"Data volumes have skyrocketed. More data was generated in the last two years than in the entire human history before that." - linked in one of the articles below.
BIG DATA - KEY VALUE STORES - STREAMING DATA - AI - PREDICTIVE - DEEP LEARNING The list could go on but I will get to the nitty-gritty of what I was thinking.
My comment re the provider issues was meant to be broad and it sounds to me, hearing it back now, that it came across as narrow. My greater point is that the cloud providers are growing at a fair clip - in my view that growth will continue at a rapid pace and potentially by order of magnitude. The viruses impact of driving workers to the cloud in record numbers has placed a strain on them and I see this pattern continuing regardless of relaxed lockdown rules and even in the case of a vaccine or treatment. I have been working in the cloud space for quite a while and complex product offerings on Azure, in particular, are moving at a pace that is mind-boggling. As a software architect with 20 years of experience, I have seen the tech world change dramatically but the past 5 years have outpaced the 15 before it. The 4DS technology may have tentacles into data centre capabilities but JD said himself in the video (linked below) that it will sit in between FLASH / DRAM / Disk Access and alleviate issues with what data centres call staged and caged data. He goes on to describe software systems that sit between computing on that data... that's where the pain points and opportunity for 4DS sits. You have to think about the space between memory and disk access. I am going to intermingle my own commentary with some quotes from JD here: 4DS will facilitate "storing data that can be read at near DRAM speeds and provide another huge layer of data storage that would enhance the performance of a storage system." Those storage systems exist today, in the cloud.
In summary, I wasn't alluding to 4DS solving an immediate problem of scale today, because the backend in the cloud will change and be innovated on when this grade of memory becomes reality. Those cloud backends will scale and number crunch more efficiently and that will lead to private sector innovation also. It will become a big wheel of technologically driven productivity - when it happens.
On the commercial side, let's just remove WD for a moment. Imagine if Microsoft, Amazon and Googles cloud businesses went to war over the opportunity cost for this tech. As for WD's part in this equation, imagine the opportunity cost of not having all those three aforementioned hungry giants fighting a war amongst themselves to innovate and capture/keep market share. I think I said a few months ago that the sale price of this thing is the last of my concerns, we have a motivated seller and motivated buyers, the only thing we need now is to "walk the talk."
The second link is well worth a scanning over at a minimum. The first link, I am sure you have seen but it never gets tired. It should be listened to many times over or very slowly... rewind where necessary.
