KIOXIA’s Maulik Sompura joins Brian for an in-depth, informative discussion about all things flash and other industry events. The topic is timely and relevant, given the massive expansion of AI and modern workloads.
Maulik Sompura is the Senior Staff Director—Product Planning and Management at KIOXIA, with over 13 years of experience in NAND, memory, and SSDs, including the last six years at KIOXIA. Additionally, his career includes stints with Intel and Toshiba.
The conversation extends beyond storage and memory, transitioning to liquid cooling, hyperscalers, and form factors. They also discuss open-source software, new fabs, concerns about scaling, and fears of another “Covid-boom-and-bust” event.
It is an informative conversation that will prompt you to think about something in the long term. We’ve broken the podcast into five-minute segments, so you can jump to the section that’s most relevant to you and your environment. However, it is well worth the time to watch this in its entirety.
Brian and Maulik kick off the discussion with how radically SSDs and flash storage have evolved, especially under the pressure of AI and hyperscale data centers.
0:00–5:00: Hyperscalers Quietly Running the Show
- SSD portfolios have exploded in complexity: many form factors, endurance levels, and performance tiers.
- The AI boom has moved storage right behind GPUs/HBM as a first-class priority.
- Hyperscalers (Meta, Google, Amazon, etc.) dictate detailed drive requirements, and those custom designs ultimately shape what enterprises get.
- OCP specs help unify and simplify the chaos by giving everyone a common target on top of NVMe.
- The industry is actively trying to shrink the number of SKUs and converge on modern form factors like E3, even as legacy form factors linger.
5:00–10:00: E3, E2, and Petabyte-Class Drives
- E3 is becoming the preferred enterprise form factor for Gen6+ due to its better power and thermal characteristics.
- 2.5″ drives will stick around for years due to long product lifecycles, but new designs are moving to EDSFF.
- E2 is a larger, capacity-first SSD form factor, seen as a true hard drive replacement at extreme capacities.
- With advanced NAND stacking, a single E2 drive could eventually reach 1 PB.
- Hyperscalers mitigate the risks of giant drives using sharding, erasure coding, and predictive analytics; rebuild times for huge SSDs are still much better than for large HDDs.
10:00–15:00: Liquid Cooling Comes for SSDs Too
- AI training systems are driving widespread adoption of liquid cooling, and that now extends down to storage.
- SSDs in E3 form factors are being redesigned for direct contact with cold plates (surface flatness, materials, and connector details).
- Liquid-cooled Gen5 SSDs will pave the way for Gen6, where power and heat go even higher.
- Enterprises are cautious about bringing water into the data center, but rising power costs and GPU density will make liquid cooling harder to avoid.
15:00–20:00: AI Storage: Capacity, Performance, and Fabric Stress
- AI pushes storage along two axes: massive capacity and very high performance.
- KIOXIA’s 245 TB-class drive (with 32‑high QLC stacks) targets data lakes and large repositories, not just generic workloads.
- Inside a modern box, storage can push 250–280 GB/s; the bottleneck increasingly becomes the network fabric, not the drives.
- Hyperscalers are racing to 400/800 GbE and smarter NICs/DPUs, while mid-market customers struggle to keep up with that level of fabric investment.
- Traditional databases and Fibre Channel remain, but vector databases and AI-centric data stores are joining the mix.
20:00–25:00: Smarter Software and a True Flash Super‑Cycle
- KIOXIA isn’t just shipping drives, it’s investing in software (e.g., ISAAC) to reduce HBM/DRAM needs while preserving AI performance.
- The strategy is holistic: improve cost and efficiency at the system level, not just through faster NAND.
- New fabs like Kitakami (K2) are ramping up, but vendors are cautious after Covid-era boom-and-bust cycles that cost the industry ~$30B.
- Scaling NAND (more layers, finer lithography) is getting more expensive and faster-paced, so that supply will grow, but in a controlled way.
- Many see this as a multi-year “super‑cycle” driven by AI and data growth, not just a normal 1–2-year flash-upturn.
25:00–End: AI Everywhere, Flash vs. HDD, and Learning from HPC
- Data keeps growing and is rarely deleted; AI is moving to wherever that data lives, including the edge, backups, and secondary tiers.
- High-capacity SSDs can deliver ~100 PB per rack, versus multiple racks of HDDs for the same capacity, with far better performance and efficiency.
- HDD performance doesn’t scale with capacity; SSDs deliver orders-of-magnitude better IOPS/GB and throughput, improving TCO and favoring flash at scale.
- Shows like OCP and Supercomputing (SC) are where the future is visible first: wide racks, 800V busbars, exotic cooling, and power designs.
- Hyperscaler and HPC innovations are steadily shaping what “normal” enterprise servers and data centers will look like, with resiliency and efficiency.
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