On this episode of the Six Five Webcast Infrastructure Matters, hosts Camberley Bates, Steven Dickens, and Keith Townsend delve into the transformative world of Storage East AI. They bring their extensive expertise to explore the latest advancements in AI storage solutions and how they’re reshaping the infrastructure landscape.
Their discussion covers:
- The evolving requirements of storage systems in AI-driven environments
- How AI is changing the landscape of data storage solutions
- The challenges and opportunities presented by AI in storage architectures
- Insights into the future of storage technologies powered by artificial intelligence
- Best practices for integrating AI into existing storage infrastructures
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Disclaimer: Six Five Webcast Infrastructure Matters is for information and entertainment purposes only. Over the course of this webcast, we may talk about companies that are publicly traded and we may even reference that fact and their equity share price, but please do not take anything that we say as a recommendation about what you should do with your investment dollars. We are not investment advisors, and we ask that you do not treat us as such.
Transcript:
Steven Dickens: Hello and welcome to episode 57 of Infrastructure Matters. It’s three of what’s going to be our gang of four on the call with you today. We’ve got Keith Townsend and Camberley Bates. Hey guys, welcome to the show.
Camberley Bates: Good morning.
Keith Townsend: Good morning, afternoon, evening, wherever you’re at. I think everyone-
Steven Dickens: It’s five o’clock somewhere, right Keith?
Keith Townsend: Somewhere. And it’s Friday.
Steven Dickens: It’s Friday and it’s beer time somewhere. We are missing Dion Hinchcliffe. He’s going to be a new regular on the show, but he can’t be with us today. So you’ve just got the three of us.
Camberley Bates: And we just decided, for everybody listening in, that Dion is bringing in the class.
Keith Townsend: Yeah, we are rough around the edges, we’ll admit that, but we own it. We’re all at an age where we can own that we’re a little rough at the edges and Dion definitely up-levels the conversation.
Camberley Bates: Totally.
Steven Dickens: So this is the scrappy trio of the gang of four and Dion’s going to bring the class going forward. Okay, that’s good. I like it. So busy docket this week. Camberley, I’ll go to you first. Tech Field Day, you’ve been out there with AI Infrastructure Field Day. I’ve got to sit in on a few of the sessions. Tell us a little bit about who was there, what you saw, what was interesting, and get us away.
Camberley Bates: Well, this is AI Data Infrastructure Tech Field Day. Usually we’ve had-
Steven Dickens: Isn’t that just fancy words for storage?
Keith Townsend: For those who are not classy.
Camberley Bates: Really now?
Keith Townsend: Camberley really does have a really mean scowl going on.
Steven Dickens: Oh, yeah. And I just was on the end of it.
Camberley Bates: Yeah, there we go. Data infrastructure. And as we’ve talked about, the world has moved. We are still in the drives and that kind of stuff, but the real meaningful stuff, stuff, there we go, technical term, as most people understand is in this software capabilities. It’s also into the… We had Pure Storage talking very, very much so in detail about their DirectFlash modules, which is they’ve got lots of smarts in these drives in that area. And there’s other firms that have invested heavily in the tech as we know, like Nvidia, it’s important, the hardware is. But the software is very important too. So as we look at the infrastructure and it also gets beyond storage, it gets beyond that idea, I’m just sticking it into the drive kind of thing.
I’m really working on this entire infrastructure and how the key thing on AI and data infrastructure, it’s as much about the speed and performance of that technology and the software that’s on there as it is about the integration and the understanding of what we’re doing with this. I mean, for instance, we had Solidigm who is a solid state drive vendor who did a phenomenal job there talking about the entire data pipeline, breaking down every piece of it. Their charts were just amazing in terms of a learning process. It was a lot of fun. We had two kinds of folks there. We had traditional infrastructure people like Keith and I, and then we had the data engineers there. So we had this really interesting conversation that was going on. And let me tell you, the data engineers absolutely loved what Solidigm, a drive vendor, was presenting. If you can imagine.
Steven Dickens: The Google session that I got to sit in, the juxtaposition of the HPE session, the Solidigm session, the Google session, we were going all the way up and down the stack. The Google piece was coming at it from the AI down, Solidigm sounded like they were coming at it from the drives up. I mean really holistic-
Camberley Bates: They actually came from here down. They started from what are the things that are going on? What does this look like? Because training, inference, RAG, archive, every one of those have got different requirements and different size, amount of data that we’re doing. And it’s very, very different. So you’ve got to break up that entire thing to say, how do I build this? Because not one thing fits to address a whole lot of kinds of technologies here.
Keith Townsend: And I think this Field Day highlights where infrastructure is going. You have this super abstracted layer that Google’s talking about and it’s infrastructure. That was an infrastructure Field Day and then you’re going all the way down. I was looking at some of the Solidigm, not just the front channel, the actual presentation, but some of the back channel conversations. And the data infrastructure folks, the data engineers were amazed at how much Solidigm has given thought to these higher level abstractions. And I think that’s representative of where infrastructure is going, where this term infrastructure has become really gooey. You might talk something as low as drives fees and fees and then something as high as what services, what abstracted-level services is infrastructure teams managing.
Camberley Bates: And into Google’s thing. They presented their very broad range of options for storage, if you want to use that term. So everything from a parallel file system, they’re involved with DAOS, which came out of Intel in terms of an open system or open source parallel file system, just regular file system block where all this fits. And so they’ve got this broad range of saying it. And one of the things that we were looking for is, when you go in, an engineer or even a data infrastructure dude has got to be able to parse what pieces do I use where. HPE was a little bit more prescriptive in terms of what they’re doing, is bringing a stack to the world, which is a huge value if somebody just wants to roll something in. “Here you go. We’ve curated this open source work. We’ve curated the technology under it. We’ve made sure it’s working together. We are allowing you to pick in pieces, whatever you need from the open source space.”
They’ve done a great job of that kind of offering that’s out there. And of course it’s a green light offering if you want to do that. And then we had Pure, which was fascinating because it was very technical. They got into some really technical items. And what we were trying to do is understand the things that they have built into their DirectFlash modules and their networking behind it and how that gives them an advantage in terms of speed, in terms of being able to feed the beast, the GPU in that area. So that’s where they went in talking about it. But it’s just a really broad range. And I know I’m missing somebody here. Who did I miss?
Steven Dickens: Infinidat. Maybe come to you, Keith. You were there, what did you-
Keith Townsend: I was not there. So I am going to defer. I was going to sneak by and go there but we’re in travel season and this is my opportunity to take a week off from travel.
Steven Dickens: Oh cool. Yeah go do that.
Camberley Bates: Yeah. Bill Basinas was there and he was presenting on where they fit both into talking about where they were working in terms of providing. So their big focus has been on the traditional transactional high-end systems. And one of the things that we’re thinking about is saying, okay, so most of what we think, but somewhere along the line, we have to bring in and marry the transactional data that’s going to go through this. VAST, who we’re going to talk about a little bit later, they talk about time series coming into that data. And think about it this way. If I’ve got an engine that I’m doing, I’m making some decisions. It’s already been trained and everything else but I’ve got new data coming in. Or I want to use new transactional data that’s going on, whatever that is. Maybe it’s the banking system or maybe it’s retail or whatever, but I need to feed that in, in real time more than likely, to augment my knowledge base that I’ve created.
And that’s that RAG. I’m augmenting my knowledge base with current absolute new data. How do we do that? And those are challenges. Those are really big challenges because we’ve got data in different places and how does that feed into this process? So we’re just at the cusp of this industry. And I think as delegates we walked away from there going, “Wow, there’s a lot to be done.” There’s a huge amount of collaboration between the data engineers and the infrastructure people to communicate because we speak very different languages.
Keith Townsend: Camberley, this reminds me, I don’t know how we missed this because we didn’t talk about it last week. I think it was in between shows, the MLPerf results came out. As we’re bridging the conversation between the Field Day event and what we’re talking about, VAST, how does the MLPerf results and the industry, this is a first, it’s 1.0, how the industry is starting to look at storage performance and its impact on AI.
Camberley Bates: MLPerf Storage 1.0 came out last week. I am going to say upfront, I have not spent the time on it, although our guys over in Signal65 have buried themselves into it and looked at it. And I’ve been on the road, so I have not had a chance to get into what, the pieces that are first out there. So this is 1.0 that they brought out. And I’m not exactly sure what this is actually reporting because there’s a lot of claims out there. “I’m number one, I’m number one, I’m number one.” So there’s a lot of the slices to measure.
Keith Townsend: And the scores will change.
Camberley Bates: Yeah. I was like, “Okay, I’m going to take a look at it,” but I think I’m sure what they’re doing is they’re looking at everything from your training to the RAG, to the whatever. And as I said, this is not one type of workload. This is five or six workloads that are in that. And then there’s more that we don’t know that’s going to be needed in order to work through that. And now we haven’t even started talking about classification and PII stuff. That’s entirely different, but that’s what MLPerf is trying to do from a storage standpoint.
Keith Townsend: Yeah, I’m looking forward to… I haven’t dived into it. I still need to read the Signal65 report. But this is something that we’ve been trying to get our storage customers to pay attention to and help us and collaborate with us to see the impact, especially on RAG, because I think most people are not doing training obviously, but almost everyone is going to do some level of inferencing and RAG and what is the impact of storage performance and subsystems and services on RAG, which is probably a good segue to what VAST is doing.
Steven Dickens: Yeah, let’s go there, keeping us rolling along. VAST made some big announcements. I wasn’t involved in those, but I know you guys were. What did they announce? Why is it significant? Tell me more.
Keith Townsend: Yeah. Storage is still Camberley’s. If you asked a virtualization question, I’m all over it. People identify me as a-
Camberley Bates: Okay, he’s handing it to me.
Steven Dickens: Mr. Virtualization, Keith Townsend.
Keith Townsend: Yes.
Camberley Bates: So what they were doing, first of all, the conference is called COSMOS, but there’s also what COSMOS is, is what they created with COSMOS is a community of technologists, technology companies to come together and understanding that this is not a one system kind of environment. But it will take a village, if you will, on bringing this to market. So that’s what Cosmos is all about. The usual suspects were very involved with that. Everything from the vendors to hardware, software and partners like in WWT. But the big piece of this is coming out with the data engine that they’re doing, which is what they’ve already done is, they’ve got the data storage, the base level data storage. They’ve been working on the vector database capability across the entire data storage, which is used for RAG.
And now what they’ve added in there is the ability to bring in NIMs, which is capability coming from NVIDIA, to be able to iterate on the RAG systems, et cetera and push that out there. There’s not a huge amount of detail on it because they’re not shipping until they say they’re GA ing and what they say they’re shipping in first half. And they’ve also talked about first quarter. So somewhere along in there that we’re going to see that. And at that time is when we’re going to get a whole lot more of the details of what they’re doing. But essentially their vision there is to be able to… And the other piece they’re doing is they’re bringing in time series data, which is significant as I was just talking about. How do you bring time series data real time into the RAG system to update and be able to reuse out. So that entire platform, their vision is that here is one platform you can use that will streamline the entire process of what you have.
So the question is, you’ve got everything there. You’ve got the ability to do block, you’ve got the ability to do file, you’ve got the ability to do object, bring all that stuff into your vector database or the environment that you need to do or your data warehouse environment, process all that and spit out the answer on the backside. So that’s where they’re at. And all within privacy governance that you need to have well integrated into NVIDIA, who is their key partner here. The question then, the big questions that we’ve had already is, well, customers, their data is already on all these other systems. Are they going to bring in a brand new system and do that? And the answer coming back from many people that we’ve talked to already, is maybe. And the reason being is because this is a new application or a new environment, and so they are setting up new areas. For instance, we hear about Dell talking about this AI Factory. What they’re talking about is that, what we’ve done in transactions is this much. What you’re going to do on AI analysis and data is going to be 10 times bigger, 20 times bigger. So, yes-
Steven Dickens: 20 times more storage required?
Camberley Bates: I don’t know.
Steven Dickens: I wonder where that-
Camberley Bates: Nvidia. No, no, processors. Primarily processors.
Steven Dickens: Okay. That sounds like a campaign to sell more disk and splash.
Keith Townsend: If we look back at what we’ve done traditionally in enterprise IT there’s opportunity here for vendors. Because when I was at my last assignment as a enterprise architect, I had what was called VMAX back then, which is now whatever PowerMax, which is, as we like to call it, the main frame of storage. We had three of them supporting one app, SAP. SAP was important enough to support three PowerMaxes, two for production, one for DR. And the rest of the infrastructure ran on Dell’s lower level storage. So if the application brings enough business value and there is uptime and performance and there’s a return on that investment, enterprises will spend the money on it. What’s very uncertain, and it came across in the Cosmo partnership, is that we really don’t know what these applications are going to look like in the future.
We’re trying to hedge our bets and there’s partners in this Cosmo, from Supermicro to Equinix to WWT, Deloitte. What’s missing is the big cloud providers. And there’s this argument, especially for AI, that this is going to be primarily an on-premises workload that the QTSs, the Equinix of the world will be hosting these workloads and we’ll have to do a lot of Lego block putting together initially. And it’s important for these types of partnerships to basically show enterprises the way, because this is PhD-level stuff right now, especially you mentioned the time series database, the time series data stuff. I just read a huge research paper on whether or not you should try and rapidly retrain versus use RAG. We just don’t know.
Steven Dickens: So fantastic discussion. A lot of storage. Camberley, you’ve been talking a lot… Or should I say data infrastructure? Sorry, I shouldn’t say storage. A couple of big things for me this week that I saw, system of record outage for Bank of America on Wednesday hit the press. Very, very few details. I went digging, spent a couple of hours going down the rabbit hole. Really hard to find what this was. Spent some time with a couple of the IBM guys last night. And there’s a massive mainframe infrastructure that is the system of record at Bank of America. And I said, “Did you guys break things on Wednesday?” And there was no reaction from those guys. I think that was a cyber attack and that’s why there was no sort of details that I could find.
Typically, if a bank’s having cyber issues, they won’t say anything. If they’re having system uptime and availability issues because they broke something, they’re a bit more transparent. So I don’t want to fuel any conspiracies, but I spent a fair bunch of time looking at this. I track outages and track down time and this type of stuff. It’s my bailiwick. Really not very many details out there. I don’t know, Keith, whether you saw this one come across your radar this week.
Keith Townsend: I did see it come across my radar and it is exceptionally quiet for a bank outage, especially one of the world’s largest banks. You typically get some pretty transparent things. People get nervous when the banking system has problems. And someone that’s frankly too big to fail, the size of this bank, typically do have some pretty transparent announcements. There’s some system failure or whatever, some high-level explanation. I expect that one way or another we will find out what happened. Because this isn’t some mid sized bank in the… I’m in the Midwest, so I can pick on us Midwesterns. It’s not a mid sized bank in the Midwest that only a handful of folks use. I’ll use a defunct name. It’s not Harris Bank of Chicago. This is a proper global player.
Steven Dickens: Something like 70 million customers. There was literally no… I must have read 10 or 15 different articles. Then I went digging from there, but didn’t find any detail.
Camberley Bates: The only article I saw was a report that some people had their balances zeroed out. Was there any truth to that?
Steven Dickens: Yeah, so people going in via their mobile app looking at their balances, their credit card balance was intact, interestingly enough. It’s always the same- Nobody ever catches a break in these outages. All of this is FDIC insured. Your money’s not gone. Don’t create a run on the bank. Don’t go to the teller and get all your cash out because you think your money’s disappeared. That’s not what happened. This will just be some type of- They’ll recover. As we’ve said, there’ll be protected copies of the data. Your money’s still there, but it was just really interesting that some of those balances were zeroed out when people were looking at their accounts, which is obviously stressful, right?
Keith Townsend: Yeah, that would mean they made $800.
Steven Dickens: Yeah, my 50 bucks wouldn’t be there and I’d be really stressed about it. Camberley maybe has got a bit more money than you and I, Keith.
Camberley Bates: I’m wanting to go up and look at my account right now because I happen to be with Merrill Lynch and Bank of America. So there we go.
Steven Dickens: Okay, so that one broke. I’m going to continue to dig, but it doesn’t to me sound like a system of record outage. It sounds to me like there was a cyber attack. I’m putting two and two together there. I could be making four or I could be making 48. But that’s what I’m saying based on what I was able to find out.
Camberley Bates: So I’ll be really interested to hear if it was and how they caught it and what did it and what systems did do this. I’m sure we may not be able to report on it someday, but it would be interesting.
Steven Dickens: I will keep digging. The other big mystery was an OCI region announcement in Malaysia, so Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. I’ve been tracking. I’ve got a research note that’s coming out on this that’s in the system that should publish either today or early next week. Another big region from Oracle. I think I see a really good trajectory from those guys around sovereign cloud. I think they get that data sovereignty is really important in various markets. Obviously with the database background that they’ve got. Those are typically-
Camberley Bates: Data infrastructure matters or is it storage that matters?
Steven Dickens: Well, I think based on this podcast, it’s storage matters, right? We should just rename the podcast. But no, I think given their background around database, where they are, they get that those system of records are going to be very often in Oracle and they’re going to need to be on-prem. So lots of details here. I think it was 7.8 billion, which is significant. Normally these are in the billion dollar range. So this is a biggie. This is like the Amazon one in the UK that I reported recently. So we’re seeing some very big investments that these hyperscalers are having to make into sovereign cloud deployment. So I think, it continues on a trend I’ve been tracking all this year.
Keith Townsend: And Oracle is unique with the cloud providers. Their differentiator is that when they bring on a region, they make the marketing claim that every service is available. So it’s not, “Oh, this is a region with these core sets of services.” If you’re using Oracle cloud VMware service, it should be available day one in this new region in Malaysia. So that $7 billion number is a big deal and it’s a big deal that they’re bringing up a new region in a new part of the world for them and the services that come along with it.
Steven Dickens: The other thing for me, and I think Oracle is able to make their regions and their cloud instances with what they’re doing with Alloy and Cloud@Customer, they can go a lot smaller with some of these regions. This one’s a big one, 7.8 billion. That’s up there. That’s up there as big as any of the ones I’ve seen. But they’re also… I think I took away from CloudWorld that it’s down to as small as three racks. If you’ve got, and you want to connect to the Cloud@Customer, the Alloy, the Exadata, Cloud@Customer, if you want to connect and create that sort of small region, you can connect that infrastructure back in. What they did and announced at CloudWorld with putting OCI into AWS to complete the set and now have AWS, Google and Azure. There’s some really good stuff that Oracle’s doing here with its… I don’t want to call it private cloud, but sort of data sovereignty and how that connects into other clouds, I think.
Keith Townsend: Yeah, I think the new term is exactly that, sovereign cloud. This ability to take these three racks, put them in an Equinix data center next to your VAST data storage, blah, blah, blah, in the whole market texture picture. And have this data locality capability with these cloud services interacting with your own data within your own region.
Steven Dickens: And that’s vital for enterprises that operate locally, government agencies, defense organizations. There’s a whole raft of people that are really paranoid about where their data sits and the regulatory and legal framework that sits around it. So I think good strategy, that Oracle’s on. 7.8 billion, again, a big amount of money, at the top end of where I’ve seen these. So fascinating announcement. I’ve got more details coming out in the research now. We have three of us this week. We’re getting up on to half an hour. Anything else from you both before we wrap?
Keith Townsend: No, this has been a… I’ve learned a lot because now I don’t have to go back and watch all the AIDI videos. Actually, I’m going to do an experiment. I’m going to feed it into NotebookLM and see if NotebookLM can just replace the three of us. It won’t replace Dion, but will replace the three of us on giving news.
Steven Dickens: We’re going to create avatars and just completely get the AI to do it, Keith? Is that what the plan is?
Keith Townsend: Exactly.
Camberley Bates: So our compatriot, David Nicholson, is feeding all his sarcasm into something he’s calling DaveBot 9000.
Steven Dickens: Oh, geez.
Camberley Bates: And he’s going to have it start writing his-
Keith Townsend: Well, good. I don’t know if really any AI can quite capture Dave’s snark yet. He may need to feed it an awful lot of data.
Steven Dickens: Snark as a Service, is that what we’re going to get?
Keith Townsend: Yes.
Camberley Bates: Snark as a Service, there’s we go, that’s the new SaaS.
Steven Dickens: Well, fantastic. You’ve been listening to episode 57 of Infrastructure Matters. We are here every week to bring you the breaking news, what’s been going on in the week of infrastructure, and how that matters and why you should care. Please click and subscribe and do all those things, share with all your friends so that we can grow the audience here. And we’ll see you next week. Thank you very much for watching.
Author Information
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.
Keith Townsend is a technology management consultant with more than 20 years of related experience in designing, implementing, and managing data center technologies. His areas of expertise include virtualization, networking, and storage solutions for Fortune 500 organizations. He holds a BA in computing and an MS in information technology from DePaul University. He is the President of the CTO Advisor, part of The Futurum Group.
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.