LSI CTO touts promise of flash, open source

Flash to the masses

As few as 0.2 percent of servers use flash now, an attach rate that could grow to 30 percent over the next five to seven years, Huff believes. With nearly 70 percent share in server storage, the market for the generally high margin products is a boon to LSI.

“Two to three orders of magnitude in growth looks good to us,” he said. “We want to be the company that brings the value of flash to the masses,” he added.

Of course so does a long line of established and startup vendors of solid-state drives, network appliances, servers and storage arrays.

“It’s a land grab right now because there is no established model of how flash gets deployed,” said Huff, who spent much of his career as a senior engineering manager in Hewlett-Packard’s server group. “The external storage world is trying to map this technology into credible solutions, but there are a lot of different answers,” he said.

In flash cards for ultrabooks “we’re killing it right now” Huff said of LSI’s product. But he sees OEMs taking ultrabooks in different directions as they try to differentiate the systems.

"They will all try to drive different requirements for displays, wireless and storage,” Huff said. “Today one [flash controller] chip and firmware customization is enough, but in the future we’ll need a portfolio of products,” he said.

Hard disks still have a long future, however, due to the high cost of flash and the heavy demand for storage. “We see no end in sight for our business building semis for the hard drive industry,” he said.

Related stories:

Technology Roundup: NAND flash

Not All MLC SSDs are created equal

Ultrabooks expected to drive growth of cache SSDs