This is the third of a series of three podcasts recorded at Flash Memory Summit 2018. In this conversation, Chris talks to Scott Hamilton, Senior Director of Product Management, DCS group at Western Digital Corporation. WDC are working on a new architecture that will deliver a composable data infrastructure for the enterprise. This podcast discussed why composable is needed and exactly what scale of customers will benefit from the disaggregation of compute and storage.
WDC are not looking to move into the general infrastructure market with this solution, but rather are developing an open standard to which other vendors can design and integrate products. This is also intended for large-scale customers that have hundreds of petabytes to exabytes of storage to process.
The discussion covers some of the issues we’re going to encounter over the next few years, as analytics (whether ML/AI or otherwise) become more widespread. Data is the new renewable resource, with continual improvements in algorithms set to allow data to be processed and reprocessed over time.
The conversation ends with a brief mention of products. More details on the OpenFlex platform, F3000 and D3000 offerings can be found online here.
Elapsed Time: 00:21:56
Timeline
- 00:00:00 – Intros
- 00:01:50 – Data is the new oil? Not really….
- 00:03:00 – Defining big data and fast data
- 00:05:30 – Managing data at exabyte scale – how will we do it?
- 00:07:00 – Why composable as a new architecture?
- 00:09:00 – Exactly how does WD view what composable means?
- 00:11:00 – Will WD be selling servers with the OpenFlex architecture?
- 00:14:00 – Disaggregation is the key to composable
- 00:16:00 – Was SAN just the first form of disaggregation?
- 00:18:00 – OpenFlex F3000 (performance) & D3000 (capacity)
- 00:19:30 – NVMe-oF – not just performance – uniform access
- 00:21:00 – Wrap Up
Related Podcasts & Blogs
- #61 – Introduction to NVM Express with Amber Huffman
- #60 – New Data Economy with Derek Dicker
- #56 – Defining Scale-Out Storage
- #55 – Storage for Hyperscalers
- The Ideal of Composable Infrastructure
- Composable IT – HPE’s Next Big Thing
Copyright (c) 2016-2018 Storage Unpacked. No reproduction or re-use without permission. Podcast Episode U1E3.
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