In a time when companies are packaging others’ open-source code into nebulous services, it’s refreshing (or nostalgic) to see a company start from scratch with a product it test drove and perfected itself.

Micron Technology Inc. is, first and foremost, a manufacturing company, committed to making such products, mainly semiconductors, according to Trevor Schulze (pictured, right), chief information officer of Micron.

The company just announced its NVMe over Fabric SolidScale software-defined shared storage with flash performance. The company’s in-house use of flash storage led them to understand the value it could offer its customers, Schulze told Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and David Floyer (@dfloyer), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during this week’s Micron Summit. (*Disclosure below.)  

Don Duet (pictured, left), head of the technology division for Goldman Sachs Group Inc., joined Schulze in an interview at One World Trade Center in New York City.

“There’s always that go-to-market flavor. There’s always that ‘how does Micron on Micron work?'” Schulze said of the company’s research and development strategy that often involves “drinking its own champagne,” so to speak.

To validate its own technologies, Micron is continually looking for ways to increase capital asset utilization and get greater yield from its fabrics, Schulze stated. The greater the yield, the more value to customers, simply put.

In the lead up to its NVMe over Fabric innovation, Micron discovered that some of the value-adds that would move the needle forward for the business were on the operations side, Schulze explained. This included how to move wafers and increase yield in various ways.

“Really, where we started to see huge business value was in this large, big data of information that was in this warehouse. And getting our process engineers and our data scientists to get to this information they never could get to before, correlating pieces of information in order to get the capital asset utilization up was great,” Schulze said. Flash storage and new architectures gave them the ability to get insights faster and manifest capabilities that they couldn’t before, he added.

Folding these new architectures into Micron’s business is crucial to growth, because its competition is increasingly using them as well. These new architectures include cloud delivery models. “We’re looking at this new capability and saying, ‘Wow, do we take legacy apps and extend them in a scale-up way? And is this the architecture to do that?’ And the answer’s been uniformly, ‘Yes absolutely,'” he said.

Scaling up in the stack and scaling-out are both on Micron’s agenda. The people and the skills to operate in the cloud environment are crucial to this, and Micron has them, but they need to be padded out, Schulze said.

Finance a bull market for NVMe?

Micron has chosen to use flash, NVMe and cloud to move up the stack and deliver extremely fast storage to companies, who Schulze said are “swimming in data.”

The big data needs of these businesses will require muliti-core computing that is forcing bottlenecks in I/O and memory to burst. “I think this fabric notion is unlocking a piece of the architecture that has been long-needed,” Schulze said.

As for customers, NVMe will likely find takers in the financial sector, according to Duet.

“Flash was a good example of where there were immediately parts of our business that said, ‘Hey, you know, just shaving off microseconds in how we conduct our business can make enormous difference to us.’ So we’re happy to be the early adopters, the guinea pigs, the pioneers,” Duet stated.

Electronic market trading groups will be particularity excited that NVMe may let them transact on exchanges at wire speed, leveraging memory check-pointing.

“I can’t think of many things coming out of the finance space, very OLTP [Online Transaction Processing], very transactional architecture, that has more potential to change the design pattern of how we build software and build ACID-type [Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability] solutions than NVMe,” Duet said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of Micron Summit 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner at the Micron Summit. The conference sponsor, Micron, does not have editorial oversight of content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE