>> Announcer: 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're at Western Digital's headquarters
in San Jose, California at the Almaden campus.
Lot of innovation's been going on here,
especially in storage for decades,
and we're excited to be at this special press
and analyst event that Western Digital put on today
to announce some exciting new products.
It's called Innovating to Fuel the Next Decade of Data.
I'm super happy to have a long-time industry veteran,
he just told me, 35 years, I don't know if I can tell
(Mark laughs) that on air or not.
He's Mark Grace, he's the Senior Vice President of Devices
for Western Digital, Mar, great to have you on.
>> Thanks Jeff, glad to be here.
>> Absolutely, so you've seen this movie over and over
and over, I mean that's one of the cool things
about being in the Valley,
is this relentless pace of innovation.
So how does today's announcement stack up
as you kind of look at this versus
kind of where we've come from?
>> Oh I think this is maybe one of the,
as big as it comes, Jeff, to be honest.
I think we've plotted a course now
that I think was relatively uncertain
for the hard drive industry and the data center,
and plotted a course that I think
we can speak clearly to the market,
and clearly to customers about the value proposition
for rotating magnetic storage for decades to come.
>> Which is pretty interesting, 'cause, you know,
rotating drives have been taking a hit
over the last couple of years, right,
flash has been kind of the sexy new kid on the block,
so this is something new,
>> Mark: It is.
>> And a new S curve I think as John said.
>> I agree, we're jumping onto a,
we're extending the S curve, let's call it that.
I think there's actually plenty of other
S curve opportunities for us, but in this case,
I think the industry, and I would say our customer base,
we have been less than clear with those guys about
how we see the future of rotating storage
in the cloud and enterprise space,
and I think today's announcement clarifies that
and gives some confidence about architectural decisions
relative to rotating storage going forward for a long time.
>> Well I think it's pretty interesting,
'cause compared to the other technology
that was highlighted, the other option,
the HAMR versus the MAMR,
this was a much more elegant, simpler way
to add this new S curve into an existing ecosystem.
>> You know, elegant's probably a good word for it,
and it's always the best solution I would say.
HAMR's been a push for many years.
I can't remember the first time I heard about HAMR.
It's still something we're going to continue
to explore and invest in, but it has numerous hurdles
compared to the simplicity and elegance,
as you say, of MAMR, not the least of which is
we're going to operate at normal ambient temperatures
versus apply tremendous heat to try and energize
the recording and the technologies.
So any time you introduce extraordinary heat
you face all kinds of ancillary engineering challenges,
and this simplifies those challenges
down to one critical innovation,
which is the oscillator.
>> Pretty interesting, 'cause it seems pretty obvious
that heat's never a good thing.
So it's curious that in the quest for this next S curve
that the HAMR path was pursued for as long as it was,
it sounds like, because it sounds like
that's a pretty tough thing to overcome.
>> Yeah, I think it initially presented
perhaps the most longevity perhaps
in early exploration days.
I would say that HAMR has certainly received
the most press as far as trying to assert it
as the extending recording technology for enterprise HDDs.
I would say we've invested for almost as long in MAMR,
but we've been extremely quiet about it.
This is kind of our nature.
When we're ready to talk about something,
you can kind of be sure we're ready to go with it,
and ready to think about productization.
So we're quite confident in what we're doing.
>> But I'm curious from your perspective,
having been in the business a long time,
you know, we who are not directly building
these magical machines, just now have come to expect
that Moore's Law will contain,
has zero to do with semiconductor physics anymore,
it's really an attitude and this relentless pace
of innovation that now is expected and taken for granted.
You're on the other side, and have to face real physics
and mechanical limitations of the media and the science
and everything else.
So is that something that gets you up every day
>> Mark: Keeps me awake every night!
>> Obviously keeps you awake at night and up every day.
You've been doing it for 35 years,
so there must be some appeal.
>> Yeah. (laughs)
>> But you know, it's a unique challenge,
'cause at the same time not only has it got to be
better and faster and bigger,
it's got to be cheaper, and it has been.
So when you look at that, how does that kind of motivate you,
the teams here, to deliver on that promise?
>> Yeah, I mean in this case, we are a little bit defensive,
in the sense of the flash expectations that you mentioned,
and I think as we digest our news today,
we'll be level setting a little bit more
in a more balanced way the expectations for contribution
from rotating magnetic storage and solid state storage
to what I think is a more accurate picture
of its future going forward
in the enterprise and hyperscale space.
To your point about just relentless innovation,
a few of us were talking the other day
in advance of this announcement
that this MAMR adventure feels like the early days
of PMR, perpendicular, the current recording technology.
It feels like we understand a certain amount
of distance ahead of us, and that's about this
four-terabit per inch kind of distance,
but it feels like the early days where we could
only see so far but the road actually goes much further,
and we're going to find more and more ways
to extend this technology,
and keep that order of magnitude cost advantage going
from a hard drive standpoint versus flash.
>> I wonder how this period compares to that,
just to continue, in terms of on the demand side,
'cause you know, back in the day, the demand
and the applications for these magical compute machines
weren't near, I would presume, as pervasive as now,
or am I missing the boat?
'Cause now clearly there is no shortage of demand
for storage and compute.
>> Yeah, depending on where you're coming from,
you could take two different views of that.
The engine that drove the scale of the hard drive industry
to date has, a big piece of it in the long history
of the hard drive industry has been the PC space.
So you see that industry converting to flash
and solid state storage more aggressively,
and we embrace that, you know we're invested in flash
and we have great products in that space,
and we see that happening.
The opportunity in the hyperscale and cloud space
is we're only at the tip of the iceberg,
and therefore I think, as we think about this generation,
we think about it differently than those opportunities
in terms of breadth of applications,
PCs, and all that kind of create the foundation
for the hard drive, but what we see here is
the virtuous cycle of more storage, more economical storage
begets more value proposition, more opportunities
to integrate more data, more data collection, more storage.
And that virtuous cycle seems to me
that we're just getting started.
So long live data, that's what we say.
(both laugh)
>> The other piece that I find interesting is
before the PCs were the driver of scale
relative to an enterprise data center,
but with the hyperscale guys and the proliferation of cloud
and actually the growth of PCs is slowing down dramatically,
that it's kind of flipped the bit.
Now the data centers themselves have the scale to drive
>> Absolutely. >> the scale innovation
that before was before was really limited to
either a PC or a phone or some more consumer device.
>> Absolutely the case.
When you take that cross-section of hard drive
applications, that's a hundred percent the case,
and in fact, we look at the utilization
as a vertically integrated company
we look at our media facilities for the disks,
we look at our wafer facilities for heads,
and those facilities as we look forward are going to be
as busy as busier than they've ever been.
I mean the amount of data is relative to the density
as well as disks and heads and how many you can employ.
So we see this in terms of fundamental technology
and component construction, manufacturing,
busier than it's ever been.
We'll make fewer units.
I mean there will be fewer units as they become
bigger and denser for this application space,
but the fundamental consumption of magnetic
recording technology and components is all-time records.
>> Right.
And you haven't even talked about the software-defined
piece that's dragging the utilization of that data
across multiple applications. >> And it's just one of these
that come in to help everybody there too, yeah.
>> Jeff: You got another 35 years more years in you?
(both laugh)
>> I hope so.
>> All right.
>> But that would be the edge of it, I think.
>> All right, we're going to take Mark Grace here,
only 35 more years, Lord knows what he'll be working on.
Well Mark, thanks for taking a few minutes
and answering your prospective >> No that's fine,
thanks a lot.
>> Absolutely, Mark Grace, I'm Jeff Frick,
you're watching theCUBE from Western Digital headquarters
in San Jose, California.
Thanks for watching.
>> Mark: All right.