 Live from the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, it's theCUBE at the HGST Press and Industry Analyst Briefing. Brought to you by headline sponsor HGST. Here are your hosts, Stu Miniman and Jeff Frick. Hi, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are live at the Sheridan Palace San Francisco, California for the HGST Industry Analyst and Press Day. For a full day of CUBE interviews, I'm joined in this segment with my co-host. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman with wikibond.org and joining us for this segment is Brendan Collins, who's the VP of Product Marketing from HGST. Going to dig into the hard disk drive market. Brendan, thanks so much for joining us. You're welcome, glad to be here. All right, so a lot of announcements today. I mean, you know, tons going on in the storage market, you know, software really, you know, eating the universe as we say with some of the acquisitions you've made. We just dug into a lot of the flash pieces and you would put from hard drives, you know, aren't dead and there's some really interesting technologies. So I'm hoping you can help us kind of unpack this. Especially the helium stuff is pretty cool. People that aren't too familiar, it might be something a little bit new with them, but the end of an era, no more, you know, air based drives going forward. So can you walk us through, Brendan, first? What were the kind of major announcements from the hard drive stamp? Yeah, so we announced three major new products today. Two of them actually are industry first. They involve both helium and shingle magnetic recording. Maybe before I get to those two, let me first talk about the 7K 6000. So that is our six terabyte drive in air and it is the last of the generation, right? So we've been designing and building hard drives since the 1950s and they've all run in air inside the product. This will be the last generation and we've come to a point where we're putting all of our chips if you want into the center of the table and we're betting big time on helium. The Aries 6000, the 7K 6000 product, rather, that will ship, obviously, for another two or three generations. That's seventh generation is probably, I would say, arguably the most successful platform in the last 20 or 30 years. The other two platforms, the other two products, rather, that we announced, the first is the HE8. So that is the second generation helio seal product. That offers not just increased capacity but low power and low cooling. The benefit to the big cloud service providers, right, is not only can you increase capacity but reduce power and cooling and increase footprint all at the same time. So if you're a cloud service provider, you're trying to deal with this explosive growth in the data center and you have a flat IT budget, this really helps them address that gap. The third product that we have is the 10 terabyte drive. That's exciting just by the sheer size of it. What we get to do is we get to leverage the 10 terabyte or the 8 terabyte helium product and use single magnetic recording. The combination of both of those enable us to deliver 10 terabytes, typically two to three years earlier than we normally would. All right, so the helium technology, can you give our viewers a little bit of understanding, why did we need to move from air to helium and what are kind of the opportunities and the challenge for the industry, the disk drive industry going forward? Well, when we started engaging with the cloud service providers a few years ago, right, they would come to us and say, look, you guys really help us out with high capacity, low cost and reliability. But if you look at our total budget, we have CAPEX and we have OPEX. The OPEX piece of that is power cooling and footprint. And they're saying, you're not doing anything for me in that space. That's when we reached into our bag of tricks and took out helium because it helps them pretty much every single one of those areas. HelioSeal as a platform going forward allows us to stay with the large three and a half inch form factor that we have probably for another 10 plus years. The five disk platform that we have today in air, we've been using three and a half inch drives for 12 to 15 years now. And it's coming to the end of an era. So at that point, you would typically have to go to smaller two and a half inch drives or invest in helium and prolong that platform. So we'd be able to stay on that cost curve for the foreseeable future. So Brandon, what's the secret sauce in the helium? Is it just literally just the attributes of the gas relative to air? Is there some other stuff going on inside the covers? I mean, what if you could explain a little bit about more because you're hitting on all the hot topics, right? As you said, it's capacity, even more it's power and it's footprint. So is it simply this enclosure with the helium and the mechanisms work better? I don't know if you can explain a little bit more. Okay, two aspects to that. First is if you were to look at the heads flying over the disk inside a hard disk drive, there's a lot of flutter and vibration going on. When you go to helium, helium as a gas is one seventh the density of air. So all that disturbance goes away. A good analogy is you're driving down the highway, you put your hand out the window, your arm flutters. Right. So helium, everything's very still. So it's one seventh the density of air. Okay. So what that enables you to do is because you have less vibration, you can go to thinner disks. As a result of that, you can go to more disks and you can pack more capacity into the same volumetric space. So that's how helium works and how it benefits. The magic sauce in helium is anybody can use helium and disk drives. The magic sauce is in how you seal it, the methodology that you use to do that at high volume in an automated factory. So we have managed to come up with processes in the factory that do that at high volume and you can guarantee the seal over the life of the product. Interesting. So Brendan, when we talk about like the 10 terabyte drive, I mean what huge capacities and the focus on that, my understanding is what you're calling active archiving. Can you lay out for us, there's been a lot of discussion as to where does archiving live? Of course we understand there's the offline archiving, if you know, stick it in a truck and stick it in a mountain versus cloud economics. Amazon can do a penny, a gigabyte per month. So where does this fit and how does, I'm assuming you guys are saying that this has changed in the game for the way archiving is done. People have been using the term cold storage actually to describe infrequently accessed data. Now cold storage is a broad term. Within cold storage there's what we call active archive, is one aspect of that. And then there's deep archive. The deep archive is more tape-like. In other words, the data could be, in the case of disks, it could be spun down or not used, extremely cost and power sensitive. If you now look at other areas or pick applications like big data, where you have to run contextual analytics, you can't afford to wait 90 seconds to spin up your drives or go find your tape drives. So for active archive, you have to do, typically have to do metadata searches and you require extremely low latency and high bandwidth. So you really need to be using disk-based technology to achieve the analytics and the speeds that you need. So that's where you need the lowest cost per gig and that's where the 10 terabyte comes in and the fact that it's disk-based means you can achieve the latency and the bandwidth that you can't achieve with tape and optical. All right, so can you talk a little bit about what your customers have seen so far with Helium? To my understanding that Netflix used Helium, so what's it done out in the wild? What's the customer experience been that obviously successful that you guys are moving forward as the direction for this type of drive? So it gives a little bit of insight. So the first major adopters of the HE6, which is the first Helium drive was primarily the cloud service providers. So they're the guys, for example, that have data centers that are as big as 10 football fields with like 100,000 servers and probably a million drives in each one. When you can go and talk to those customers and say I can cut your total petabytes per watt in half by deploying Helium versus Air, that's a big deal. The fact that you can pack more capacity into that volumetric space means you also need less servers, not just less storage, less servers, networking gear and less footprint. So all of that translates into much lower capex and OPEX. Interesting, so that was really the OPEX driver from your cloud service provider was really the driving force behind the Helium move. Yes. Interesting. And are you seeing any more, are you seeing some of that happen in the enterprise space as well where they're starting to do and act a little bit more like a cloud service provider company in terms of the way they're scaling and the way they're building out and their kind of changing requirements? Traditionally, enterprise OEMs would be a little bit more conservative in adopting new technologies. So they took a wait and see approach to see how it would work with the cloud service guys. Today, I think the enterprise OEMs are needing to compete more directly with the cloud service providers. And they also need to adopt these technologies. And if the economics are as radically improved, as you say, then when their internal customers are shopping their internal services against an AWS or whomever, they're really going to be at a disadvantage if they're not taking advantage of this economics. That's right. You have the exact same set of challenges when you go to a private cloud, which most of those folks have versus the public cloud, the cloud service providers. So, they have the same budget challenges and the same need to manage all that growth, that storage growth. Interesting. So Brendan, if we look at kind of disk versus flash, one of the huge advantages flash has had is power is much, much less than disks. And traditionally, disk has had much more capacity. So we're starting to see a closing of the gap on capacity. Flash is getting more. But now you've also closed the gap, I think, on some of the power consumption with what you're doing with disks. So can you help kind of sort out, what do you guys see? Because you guys, obviously, are looking for both to succeed. So how should people be thinking about the kind of disk and flash adoption? And obviously it's use case specific, but can you give us some of the guideposts to how to think about this? Some people think it's one or the other and they're really complimentary. If you speak to some of the storage architects in the data center, they would argue that about 10 to 15% of all data is hot, right? We would agree with that. How much? 10 to 15? 10 to 15%. If 10 to 15% of the data is hot, that is probably the percentage of the data that will end up on flash. So you will end up paying a premium for flash, but that's okay. In a market that's low latency or high bandwidth or that's valued, you will pay that. For the other 85% of the market, that is more mainstream capacity. And we see that continuing to be enterprise capacity, disk-based, and even more so as we move to cold storage of Active Archive. The cost per gig, that gap will continue to widen. Yeah, interesting. But you guys are continuing to really renew the life cycle of disk with this new helium strategy. Yes. Helium in my mind enables us to stay with the current three and a half inch form factor, which is high volume and enables scale and low cost. And we should be able to deliver future technologies like hammer or bit pattern media and put them on top of helium and ship for the next 10 to 15 years. Right. So you talked about 10 to 15% of the data is hot, what percentage of the data do you find in these big service providers is really cold? Like cold, cold, cold, drive it to the mountain. Versus now you've got this Active Archive opportunity and what was interesting in some of the conversations earlier is that, you said that the actual value of the data increases over time. Right. And there's things that you may not know that are there that you're going to go back after the fact and pull out and drive data. So I mean, should anything be cold? What percentage of it is cold, cold? I've heard varying degrees. I've heard anything from 50%. I've heard up to 80% at different cloud service providers. But I think a lot depends on your application. There are applications for this Active Archive or this HM10, this 10 terabyte drive that we have that requires, as we said, low latency and high bandwidth. If you look at applications that use big data, so you have these massive data sets and you need to continuously run analytics on them. That's a good example of data that's been infrequently accessed. You could classify as cold, but it's also, it's been frequently accessed. There's the infrequently accessed stuff that would typically be stored on tape or optical. There are certain applications that require only that and you have less analytics where you can afford to wait 30 seconds or 45 seconds or minutes for your data. I think that will continue to be on tape and optical, but it's also a class of cold. Right, and is that where you kind of define the line is based on latency at which you can wait to get the data? Is that really what defines kind of your tiers? Yeah, within cold storage, we showed a chart today that showed deep archive or cold storage off to the right that could be tape or optical or even spun down disk versus low latency, high bandwidth. That's where our active archive and the 10 terabyte drive plays. All right, so Brendan, we spend a lot of time talking about density of the configurations here. One of the things that I hear is really the limiting factor, especially if you're talking in the enterprise is usually the power density that we can get. Most customers are kind of locked into a data center and have limits as to how much they grow. How do the technologies that you're releasing help address those needs for the enterprise? So let's say, I mean, there are a lot of application areas like in financial services. Let's say you're a bank and you're in New York City and you're on the 19th floor and your data center is full, but you now need to go from 50 petabytes to 100 petabytes. You can't go to a new building or a new floor. One of the ways of doing that is to replace your existing storage that runs on air with higher capacity, low power drives. So in that particular case, you can actually reduce your watts per terabyte by 50%. So you can actually double your capacity and still stay within the power budget. Yeah, I think we're good. So Brendan, thanks for stopping by. Learned a lot about helium and really extending the life of this active archive, which is a new kind of area of storage that really wasn't actively mined before. Yeah, Brendan, the last thing you have to show, on our intro package, we've got a little clip of the helium here at the show, which not only is it the drive itself, but it's in a non-conducting liquid, I guess. Can you explain what we're showing off there? There's no fish in there because it's not water. But what are we looking at? Yeah, there are applications out there in the marketplace for racked-end servers where power and cooling is a big deal. One of the ways that our customers are dealing with that is immersing the storage and the servers in this non-conductive liquid. So this is an example of that demo. And the purpose of it is to show that the drive does not have air or an air filter. So you can see actually the motherboard, the processor, you can see the bubbles. So the drive is sealed inside the server. Yeah, interesting, because that's the next talk and great talk in cooling too, right, is liquid cooling. So I guess you guys are already pre-configured and ready for a liquid cooling environment. Well, Brendan, thanks for stopping by theCUBE, good stuff. We'll be right back with our next segment here from the HGST Press and Analyst Day. I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE, we'll be right back.