Virtual FMS Show Awards
The 13th annual Flash Memory Summit Best of Show Awards winners were presented by Flash Memory Summit's emcee Jay Kramer and TechTarget Group Publisher Jillian Coffin. Get to know the 2020 winners.
00:18 Speaker 1: Welcome to the Flash Memory Summit 2020 Best of Show awards ceremony. We normally have this ceremony live at the Santa Clara Convention Center with the excitement of all the vendors being together, but we're equally excited today to make these announcements virtually and broadcast this news to the world. Jillian, this award ceremony is our FMS panel of judges, and I want to thank you for joining me to announce some of the winners. And what are your thoughts about Flash Memory Summit awards?
00:52 Jillian Coffin: Well, you know, personally, I love a good awards ceremony and at the Target, we're always happy to celebrate and applaud all of the innovation and hard work from vendors in the storage community, so I'm happy to be your wingman, in terms of presenting the awards for FMS this year.
01:09 S1: Great, so Jillian let's announce the winners, starting with the first award is for the most innovative flash memory customer implementation, and the winner is Pavilion Data. Pavilion Data has their flash array solution handling some of the most mission-critical applications you can imagine with a large federal government agency running facial recognition applications, where record-breaking performance can be a lifeline needed to protect the lives and property of the U.S. citizens. Congratulations to the Pavilion team.
[applause]
01:44 JC: Congrats. Next, we go to the most innovative flash memory startup. This is one of the most exciting things about the Flash Memory Summit with all of the new companies that launch at this conference. The winner is Neo Semiconductor, with this release of a new hardware architecture for NAND flash that can accelerate performance and cost effectiveness of any type of persistent memory. Imagine what this can mean for 5G, robotics, virtual reality and AI applications. Congratulations to the Neo Semiconductor team.
[applause]
02:23 S1: I am equally excited about another startup we are honoring in the flash controller category. It is an emerging company, and the winner is Baidu. Baidu is leveraging a new industry standard form factor with a controller engine that can address customers' needs for heightened levels of quality of service from their overall storage solution. Congratulations to the Baidu team.
[applause]
02:50 JC: Now, this is a fun category, as we look at the most innovative flash memory consumer applications, and the winner is Enmotus with their flash solid-state storage drives, which can make a real difference in things like gaming applications where speed and endurance and big capacities are so important to the overall customer experience. Congratulations to the Enmotus team for your innovation and artificial intelligence for this next phase of the solid-state disk solution.
[applause]
03:23 S1: We have another winner in the consumer application space with a company that had designed a new level of security capabilities for SSDs, and the winner is Western Digital with their ArmorLock encrypted NVMe SSD. This product uniquely provides biometric protection integrated into the SSD consumer solution. We typically think about security, Jillian, with workers where high levels of confidentiality is paramount in business-critical industries, but consumers need high levels of protection also for the things they store. So, congratulations to the Western Digital team.
[applause]
04:04 JC: Next is the most innovative flash memory enterprise business application, and the winner is Pliops with their storage solution for databases such as MySQL. Databases are driving so many web-scale and hyperscale cloud applications, and Pliops has a storage processor that accelerates every type of persistent memory, including storage class memory and QLC, with the ability to achieve new levels of scale, speed and cost effectiveness in any data center. Congratulations to the Pliops team.
[applause]
04:41 S1: So, now we have a new category for this year with the most innovative hyperscaler implementation, and we are proud to recognize Fungible for their totally new approach to compute and storage architecture with their data processing units where their storage cluster can allocate resources on demand and deliver high performance, reduce the footprint and achieve cost efficiencies for the next-generation data center. Congratulations to the Fungible team.
[applause]
05:12 JC: And this is another new award for this year, with the most innovative artificial intelligence application, and we are excited to see all the innovative ways that storage can be applied to AI workloads. For the system architecture category, the winner is Nvidia. This award recognizes the incredible success of Nvidia products, which are extremely popular reference architectures, partnered with the entire storage and memory vendor community addressing analytics, training and inference workloads. Congratulations to the Nvidia team.
[applause]
05:48 S1: So, for the most innovative AI application, there's a category of all-flash storage arrays, and clearly, storage for the AI and machine learning use case requires NVMe-type of high-performance storage tier, and the winner is IBM. IBM storage with IBM Spectrum Scale storage management can create a single unified file system across GPUs, x86 CPUs, and even IBM power processors for hybrid and multi-cloud IT environment. Congratulations to the entire IBM storage systems team.
[applause]
06:25 JC: And the next AI category is for system-on-a-chip technology, and the winner is Ambiq. With Ambiq, their AI technology touches product solutions such as smart watches, fitness brand, predictive health and maintenance devices, smart security devices and smart home devices. We are proud to recognize Ambiq's Apollo system-on-chip for its low-power package integrated with MRAM for high-performance. Congratulations to the Ambiq team.
[applause]
07:01 S1: Let's not forget about software attachments this Summit, and the winner in this category of AI applications for software is WekaIO. WekaIO's software-defined technology with a high-speed parallel file system, enables actionable intelligence, operationalizing exascale datasets and governance with end-to-end security. WekaIO is well-positioned to address AI applications like autonomous vehicles and mobility as a service. Congratulations to the WekaIO team.
[applause]
07:37 JC: So now we get to the highly coveted most innovative flash memory technology, and for the SSD category, the winner is Intel. Intel is clearly a market leader with their innovation designing a high-performance tier of memory called Optane and a solution that can check all the boxes, whether it's greater density, accelerated speed and the ability of protecting data with persistence. The next wave of business-critical applications such as real-time analytics, IoT and video and image processing are ready for this memory gear. Congratulations to the Intel team.
[applause]
08:14 S1: Next, we have the most innovative class memory technology for controllers and systems. The winner is a collaboration of Marvell and HPE. This award recognizes Marvell's NVMe rate accelerator, and HPE for the integration of their OS Boot devices, solutions well-positioned to deliver high-performance and reliability and access to logs, and deprograms, and it translates into offloading rate one processing and directly connecting to NVMe M.2 SSDs, enabling the HPE OS Boot solution to consume a single PCIe slot. Congratulations to the entire Marvell and HPE team.
[applause]
09:01 JC: And QLC is really a big deal this year at the Flash Memory Summit, as it promises to deliver high-speed solid-state storage at disk economics. The winner for the most innovative flash memory technology with the all-flash array category goes to Pure Storage. Pure Storage released the industry first all-QLC flash storage array delivering NVMe, non-volatile memory express performance, hyper-consolidation and simplified management for high-capacity workloads, and making it possible for customers to deploy flash storage for a growing number of application workloads. Congratulations to the Pure Storage team.
[applause]
09:43 S1: Now, we have the most innovative flash memory technology to the hardware and software architecture category. The winner is Vast Data. We're proud to recognize the Vast Data LightSpeed storage architecture with a disaggregated web-scale design built from the ground up to use low-cost QLC flash with metadata stored in 3D XPoint technology and NVMe over Fabrics to achieve accelerated performance and a new level of storage economics. Congratulations to the Vast Data team.
[applause]
10:16 JC: And our next awards are recognizing the new industry standards led by volunteers of the storage vendors and industry consultants. We all know how impactful standards initiatives can be for improving thermal, power, footprint packaging with new form factors for data centers. We are proud to recognize the winner, Nokia, for the leadership and driving the new industry standard with the enterprise data center form factor. This is a specification defining an innovative design for flash storage drives, enterprise servers and storage systems. Congratulations to the Nokia team.
[applause]
10:56 S1: There are great things happening in the storage industry standards world, and we are proud to recognize the winner, NVM Express Technical Working Group for their ratification of the NVMe Zoned Namespace command set specification. This new standard sets the foundation for data placement policy, which is the foundation to accelerate storage apps with tighter I/O access latency, less overprovisioning and less write amplification. Congratulations to the NVM Express team.
[applause]
11:31 JC: And then there's a standards organization for storage which is driving new storage standards for the last four decades. The win goes to the Storage Networking Industry Association with their Object Drive Technical Work Group. They have ratified a new version of the technical position native NVMe over Fabrics drive specification, which now defines the interfaces to Ethernet-connected storage devices. This new standard describes how to discover and configure the drives, their interfaces, the speeds and the management capabilities. Congratulations to the SNIA team.
[applause]
12:09 S1: Jillian, that was fun. Did you enjoy that?
12:14 JC: That was fun. I always enjoy celebrating the innovation and hard work of a really group of talented people and vendors in this space.
12:24 S1: This now concludes the 2020 Best of Show awards program. Congratulations to all the winners for the incredible innovation you've brought to the persistent memory industry. We look forward to seeing everyone next year at FMS 2021.
