The Edge Landscape and how Innovative High-Density Storage Transcends Edge Workloads | The Six Five Summit

The six five Summit is back, it's 2024. And we are talking about ai. We're talking about AI and the impact of the enterprise, the continued build out of AI infrastructure, which is, as you know, in the data center, but also on the edge.

Daniel, how you doing, my friend? Yeah, pat, it is good to move on from some of the data center conversations. Of course, today we have our cloud infrastructure track, but we're also here on our edge track.

And Pat, we've heard this many, many times about the size of the opportunity. And of course, data centers are exploding. The AI factories and data centers are being built because we know the future workloads and how important this is gonna be.

But if you think about things, whether it's vehicles, factories, whether it's retail stores and operations, there is so much data being created at the edge that it would be a big miss if we didn't spend some time talking about that. Absolutely. And Dan, you know, I love to look back in history and literally over the last 40 years, every major shift has been a movement.

It's kinda like an accordion, right? We go out expands contracts, right? So we saw mainframes, mini computers, X 86 servers, pc, smartphone, tablets, and then the industrial IOT.

I mean, it just goes back and forth. And I feel like we are in the mode of this moving out and historically compute, uh, storage, uh, and memory, uh, typically wind up being where the data's created. And, and that's, and that's the edge.

So I'm super excited to have this conversation about storage on the edge Edge. Dave and Greg, welcome to the show. Hey, yeah, welcome guys.

Thank you. Yeah, It's great. Hey, can you just tell us real quickly what SOY does for those who might not be aware?

Sure. Uh, yeah, so my name's Dave Dixon. This is Greg Matson.

I'm a co CEO in. So Im, and, uh, soy was created back, uh, about four years ago. We were an acquisition by SK Hynek from the old Intel NA products group.

Uh, so now that we're really a, you know, a company and entity, et cetera, we have a unique focus compared to everybody else in the n business. We're really entirely focused on, you know, the data center business. But that of course includes the storage servers there at the Edge as well.

I Love it. Greg, how about yourself? Well, I run strategy and marketing for the company.

So anything to do with products and from definition to go to market to doing stuff like this. Let's talk about the, the, the, the growing opportunity at the Edge. Of course, uh, we've enjoyed, uh, having a couple sit downs with you.

People that are watching our infrastructure track may see these gentlemen Again in another conversation. Yes, maybe. But, uh, you are really a perfect example of that data center to edge.

You heard us kind of teeing it up. How big is this opportunity? Do you see it?

And talk a little bit about it, specifically through the lens of Storage. Well, yeah, as we did talk about previously, we looked at the scalability, right, of the infrastructure in the data center and how the, you know, high performance, high density QLC SSDs are really gonna make it be a game changer for data center storage. Now, like you mentioned, you know, edge growth is probably gonna be at least two x faster, what we see in our projections faster than what's happening in the, in the data centers.

So that opportunity is gonna be even bigger there for edge servers, et cetera. And, you know, they're really gonna have the same growth drivers. If you look at, you know, what's happening on the edge, I think we're familiar with those magazine articles from not too long ago, right?

Data is the new oil. Yeah. And all that data, you know, it's all being created, obviously out there on the edge.

And, you know, one thing we've been talking about internally, uh, because we're very familiar, very close to data, it has a lot of what we call gravity associated with it. It's very costly and expensive to kind of move it. Just want to stay there.

If you, if you really want to try and shift all that data back to a data center back up to the cloud to complete all the analytics and AI training, et cetera, it's too darn slow, too darn expensive to do it. So we're gonna see more and more trends of analytics com computation, uh, even light training happening more at the edge than, and we're seeing that now. We're gonna continue to see that it's gonna be a mega trend over the next rest of the decade.

Yeah. So Greg, is this, is this classic like, uh, smart, you know, we always like to put smart, smart manufacturing, smart logistics, uh, anything done with, uh, cameras? Is this the flavor of what we're talking about on the edge?

Retailing, Retailing, there's also, you know, detection, right? For fraud or quality detection network, you know, maybe a power grid, you know, failure detection and uh, you know, just anything like that. But it is, uh, as Dave said, you know, it's so expensive to move the data that it will have to be that some level of compute gets moved back to make the data useful at the edge.

Because if you just store it there and do nothing, right, it's worthless. So it might be obvious to some that, that there's a difference between storage related to the data center and the edge, but I think it's worthy of a conversation. I mean, how is it different?

Is it different from reliability, performance capacity, form factors? How, how is it different and why is it different? Well, I think, uh, some, we'll see some of the same trends that we talked about in the data center itself in terms of power and performance.

But, you know, you mentioned reliability. I think that's a interesting one. You know, it's much harder to have, you know, service stuff out in the field and of course, than, you know, inside the data center.

And so you're gonna see longer expected lifetimes and just the reliability requirements of comparisons between SSDs and HDDs. Uh, historically, the, the trends have been about 10 x better annual field rates between SSDs and, and HDDs because of the mechanical aspects of HDDs. Of course, when you talk about that being, you know, more and more deployments out in the field and having to service those higher failure rates out there, that's gonna be a much bigger deal.

Yeah. So, you know, at data center, right? What are some of the constants, right?

Raised, raised tile flooring, right? Yeah. Every one of them.

And now we're even seeing very dialed in, in cooling, uh, types of systems. I mean, it's literally a science as you go down each one of these floors, but also each one of these aisles and on the edge, I mean, it could be a server bolted to, uh, a brick wall, uh, that has, eh, the air conditioning sometimes doesn't work and, and it goes out, uh, could be in the elevator shaft, uh, of, uh, of a company on the shop floor, uh, of a major auto, uh, manufacturer. So the, the variability certainly has to be that challenge too.

Absolutely. And that's, you know, where the ruggedness of a solid state drive comes in versus a hard drive. Right?

And, you know, as, as Dave said, even the reliability, you know, five to 10 x or more in some cases, uh, reliability differences, um, translate into just ease of deployment, uh, of SSDs versus hds at the edge. And, and when that hard drive goes down, business essentially stops, right? Can stop you lose your data.

You know, maybe it's okay, maybe it's not that critical data. Maybe you're a, a big groceries chain and you had your, you know, your one store lost all its records for the day and you're not uploading the revenue back into, uh, it kind of Sounds like a big, big deal To me. That's kind of a big deal.

Yeah, there's, but it ranges. Yeah. So You guys, you know, could call out, uh, maybe some of the opportunities too.

You know, reading on this, you've made some commentary about a DAS, uh, on research. Uh, talk a little bit about kind of, you know, even more how specifically SSDs can uplevel 'cause really what you're, you tend to be talking about the edge, yet tend to be talking about a lot about service providers. Yeah.

The, um, you know, we talked about the reliability and some of the ruggedness. Um, you know, now where I think we're getting into some of these real time applications of what's happening at the edge, we're gonna really gonna look much higher at the much higher performance requirements right now. We're gonna be doing real time decision making right on the edge.

And that really requires much better latencies to, you're not gonna be sending the data back up to the cloud to make a decision about what to do in a factory, for example, or in the middle of an operation. Uh, you know, those decisions need to made, be, made real time between the computation and the storage and between, uh, you know, the random read, uh, performance differences, then the quality of service latencies. It's really a, it's no comparison between the, you know, what's happening with the legacy 90%, um, HDD in storage right now to, you know, where SSDs are gonna really be the much bigger impact.

Yeah. My company's done research on AI and the Edge, uh, probably, probably about five years. Yeah.

And it was machine learning, not really deep learning. 'cause they have a hard type, it's kind of a black box. But when I compare that to generative ai, it's smaller data.

Okay. Even the, even a small model, oh, a a measly billion parameter, uh, model that I have to infer against is still much bigger than this random object recognition AI framework that I pulled down, uh, off, off, off hugging face. And then what we're seeing too is the co-mingling of data on the edge, uh, brings, uh, storage to, uh, to, to the forefront.

So it seems like a, a big opportunity. Yeah. Well, and that's where the, you know, the capacity density that you can get with high capacity solid state drives is, you know, as much as four to five x more than the highest capacity hard drives available today.

Right. Enabled by both the form factors, but also just the, the sheer capacity of each drive. You know, I mean, right.

Today we're shipping 60 terabyte drives and the nearest competitor hard drive is 24 terabytes moving to 30, you know, later this year. And by that time we'll be well ahead of the 60 terabyte, uh, capacity point. So, you know, you're, you're teeing me up very nicely, Greg, and I appreciate you doing that.

But, uh, portfolio, let's talk about that a little bit. 'cause I think we've, we've talked at a macro level about what the challenges and opportunities are, where storage fits in. But what about soy?

So what are you building, Greg? Uh, talk a little bit about the products and how they're addressing these challenges that we've outlined. Well, for several years now, we've been looking at the opportunity to how do we capture more of that cold data that's sitting in hard drives and putting it, you know, transforming it into warm data?

Mm-Hmm. And what's required, what's required is a broad selection of form factors, depending on the type of server used. So at the edge, you might have a different form factor than you use in the core data center.

Uh, also flash technology. So we're on our fourth generation of, uh, quad level cell flash technology, very well proven, highly reliable. And we're translating that into the, the highest capacity SSDs on the planet.

It's right There, by the Way. Oh, yeah. Here's Show and tell everybody, Here's one of our 61 TE terabyte drives today.

So that is, You know, those things I, I gotta tell you are hot commodities these days with the, all the AI build outs, both in core data center, but also at the edge. I have to ask, I mean, some people might be watching and they're like, okay, what's the, what's the catch here? What, what, what am I missing?

Right. Why now that I've got, you know, QLC and the ability to, uh, have, have a ton of error correction, uh, performance is good, reliability, right? Like, what's the catch here?

Like, what, what do, what objections would you possibly get from this? Or are you getting from this and how are you overcoming them? Oh, that's a good question.

You know, first is everyone knows that from a, a CapEx perspective on a per gigabyte basis or per terabyte basis, uh, flash drives are more expensive than a hard drive off the shelf. And, but what we're seeing with building out this new technology type of data centers is that CapEx is quickly overshadowed by the other costs, whether it's power constraints, whether it's space constraints, and in many cases it's the con constraint of leaving a GPU unutilized and, you know, all the big data centers today, uh, from a core data center's perspective of already moving to, to high capacity flash. But, and we're seeing that trend at the edge, right?

As well, where the space is even more at a premium. The transition has been, uh, magnificent. And when you're literally, you have companies that have to outlay billions of dollars in, in CapEx, if they can possibly, um, shorten that even by a couple months.

Yep. That's a tremendous amount of capital and working capital that, that, that, that could be used. So Yeah, I look at a calculus.

Yeah. And, you know, those that are doing the very, very simple math to Greg's point are gonna often land at h hd, you know, but, uh, if you're doing the, the full calculus workup Yeah, I think you're gonna very quickly see that rotate. Yeah.

I know it's a little bit different on the edge, you know, but, but it's like that's where the reliability comes in and the speed if you're trying to run the models Yeah. Out there on a hard drive, that just seems like something, I think you have like a really hard a, a two foot tall rack and that's all you can get in there, you know, on the edge. I mean, there's lots of, anyways, we could have the debate, but the, the TCO debate I think will be very interesting.

And I think when you do like that long term CapEx in return on, on capital, uh, you know, you do that math, I think you're gonna increasingly see what you've built becoming more and more, uh, of a, of a winner in that formula. But again, it takes time. It does, yeah.

It takes time, but it's a little bit miraculous how quickly all of a sudden this, the, the sheer compute intensity of ai, right, the cost of all the other components Yep. In ai, all of a sudden switching to, to solid state is it's almost a no brainer. Yeah.

Yeah. And by the way, on the power front, my just kinda, my final volley here is, is if I move from hard drive to your SSDs, I could have more power available to A GPU. That's right.

Exactly. Right. And, and, and that's, that's a, a conversation.

I, I like to call that power sloshing. I don't know, everybody likes it, but essentially I'm moving this power budget over to here. And, and by putting, uh, SSDs on the edge, you're giving them that opportunity.

That's right. And, and maximizing your investments in, in GPUs. And that my friend was the whole calculus.

Greg, Dave, I wanna thank you so much for joining us here at this year's six five summit. Our pleasure. You guys appreciate it.

Alright, everybody, stay with us. We are here in the intelligent edge at the Summit 2024. It's a six five summit.

I don't know why it looked like I might've forgotten that I didn't, uh, stay with us for all of our sessions. Another great year, another great event. We appreciate you.

We'll see you back soon.