The Impact of 122TB SSDs With GIGABYTE and Solidigm at SC24

Yuyang Sun: Another great day at Super Compute 2024. We are at the show floor of this amazing show. My name is Yuyang [Sun, Product Marketing Engineer]. I'm from Solidigm. Today I have the pleasure to have Chen [Lee, Vice President of Sales, HPC, DC & Enterprise] from GIGABYTE join us for an interview.

Chen Lee: Well, thank you very much to Tech Arena and Solidigm for inviting me for this media interview. We are honored to have all of you here at the GIGABYTE booth.

Yuyang: So, Chen, tell us a bit about GIGABYTE.

Chen: GIGABYTE. Well, I think a lot of people know who GIGABYTE is because we are synonymous with gaming and consumer products. But not too many people understand GIGABYTE has a server side of the house. And that being said, we started the GIGABYTE server division back in 1989 and our founder, Dandy Yeh, had the foresight to see this is an emerging market that we need to get into. So a year later he created a server division. I've been with the company since 2006 and we continue to grow our business here in the US and globally. And today, you know, we're probably one of the top white box manufacturer [for personal computers and servers] in the world.

Yuyang: Amazing I didn't know GIGABYTE had such a long history.

Chen:  Yeah, we've been around for quite a while. An interesting story is that back in 2004, a group of people came to our booth at Computex and they said, “Hey, we’re this company called Google and we're looking to build open compute.” Nobody knew what it was and nobody really cared [about] doing business with them, but we took on the challenge. You know, we’ve got so many these little stories that we fed into this industry. It'd be interesting to write a book about it, maybe, one day.

Yuyang: Well early engagement definitely pays off.

Chen:  Yes, and that's everything about the server market, right? You’ve got to be first to the market. You’ve got to have excellent products. And you have to have reliability. [It’s] much like the Solidigm drive.

Yuyang: Since you're bringing it up, let's talk about this new Solidigm SSD drive.

Chen: Okay.

Yuyang: Solidigm just launched a 122TB SSD which you're holding.

Chen: Which is amazing!

 Yuyang: You're holding it your hand.  So this Solidigm SSD is really for data intensive use cases, supercharging the AI workload.  So, Chen, tell us about what's your view of high-density SSDs, and also specifically Solidigm’s SSD.

Chen: With the emerging of the AI market, it becomes necessary to be able to react fast along with the GPU, the CPU, and the data needs to be seamless with the systems. So being able to have something with this kind of capacity plus the speed, it is amazing.

Yuyang:  And this SSD actually, given the density, is able to provide the high speed as well as the amount of data that the customers need for AI training.

Chen: Exactly!

Yuyang:  In addition to that, with [such] a large density, it's able to store more data with less footprint and infrastructure so that it's better for cost efficiency as well as energy efficiency.

Chen: Think about it, if we have to run that in a 3.5 inch SAS drive….

Yuyang:  Yeah [laugh].

Chen: Can you imagine how much space, how heavy, everything's going to be? Solidigm's breakthrough really makes this industry more efficient and gives us more performance too.

Yuyang:  Exactly! You can now hold maybe a petabyte of data just in your hand, maybe eight of these is a petabyte!

Chen:  Yeah yeah, it’s crazy! When I first started, I was happy to have 16 megabyte storage. Now we have 122TB.

Yuyang:  Exactly. All right, thank you so much. It's a great pleasure to meet you.

Chen: Anytime. Thank you.