The 2015 Flash Memory Summit may represent the moment where flash memory was universally recognized as king of the storage world. In the above interview, Conference Chairperson Tom Coughlin and Technical Chairperson, Brian Berg, discuss some of the significant announcements at this year’s event, including:

• Announcement of the world’s largest storage drive – a 16 Terabyte solid state drive from Samsung – the typical consumer won’t be the target, but it could be a valuable tool today for data center applications.
• In-Storage compute applications, where processing is essentially done in the storage – very useful for big data applications where performance and response is mandatory.
• A number of announcements of vendors using the open source Ceph for managing storage (10 million downloads & counting).

And flash memory is showing up everywhere. Toyota’s GM of Advanced Research Hideo Inoue discussed one of the more interesting applications of flash memory, which is its use in autonomous vehicles. He indicated that one of the key requirements of these data centers on wheels will be flash memory that last 20 years.

Berg references his interview with Eli Harari, founder of SanDisk, whose early work that led to the development of the floating gate EEPROM in the 1970s, as well as System-Flash – the work he did with 2015 FMS Lifetime Achievement Award winner Bob Norman and current SanDisk CEO Sanjay Mehrotra in the late 1980s that manages flash memory cells.  Both were essential for every flash-based product and technology seen at the 2015 Flash Memory Summit.

Tom Coughlin sums up the significance of the event, “Flash is having a major impact on the design of interfaces, on the design of storage systems and the way they are used.”

Stay tuned to ViodiTV for additional coverage of the 2015 Flash Memory Summit.