 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live at Dell EMC World 2017. This is theCUBE's coverage of Dell EMC, the combination, the big news here. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE and my co-host, Paul Gillan. Our next guest is Steve Finger, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Storage Product Business Unit at Toshiba and Ravi Penteconti who's the SPP of Server Solutions and Product Management at Dell EMC. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you, Ravi. Steve, nice to meet you. Thanks for having us. Steve, so tell us what's going on at Toshiba because I want to hear what you guys are doing and your role in relationship with Dell EMC and what is going on with your architecture because we've been hearing a ton about IoT at the edge, centralized pushing intelligence to the edge, new architectures. The world is kind of moving to a new architecture. What's your pitch? Sure, well Dell and Toshiba have a long history, 20 plus years of working in both strong innovators. We're engaged on both our hard drive products as well as our SSD products really across every aspect of Dell's portfolio, client, server and storage. And we're really taking the architecture, both of those product categories are really popular as everyone, you know, data explosion is happening. A lot of that is ending up on storage and our focus areas there on hard drive are around the near line storage, which are the high capacity eight terabyte and higher, really popular with cloud architectures. We have a 14 and 16 terabyte helium based drive coming out next year, which will put us in a strong leadership position. And then on the SSD side, what we're highlighting at the show today is our latest generation NAND. And we've moved into 3D NAND and we're showing our wafer with 64 layer 3D flash, as well as the first public demonstration of any company of an SSD using that 64 layer 3D flash. So we're on that cutting edge and we see that really growing. And you mentioned IoT, that's really driving a lot of the big data growth. That a lot of that data will reside on hard drives, right, for the long-term storage, but then you bring that into an SSD tier for the very rapid analytics work that you want to do to make decisions with that data. Talk about the impact of the latest state of the art, because to me it's, oh my God, speeds and fees, but storage, people always care about storage. I mean, go back to the original iPod and iPhone. These are in devices and mentioned IoT. The state of the art has to get better, faster, cheaper. What's the impact to some of those specs on that you guys just released in terms of the media and the SSD? What's the impact going to be for customers scenario-wise? What's some of the impact that'll look like? Sure, well, I think the number one impact, as I talked to customers here at the event, and it's no surprise, but every... Give me more of that they say. Every customer, every Dell executive says we need more. So really it's just the SSD adoption is exploded. Yes, we do need more. Yeah, exactly. So that's exploding and so the number one thing this will do is each individual die on the wafer doubles in capacity and then it will soon double again and double again after that. So this 3D technology really allows us to drive density and that means lower cost. It means more capacity. It also means we can develop denser SSDs. So more in the same space or smaller space. So for the consumer it's obvious it's all the devices that wearables, but the business it's really more fundamental than that. Things that are going to be connected to the network, the microwave, the air conditioning, all the sensors in the world are going to be now digitally connected. Once analog, now digital. I mean that's kind of where I... Does that kind of get that right? Absolutely and that same technology will be used in a lot of end devices. It's in your smart phone, it's in your smart watch. It'll be in a lot of those smart devices capturing the temporary data but then that all gets consolidated in a massive pool and companies are looking for how do they efficiently scale to capture and analyze that data and turn it into revenue and profit and that's where the performance of SSDs and even in the future the higher capacity levels will allow efficient scaling at the data center. Well, Robbie in the hyper-converged market now all of a sudden you've got the storage coming back into the server. What are customers looking for in terms of performance on that storage side? Are they driving you for the same kind of constant drive for more capacity and better performance? Absolutely Paul, I mean if you think about it the workloads that today are vastly different than the workloads that they've passed. Think about it, I mean today people are not looking for data to be just collected. Data is really, it doesn't have the complete value or in my view it doesn't give you anything other than just lots of bits and bytes. What really gives you the power to act upon is information and so to create information you need to take the data, go process it and get you to the same, to the level of detail that you can act upon, right? So that's the analytics engine. So having said that, today when you look at any of the industries, whether it is genomics, whether you're looking at machine learning, deep learning these require a sense of performance to be provided for our customers because they're looking at analyzing data quickly enough and that's when they can act on it. So our customers absolutely are asking for better performance and higher capacity and they're needed now. So Toshiba's not a new player to you though. You guys, they've been a supplier to the power. It's right for- Absolutely true, I mean they've been a fantastic supplier for the last 20 years. We look at them more as a partner. They've been with us through the journey. I mean we've been, if you think about it for the last couple of decades we've been shipping a product and they've been working through us. We've been working together just not as, it's not really a, it's not just a supplier kind of relationship. We actually track the new technologies. Steve just talked about the 3D cross-point and things of that kind. We are working on those technologies together to ensure that we give our customers just not the latest technology but also to provide them with the right price performance. Again I emphasize price performance because it's just not one of them on its own that has merit to our customers. Is brand important to your customers in terms of a storage provider? They ask for Toshiba brand or does it matter? What they do ask for is, they ask for reliability. They want to make sure that they have a reliable product and then if you think about it that really translates to them to certain vendors. So yes, they could have a potential propensity for a certain vendor, but it all starts with reliability. If you really can't have a reliable component in the servers that we sell, it really doesn't help our customers. And that's where it goes back to the point I was making earlier, which is that this long standing relationship with the companies, because we have built that reliability to the product and Toshiba has been providing it for us. Steve, talk about the relationship with SSD and the enterprise. I mean, everyone knows people want more solid state. That's, everyone kind of sees the consumer products. Where's the progress bar in terms of adoption because we, I hear stories and we actually report them on SiliconANGLE. I'm buying capacity of all flash drives. Server certainly has their share of flash as well. David Floyer and Wikibon have been covering that for years, but now in the enterprise and all the other mainstream products. Where's the analogy here? What's the tipping point? Are we there? Well, from a, if you look at it from a dollar spent perspective, actually this year is the crossover where enterprise SSDs will consume a higher amount of the spend than enterprise hard drives. So people are putting their money. Spending jiscumine. The old hard drives, spending rough. And so that crossover will happen. It has happened if we had more supply, if the industry had more supply, I'm sure it would have already happened. And now if you look at it from a gigabytes perspective, though of course hard drives are much, much, are still the vast majority of the bits shipped. And so it really is about that intelligent use of flash. It's fast, it's very reliable, it consumes less power, but it is also more expensive. So you have to pick the right applications or the right ways of deploying those. And that's where Dell and Toshiba work together with partners like VMware. We're talking about a certified solution around Toshiba Dell, VMware vSAN, as well as Nutanix. And both of those solutions in a converged architecture and hyper-converged architecture, they rely on SSDs in every node to ensure you get the performance scaling. The SSDs have been exciting because sort of hard disk performance peaked out about 10 years ago. And we've been sort of jury rigging ways to make it faster, but SSDs genuinely are getting faster and faster. What is the upper limit on speed right now? Are we looking at Moore's law type of growth in performance or does that top out at some point? We get to saturating the interface with performance, but I'll tell you the most customers aren't asking us for more IOPS performance or more bandwidth. Certainly it'll take it, but when you put several of these in a server or a storage box, it's more than the interface can consume. So certainly there's been, if you look at the bi-segment type of growth rates, it's moving into the how cheap can we make it? Can we reduce the endurance? It's still plenty fast, and that's kind of opening that up, but that's a growing tier. And so we're really seeing that kind of good enough performance driving a lot of the expansion. Ravi, talk about the architectural challenges. I was joking with Dave Vellante a couple of weeks ago about Dell, talk about Dell. They supply chain, was there big innovation? Everyone kind of knows that story of how they, I said data's the new supply chain, right? So data is now coming in. You got the form factor on the storage memory, which everyone wants more SSDs. Give me more, we heard that. How are you guys going to build your server architecture to handle the tsunami of data coming in from stuff that this is going to enable? I mean, everything in a business that will be instrumented with data, devices and sensors are coming in. Is there a server for that? And how do you think about that? It's a moving train, architecturally. So what are you guys doing? Give us an overview. It's interesting that you asked, John, because when we look at a server today, it does have to deal with lots of data coming in. And it's just not data, but if you look at it, there are, we used to talk about storage tiering. Now I think we got to start looking at memory tiering. And what this means is, we have to fundamentally change the way the architecture of the system is put in place. And for example, 14G, we are now coming out with one of our more important tenants. It's all about scalable business architecture. Again, this goes into the whole premise of, as we talk about the workloads, as workloads change, you talk about IoT, you talk about how all the data is coming and you got to synthesize it. You also now need to have an architecture that essentially says, I have to go get this data in and get it at the right time. It's not just getting data in. So we're working on things called MCA, which is Memory-Centric Architectures. Because end of the day, it's analogous to, and I'm from California, right? I mean, we have, you know, the Bay Area, we have the 101 that kind of is the nerve of the entire Bay Area, and... It's crowded, we didn't even hear it. It's crowded. There's flying cars. There's flying cars. There's a lot of bottlenecks. Absolutely right. I owe problems. You're absolutely right. Yeah. There's riots. Elon Musk is going to figure this out. That's the goal, right? So as he figures it out, we on the server side are trying to do the same thing, which is as more data, like more cars on the road, we now have to go ahead and ensure that the connectivity between your memory subsystem, your storage subsystem, and the CPU actually comes out to be a low latency, high bandwidth kind of a solution, which is what goes back into what I call as the Memory-Centric Architectures. So that's essentially what we're working on to ensure that we have an optimal performance at the application level, because that's what customers really care for. What is tiered memory? And is that actually a thing now in the 14G server? It's a, so tiered memory is something that, I mean, we are setting the stage for the future, right? So we talk about tiered storage. We have tier one, tier two, tier three storage, wherein if data was not being utilized, you basically take the data, put it on the tapes, for example, right? In the current generation, a lot of people use hard drives as a way of putting data out. So likewise in memory, I mean, if you really think about it, you have the registers, you have got the L1 cache, L2 cache, you have got those caches, then we are coming into all kinds of NVMe drives. So that's what I mean by kind of clearing we have to deal with. There is normal memory, you've got persistent memory, right? So those are the new memory technologies that you're putting in. And by the way, state and stateless cloud native, really, and microservices use state and stateless apps, you have to differentiate between the two and SSD is great for that. Yes. So this is where, as going back to your question Paul is, that's the way, I think we are in the early stages of how we evolve. So that's where you'll see, we're going to support persistent memory, for example, when people look at SAP HANA, they want to have memory, it's basically in memory database. So these are the kind of things we are doing. So with 14G, for example, we are working on things like that. We'll have 14, I mean about 19X, more NVMe than we had in the prior generation. I wish I could get into more specifics, but we will do as we get into the formal shipment of the product. But again- Shipments in the summer though, right? This summer? Yes, it's the summer. Summertime frame, absolutely. A few months away. Okay, talk about the relationship between you guys. Obviously your partners, this is a significant component, I would worry about as a customer, availability concerns, allocation of the product. Are we good? Supply? Solid? I don't want to put you on the spot. No, absolutely. It's a great question. Let's put you on the spot. We need more. Absolutely, that's a great question. Get a checkbook out. And it is. And get a commission. It's a great teamwork. You think about it like the great teams in history, Jordan, Pippin, they've worked together, they've worked out on the King, exactly. And they can anticipate each other's next steps. And that's really how we're operating. Ravi mentioned that, we've worked hard to make sure we have product alignment up and down. And the next is Dell, technologies has massive scales. So aligning the supply chains is key. And we've done that to make sure we have the right products in the right place for Dell's customers. But in terms of supply, yeah, it really is about getting to that next generation where we can double our capacity for wafer or even more in some cases. So that'll really allow us to open the spigots. And we think 2018 is going to be a really great year. And the impact to customers, guys, just comment on the relationship. What's going to be the impact to your customers? So first and foremost, I mean, jokes apart, I know we know about the constraints in the industry on SSD drives. I mean, that's an industry wide thing. So one of the things we have been doing with Toshiba is we have regular interlock meetings and we discuss where the demand is and we help forecast where we are headed and we actually work through the process. And we do anticipate that something that Steve's team and our teams will be doing together. And- It's not new for Dell. This is their wheelhouse. It is, it is, but I will tell you, John, given the constraints we had in the industry, I must say that in the last couple of quarters, we had to put a lot more emphasis on how we go deal with this because going back to the prior comments that both the gentlemen made, there is such a demand for the SSDs right now that I wish the supply and demand were not out of balance, but they are, right? We've got to work through and try to ensure that we don't surprise them as partners, so we don't come back and say, hey, you know what, give us a truckload tomorrow. So that's something that we are actually finishing. And they're shaping your strategy too, because they're an indicator to where you can go based upon the tech, the state of the art. Absolutely. This is where I call it's a constant feedback mechanism we have built. I mean, they know the SSD drive market, the NAND flash technology is better than we do, right? They do. And then we understand the overall customer side and what the impact is from the compute side, for example, in our case. And now we go back in and try and see how we can do a better mechanism of shaping the demand and ensuring that the right product is available at the right time. Is there a relief in sight for the shortages? I think it's going to be linked to those next generation technologies as we ramp those and get them into production and to SSDs and into Dell EMC systems. Then you will see the balance come back in the industry. Steer, striers, less? That's, I think most people are saying it's going to last through this year. We're obviously working very hard to get the right products in the right place, but I think most people are saying it'll last through this year, but we'll see. Hard to predict. I think that's the consistent message we get is at least three to four quarters before things stabilize. Well, Ravi, congratulations on the scale. I think it's a huge advantage and certainly get some great supplier relationships with that scale. Congratulations, Steve, on the state of the art, new stuff coming, more faster. Come on, bring it on. Absolutely. Internet of Things is waiting. That market is waiting for you guys. So congratulations. Thanks for coming on. We appreciate sharing your insights. No, thank you. I mean, we couldn't have found a better partner as we announced our 14G and we're excited about it. And thank you for having us, both John and Paul. Thank you very much. Great stuff. Deli and Cyril bringing the state of the art content here in theCUBE, but more importantly, faster memory, SSDs in the enterprise, taking over the hard disk drive. Certainly a ton of data, a tsunami of data coming in from all angles, IoT in the enterprise, everywhere else. Mr. Cube, share in our data with you. We'll be right back with more live coverage. Stay with us.