Brian and crew recently landed in Montreal to tour the Hypertec lab facility and witness some interesting immersion-cooling trends with the leader in the field.
Following the lab tour and product demos, Brian sits down with Scott Shadley, Director of Leadership Narrative at Solidigm. Scott and Brian have a lively, candid discussion as they trace the evolution of cooling, flash storage, and breaking away from legacy hard-drive form factors.
However, it’s not all about immersion technology. Brian and Scott discuss signal integrity challenges in PCIe Gen5/6 and the trade-off between performance and reliability. Of course, there can’t be a podcast without an AI segment, so we cover topics such as AI-driven data growth, RAID resiliency, and large-drive “blast radius” management.
Scott discusses Solidigm’s focus on developing products that customers want, rather than guessing what the industry needs. This only works when vendors work closely with customers to understand their pain points. Scott gets into the collaboration with NVIDIA. It is easy to hear the excitement in Scott’s voice. Of course, because it is a massive hardware environment, Brian has a hard time wiping the smile from his face.
This podcast covers everything from early Fibre Channel drives to flash and NVMe, and also explores edge computing applications, AI inference offload, and immersion-qualified SSD developments.
This pod is a must for anyone interested in the evolution of immersion cooling and flash storage, as well as why a strong partner ecosystem is crucial for customer success. If you have an extra 35 minutes, give this a listen or watch it from end to end; it’s worth the time. If you’d like to explore specific topics, we have broken it down into five-minute segments.
0:00 – 5:00 | Immersion Cooling and Industry Trends
Highlights:
- Opening from Montreal with Solidigm and Hypertec.
- Discussion of immersion cooling, liquid vs. air cooling, and touring Hypertec’s facility.
- Mention of OCP and how data center engineers are “becoming plumbers” due to widespread liquid‑cooled infrastructure.
- Solidigm’s collaboration with partners on direct‑to‑chip liquid cooling solutions is co‑designed with NVIDIA.
- Philosophy of open innovation: Solidigm contributes IP to industry standards via SNIA to ensure interoperability.
- Emphasis on customer‑driven innovation over chasing the next PCIe or interface generation.
5:00 – 10:00 | Evolution of Flash Storage and Form Factors
Highlights:
- Reflecting on early enterprise flash (Intel X25, SAS/Fibre Channel SSDs).
- Transition from legacy hard drives to SSDs and the “breaking the box” moment with NVMe.
- Emergence of new form factors (EDSFF → E1.S, E1.L, E3).
- Discussion about how standardization is evolving beyond traditional 2.5” and 3.5” drive designs.
- Design challenges with immersion environments and high‑density flash platforms.
- Importance of thermal stability: consistent environments improve endurance and reliability.
- Cooling innovations directly tie to longer SSD lifespans and greater efficiency.
10:00 – 15:00 | PCIe Generations, Signal Integrity, and System Design
Highlights:
- Talk about connector design challenges in next‑gen cold‑plate and PCIe Gen 5 and 6 environments.
- Signal integrity issues grow from PCIe 3→5→6: Every generation increases susceptibility to noise.
- Analogy: PCIe evolution from 3G to 5G: more nodes, shorter distance, tighter tolerances.
- Solidigm’s view: optimize system architecture and density instead of chasing raw drive speed.
- Many enterprise customers remain on Gen4 because it’s “fast enough” for distributed workloads.
- Shift from pure performance toward holistic throughput, reliability, and efficiency.
15:00 – 20:00 | Reliability, Capacity, and Customer Trust
Highlights:
- Performance is balanced with quality, longevity, and consistency.
- SSDs reaching “reliability of a DIMM.” Many customers stop swapping drives; they fail “eloquently.”
- Customer satisfaction and trust are top priorities; Solidigm scores highly in vendor ratings.
- Rise of ultra‑dense drives like 122TB models (D5‑P5336 family) and discussion of adoption.
- Larger capacities are no longer halo products.
- Manufacturing challenge: Smaller drives are harder to produce as NAND density increases.
- Drives sized for total cost of ownership (TCO) optimization; approach to “replace spinning disks.”
20:00 – 25:00 | Data Growth, AI, and Blast Radius Concerns
Highlights:
- Industry shift from deleting data to keeping everything, fueled by AI training and inference needs.
- “Data sovereignty” trend: Regional training data sets lead to more localized capacity requirements.
- Growing demand for massive local storage to adapt global models like GPT.
- Discussion of “blast radius” and the risk of losing a 100 TB drive.
- Hardware RAID for NVMe is back; GPU‑accelerated parity rebuilds are gaining traction.
- SSD rebuilds are fast. Downtime rather than permanent data loss is the genuine concern.
- Many operators now design for failure‑in‑place architectures instead of manual swaps.
25:00 – 30:00 | Future Directions, AI Edge, and Innovation Opportunities
Highlights:
- Reflection on industry-wide stock shortages driven by the AI boom and NAND supply lags.
- Unique opportunity to rethink architectures and possible new form factors or integrated flash + networking.
- Edge innovation: NVIDIA’s Spark and Jetson products blur the boundaries between data centers and desktops.
- Exploration of NVMe offload for inference and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).
- Hope for a future where storage innovations take center stage at GTC alongside compute and DRAM.
- Emphasis on cross‑industry collaboration. SNIA’s new “Storage.AI” working groups integrate storage, networking, and AI alignment efforts.
30:00 – 34:00 | Closing Thoughts and On‑Site Testing
Highlights:
- Returning to Hypertec’s immersion servers for real‑world tests with Solidigm drives.
- Discussion of thermal stability advantages: consistent temperatures equal no throttling.
- Solidigm is working toward fully qualified SSDs for hydrocarbon‑based immersion liquids.
- Closing conversation: Mutual excitement about hands‑on experimentation, performance consistency, and hardware innovation.
- Wrap‑up and goodbyes from Montreal.
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