With roughly 5,000 people in attendance, the 2014 Flash Memory Summit was once again a successful event. The Toshiba booth was filled with people looking at our SG4 Series TLC based client SSD, Enterprise SAS and SATA SSDs, and 15nm NAND wafer. The booth was also staffed by OCZ (a Toshiba Group Company) who showed off some of their latest Enterprise SSDs. PCIe, M.2 form factor and NVMe dominated the majority of the discussions we had with attendees visiting our booth. With the potential each of these technologies offer, it's obvious that they will become a major part of the flash storage marketing in the next few years and everyone wants to be up to speed on what coming out.
Outside the exhibit floor there were more keynotes and conference secessions than anyone could possible attend. There were a wide variety of keynote speakers that ranged from the likes of Microsoft, IBM, Nimbus to Alibaba all primarily focused on making flash work across the enterprise. In the big picture, flash is still relatively new to the datacenter and everyone is looking for the right way to test, deploy and manage the latest devices in the datacenter and other server and storage environments. Conference sessions covered more specific topics like standards, data management, applications, security and architecture. Between the higher level keynotes and deeper conference sessions there was something for every attendee.
The 2015 Flash Memory Summit is rumored to become even larger with more exhibit space. As flash technology continues to make is way throughout the enterprise we'll see the number of companies supporting flash deployment increase as well as the number of attendees looking to gain more knowledge at the conference. We look forward to having everyone stop by the Toshiba booth in 2015. See you then!
The views expressed on this post are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of TAEC or Toshiba Corporation.
