Mike Cordano, President & Chief Operating Officer sits down with Jeff Frick at Innovating to Fuel the Next Decade of Big Data, Western Digital World HQ in San Jose, CA https://siliconangle.com/2017/10/18/if-data-is-the-new-oil-is-storage-the-new-refinery-letdatathrive/ If data is the new oil, is storage the new refinery? Just as oil propelled Standard Oil Co. Inc. to a position of dominant industrial power in the late 1800s, data is doing the same for a number of technology firms today. Half of consumer online spending in the U.S. is controlled by Amazon, a company that relies extensively on mining data so it knows what you want before your buy it. Nearly all revenue for digital advertising in America flows to two companies: Facebook and Google. The list goes on, but one constant is clear. Just as oil spawned the growth of many industries, data is reshaping the technology stack. From robotics (think autonomous cars) to the entire field of data science, a new era of innovation is underway. This is forcing any enterprise that handles data to innovate as well, and there may be no better example of this transformation than what is taking place in the storage layer, where the application of machine learning and artificial intelligence is refining data management in new ways. “Pick your domain; there’s going to be innovation across a lot of fronts, across a lot of traditional vertical industries that is all going to be about data and driven by data. And there has to be an infrastructure layer that actually enables it,” said Mike Cordano (pictured), president and chief operating officer at Western Digital Corp. What that infrastructure will look like over the next two to three years was the focus of discussion earlier this month, as Western Digital unveiled new storage technology that is designed to handle the explosion of data across the enterprise stack. Cordano stopped by theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, and spoke with host Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick) at the Western Digital Presents: Innovating to Fuel the Next Decade of Big Data event in San Jose, California. Frick also separately interviewed Janet George, fellow and chief data officer at Western Digital, and Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing devices, at Western Digital. They discussed key elements of the company’s new storage technology, enterprise trends that are shaping data management tools, the important role of AI and machine learning in bringing compute to data and potential innovations in the future. (* Disclosure below.) New approach for data explosion The challenge facing Western Digital and other companies in the storage space is how to innovate scaled growth while allowing multiple software applications to access data and transform it into something useful. Storage industry veterans could see that perpendicular magnetic recording technology, or PMR, introduced a decade or so ago, was beginning to run out of steam in the face of exponential increases in data demand. So Western Digital embarked on a journey to develop new storage technology that would be faster, dramatically expandable and cost-efficient. Investments in two different technologies — heat-assisted magnetic recording, or HAMR, and microwave-assisted magnetic recording, or MAMR — yielded a verdict: MAMR. Unveiled by Western Digital at its headquarters event this month, MAMR uses an oscillator-generated microwave field for greater reliability and more capacity in handling data storage needs. Hard drive capacity can be increased to at least 40 terabytes, with 2.5 million hours of reliability. “When we go to MAMR, everything is seamless, everything is transparent, and it’s great,” said Collins, who cited an “order of magnitude difference” in the heat level between HAMR and MAMR. Western Digital’s announcement is also significant because it heralds the evolving shift from bringing data to compute, to moving compute to data, a change made necessary because datasets are rapidly becoming too large to transfer in any substantive way. “We want to drive this architecture that brings compute to the storage and enables some things that just can’t be done today,” Cordano said. Applying AI and machine learning The data science team at Western Digital sees the development of MAMR, with its speed and capacity, as an opportunity to apply artificial intelligence and machine learning tools within the constructs of the data itself. This is becoming increasingly important because many businesses are moving toward an “internet of things”-based model where data is captured and analytics are applied in real-time rather than stored indefinitely for later use. Retail is a prime use case for this, as merchants yearn for real-time data to reduce abandoned transactions. ......... @Western Digital Corporation @SiliconANGLE theCUBE @theCUBE #theCUBE