Our Charter/Purpose is three-fold:
• To promote fellowship among the participants in the storage industry.
• To provide a informal forum for and to foster the continuing development of storage technology.
• To Eat, Drink, Be Merry, and Network!
Because it's ALL about STORAGE!
Who is eligible to attend participate:
Anyone with present or past affiliations in the storage arena—including components, drives, systems and software: optical, magnetic, and solid state.
6:00 pm Arrive, Register, Networking, BAR Sponsored by Contour Semiconductor
7:15 pm Dinner
Fire grilled salmon served over sauteed spinach
Asian glazed chicken drums
(Vegatable Lasagna by special request)
Honey glazed baby carrots
Spicy rice medley
Garlic herb roasted potatoes
Fresh baked rolls with butter
Unlimited coffee, tea and sodas
~8 pm After Dinner Program
New Directions in Solid State Storage!
Will include HILITES and Key Speakers from the Flash Memory Summit which concludes on the same day. [The program is currently being defined. Contact Tom or Ron if you would like to participate]
Saul Zales, Chief Executive Officer, Contour Semiconductor; Scott Cleland, Senior Director of Product Marketing, Violin Memory; Scott Holewinski, President, Gillware; and John Baskett, VP, North America Business Development, Memblaze Technologies
Sol Zales will talk about "Contour Semiconductor Attacks NVM Costs"
Existing non-volatile memory technologies are reaching their scaling limits and not keeping pace with the reliability and system-level performance needs of new applications like smartphones and solid-state disks. Most innovators have chosen to focus on the memory element; exploring resistive, magnetic and even carbon nanotube technologies.
From 2000 - 2010, Phase-Change technology was considered by many to be the likely replacement for NAND. Both Micron and Samsung produced NOR-interface PCM devices, targeted at feature phone applications. PCM offers significant technology advantages, including; endurance and retention orders of magnitude greater than NAND and scaling demonstrated to 6nm. While the industry talks about 3D NAND, ReRAM and MRAM, PCM R&D continues at all major memory manufacturers.
PCM’s path to greatness stalled with the advent of smartphones and additionally, production cost challenges. However, new approaches to PCM implementation combined with solid-state storage, the Internet of Things and wearable technologies are especially well suited for PCM and emerging memory manufacturers.
Solid-state storage developers have dealt with NAND’s declining endurance curve, increased errors and page / block mismatch by increasing the sophistication (and cost) of their controllers, as well as overprovisioning NAND, using higher performance (and cost) eMLC, or both. In this application, PCM would serve to reduce the load on the controller and likely reduce overprovisioning.
Contour engineers have created a cross-point 4F2 cell that achieves low programming current with no cell disturb, all in less than 15 mask layers and 350 process steps; approximately 1/3 that of traditional NAND. Our technology allows a significant savings in capital equipment cost and increased throughput in a given fabrication facility, along with a substantial reduction in die cost as compared to NAND flash memory on an equivalent technology node.
Scott Cleland will discuss "Apps in a Flash; Why Storage Is Good for Your Business"
Decades ago we moved from tape to disk. With the deluge of data being processed today enterprises are feeling the pressure both in time and resources to process data, build reports and operate their business better. Scott Cleland, senior director of product marketing of Violin Memory, will discuss how all-flash systems can ease the squeeze in the application layer for the enterprise datacenter. Learn how flash is radically increasing application performance while dramatically decreasing operational expenses and why flash is at the economic tipping point for broader adoption.
Scott Holewinski will tell us about "The Challenges of Recovering Data from Self-encrypting SSDs"
We live in a safety net society. Forget the password for your bank account? No problem. Answer a couple security questions and just like that your password is reset. Lock the keys in your car? Don’t worry. Call the automaker and they’ll unlock your doors for you. Today most people assume that when it comes to technology there is always a way out, but in today’s everything-is-a-shade-of-grey world of information security, self-encrypting SSDs are black and white. You either have the right credentials to access the data or you don’t. There’s no back door and no one you can call to unlock it. The elevated security measures implemented in self-encrypting SSDs represent a key selling point over other storage devices, but in the event of a device failure they can be problematic to the data recovery effort. Yes, we all know that we should backup our data, but the reality is that many people don’t. When storage devices fail and the data isn’t backed up, professional data recovery labs are employed to save the day and resurrect the data. Explore the current state of data recovery techniques from self-encrypting SSDs and how the data recovery and SSD industries can work together to ensure the recoverability of data from failed SSDs.
Today’s application workloads demand more of our data center infrastructures. Traditional storage devices are in the critical path, and struggling to meet this demand. Flash memory is finding its way into more enterprise-class storage systems, augmenting and sometimes replacing slower digital storage technology. As flash gets less expensive per GB, the decision to use flash memory where speed matters becomes more and more attractive. However with many of the flash technology alternatives in the market today, reliability continues to be a concern to enterprise IT professionals and has become one of the primary limiting factors in the adoption of the all-flash data center. Learn how Memblaze is enabling the all-flash data centers of the future by offering state-of-the-art, high-performance solid state flash storage products and solutions with uncompromised reliability benefits necessary for the enterprise.
Saul Zales, Chief Executive Officer, Contour Semiconductor
Saul has 30 years of experience in all management aspects of the semiconductor industry, including engineering, high volume manufacturing relationships, marketing, business management, equity investments and licensing. Saul previously served as executive vice president of corporate business development at Fusion-IO, Inc. and was vice president and general manager of corporate development at Numonyx B.V. prior to that company’s acquisition by Micron. Saul was also at Intel Corporation for twenty-four years, last serving as director of its flash memory business, where he guided the company’s flash technology joint ventures, joint development programs and technology licensing. Saul has a degree from the University of Pennsylvania.
Scott Cleland, Senior Director of Product Marketing, Violin Memory
Scott Cleland is Senior Director of Product Marketing for the pioneer in all-flash arrays, Violin Memory. With 30 years of engineering and marketing experience in flash, disk and tape storage, he enjoys a rich environment of storage IP and focus. Previously, Cleland served as Director of Enterprise product marketing at Fusion-io, lead the worldwide LSI storage channel, was the director of worldwide marketing for Adaptec and prior to that spent six years at AMCC’s 3ware storage division. Cleland also served as director of product marketing and technical marketing for IBM’s Mylex storage division, and previously held marketing and engineering positions at Archive, Exabyte, BusLogic and Conner Peripherals.
Scott Holewinski, President, Gillware, Inc.
Scott Holewinski, President of Gillware, Inc., oversees the sales, marketing and engineering operations for Gillware Data Recovery and Gillware Online Backup. Scott has more than 10 years of experience in the data recovery and data backup industries and is responsible for many of Gillware’s existing partnerships with storage and computer OEM’s. In addition to his work at Gillware, Scott teamed up with his Gillware partners to help form two additional Madison, WI based startups. Phoenix Nuclear Labs founded in 2006 and Shine Medical Technologies founded in 2011 leverage nuclear fusion technology to produce medical isotopes and cancer treatment elements.
John Baskett, VP, North America Business Development, Memblaze Technologies
John Baskett is responsible for strategy, alliance partnerships, and business development in North America for Memblaze Technologies. John spent the last 15 years working in the SoC and processor semiconductor space primarily targeting storage, server, networking and communications platform designs. John most recently led the global field application engineering team at Calxeda, driving scale-out ARM server and storage solutions for hyperscale and enterprise datacenters. John was previoiusly at Broadcom, by way of acquisition of Netlogic, where he led world wide design engagements with the largest networking and wireless mobile infrastructure OEMs utilizing their XLP multicore product – the densest and most complex multicore SoC at the time. John also has held various technical marketing, sales, and application engineering roles with LSI, Emulex, Tarari, Hifn, and Tellabs.