Podcast #98: Solidigm’s Greg Matson Talks NAND and the Future of Flash

Brian was invited to the VAST Data Ceres launch “party” recently and while there took advantage of sitting down with VAST Data partner Solidigm’s Greg Matson, Vice President, Strategic Planning and Marketing. Who is Solidigm you ask! Solidigm was borne from the 2020 agreement by SK hynix to acquire Intel’s NAND and SSD business. Solidigm is now poised to become the go-to partner for customers in solid-state memory storage with SK hynix’s global presence.

Greg is not new to Intel’s NAND and SSD business, having spent 11 years at Intel as Sr. Director, GM, Strategic Planning and Marketing for Data Center SSDs. With ruler technology growing in popularity and the primary memory used in the new VAST Data Ceres platform, this conversation was timely and informative.

Solidigm E1.L SSDs

StorageReview has reviewed a number of E1.S and E1.L rulers lately, with Solidigm being one of the vendors supplying hardware for our tests. Greg’s knowledge of the technology and the industry make this a great podcast. If you want to jump around the discussion, we have timestamped the entire podcast for you.

00:00 Introductions
- Greg’s background
- NAND/Flash/QLC
- Use Cases for each
- Solidigm’s portfolio
  - QLC
  - VAST integration
06:00 Technology innovation
- Democratization of Flash
- Startups can move faster because of this technology
- Ruler specific discussion
10:00 Rack height for servers
- 2-U vs 1-U
- Brian talks about new servers in the SR Lab
- E1.S and E1.L Solidigm product focus
- Flexibility
15:00 Capacities
- Storing data
- Data Retrieval
20:00 Design thresholds
- Voltage
- TLC Demands
  - SSAS
  - Evolution of existing systems
  - What do customers really want
  - Capacity and IOPS
- 25:00 PCIe Gen3 vs Gen4 vs Gen5 vs Gen6, etc
  - Adoption of new technologies
  - Storage
    - What are the concerns
    - Thermals?
    - Heatsinks?
- 30:00 Form factors for Flash
  - Disruptors
  - Success will drive change
- 35:00 Media discussion
  - SCM and QLC in VAST Ceres platform
- 40:00 Sourcing demands
  - QLC
  - TLC
  - History
    - SATA
    - NVMe
- Conclusion and entertaining discussion to end podcast!

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2 years ago

Harold Fritts

I have been in the tech industry since IBM created Selectric. My background, though, is writing. So I decided to get out of the pre-sales biz and return to my roots, doing a bit of writing but still being involved in technology.