Solidigm Shines at Flash Memory Summit 2023

With a mainstage keynote, live demos, more than a dozen technical presentations, and inclusion in a Best of Show award, Solidigm’s industry-leading products and technical expertise were on full display at this year's Flash Memory Summit (FMS).

The August 8-10 event in Santa Clara, CA, focused exclusively on the memory and storage industry. Scott Shadley, Strategic Planner at Solidigm, is also an FMS Conference Advisory Board (CAB) member. "In its 16th year, Flash Memory Summit 2023 did not disappoint,” said Shadley. “With a rebound of attendees -- just over 3,200 -- the event brought together a cross-section of the industry,” he said. "Solidigm's presence was certainly a key aspect of the event’s success, and our booth had a great array of solutions for attendees to experience.”

Day 1 of the event featured a mainstage keynote by Solidigm Fellow Robbie Frickey who talked about the increasing need for hyper-dense storage from the core to the edge.

Frickey described how storage challenges are intensifying as the need increases to accelerate access to data in more places. He described a landscape where read-intensive workloads are dominant and in which ML, AI, big data analytics and CDNs get smarter, better and more immersive. He shared a smart transportation example in which in-vehicle data is both generated and needed to be accessed by things like sensors, trip logs, smart roads, weather, entertainment and across the far edge, edge infrastructure and core data centers.

He went on to say that Solidigm’s density leadership, large capacity drives (like the recently announced D5-P5336), and focus on high-performance solutions can bring more value to industries like healthcare, retail, smart agriculture, smart industrial and smart hospitality.

Beyond the keynote, 16 presentations were given by Solidigm team members over the three days and covered topics related to data center, client, pathfinding architecture and security architecture.

 Solidigm’s latest drive, the D5-P5336 with 61.44TB (the world’s highest capacity PCIe SSD), was showcased in three demos on the tradeshow floor. One showed how the drive enabled 2PB in 1U on a Supermicro Server, and another featured the drive in a demo of first generation Solidigm SLC in Cloud Storage Acceleration Layer (CSAL). Additionally, Solidigm showcased how high-capacity SSDs could enable data collection and AI at the edge using a Cheetah RAID Raptor server. You can read more about this demo in an article from Storage Review. Additional data center demos included computational storage and a comparison with a competitor's recently released TLC product.  

On the client side, the team showed a side-by-side comparison between a laptop running Solidigm Synergy^TM Software and a laptop without Solidigm Synergy Software. The boost provided by the software (up to 120% faster read speeds) was clear to see. The demo also gave visibility into the Solidigm Synergy Toolkit, which monitors drive health, activity, temperature, and more to get the most out of any SSD system.  Also on display was the P44 Pro Series for high-performance gaming. The ultra-fast and power-efficient drive was housed in a Solidigm-branded console from our partner MAINGEAR.  

As the Summit drew to a close, Supermicro and Solidigm were named a Best of Show Award Winner for Most Innovative Sustainable Technology in the Data Center Storage category for the combination of Supermicro's All-Flash NVMe Server and Solidigm’s D5-P5430, a highly efficient, essential endurance PCIe 4.0 drive designed for mainstream and read-intensive workloads. Tahmid Rahman, Director of Product Marketing Data Center (right in above photo), accepted the award with Patrick Chui, Sr. Director, Product Management, Cloud & Enterprise Storage System at Supermicro (center, with Jay Kramer, left, FMS Business Chairperson and Awards Chair).

Being included in this award capped off a successful few days that showcased Solidigm’s industry-leading products and expertise. Scott Shadley agrees. “Attendee feedback to the event staff has been great, and Solidigm winning a Best of Show award with our industry partner Supermicro highlights Solidigm's leadership position in the market."