5 Fast Facts with Solidigm’s Dave Sierra
As we prepare to roll out the TechArena 2024 Data Center Efficiency Report, I was honored to sit down with Solidigm’s Dave Sierra to learn more about how storage media innovation will help yield improved efficiency to solution delivery in the market.
Solidigm has been featured extensively on TechArena and is a leading supplier of storage media aimed at data center-to-edge environments. Dave is part of Solidigm’s Data Center Solutions Marketing team and is responsible for proving and conveying the value of their storage products.
ALLYSON: Why is compute efficiency becoming so critical in 2024? Is this just about AI, or are other factors like the slowing of Moore’s Law coming into play?
DAVE: As a former Intel-er, I greatly appreciate the nearly 60-year run of Gordon Moore’s Law, but technology, physics, and economic limitations are bringing that era to a close. What isn’t slowing is the pace of compute innovation and performance improvement, largely driven by the economics of the AI opportunity. While GPUs and other compute elements are indeed becoming more energy efficient, it comes at the price of huge overall increases in raw power needs. Securing and allocating more and more power for compute resources is becoming the critical factor in efficient AI data center design.
ALLYSON: How is storage part of the energy efficiency solution, and why is the move to SSDs a critical part of any IT strategy?
DAVE: You can’t talk about energy efficiency without talking about AI, and vice versa. The mind-boggling energy needs of today’s GPU infrastructure and the corresponding difficulty in sourcing power rightly grabs headlines. But storage is an underappreciated component of a modern data center’s power consumption, with several estimates pegging it at 30-35% of overall DC IT power. Solutions designed with performant, power efficient, high-capacity SSDs enable you to store more data in less space versus legacy storage options. Designing for fewer drives in a solution is more energy efficient, requires fewer servers, and reduces overall cooling infrastructure needs.
ALLYSON: Solidigm is a leader in delivering storage media to the market with decades of experience working from data center to edge. How have you differentiated your solutions from an efficiency perspective?
DAVE: As a company, Solidigm’s sole focus is delivering reliable and innovative storage solutions from the data center core to the edge. We paved the way for the industry’s ongoing transition to more space and energy efficient EDSFF (Enterprise and Data Center Standard Form Factor) SSDs with our first-to-market ‘Ruler’ design in 2019. Today, our ultra-high-density Quad Level Cell (QLC) SSDs allow infrastructure efficiency leaders to consolidate less efficient, less reliable storage designs onto a modern, high capacity, power and space efficient infrastructure. We have a roadmap of innovations that will continue to deliver improved core-to-edge efficiency value in the coming years.
ALLYSON: What do you see as the lifecycle of storage media, and is it changing?
DAVE: When SSDs first entered the market, there was significant industry concern around drive wear out – a limited number of times you could reliably move data in and out of a NAND cell. With improved technology and algorithms, those concerns are mostly a thing of the past, but today’s high-density SSDs are further improving the narrative around SSD endurance. Consider the 61.44TB Solidigm™ D5-P5336 SSD, with a lifetime petabytes written (PBW) rating of 65.2 petabytes. A typical Content Delivery Network (CDN) workload might take 14 years to write that much data to a single drive. ‘Your mileage may vary’, but you can model your own workload characteristics against Solidigm’s products using our endurance estimator at https://estimator.solidigm.com/ssdendurance/index.htm.
ALLYSON: Where can readers find out more about Solidigm products and connect with the Solidigm team?
DAVE: A great place to learn more about our power and space efficient storage is at https://www.solidigm.com/solutions/artificial-intelligence.html. Other ways to connect:
- https://www.linkedin.com/company/solidigmtechnology/
- https://www.facebook.com/Solidigm/
- https://www.youtube.com/c/Solidigm/
- https://x.com/solidigm
As we prepare to roll out the TechArena 2024 Data Center Efficiency Report, I was honored to sit down with Solidigm’s Dave Sierra to learn more about how storage media innovation will help yield improved efficiency to solution delivery in the market.
Solidigm has been featured extensively on TechArena and is a leading supplier of storage media aimed at data center-to-edge environments. Dave is part of Solidigm’s Data Center Solutions Marketing team and is responsible for proving and conveying the value of their storage products.
ALLYSON: Why is compute efficiency becoming so critical in 2024? Is this just about AI, or are other factors like the slowing of Moore’s Law coming into play?
DAVE: As a former Intel-er, I greatly appreciate the nearly 60-year run of Gordon Moore’s Law, but technology, physics, and economic limitations are bringing that era to a close. What isn’t slowing is the pace of compute innovation and performance improvement, largely driven by the economics of the AI opportunity. While GPUs and other compute elements are indeed becoming more energy efficient, it comes at the price of huge overall increases in raw power needs. Securing and allocating more and more power for compute resources is becoming the critical factor in efficient AI data center design.
ALLYSON: How is storage part of the energy efficiency solution, and why is the move to SSDs a critical part of any IT strategy?
DAVE: You can’t talk about energy efficiency without talking about AI, and vice versa. The mind-boggling energy needs of today’s GPU infrastructure and the corresponding difficulty in sourcing power rightly grabs headlines. But storage is an underappreciated component of a modern data center’s power consumption, with several estimates pegging it at 30-35% of overall DC IT power. Solutions designed with performant, power efficient, high-capacity SSDs enable you to store more data in less space versus legacy storage options. Designing for fewer drives in a solution is more energy efficient, requires fewer servers, and reduces overall cooling infrastructure needs.
ALLYSON: Solidigm is a leader in delivering storage media to the market with decades of experience working from data center to edge. How have you differentiated your solutions from an efficiency perspective?
DAVE: As a company, Solidigm’s sole focus is delivering reliable and innovative storage solutions from the data center core to the edge. We paved the way for the industry’s ongoing transition to more space and energy efficient EDSFF (Enterprise and Data Center Standard Form Factor) SSDs with our first-to-market ‘Ruler’ design in 2019. Today, our ultra-high-density Quad Level Cell (QLC) SSDs allow infrastructure efficiency leaders to consolidate less efficient, less reliable storage designs onto a modern, high capacity, power and space efficient infrastructure. We have a roadmap of innovations that will continue to deliver improved core-to-edge efficiency value in the coming years.
ALLYSON: What do you see as the lifecycle of storage media, and is it changing?
DAVE: When SSDs first entered the market, there was significant industry concern around drive wear out – a limited number of times you could reliably move data in and out of a NAND cell. With improved technology and algorithms, those concerns are mostly a thing of the past, but today’s high-density SSDs are further improving the narrative around SSD endurance. Consider the 61.44TB Solidigm™ D5-P5336 SSD, with a lifetime petabytes written (PBW) rating of 65.2 petabytes. A typical Content Delivery Network (CDN) workload might take 14 years to write that much data to a single drive. ‘Your mileage may vary’, but you can model your own workload characteristics against Solidigm’s products using our endurance estimator at https://estimator.solidigm.com/ssdendurance/index.htm.
ALLYSON: Where can readers find out more about Solidigm products and connect with the Solidigm team?
DAVE: A great place to learn more about our power and space efficient storage is at https://www.solidigm.com/solutions/artificial-intelligence.html. Other ways to connect:
- https://www.linkedin.com/company/solidigmtechnology/
- https://www.facebook.com/Solidigm/
- https://www.youtube.com/c/Solidigm/
- https://x.com/solidigm
