All-flash datacenters are still somewhat controversial. Is it the future or just an unnecessary expenditure? Rick Hegberg, VP of Americas Commercial Sales at SanDisk Corp., talked with Jeff Frick and Dave Vellante on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s Media production team, at HP Discover 2015 about the future of flash.

“We’re one of the innovators in the NAND [flash] technology,” Hegberg said. “We’ve spent over $2.1 billion in making a series of investments to build up a portfolio of solutions that we can offer to our customers like HP. And those are software acquisitions, as well as hardware acquisitions.”

Hegberg  added, “Most recently we acquired a company, Fusion-io … which is the largest of the acquisitions we’ve made. So it’s a big, big investment SanDisk is making to deliver enterprise solutions based on our NAND technology.”

The Flash drive cost debacle

One limitation of flash drives is cost, but the cost of flash drives is decreasing faster than the cost of spinning disks, according to Hegberg.

“The fundamental problem with spinning disk, or we call it ‘spinning rust,’ is that there’s only so much you can do to reduce the cost of that, versus in a solid-state drive, which is based on semiconductor technology, we continue to drive down the cost,” he said. “We put more bits per cell, we drive down the lithography, similar to what any semiconductor process is, and so we can continue to drive down the cost, as well as we’re actually increasing the capacity.”

Assessing life cycle costs

It’s also important to consider the lifetime costs of running a data center based on disks rather than flash.

“The power consumption of a storage array and/or a server based on flash is significantly less than that of a hard drive,” he said. That doesn’t include the performance gains of flash or the advantages of data sharing, such as accommodating multiple copies of data on a small amount of space.

From Hegberg’s perspective, “There will always be a place for hard drives, for archival data … but when you’re talking about tiering data, high-performance data, this is where you’re going to want it.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of HP Discover Las Vegas 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE