Storage For The AI Tidal Wave
episode
Uplink: AI, Data Center, and Cloud Innovation Podcast
35 min
2 speakers
5 chapters
transcribed 1 month ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to Uplink, where we explore the world of digital infrastructure, uncovering the technology fueling AI and cloud innovation with the leaders making it happen. I'm so thrilled to be here. We're at GTC in San Jose. I flew in this morning. I did too. Okay, we both got in this morning. From New York?
Yes.
I'm coming from Australia, so I've got you beaten slightly. So what we've got with us today, Renan, who is the founder and CEO of an incredible company called Vast. And it's a rare opportunity to have a conversation. I wanted to chat about a whole range of things, and Renan said he's happy to chat about anything, so we'll see where this conversation goes. Firstly... This is the overnight success story, 10 years in the making. So Vaas has literally come out of the gates and has just become so famous in the last probably few years, but you've been at this for 10 years. And prior to that, you had an incredible journey at Extreme.io where I know you took a company. from $0, I think, in revenue to $3 billion in three years.
So it's not your first go at actual storage. And maybe tell us a little bit about the journey from Xtreme.io to VAST. And then I've got a whole range of questions I'd love to ask you about some of your philosophy around what you've built and then lead into sort of where we're headed from an AI perspective, NeoClouds, you name it. So maybe we'll start with you're at Xtreme.io and you decided to do something different, I guess.
Yeah, well, Extreme.io was acquired into EMC. And so that $3 billion, we had a lot of help from, at the time, the best sales force in the world.
So it was acquired before. So you built the product and then came into EMC and then EMC scaled that through the machine.
We started to build the product. When we were acquired, it was two years into it. We didn't actually have a full product yet. It took us another year within EMC to go generally available.
And then crushed it.
How did Renen Hallak’s early storage experience lead to founding VAST Data?
And then, yes, that first year was more than enough.
And it was flash.
It was.
And back then, that was pretty different or rare at the time.
It was new. Hard drives were the predominant. And Flash was new. It was a very small system. It was just for VMs and databases. It was a very niche type of product. But it was the early days of all Flash systems.
And so Flash was born, so to speak. And at the time, was it performance or was it just that Flash had just come into existence and here's this new thing?
So Flash existed for many years, but not in the data center. It was a consumer technology, which is weird. Usually you come from the top down. Flash went bottoms up. But suddenly it made sense because of performance reasons to start using Flash. in the data center and extreme IO was one of those first systems.
And so then you, this is the question that I was thinking. You obviously had this sort of contrarian idea that at the time must've seemed crazy, but today is just so perfectly positioned you for this insane success that you've seen. What was the crazy idea that you had? Was it back there that you had that idea or did you just sort of step out before or?
It was back then. It was, if you think 10 years back or even 11 years back into 2015, it was AI and it was very, very early AI.
That is early. Yeah. To have that even belief that that was going to turn into anything.
I didn't know it would be anything like this, but I thought if we can help build the thinking machine, even if it's a very low probability of success and even if it never actually materializes, it's worth a shot. 2015, Google just acquired DeepMind. Yes. And so it was very, very early days of neural nets starting to show promise. But it was even then pretty clear, at least clear to me, that you needed very fast access to a lot of data in order for this to work. And I looked, I was a part of EMC. I looked at all of the different systems that we had in-house and None of them were scalable enough. None of them were performant enough to enable this next revolution.
So the theory was that AI is going to have to access so much more data so much faster or across a much bigger landscape.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:02–2:00
2
How did Renen Hallak’s early storage experience lead to founding VAST Data?
2:00–12:42
3
When did Hallak first predict AI would change storage requirements and why?
12:42–16:48
4
How does software-defined storage remove the trade-off between performance and capacity?
16:48–27:36
5
Why are neoclouds emerging and how do they differ from hyperscalers?
27:36–35:41