As SanDisk celebrates its 25-year journey, Ravi Naik, CIO, SanDisk Corporation, talks to Pankaj Maru about the company’s focus areas, how flash is faring in enterprises, and the future of this technology
What is the focus area of SanDisk in the flash memory space?
Most people know SanDisk’s flash memory in consumer retail products like smartphones,laptops, cameras, ebook readers and tablets, but not many know about flash in the enterprise and the growth potential of that market. Finally, we are in a position to bring out our products in the space that are used and managed by CIOs. So our focus is flash in the enterprise, which includes client SSD, enterprise SSD and software bundle for performance. Overall, 10% of our revenue in 2012 came from SSD and we expect 25% revenue to come from SSDs by 2014. There is actually a large penetration and huge demand of SSDs in the market. Laptops from Apple, Lenovo and other brands are coming up with SSDs.
How are you dealing with enterprise customers on the flash memory front?
Coming back to the three focus areas — client SSD, enterprise SSD and software, enterprise customers are very different from retail or end consumers. For instance, client SSDs are basically drives that are not going to be in the laptops or desktops. These traditional SSDs are going to be replaced with flash memory as it offer significant advantages to enterprises. It offers significant reduction in boot times, power consumption and enhances overall application performance.
We are among the very few companies that have actually deployed SSDs internally in 5,000 laptops of our employees. Given the swappable form factor of SSDs, we didn’t actually go out and purchase new laptops with SSDs but just replaced the hard drives with flashbased SSDs. Not only does it benefit and improve productivity of employees but also extends the life of laptops and computers compared to non-flash, non-SSD computing devices.
On the enterprise SSD, as it is said ‘flash is the future of storage in the enterprise’ — we are talking of data centers. Traditional spinning disks consume more power, generate lot of heat, which in turn increases the data center management cost. More importantly, the fact that spinning disks just take longer time to store and retrieve data, flash memory or flash based SSDs acts as huge performance enhancer for enterprises. So, we are looking at our enterprise SSDs to get introduced in data centers and benefit enterprises.
To benefit from SSDs, will enterprises and data centers need to change or realign their overall IT architecture?
You really don’t need to worry about the applications architecture. The applications that run over the underlying storage would not even know that now they are retrieving data from the SSD box. Enterprise SSDs can be introduced in data centers in a number of ways — full flash array,layer of flash as well as thin layer of flash with software. Besides, we have a software component that we got through the acquisition of FlashSoft sometime in 2012. This caching software helps to write data to the SSDs and improves the performance of SSDs further from the natural advantage it offers. Hence, enterprises can use SSDs through specific software for specific applications, including some that demand a thinner layer of flash to drive performance and productivity.
By when do you think will flash memory based products become mainstream, with massive adoption in the enterprise IT world?
We are seeing a significant demand for flash memory products today. It’s been 25 years since we started off the journey, and the cost of flash has reduced 50,000 times and the capacity in the same duration, has increased 20,000 times. So, the capacity goes up while the cost also goes down and that’s the perfect point in time when it becomes indicative that flash would be the first choice for application performance and productivity gains. We could see this happen, maybe in the next 12-24 months. There will be spinning disks (where it makes sense to have spinning disk for certain applications)as well as SSDs coexisting in the market.
