Data storage innovations revealed at Technology Live! London
Author : Federica Monsone, A3 Communications
14 April 2025
Data storage innovators took centre stage at the latest London edition of Technology Live!, sharing developments from breakthroughs in SSD controller code to testing SAS deployments in outer space.
The event showcased enterprise data storage organisations FADU, Hammerspace, STA Forum, and StorMagic. Delving into performance upgrades and innovations, presenters unveiled their plans for the future: sharing valuable insights into the evolving direction of storage technology, emerging trends, and challenges shaping the industry.
FADU tackles PCIe Gen 5 SSD efficiency challenges with innovative controller design
FADU is a fabless semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, USA that specialises in designing high-performance controllers and custom firmware. FADU’s controller technology is in both its own enterprise SSD line, and solutions by major brands such as SK Hynix and WD.
At Technology Live!, FADU’s Senior Director of Product Planning, Johnmichael Hands, explained how the company’s novel architecture addresses power consumption and scalability challenges, which are critical for data centre efficiency.
FADU’s design uses a scalable approach by pipelining commands, allowing each stage to operate concurrently through a dedicated packet processing unit (PPU) core. This division of processing into smaller stages eliminates bottlenecks, resulting in a controller that combines high performance, low power, and flexibility.
The company’s ECHO enterprise PCIe 5.0 SSDs, available in U.2, E1.S and E3.S form factors, demonstrates these advancements. According to Hands, the custom RISC-V architecture provides up to 50 percent greater power efficiency than competing drives.
Federica Monsone, A3 Communications
Looking ahead to 2026, Hands also previewed Sierra, FADU’s PCIe 6.0 SSD architecture which promises speeds exceeding 28GB/s, while continuing to maintain power efficiency. It will feature advanced NVMe capabilities for cloud workloads, enhanced security functions, and improved virtualisation performance.
Hammerspace unveils new ‘Tier 0’ feature to maximise GPU with fast NVMe storage
At Technology Live!, Hammerspace showcased version 5.1 of the Hammerspace Global Data Platform, introducing a new ‘Tier 0’ feature. This innovation consolidates unused NVMe server storage into a single shared space, delivering data directly to GPUs at ultra-fast NVMe speeds.
Hammerspace SVP of Global Marketing, Molly Presley, was joined by Chief Technology Officer Trond Myklebust and EMEA Managing Director Ryan Taylor to demonstrate how this consolidation can significantly boost GPU performance.
Presley highlighted the benefits for AI, data science, and scientific computation, while reducing setup times. She also emphasised the inefficiencies of siloed local storage, where underutilisation leads to higher infrastructure costs, greater power consumption, and longer setup times. Hammerspace’s shared Tier 0 storage solution eliminates these issues by achieving microsecond latencies, delivering data without the delays associated with higher-tier storage access.
In a large-scale AI training scenario involving 1,000 GPU servers and 100PB of capacity, Hammerspace estimates potential savings of 929K GPU hours per year, translating to approximately $40m in infrastructure cost reductions.
Out-of-this-world storage performance with NVMe and SAS
SNIA SCSI Trade Association Forum (STA) Chair Cameron Brett provided a vendor-independent perspective on the future of serial-attached SCSI (SAS) technology. His session at Technology Live! included a preview of 24G+ SAS and insights into the groundbreaking Spaceborne project that tested data storage performance in zero gravity.
Brett explained that the new 24G+ SAS standard prioritises functionality upgrades. New key features include command duration limits, rebuild assist for SSDs, persistent connections, preset formatting, logical depopulation, and the SlimSAS-HD connector.
Next, Brett described how servers were put to the test in one of the most extreme edge environments. The Spaceborne project tested an HPE Edgeline EL4000 and DL360 Gen10 server onboard the International Space Station. With 120TB of local SAS storage, these servers proved that SAS technology can reliably support zero-gravity data experiments, and that off-the-shelf storage solutions are robust enough for the most remote edge computing.
Full-stack hyper-converged storage at the edge with StorMagic
StorMagic, known for its “edge-first” data solutions, unveiled v2.0 of the open-source SvHCI full-stack virtualisation infrastructure at Technology Live!. Chief Product Officer Bruce Kornfeld and Chief Technology Officer Julian Chesterfield showcased this feature-packed update.
The updates solidify StorMagic’s focus on delivering robust, scalable, and user-friendly storage solutions for edge environments.
A standout update is the introduction of up to 16 snapshot backups per VM, with near-instant creation and restoration. This enhances SvHCI’s ability to address ransomware challenges, offering point-in-time records of VM disk contents. It also enables roll back of failed updates and recovery of corrupted data.
Kornfeld and Chesterfield revealed the new StorMagic Edge Control, a cloud-based fleet management interface. This tool simplifies the management of StorMagic SvSAN and SvHCI systems at the edge, as well as vSphere, Hyper-V and KVM. It also provides a comprehensive view of hundreds or thousands of remote servers, and it offers quick system health insights and full admin controls.
Another notable update is the streamlined process for importing VMs made through the wizard-based user-friendly SvHCI Virtualization Manager.
Additional new SvHCI 2.0 features include:
stretched clusters,
improved virtual NIC support,
increased virtual disk capacity, and
enhanced VM density
Contact Details and Archive...