SanDisk Corp. might not be the first company you expect to see at an open source conference. But Allen Samuels, Engineering Fellow and Software Architect in the Enterprise Solutions Group, said it’s what their customers want.

During an interview with theCUBE, of the SiliconANGLE Media team, Samuels explained: “If you look at the way our business is evolving …. [and] where Flash is going these days, you see us investing in data center, and in the consumer space, and in mobile. And actually in all of these areas, open source and Linux are playing increasingly critical roles. So that’s what our customers want, that’s why we’re doing that.”

Even though software seems to be eating the world, hardware is not irrelevant, Samuels said, noting “It’s a synergy between the two. Hardware as it advances creates new capability. But you need software to unlock it.”

Flash is driving new capabilities for hardware

And flash memory is a big part of what’s driving those new capabilities. “Flash is pervasive in all the storage applications. It creates enormous new business value, simply by our ability to process data thousands of times faster at much larger scales,” Samuels said.

“I think it’s really easy for people to understand, if you give them a computer with a hard drive and then you give them a computer with flash, within one minute they say …. ‘this is so much better, I’m never going back,’” he continued.

Even with the expense of flash, Samuels believes the industry won’t be going back. “I’m old enough to remember the transition from tape-based computing to hard drive-based computing. We went through the same exercise. The learning curve happens, Moore’s law continues to march on. We have 3D flash now just hitting the market all across the industry. There are many years to come of decreasing flash prices, and as that happens, you’re going to see flash increasingly be the center of computing.”

See Samuels’ entire interview below.

Photo by SiliconANGLE