Samsung Tech Day: The Intersection of Flash and Real-Time Services

Can flash technology help walk your dog? It sure can. It can also help you get popcorn when the craving kicks in or offer a ride when you most need it. As usage of “person to person” (P2P) services such as Rover—an app that helps you quickly find a dog walker in your neighborhood—or Amazon’s Prime Now and Lyft continue to increase so does the need for flash technology to ensure a fast and flawless user experience.

At our recent Samsung Tech Day, where we welcomed over 250 customers, partners and influencers to our Silicon Valley headquarters, we discussed what is driving the advancements in flash and storage technologies. These include P2P applications, the rise of AI and IoT, which are all creating an incredible amount of data.

In addition to the data deluge, we also live in the "now" and "always on world", where any amount of latency or delay in service delivery can severely impact technology adoption, usage and a business’ success overall. As consumers, our threshold of patience is also shifting. Consider this example, a baby boomer will get frustrated after waiting just one second for an app to start while Gen Z now gets antsy after only 0.2 seconds. Today, immediate responsiveness from cloud-based infrastructures is no longer a nice to have, it is a requirement.

Samsung’s new technologies announced at Tech Day offer the industry the size, speed and scale that today’s world needs. These smarter solutions ensure ultra-low latency for demanding cloud-based applications, while increasing system scalability and enabling higher data processing speeds. These technologies are foundational in transforming data intelligence into action so technology can contribute and blend into our lives in intuitive ways. But what’s most important for Samsung is that at the core we are helping to transform our customers’ ideas into reality and bring innovations to market that are reshaping how we all live.

Here are some of the specifics about the technology Samsung announced at Tech Day helping to enable this innovation:

• A 1Tb V-NAND chip that will enable 2TB of memory in a single V-NAND package by stacking 16 1Tb dies, representing one of the most important memory advances of the past decade.
• NGSFF (Next Generation Small Form Factor) SSD, the industry’s first 16-terabyte solution at just 30.5mm x 110mm x 4.38mm, providing hyper-scale data center servers with substantially improved space utilization and scaling options. By utilizing an NGSFF drive instead of an M.2 option, a 1U server will now be able to increase its storage capacity by four times.
• The SZ985, our first Z-SSD product, featuring ultra-low latency and high performance for data centers and enterprise systems to perform extremely large, data-intensive tasks such as real-time “big data” analytics and high-performance server caching. The SZ985 requires only 15 microseconds of read latency time which is approximately a seventh of the read latency of an NVMe SSD, and at the application level, reduces system response times by up to 12 times as compared to NVMe SSDs.
• Key Value SSD, a new approach for storing data. With the crushing amount of insights being generated by social media services to IoT applications, it is resulting in massive amounts of text, images, audio and video files or object data. Managing object data brings complexities due to the processing requirements and the fact that more is always being added. Through Key Value SSD technology, we can now enable SSDs to process this data without converting it into blocks. Instead, we can now assign a ‘key’ or specific location to each “value,” or piece of object data – regardless of its size. As a result, when data is read or written, a Key Value SSD can reduce redundant steps, which ultimately leads to faster data inputs and outputs, as well as increases TCO by significantly extending the life of an SSD.

As I look ahead, whether through an IT lens or just as an everyday user of P2P services, flash NAND and storage will continue to play a vital role in this new data economy and our lives overall. And more importantly, it will help with everyday life tasks and perhaps even save your favorite slippers from being chewed up on the days you can't walk the dog--and I’m sure we can all appreciate that!