Consumer Systems, Devices Need Local Storage to Protect, Serve

Santa Clara, Ca, July 20, 2014 – DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) is on the rise and business/personal device users need to ensure their data, their information will always be available, always will be protected, always will be private according to Consumer Storage panel discussion experts at this year’s Flash Memory Summit (August 5-7) at the Santa Clara Convention Center.

“People take it for granted that their data will always be available on their always-with-them, always-on devices,” Andy Marken, session moderator of the August 5, 9:45 a.m. session, noted. “Storing and protecting that data is becoming a major issue, major challenge and a key topic at this year’s 3-day FMS conference.

The industry estimates more than 2.4B devices will be sold this year and nearly 35M ultraportable PCs. Losses and thefts from The Cloud is proving that the infrastructure simply isn’t safe. One of the best solutions he noted is to become a smaller hacker, cybercrime target with local personal, home and departmental storage and backup.

The device and solution providers agreed that while smartphones and tablets/phablets garner most of the consumer attention, traditional PCs (notebooks, desktop systems and laptop/tablet hybrids) haven’t lost their place in the personal/business mix. This year, IDC and Gartner estimate more than 308 million systems will be sold and that worldwide, more than 300M are used daily for personal and business work and entertainment.
IDC officials noted that the most current and most critical information in any company today isn’t in the data center but on the outer rim of the organization’s network on the individual devices – smartphones, tablets, and computers. One of the panelists noted, “While the cloud sounds nice, it is far from safe, secure or always available. “
In a pre-conference meeting, the panelists agreed that the computing device market is undergoing a dramatic expansion and their biggest challenge is to provide fast, economical and reliable storage of the data as far from prying eyes as possible. To meet the challenges, executives from Samsung, Other World Computing, IMI, Silicon Motion and Toshiba will discuss options that solution designers, retailers and consumers need to consider to meet the growing information storage demand.

Session panelists will include Chris Geiser, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Memory & Storage, Samsung; Larry O’Connor, CEO of OWC; Peter Schade, President, IMI; Stanley Huang, Product Marketing Manager, Silicon Motion; and Maciek Brzeski, Vice President of Branded Storage, Toshiba.

During the session several new proof-of-concept design solutions will be unveiled while speakers from Silicon Motion, Samsung and Toshiba will explore next-generation technology and applications of consumer and business-grade SSD products. OWC’s O’Connor will discuss the bottleneck between storage and the consumer device and how the new generation of USB 3.1 and Thunderbolt 2 interfaces can meet the performance demands and user expectations.

Ponemon Institute recently noted the increasing threat level to critical infrastructure and third- party (Cloud) storage services. Their report noted that the release of “products” such as the Stuxnet work and Shamoon virus have shown that open, crowd storage is susceptible to compromise and content/identity theft.

More than 70 percent of the firms Ponemon Institute studied reported security breaches, and consumer session panelists agreed that the best way to ensure the availability and protection of personal and business data is with storage solutions designed for the individual, department and business unit. “The cloud is nice to pass through,” one panelist noted, “but until reliability, security and privacy improves it’s just too much of a wild west out there.”

In addition to the consumer application panel session, there will be conference meetings featuring end users, solution developers, designers and application leaders in the wearable, mobile, 4K video content production, healthcare, enterprise and other market areas.

The 9th Annual Flash Memory Summit will also feature keynote speakers from Alibaba, Samsung, Dell, Microsoft, SanDisk, IBM, Fusion-io and other industry leaders. More than 100 information-packed sessions will have presentations by leading experts and will include complete coverage of SSDs, controllers and the very latest in advanced technologies.

The three-day event will include plenaries on 3-D flash, forums on NVMe, architectures, enterprise SSD, enterprise storage design/applications and performance measurement. There will be more than a dozen tutorials on reliability, enterprise SSD selection, software-defined storage and enabling Big Data applications. To help attendees stay abreast of the fast-moving industry there will also be a series of hands-on laboratories on custom hardware, NVMe compliance, cloud storage and non-volatile DIMM.