Jocasta Mann
Team Quarch had the advantage of an extra two pairs of hands this year at Flash Memory Summit, the largest global conference for the storage industry.
We attend Flash Memory Summit (FMS) around the first week of every August. As well as networking and access to workshops and talks, it’s a chance for us to greet familiar faces and discover new opportunities in this fast-growing and ever-changing market. Some of the biggest names – not only in storage but in tech itself – are regular attendees, and the event focus was still very much on NVMe, the leading industry standard interface for Solid State Drives (Quarch is a key component of its interoperability testing program).
Jetting off to San Jose in California, myself and one of our hardware engineers had the opportunity to join our CEO and Director at the show for the first time. It proved to be a brilliant learning experience – and for me personally, a real crash course in getting to know the industry, the tech and some of our partners.
We began with a couple of days to spare, giving us time to shake off the jet lag (and visit a few vineyards) before setting up our stand at the conference center. Joining us on the neighboring booths were our friends at Serial Cables – Quarch’s reseller in the USA – and SerialTek, with their new Gen4 analyzer on show.
Three busy days of networking commenced, with a chance for me to get to know our partners at Sanblaze and Oakgate, who integrate Quarch products into their own testing solutions. It was great also to meet our friends at UNH-IOL, who hosted the NVMe plugfest we attended as a testing partner in Boston earlier this summer. The team enjoyed being able to meet new people from all corners of the world, with various specialisms within the storage business.
Naturally it’s come and gone in a flash (sorry, couldn’t resist) but we left with our minds full. For me, speaking to those in the industry only solidified my enthusiasm for what we do: There were labs and individuals alike around the globe who had yet to benefit from a simple solution to the complex, time-consuming testing processes they’ve used (not to mention the bulky equipment). It needn’t be such a headache to qualify and analyze the performance of storage and network hardware – and there are plenty of ways we can help. Encouragingly, we weren’t the only ones who thought so.
