In The Arena by TechArena - Cracking the Code on Storage Efficiency with Solidigm

Episode Date: September 30, 2025

Explore myths, metrics, and strategies shaping the future of energy-efficient data centers with Solidigm’s Scott Shadley, from smarter drives to sustainability-ready architectures.

Welcome to Tech Arena, featuring authentic discussions between tech's leading innovators and our host, Alison Klein. Now, let's step into the arena. Welcome to another episodes of Data Insights from Tech Arena. My name's Allison Kloin, and because it's a Data Insights episode, it means Janice Naurowski from Solidime is with me. Welcome, Janice. How are you doing? Hi, Allison. Thank you. I'm doing. I'm doing great, and it's awesome to be back today. So, Janice, I think we've got a celebrity guest with us from Solidime today. Can you introduce the topic and who will be talking to today?

Yes, yes. Today we have a very cool topic and an equally cool person, right? So we're going to talk a lot about efficient edge solutions with Mr. Scott Shadley. Scott is the director of leadership narratives for Solidime, and he really is genuinely a cool person. So we're excited to talk about efficiency today. Welcome, Scott. Hello, ladies. I appreciate the cool introduction. It was very polite of you to make me feel very uncomfortable as we get started here today. So, Scott, you've been on the program before, but I know we have some new listeners listening today. So why don't you go ahead and reintroduce your

role at Solidime and your focus on storage efficiency? Yeah, as Jenny said, I'm a director of leadership narrative. My focus here is to have conversations with customers, partners, engage the marketplace to better understand how we all play well together. In the case of stuff like efficiency, it's understanding how we manage budgets. Most budgets include power budgets and all the other aspects of building an efficient data center. And with that, Scott, let's just dive right in and talk about the myths. What are some of the most common myths or misunderstandings you encounter around storage efficiency and how do you counter them? That's an interesting one. If we go back in time and bait myself as much as anybody else. Solid State drives were originally invented

to be very fast, but very power efficient, if you will. And as we've seen the ecosystem evolve and getting into the modern architectures that we have, some of these particular flash-based storage products are drawing more power than they were expecting them to ever draw. And so you do have some people that go, it gets too hot or it's not effective for what I want. And that's because we've always use the same metric, dollar per gigabyte, and then you play with the rest of it. And there's a lot of new metrics that we're focused on today, like watts per terabyte or terabytes per iop type of thing, so that you can help people understand and counter the, it's just too hot or it's just too expensive or it's just whatever, right? So we've evolved the ecosystem

to talk through what a modern infrastructure looks like, which means there will be some form of solid state alongside everything else that's in the box. Where do you typically see organizations losing efficiency in current storage environments? I know that storage doesn't get a ton of attention in this space because compute just takes so much more resource utilization from an energy perspective. But there are areas of inefficiency, and what are the cost implications for those inefficiencies? Yeah, when you look at the efficiency of storage, it gets to a conversation around the idea of bottlenecks or expectations of what something's going to draw, specifically from power

perspective, you're not always going to have everything active. There is these idle times, and the question is, what's idle? Because you can only afford for certain things to be idle in a modern infrastructure. One of them is not your compute. Your compute has to be active at all times. And so the ability to turn on and off storage devices in a more efficient way or put them in certain power states. We've done a lot of work Solidime has within the standard.

bodies to dictate and encourage and develop with partnerships of other companies these power states that we can actually put drives in to make sure that they make the most use of the power available to them and have fast on, fast off and things that you just can't do with other aspects of a storage infrastructure. So along those lines and Scott, how is Solidime though specifically prioritized power efficiency and reduced operating costs specifically in drive architecture and system design. So that comes back to the underlying physicality of the product. How many different devices you put in there, what you do from that perspective. Everybody looks under the cover and sees a bunch of flash and we talk about it and it's layer count or we talk about it and it's nanometer design,

things like that. But there's so many other components that are involved in the building blocks of the storage components. You have the amount of memory you put in it. Keep in mind that DRAM does sit inside an SSD and it tends to draw even more power than the flash. And then we build very power-efficient controllers. The underlying brains of the SSD can draw a significant amount of power if designed inefficiently, which is something that has been a long focus of the Solidime heritage to build power-efficient solutions from that perspective. And then when you get into the big drives, just making sure that when you have 122 terabytes in a single drive, if everything's on, you're drawn a lot of power.

But we've found ways within the architecture, firmware design of these products to only keep active what we need so we can actually reduce the overall draw. Because when you have one drive, it's one thing, 9, 12, 15, 20 watts. When you've got 24, 48, 96, hundreds of them in a rack, it makes a large difference how much each individual component can articulate the power consumption. I'm going to put you in the hot seat. Can you share a customer deployment where you saw that tuning for efficiency, not only lowered energy use, but actually improved application performance? This is when we get into partnerships with companies like Ocean, for example. They build an infrastructure that reduces the physical footprint required.

And when you reduce the footprint required because you go from a whole bunch of hard drive-based solutions into a couple of racks of just SSDs, the drive itself isn't the key aspect of that as far as the power savings. The footprint or the TCO of that entire infrastructure is huge because you're not only pulling out storage devices, if you will, but you're reducing server count. which you're reducing everything else about it, rack-level power, footprint savings, and that footprint can then scale appropriately. So there's a bunch of TCO modeling and effort that we put into that.

We have an efficiency expert on our staff that just does a great job of being able to help people understand it's not about the drive. It's about the rack and what you can do with the rack to make that rack more efficient. And then what about Scott key performance indicators? How should IT teams monitor this when tracking storage efficient? over time. One of the myths that we can go back to around storage products is that they tend to wear out in a weird way or people have to worry about efficiency because they're worried the drives

get warmer or more active when they get older because they have read-write problems or whatnot. But we build a lot of things into the solutions like telemetry and information you can pull from the products that you can understand exactly what you're doing with it in real time. If you're seeing it sitting there doing some unique things and drawing more power, you know, power, you can kind of shift the direction that you're working on that product or how you're using it and allow it to recover or find a more efficient way to write code around it. One of the most

unique things that relates to storage is when people are really used to spinning media and they're doing everything this way. They put all kinds of things in their code to wait for data. And when the SSD architectures get dropped in, those wait times are still there. And so you're already got your data back, but you don't know it. So you're waiting and you're wasting power because your actual software architecture doesn't realize the data is already there. You're making a pretty compelling argument for storage efficiency overhaul. And I guess one thing that I want to ask is what key areas should customers address first for quick wins in that process? I kind of touched on, at least I would classify as the most prominent one,

is if you're going to look at doing a modernization of your infrastructure, you're going to utilize some form of hybridized architecture of flash with hard drives or a larger memory footprint. And the underlying software that you're working with, whether it's in-house or it's bought from a third party, has to be designed to actually efficiently look at and look for the data when it's supposed to arrive because the idea of cycle time is one of the biggest killers in storage efficiency and even power efficiency is because something's waiting when it shouldn't. And that's really one of the, I would call the key things. Another one is to right size the environment. If you really think you need the performance, you probably really don't.

I'll be honest. We've got some really fast drives that people never run fast enough, but they bought them thinking they needed them and they're hotter than they want them to be. So working with us to articulate what's the right fit is also key. So software infrastructure, don't just buy the fastest things since sliced bread. And even sometimes the biggest one isn't what you need. We've got the portfolio to solve that problem and help you make yourself the most efficient system that can also scale. And with that portfolio, Scott, I'd draw a curveball at you, but as sustainability mandates and energy targets become more strict, how is Solidine really adapting its roadmap to align with ESG regulatory expectations? That's another fun one. I mean, we all want to get to that

idea of net zero, if you will, from our perspective of that. There's been some really interesting articles that have been written around carbon neutrality even. We've partnered with a few folks on that and had a couple of articles you can find on our website about that. But at the end of the day, it's designing a product that allows a customer the flexibility to tune it. And if you just have something that plugs in and turns on and you have to use it the way it came, that's not always the best thing for you, especially when you're doing, to your point about regulatory, AMIA regulations versus US regulations versus APAC regulations, how do you manage it all? You can. can't as the drive, but you give the user the hooks and the capabilities in a product

as you design them to allow that customer, that flexibility, and then to make sure that's standard across your products or other people's products so that the user only has to do it once and everything reacts the same way. Scott, you gave us a great perspective on efficiency and storage, a lot to think about and unpack from this. And I'm sure that our listeners are going to want to reach out and talk to you. Where can they find you? And how can they engage with Solidime volistically? Yeah, so solidime.com is fairly easy start. Our website has a lot of great information.

I've written a few articles. All of my coworkers, Dave Sierra, has written some great stuff on efficiencies and things like that. You can find me on socials at SM Shadley, on LinkedIn, Blue Sky X, all that fun stuff. And at any point in time you want to talk, I can easily find the right guy because I know a lot about the drives, but I've got a lot of friends that know a lot about the rest of the system. and architectures, and I want to make sure we're talking to the right people. Awesome. And thank you so much for spending time with us. And Janice, that wraps another edition of Data Insights. It's always a pleasure. Thanks so much for your time. Thank you, Allison. Thanks for the opportunity. It was a fun one.

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