Recap of The Future of Memory and Storage Conference 2025

August is synonymous of holidays for sure but for a fraction of the world, at least in IT, it also means a classic summer stop in California, in Santa Clara to be precise, for the Future of Memory and Storage aka FMS conference. This is one of the events where the industry meets, just see the Hyatt lobby every day…

This annual event just took place last week and the atmosphere was, once again, super positive and we all know why, the memory and storage market segments are doing very well. And just to confirm that trend, we invite you to check recent quarterly and fiscal year revenue results from several vendors. Among recent fiscal results, we pick Seagate and Western Digital both delivered exceptional revenue levels above $9 billion each, Supermicro with $22 billion, SK hynix with its Q2FY25 or Commvault with $282 million for its Q1FY26 or Penguin Solutions with $324 million for its Q3FY25.

The keynote program was exceptional with sequentially several leaders launching products insisting on strategy and partnerships.

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The first impression is that year is very similar to 2024 with approximately the same number of exhibitors – 74 – and by the number of attendees, above 3,000. In details, there are differences, Sandisk came back, several months after their official split with Western Digital and some vendors didn’t come, we mean some famous ones were absent like Phison, Solidigm, Swissbit or even Seagate. But even if some companies didn’t exhibit, they’re present as we met several of them during sessions or on the expo floor and some companies organized side events. We’re still surprised to see some players and wonder why they come… We noticed some empty zones in the expo and some empty booths inviting us to think about last minute cancellation.

At the same time, DDN and Pure Storage has a booth and we saw lots of industry associations, we saw Hammerspace and Verge.io as well. As usual, lots of announcements have been made as this event really serves as a focal or anchor point for the industry. Among major topics, the ones seen and pitched at many places, we can list memory with DRAM but above all HBM, CXL and PCIe Gen for the connectivity, SSD controllers and high capacity SSD, plus DPU, all these pushed by AI.

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The first main topic – memory – has been highly covered in many dimensions with several approaches. Sandisk and SK hynix unveiled a strategic partnership agreement about HBF – High Bandwidth Flash. Several vendors insisted on SLC/SCM like Kioxia with XL-Flash Gen 3, Micron or Phison with the Pascari X200Z. It appears that the new target is to deliver 100M IOPS in 2027. We also appreciated the content shared by Nvidia on SCADA – the SCaled Accelerated Data Access-, the new programming model GPU oriented vs. GDS linked to CPUs needed to deliver top inference and predictive AI performance.

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The second subject that really shook the floor is related to the several announcements around high capacity SSD, QLC based, relied on last NAND generation with 2Tb die, connected via PCIe Gen 5 with NVMe obviously. Samsung and SK hynix already shared their news but at this FMS, Kioxia, Micron and Sandisk have shown their 245-256TB models and explained their respective strategy on this segment.

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The connectivity was also covered by PCIe Gen 6 and others, some exhibitors unveiled new TLC drives with Gen 6.CXL was present at multiple booths, like Xcena, Unifabrix or Wolley for instance, and largely in the conference program. On this shared memory, expansion, pooling and globally fabric aspect, Kove Networks was again present this year to promote their pretty unique Software Defined Memory model.

Regarding SSD controllers, dedicated players like Silicon Motion or FADU announced new generation of products, Supermicro and Phison shared some synergy around Phison’s Pascari product line.

DPU has been a topic promoted by MaxLinear or Chelsio among others, respectively with the new Panther V Storage Accelerator now supporting PCIe Gen 5 and T7 DPU.

We need to mention also the pretty active presence of RAID with various players like Graid Technology, Microchip and Wildfire Storage, all these 3 announced new product iterations.

Several industry associations shared updates on their specifications like the NVM Express with NVMe 2.3, the PCI-SIG with PCIe Gen 8, the Ultra Accelerator Link Consortium with the 200G 1.0 specification or the UCIe Consortium with details on the 3.0.

Among various news, we choose to list:

• Chelsio with the T7 DPU,
• Graid Technology with the SupremeRAID HE (HPC Edition),
• Kioxia with the LC9 245TB SSD.
• MaxLinear with the Panther V Storage Accelerator,
• Microchip with the Adaptec SmartRAID 4300,
• Micron with the 6600 ION 245TB SSD,
• NVM Express with a set of new NVMe specifications,
• Phison and Supermicro for collaborating on dense storage server,
• Pliops with FusIOnX,
• Sandisk with the SN670 256TB SSD,
• Sandisk and SK hynix collaborating on HBF,
• SiliconMotion with the MonTitan SM8366 SS Controller,
• Xcena with the MX1 Computational Memory,

And of course, the conference delivered its annual awards, please refer to this news to have the full list.

Jim Pappas is the recipient of the 2025 FMS Lifetime Achievement Award for his active leadership and driving roles for building standards such as USB, PCIe, CXL, UCIe and more recently UAL.

Rita Gupta is the recipient of the 2025 SuperWomen of FMS Award having extensively worked and developed PCIe and CXL based architecture at AMD.

Next FMS, the 2026 edition for the 20th anniversary, will take place at the same location from August 4 to 6, 2026.

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