Recap of FMS 2024

Once again, like every summer, the annual rendez-vous of storage professionals, I should say semi-conductors oriented ones, took place at the Santa Clara convention center and it was a success. The idea to extend the show with new technology domains seems to have attracted new companies even if at the same time, we were surprised to see some others not exhibiting. As the show is referred most of the time by its acronym, FMS, it was key to maintain this and find other words behind. And that mission is delivered, several speakers have insisted on this, “The Future of Memory and Storage” is a good name.

In terms of attendees, organizers didn’t give us last verified numbers but according to them, the conference passed the barrier of 3,000 which is a good number but still far behind what we saw before Covid.

We saw around 75 exhibitors this year, approximately 20 less if we compare with 2023, with some surprises. Several key players had a booth like Fadu, Graid, Hammerspace, Infinidat, Kioxia, Marvell, MaxLinear, Microchip, Micron, Nimbus Data, Phison, Pliops, Samsung, Silicon Motion, SK hynix, Viking with 2 dedicated zones, Western Digital and Winbond. In this list, only a few storage subsystems or data management vendors were present and it would make sense to approach or invite others to have a more comprehensive representation of the industry. We didn’t see Atto, Bittware/Molex, Kalray, Lightelligence, Montage, Panmnesia, Seagate, Solidigm, Swissbit or Tuxera, some downgraded their sponsorship level like Marvell but some companies came back like Micron or Phison with interesting keynotes and others appeared like Kove, UnifabriX or ZeroPoint Technologies.

Market consolidation has for sure an impact on this roster, Solidigm argued that their decision is related to some sort of convergence with SK hynix, we remember that during the 2023 edition, Solidigm has made a big announcement with the 61.44TB SSD. What a surprise when we saw Solidigm organizing a side event and announced August 6 two data center SSDs.

The recent news about the anticipated merger between Kalray and Pliops that didn’t happen had the effect that one of these 2 didn’t exhibit. We still don’t understand the rationale behind the original plan, how a company like Pliops would accept to lose 80% of its value during such a deal. We spoke with Ido Bukspan, CEO of Pliops, who confirmed the status and its independent trajectory but still with some potential partnership synergies.

The conference was the opportunity exactly at the middle of the year to invite players to announce key products, technology initiatives, customer wins or even mergers. This year many of these companies, even ones who didn’t have a booth, continue this exercise and it is an annual rendez-vous for market observers. The list of keynotes has been impressive even if we wonder why Western Digital had 2 keynotes, we heard that the 2nd one would be used to announce something that finally didn’t happen. StorageNewsletter.com was a partner of the event and we had the opportunity to meet and discuss with plenty of people.

Regarding topics, no surprise, just confirmation this year, they were about the impact of AI in the processing, memory, connectivity and storage chain. Vendors spoke about HBM and DDR, PCIe Gen 5 and 6, NVMe with FDP and CXL of course, computational storage plus more in general about performance, capacity and energy dimensions. AI is hot, no surprise here, it’s a real-time race, and it puts a significant pressure on vendors and thus on IT infrastructure. It is more a question of how rather than when as all people are speaking about it having projects in various aspects of it for different use cases. The one exposed on stage by Sebastien Jean, CTO of Phison, during the keynote of the company, presenting how they built a comprehensive real-time knowledge base, was a very interesting one illustrating the variety of AI projects. It touches everything in our life.

Among other news, we can list:

Fadu unveiled SSD controllers and CXL based solution,
Kioxia demonstrated optical interface for SSDs and SSD RAID offload but also 2Tb QLC flash,
Kove showcased Kove:SDM, its Software-Defined Memory that recently gained a lawsuit against AWS,
MaxLinear insisted on its Panther III storage acceleration card,
Microchip with a new Flashtec PCIe Gen 5 SSD controller,
Micron showcased the 9550 NVMe SSD,
Nimbus Data announced FlashRack Turbo, ExaDrive DC and EN, an interesting Ethernet native SSD exposing a NVMe-oF interface and NFS, and a new iteration of its HALO software,
Phison presented aiDAPTIV+ and its Pascari product line,
Pliops demonstrated its XDP LightningAI platform,
Samsung presented a series of CXL solutions, new HBM and of course its 128TB BM1743 SSD plus other things,
Silicon Motion presented the SM2508, a very power efficient PCIe Gen5 NVMe 2.0 client SSD controller,
SK hynix insisted on its computational object storage system and of course other its 321 layers NAND plus its HBM solution,
Western Digital showcased different things, among them different flavors of SSD, OpenFlex Data24 4200 NVMe-oF and the RapidFlex interposer,
ZeroPoint Technologies announced its zstd decompression hardware IP.

Harriet Coverston, CTO and co-founder of Versity Software, received the SuperWomen of FMS Leadership Award for all her contributions during a long active career in data archiving domain.

Hideaki Aochi, Ryota Katsumata, Masaru Kito, Masaru Kido, and Hiroyasu Tanaka are the recipients of the 2024 FMS Lifetime Achievement Award for creating the first NAND-type 3D Flash Memory.

Eight categories for more than 20 awards this year. Among them we noticed Graid Technology, Hammerspace, Kove, MetisX, ShapeShift Ciphers, Viking Enterprise Solutions, Phison, Pliops, ZeroPoint or UnifabriX.

Surprisingly, the conference agenda added a cold data stream with players like Cerabyte or Biomemory, 2 players on the other data hierarchy pyramid.

Two fundamental questions remain open, why this event attracts so low number of end-users except a few big ones and why organizers for a long time pin their event to the beginning of August that prevent them from having large European presence and some key vendors… The word “Storage” is used in the conference name with the goal to be more universal and global…

Next FMS, the 2025 edition, will take place at the same location from August 5 to 7, 2025.