In this episode of the Infrastructure Matters podcast, hosts Steven Dickens and Camberley Bates, discuss highlights from the Flash Memory Summit (FMS), which covers various aspects of data storage and technology beyond flash and two remarkable women in the industry who received awards: Amber Huffman from Google and Amy Fowler from Pure Storage. They also touch on technological advancements, including PCIe Gen 5 and innovative cooling systems for dense disc drives. They also talk about the Panel discussion from FMS on the CHIPS Act of 2022, how it has progressed in the last 12 months and key governmental actions that have been taken.
Topics include:
- Highlights from the Flash Memory Summit with advancements in technologies like PCIe Gen 5 and innovative cooling systems for dense disc drives
- The CHIPS Act of 2022, a government initiative investing in R&D and semiconductor manufacturing, is examined, emphasizing its nationwide approach and geopolitical implications
- Increasing role of technology in industries, such as automobiles and the collaboration with Qualcomm and Cadillac
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Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this webcast. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this webcast.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Transcript:
Steven Dickens: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Infrastructure Matters podcast. I’m Steven Dickens, one of your co-hosts, and I’m joined by the lovely Camberley Bates. Hey Camberley, welcome to the show.
Camberley Bates: Hey, good Friday I think.
Steven Dickens: Yeah. So based on our off camera, take a breath. You’ve had a busy week. Let’s dive straight in.
Camberley Bates: I just said oh my God.
Steven Dickens: So I know you’re still capturing your thoughts. You’ve literally just landed back home. Flash Memory Summit, saw you from afar rocking it on the stage, giving out awards, being your awesome self. Know there’s a lot of structuring of all your meetings to do. But just what were some of the big themes? You were bouncing from one bit of technology to another bit of technology. You were deep in the guts of this straight into another meeting on a different topic. Give us a perspective of Flash Memory Summit.
Camberley Bates: Well, Flash Memory Summit first of all is expanded beyond just Flash. I don’t know, it’s been around for 20 something years. It’s broadened there. So it is all about storage, data storage, it’s all about Flash, it’s all about CXL memory. We even had a session on archive, Fred Moore, who is the tape guy, was there. So it covered everything. And I’m on the executive committee of the conference, and so when I get there, I’m all over the place. And so I’ll give you a few really wonderful highlights that I love. Okay, so I’ve talked about Superwoman in Flash. I know everybody is tired of that from me, but I want to highlight two people that received big awards this year. One of them is Amber Huffman, who is with Google. She was the first award winner for the Superwoman in Flash Leadership Award. This year, she received the lifetime achievement with Flash Memory Summit. And her CV is just incredible.
I knew her when she was an Intel fellow. She was the person that drove NVME, the consortium there. So she’s a gatherer of people. She’s been very involved in the OCP world. She’s been very involved with the CXL. I mean, she goes back for years and years and years. So it’s an incredible award that she received and just huge standing ovation from everybody seeing that. On the heels of that, we do a Superwoman in Flash Leadership Award, and that person was Amy Fowler and she is the VP and GM for Pure Storage. Fabulous lady, super high energy, and right now is running the work for Flash Blade, which is a very, very successful product coming out of Pure Storage. So it was great to see that. So those are the people, two of the big people from-
Steven Dickens: It’s good to get the people right. And you do a fantastic job of this elevating other women in tech. I think we get so obsessed with what we do talking about the products and the announcements and that we bounce from event to event. I think it’s always worthwhile to take a pause on a moment and go, “There’s people behind this technology innovation and we’ve got to showcase that.”
Camberley Bates: And that was the energy of also the conference. So this is second year post Covid that we’ve had it. It is a smaller conference. There’s about 3,500 people. It is a geek fest. Most of these guys are PhDs. I feel like I’m going to supercomputing when I get to these guys because they’re talking the grunges of the technology that build the things that enable us to have phones, that enable us to have laptops. One of the cool technologies that was announced and is this air jet. It’s a cooling system for drives. And specifically it’s a cooling system. Now somebody said, “That’s a fan on there.” And the woman that is the CTO, she goes, “No, it’s not. No, it’s not a fan.” But anyway, it’s a cooling system for very, very dense disc drives. There’s two vendors that announced the air jet with their drives. And I believe that was Fison and Micron that did some big announcements. But their for gaming, gamers. And what the gamers have really runs hot.
I didn’t get to go to their breakout, but they got a big award for it and it’s probably the most talked about cool different technology that was on the floor. So that is one thing. All over the place was lots of announcements on PCIE 5, Gen 5. There was just a huge cadence of announcements. And there’s probably 50 announcements that come out of this conference, so that’s why I’m still reeling about what is there. But PCIE Gen 5 is the next generation giving us lots of speed, lots of capacity, et cetera that we’re going to see out there. So that was one of the other big ones that was laid out in the world.
Steven Dickens: Fantastic. So it sounds like you’ve had a busy week. Always good to record on a Friday after a busy week because the brain’s still spinning. But now, if you were to be looking ahead, what would be the big trends that you’re seeing coming out? You talked about PCIE 5, talked about cooling from a gamer driven use set. Anything else came out of your conversations? I know we’re capturing you without much time to decompress. But just what was your raw take of other big themes that came out of the show?
Camberley Bates: Well, there was another big section on CXL, CXL technology initially that is consolidating membrane and being able to use more memory lanes, et cetera, to solve some of the problem that we have with being able to get as much processing speed as we possibly can. So we are to Gen 3 CXL, not Gen 3, but CXL 3.0 specification was brought out earlier this year. But we’re just getting to the point that some of the early Gen 1 is being able to be shown and shipping and then we’re going to be seeing more 2.0. So this has continued. There’s a pent up demand to see this come out, especially for the HPC processing. And so every time is kind of inching forward to getting more and more out of the space.
So the first place we’ll see it is HPC. We’ll also see it in some really big database spaces that are rolling out. And of course the first place we’re going to see some of that work is up in the cloud because that seems to be the easier rollout path that we have. Gen AI everybody was talking about. It was in every presentation. So everybody was tying that piece to it. Although what we do know about Gen AI right now, or ChatGPT, it’s hugely processor based. A lot of processes going on, less data. One of the things that we did see or have with our conversation is that this crowd does not quite understand this concept of data platform that we’ve been talking about or we just started to talk about, what that means, which Futurum group will have some stuff rolling out on that space.
But what they are asking the question out about is, what are the key big applications or use cases that we’re going to see for Gen AI come out? Where should we putting our investments in terms of the tuning and capabilities of the technology? And those are some of the big questions that they have. And hopefully as an organization, the firm will be able to answer those shortly with some of the research that we’re bringing out the door.
Steven Dickens: Yeah. Looking forward to it. I get the impression that you and Krista, there’s some research notes coming out next week. There’s lots of coverage. Still decompressing and writing, but no, sounds like really fascinating week. For me this week… Oh, okay. Sorry. I’m cutting you off.
Camberley Bates: Well, let me go through what we did. Krista and I, Krista McCumber and I hosted the track on data security and protection. Pretty much it was all about data security. Yeah, we’re talking about protection, but it was all about the security. And total geek fest if you want to get into this. We are getting down into the grunges of the firmware and the code and the design of the just drives and what they’re doing to harden these and all the different approaches. And there’s lots of arguments about what’s going to be the best way to get at this. But clearly you’re having to secure the boot drive and all the layers above it even before you get to the controller. So they’re looking at all kinds of different ways that they’re doing that, especially looking forward into, how do we handle this with quantum computing? Is this enough for quantum computing?
And then you have to, if you’re adding more code, in there in order to encrypt and keep things encrypted whether in motion or in static, where is that being implemented because you have an implication of cost and speed? So you’re looking at all of those different approaches to how people are doing this. And I think one of the most fascinating ones that we’re seeing coming out is what IBM is going to be doing with their flash core modules. So look forward to some reporting on that. We’ll put out a research note here next week on a bunch of the items that are coming out. But it’s the flash core module that was in the RPU that’s in there. That’s the terminology that was being used, is where they’re going to be putting that in the module itself, but also being able to grab the information and update that information based upon learning across all of the flash system devices that are in the market.
Steven Dickens: Fascinating. I think you and Krista are going to really hit it out the part with some of that analysis. I’m looking forward to reading. And you guys do a great job of covering this stuff. So I’m looking forward to digging in there. So for me this week, not on the road. I’ve got two weeks worth of on the road coming. We’re going to be out at VMware Explore in a couple of weeks time. I’m off to share the mainframe conference, which is equally a geek fest next week. Big one for me that I’m writing about at the moment was the Enterprise Linux Association. Came out just yesterday, so I’m still sort of digging in. This is Oracle, SUSE, CIQ getting together to really collaborate in the open source community.
There’s been a lot going on. We’ve had Gunnar Hellekson from Red Hat on our show. We’ve also had Wojciech who’s the general manager over at SUSE talking about this. Some fascinating stuff happening in the open source community. I think we’re at an inflection point. So it’s going to be fascinating for me to see as I dig in. I’ve literally just got a bunch of tabs open on my browser, so I’ve got to start to do the reading this afternoon. But the initial announcement looks positive. I think always a big fan of when these communities get together and form and it’s going to be fascinating to see how that evolves.
Camberley Bates: So Steve, I know you were very involved, or actually you were leading a significant effort on LinuxONE on the mainframe that’s coming next week. How much of the mainframe community, is there a number there that you can talk about what percentage of those mainframes are actually running Linux now versus z/OS?
Steven Dickens: I had a briefing this week from IBM and there’s some numbers and some work and some research that we’re talking about doing with those guys. I think LinuxONE is one of the fastest growing products within IBM’s entire portfolio, not just systems. Has been growing upwards of 20, 30, 40% year on year since that was launched back in 2015. So Linux adoption on the mainframe, great story all around. The biggest customers, I think it would surprise you to see that the biggest customers on the mainframe aren’t z/OS customers, they’re Linux customers.
Camberley Bates: Interesting.
Steven Dickens: So that would surprise you. I think the biggest mainframe customers are also the biggest users of Linux. The fastest growing users of the mainframe are the fastest-
Camberley Bates: Why is that?
Steven Dickens: I think it’s just the combination of the two platforms together. There’s a couple of different models here. There’s customers who are deploying Linux only on their mainframe under a LinuxONE branded box and have got no z/OS. I spent some time with a Jamaican bank, Sagicorp. They did the first deployment of a mainframe system in Jamaica. And basically they’ve got no z/OS, they did a Unix to Linux migration onto LinuxONE. So there was no z/OS in that environment. But then you’ve also got big organizations like Citi who’ve got a huge z/OS environment and then they’ve gone and done a MongoDB consolidation where they won partner of the year, IBM did for this deployment at Citi of a huge MongoDB database as a service platform running on Linux on the mainframe. So you’ve got two different modes. You’ve got Linux adoption happening independent of z/OS, and then you’ve got it as a side card to z/OS.
Camberley Bates: Interesting. Okay.
Steven Dickens: But the interesting one for me, going back to the open ELA, a new foundation. Going to dig in, see how that’s structured and formatted. I think the interesting one for me was it kind of makes sense for what SUSE has been doing. It’s going to be interesting to see what Oracle does in this space. They’ve got some dependencies on some of that code base that manifest themselves in Exadata and the new Oracle cloud compute that we covered. It’s going to be fascinating to see. That was the other big announcement of the week, the Oracle Compute Cloud customer. They’re calling it 3C, which is a lot easier to say than Cloud Compute Customer.
Really fascinating announcement from Oracle. They’ve had a lot of success with Exadata Cloud Customer connectivity between the Oracle cloud infrastructure as a public cloud and an on-premise deployment. I read a Forbes article about this and collaborated with Ron Westfall on some coverage on our platform and we’ll put both of those into the show notes. But fantastic connectivity. I think Oracle’s very definitely becoming the fourth player in cloud and I think they’re very trusted for some of these enterprise workloads and that ability to run big on-prem tethered cloud environments connected to OCI. They’re less concerned about just it has to be public cloud. And I think that’s going to serve them well.
The other thing that was interesting in the announcement for me was they genuinely don’t care from a pricing point of view whether it’s on-prem or in the cloud. It’s exactly the same price. And I think that level of transparency, you’re not forcing an enterprise architect to make a price decision about where they put it. They can then focus on the right characteristics for the workload. So I know we’ve spent a lot of time in previous episodes talking about hybrid cloud and workload placement. Oracle stepping right into the sweet spot with that with it’s Compute Cloud Customer.
Camberley Bates: So let me tie Flash Memory Summit to the Oracle Exadata box. Last spring I was hosting panel over at the CXL Mem Con is what the conference is called. And one of the speakers there was one of the chief architects of the Exadata product. And what he presented on is a Requiem for Optane, which was kind of his quasi joke, but quasi serious because it was designed with Optane, which if you know what Optane was, it’s persistent memory, right? And so CXL and memory is possibly that replacement over time for Exadata, what they’re looking for. So talking about the CXL progression of what’s coming out there, is that we may be seeing that being part of the architecture of the Exadata box. So that performance is based upon persistent memory.
Steven Dickens: Yeah. Oracle does a great job. As part of the briefing this week, 60 optimizations in Exadata purely looking at one Oracle database. How do you make that absolutely fly? I think they do a great job in that space. I mean there’s other ways to do it. We talked about LinuxONE. There’s some great Oracle consolidation stories there. But I think that Exadata connected to an OCI environment really helps from an operational management perspective.
Camberley Bates: So one of the other things I did at the show, and I’d like to maybe talk a little bit about that with the time we have, was I hosted a panel on the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022. Most people know it as a CHIPS Act, but I got corrected because there’s a lot of money going into science. Some of the people that are on there was Russell Harrison, who’s the managing director of IEEE USA, Steve Pawlowski from Micron, on Jay Tatoren from Samsung. He’s government affairs and Daniel Armbrust who is co-founder and director of Silicon Catalyst.
Some couple items on there if you don’t know the details on it. It’s a government act that will be putting about 280 billion dollars in the next 10 years into R&D, workforce development and semiconductor manufacturing. And we’re about a year into this. It’s coming through the Department of Commerce. Fascinating piece of work. Two highlights on it I’ll make. One, this is a nationwide implementation. We’re seeing silicon and R&D and workforce enablement, et cetera. And very huge amount of emphasis in the group saying, this is not Silicon Valley, this is not Boston, this is not Austin. This is the nation. Kind of looking to say, “How do we raise this entire nation’s ability in terms of the semiconductor industry or whatever is being implemented. Secondly, it’s not just manufacturing. In fact, manufacturing is about 60 billion of the money. The rest of it has to do with R&D, workforce enablement and some tax incentives.
That’s fascinating, especially when you start looking at where the investments are in that. One of the things we reflected on is in the last year there has been 200 billion, another 200 pledged by and going forward by many of the manufacturers, including Intel, Micron, those kinds of guys that we know, plus a lot of other smaller ones in all kinds of cities, states. And New York where you’re out of, a huge amount of money going into New York. Money going Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota. Yes, Colorado. But we’re a tech center here. Yes, Texas, yes. But states and cities that have not been necessarily known for all of this. And as we look at ourselves as this digital, gen AI, all this stuff that is exploding here, it’s a nationwide gig. And I was absolutely completely fascinated by, not fascinated, but impressed about what we have done as a federal entity to help this industry to really jumpstart and move forward.
Steven Dickens: If you’ve not read this book by Chris Miller, I’ll send you the link. But I read this on vacation recently. It gives the whole history of Silicon Valley. It gives the geopolitical backdrop to TSMC, some of the underlying technology that’s based out of the Netherlands and gives you the historical context to understand… And I’m no chips guy, but I read it on vacation just to sort of gen up on this space. I think it’s fascinating for me to understand what this is going to mean on a geopolitical level for us. We’ve obviously got the tensions with China, Taiwan Strait stuff going on. But I think the US has long had leadership in this space and it needs to in some of the spaces reestablished that leadership, in other places continue to put the foot to the floor and continue to be a leader.
Camberley Bates: And there is quite a bit of tension. Biden came out this week talking about China or with an executive order on China despite some of the big semiconductor firms saying this is going to hurt. So their concern is as we close down their access to advanced chips, advanced technologies, China’s picking up their building of legacy systems, which can have an impact on the revenues for the other industries or the other companies in the United States.
Steven Dickens: We’ve seen Micron get caught in that crossfire as well with some of the stuff that’s going on, which is unfortunate.
Camberley Bates: Yep, yep. But it will work out. It will balance itself out is my belief system. And as I said, I’m not always a fan of what’s coming out of Washington. But with this one I’m like, “You go, guys, you got this moving. This is really, really good for the country.”
Steven Dickens: We’ve had Daniel cover the CHIPS Act with Pat Gelsinger and some of the team there. I think there’s also podcasts that he’s recorded with the team at Qualcomm. I think from The Futurum group, we’ve got a pretty bullish pro US excellence and leadership type of take. I think the vendors that we have the pleasure of working with are going to innovate forward and get us to where we need to be. I think the government greasing the skids and making innovation easier and more tax efficient is just only good policy regardless of which… This got bipartisan support. Trying to get bipartisan support for anything in Washington, it must be a good idea if it got bipartisan support.
Camberley Bates: And I think the differences I’ve been reading and understanding and hearing awful lot from Gelsinger and even Micron, Qualcomm, et cetera, the big companies on the CHIPS Act, the twist that I didn’t pick up on this is how much this has really pushed forward to be a nationwide effort. And it is not these Intel, Qualcomm, Micron. But it’s a, can we look at this as a team of USA Americans, including everybody that’s immigrated into us and is into this industry and say, “How do we take this to all parts of the country?” Because if everything gets digitized, we’re all computer geeks. The stuff that the kids do on computers, we wouldn’t even thought about doing when we were growing up is teenagers unless you were the geek in the back room. Right?
Steven Dickens: There’s been some announcements with Qualcomm this week around a collaboration with Cadillac. I think Olivier on our team covered that. The bill of material spend in a car from a chips perspective and technology perspective has just radically shifted and is only going to get more, the percentage, as we look at advanced autonomous driving, as we look at infotainment systems, as we look at electric vehicles. All of these are technology and innovation driven platforms these days.
Camberley Bates: So I’m wondering if that means the geek squad is going to get into auto maintenance.
Steven Dickens: I think on that note, Camberley, everybody’s going to be geek squad. That’s the wrap up. You’ve been listening to the Infrastructure Matters podcast, brought to you by Camberley and I today, and we look forward to you joining us on future episodes. Click and subscribe, do all the things to help the algorithm, and we’ll see you next time.
Camberley Bates: Thank you guys.
Author Information
Regarded as a luminary at the intersection of technology and business transformation, Steven Dickens is the Vice President and Practice Leader for Hybrid Cloud, Infrastructure, and Operations at The Futurum Group. With a distinguished track record as a Forbes contributor and a ranking among the Top 10 Analysts by ARInsights, Steven's unique vantage point enables him to chart the nexus between emergent technologies and disruptive innovation, offering unparalleled insights for global enterprises.
Steven's expertise spans a broad spectrum of technologies that drive modern enterprises. Notable among these are open source, hybrid cloud, mission-critical infrastructure, cryptocurrencies, blockchain, and FinTech innovation. His work is foundational in aligning the strategic imperatives of C-suite executives with the practical needs of end users and technology practitioners, serving as a catalyst for optimizing the return on technology investments.
Over the years, Steven has been an integral part of industry behemoths including Broadcom, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and IBM. His exceptional ability to pioneer multi-hundred-million-dollar products and to lead global sales teams with revenues in the same echelon has consistently demonstrated his capability for high-impact leadership.
Steven serves as a thought leader in various technology consortiums. He was a founding board member and former Chairperson of the Open Mainframe Project, under the aegis of the Linux Foundation. His role as a Board Advisor continues to shape the advocacy for open source implementations of mainframe technologies.
Camberley brings over 25 years of executive experience leading sales and marketing teams at Fortune 500 firms. Before joining The Futurum Group, she led the Evaluator Group, an information technology analyst firm as Managing Director.
Her career has spanned all elements of sales and marketing including a 360-degree view of addressing challenges and delivering solutions was achieved from crossing the boundary of sales and channel engagement with large enterprise vendors and her own 100-person IT services firm.
Camberley has provided Global 250 startups with go-to-market strategies, creating a new market category “MAID” as Vice President of Marketing at COPAN and led a worldwide marketing team including channels as a VP at VERITAS. At GE Access, a $2B distribution company, she served as VP of a new division and succeeded in growing the company from $14 to $500 million and built a successful 100-person IT services firm. Camberley began her career at IBM in sales and management.
She holds a Bachelor of Science in International Business from California State University – Long Beach and executive certificates from Wellesley and Wharton School of Business.
