison, right? Obviously flash is the shiny, the shiny new toy getting a lot of buzz over the last couple of years. Western Digital has a play across the portfolio. But, you know, the announcement earlier today said you're still going to have like this 10X cost differentiation. Yeah, that's right. Even through, I think it was 2025, I don't want to say what the numbers were over a long period of time. You see that kind of continuing, you know, DC, any kind of conflict between those two or is there a pretty clear stratification between what's kind of going to flash systems or what's going to hard drive systems? That's a great question. So even in the very large hyperscale data centers, we definitely see where flash and hard disk drives are very complementary. You know, they're really addressing different challenges, different problems. And so, you know, I think one of the charts that we saw today at the briefing really is something that we agree with strongly at IDC. Today, maybe about seven or 8% of all of the combined HGD SSD petabytes shipped for enterprise are SSD petabytes. And then that grows to maybe 10. Like seven percent? Six to seven percent. Yeah, so you still have 92, 93%, 94% of all petabytes that again are HGD and SSD petabytes for enterprise. Those are still HDD petabytes. And even when you get out to 2020, 2021, you know, again, still about 90%, we agree with what Western Digital talked about today, about 90% of the combined HGD SSD petabytes that are shipping for enterprise continue to be HDDs. So we do see the two technologies very complementary. You talked about SSDs kind of, you know, getting their scale on PCs, and that's true. They, you know, really are going to quickly continue to become a bigger slice of the storage devices attached to new PCs. But in the data center, you really need that bulk storage capacity, the low cost capacity, and that's where we see that the two SSDs and HDDs are going to live together for a long time. Yeah, and as we said, the complementary nature of the two different applications are very different. You know, you need the big data to build the models, to run the algorithms, to do stuff, but at the same time, you need the fast data that's coming in, you need the real-time analytics to make modifications to the algorithms and learn from the algorithms. That's right, yeah. So it's the two of those things together that are one plus one makes three type of solution. Exactly, and especially to address latency. Everybody wants their data fast. When you type something into Google, you want your response right away, and that's where SSDs really come into play, but when you do deep searches, you're looking through a lot of data that has been collected over years, and a lot of that's probably sitting on hard disk drives. Yeah, the last piece of the puzzle I just wanted to address before we sign off, which I thought was an interesting point, is not just necessarily the technology story, but the ecosystem story, and I thought that was really kind of, I thought the most interesting part of the MAMR announcement was that it fits in the same form factor, there's no change to OS, there's no kind of change in the ecosystem components in which you plug this in. Yeah, that's right. It's just you take out the smaller drive, the 10 or the 12 or whatever, or 14 I guess is coming up, and plug in, they show out a picture of a 40 terabyte drive. That's the other part of the story that maybe doesn't get as much play as it should. You're playing in an ecosystem. You can't just come up with this completely, kind of independent radical new thing unless it's so radical that people are willing to kind of swap out their existing infrastructure. I completely agree. It can be very difficult for the customer to figure out how to adopt some of these new technologies. And actually, the hard disk drive industry has thrown a couple of technologies at their customers over the past five, six years that have been a little challenging for them to adopt. So one was when the industry went from native 512-byte sectors to 4K sectors, seems like a pretty small change that you're making inside the drive, but it actually presented some big challenges for some of the enterprise customers and even the shingled magnetic recording technology. So it is a way to get more data on the disk and Western Digital certainly talked about that today, but for the customer trying to plug and play that into a system and SMR technology actually created some real challenges for them to figure out how to adopt that. So I agree that what was shown today about the MAMR technology is definitely a plug and play. All right, I'll give you the last word as people are driving away today from the headquarters. They got a bumper sticker as to why this is so important. What's it say on the bumper sticker about MAMR? It says that we continue to get more capacity at a lower cost. Isn't that just always the goal? Isn't that great. All right, well, thank you for stopping by and sharing your insight. I really appreciate it. Thanks, Jeff. Jeff Frick here at Western Digital and you're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching.