 Hi, this is Stu Miniman with wikibond.org, the cube on the ground at all the big events in Silicon Valley here at Moscone West, where Intel developer Forum 2014 is going on. And joining me for this segment is Chris Ptene McMonagall, who's with the Alliances Group at Intel. Can you tell us a little bit about your role at Intel? Yeah, I work in our communications and storage infrastructure group. And I work with our ecosystem of storage software partners, primarily ISVs, but also some OEMs as well. Alright, well Christine, of course, Intel works with all the storage companies because pretty much today, storage runs on Intel-based hardware. That's right. So there's some news this week that we want to cover though. Intel co-led a round of funding for a company named Maxta, which we are familiar with. It's known as a hyperconverged player. So can you tell us a little bit about, you know, why is Intel investing in Maxta? Yeah, we find these types of solutions very interesting. As soon as you're loading compute and storage onto the same server, you see even more demand for performance. So clearly that's a good fit for Intel and our processors and our other components that we sell into storage systems. And then on top of that we see Maxta as an early instantiation of software defined storage as well. And we see that as, you know, where the industry is heading. And we have a strong vision for the future on software defined storage. And Maxta's well aligned with that. Great. So Christine, when we think about, you know, how server advancements have happened, Intel's constantly coming out with, you know, the new generation. So Grantly just came out, which of course gives us, you know, there's more performance, there's more things we can do with it. And that of course gives opportunity for things like the software defined storage solutions of Maxta. So can you give us, what is the update with Grantly? Yeah, we launched the Grantly platform yesterday and Grantly is a great platform for storage. It's really going to deliver some of the capabilities that are needed for today's and tomorrow's next generation storage platforms. And as part of the launch, that included our newest generation of the Xeon processor, the Xeon E5 V3. And in addition to that, it also included our newest generation of SSDs, the P3,700 series, which are using the brand new NVM Express interface, which really streamlines communications with the CPU for a dramatic boost in performance. And in top of that, we've got our 40 gigabit ethernet support as well. So all of those can come together and support a great storage platform. And Maxta is one of our partners aligned time to market on this platform. They've been testing out Grantly versus the previous generation Romly platform. They've seen some significant performance gains, about 40%, for example, on the number of exchange users that can be supported on a server. All right, so we definitely are seeing new architectures that are being able to be driven by these new technologies, higher performing processors, lower latency, high performance networks all coming together to really redefine the way the storage industry is coming. You know, what else should our watchers be looking at down the road in this space from Intel and the storage partnerships? You know, we come out with great new features in each generation. We've actually got storage capabilities built into the Xeon CPUs now, specifically for storage. In addition to that, we've got a great optimization library called ISA-L that helps optimize a lot of common storage instructions, such as D-dupe and compression and encryption, and allows people to really improve the performance on those types of capabilities, all of which can help dramatically reduce the amount of capacity required in your storage system. So we're seeing a lot of demand for this kind of intelligence in storage today to help counteract the dramatic growth in data. All right, well, Christine, I appreciate you taking the time out of your busy schedule here at IDF to share with us everything going on here. New architectures, new capabilities, always driving the next generation of technology. So this is Stu Miniman with theCUBE on the Ground from IDF 2014 at Moscone in San Francisco.