Six Five Connected with Diana Blass: How Edge Storage is Fueling AI Innovation

Is storage the true MVP behind AI’s progress?

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Host Diana Blass leads an insightful discussion that promises to transform your understanding of AI's critical frontier: the edge. 

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Join us with an exceptional panel of industry leaders from Dell Tech World 2025, including Solidigm’s, Greg Matson, SVP, Head of Marketing & Products, Alan Bumgarner, Director, Strategic Planning, Data Center Group, and John Quinn, Sr. Field Application Engineer. Also featured are Michael Dell, CEO, and Greg Schiff, Principal Solutions Architect, Media & Entertainment, from Dell Technologies; Christopher Sullivan, Director, Research & Academic Computing, College of Earth, Ocean & Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University; and Brian Martin, AI & Data Center Lead at Signal 65, The Futurum Group. 

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Tune in as they meticulously dissect how groundbreaking storage advancements are vital to unlocking AI's full potential across diverse and demanding industries that are harnessing AI at the very edge to achieve groundbreaking work and redefine possibilities.

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Key takeaways include:

🔹Storage Is The Unsung Hero of AI: Guests reveal how storage is the cornerstone of progress in the AI transformations that are taking shape. The discussion emphasizes the necessity for swift, universally accessible, and robust storage solutions to efficiently manage, process, and ultimately derive intelligence from growing volumes of data.

🔹Dell PowerScale & Solidigm SSD: Gain an exclusive look at the powerful collaboration between Dell PowerScale and Solidigm SSD. This segment will highlight how their combined prowess offers unprecedented storage density and extreme performance, proving critical for today's most data-intensive AI tasks.

🔹Illuminating Use Cases: From next-gen ocean research demanding the management of colossal datasets to Hollywood's intricate virtual production challenges to healthcare's evolving needs for instantaneous archive access, and the futuristic design of AI labs by Signal 65 – understand how these cutting-edge solutions enable real-time data processing and analysis, propelling industries forward at an astonishing pace.

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Learn more at Solidigm.

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Or listen to the audio here:

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Disclaimer: Six Five Connected is for information and entertainment purposes only. Over the course of this webcast, we may talk about companies that are publicly traded, and we may even reference that fact and their equity share price, but please do not take anything that we say as a recommendation about what you should do with your investment dollars. We are not investment advisors, and we ask that you do not treat us as such.

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Diana Blass: AI is transforming everything from ocean research to digital production. But real change doesn't just require data. It demands the ability to access and act on it in real time. Innovation like Dell's Power Scale introduced powerful new ways to bring AI to the edge, enabling real time insight where it matters most. But there still was one limitation. Compact, high capacity storage that can manage the explosion of data we're seeing in the AI era. Can something like this change that?

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John Quinn: A 122.88 terabyte, we call it NVMe Drive.

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Diana Blass: At Dell Tech World, Dell announced that it will integrate the 122terabyte SSD by Solidigm  into the Dell Power Scale system. Can you fit just one in here?

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John Quinn: We can fit 24122 terabyte drives across the whole solution space. 

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Greg Matson: It really allows Dell to provide the highest capacity storage for AI and other big storage deployments.

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Diana Blass: Come with me as we explore use cases where innovation like this can be a game changer.

Meet Christopher Sullivan, a researcher at Oregon State University, on a mission to clean up the planet, starting with plankton.

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Diana Blass: Plankton are microscopic organisms that float in the ocean. But they play a massive role in producing oxygen, absorbing carbon, and supporting the entire marine food chain. Which is why they can provide amazing insight into changes in our climate.

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Diana Blass: So walk me through how you're monitoring the plankton.

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Christopher Sullivan: Right. So we have a device that I carry behind our $150 million research vessels that we take out into the ocean and it actually collects about 50 to 100 terabytes of data every couple days when we're out there.

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Diana Blass: The challenge, it's analysis that needs to happen at that moment with no wait time.

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Christopher Sullivan: Plankton's microscopic, so it's not easy to see. And so we actually have to move the boat around potentially where the plankton are. So if I'm not able to do the work at the edge of the ship, I might come back with bad data.

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Diana Blass: So it's amazing. You can also power a data center on a ship.

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Christopher Sullivan: Correct. And this is a full size data center where I can put all of my processing and all of my storage capabilities I need.

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Diana Blass: Storage solutions like Dell's PowerScale. PowerScale is ideal for edge environments because it's compact, fast and built to handle massive unstructured data, even in the most remote locations. That means researchers like Sullivan can work in the middle of the ocean, undisturbed by limited connectivity or the need for cloud access. And now they can double their capacity by integrating Solidigm's 122 terabyte SSD, all without expanding their footprint.

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Christopher Sullivan: The important piece of technology for AI was the cheap hard drive. Before that we had data in filing cabinets. And by moving that out into the digital context, AI came to life.

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Diana Blass: It's a new era, one where every company is data rich. And as Michael Dell noted in his keynote, that data is increasingly being created and kept at the edge, with warm and hot storage becoming the new standard.

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Michael Dell: Constantly in circulation, with thousands of multi agent systems transforming millions of tasks.

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Diana Blass: You see, hot storage isn't just about speed, it's about readiness. It keeps data instantly accessible, even as it scales. That means no waiting, no offloading, and no barriers between your data and your next decision. Dell PowerScale is a prime example of a hot storage solution built to deliver fast scalable access to unstructured data. While critical for AI, it's also valuable in other data rich environments. Take virtual production as an example.

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Greg Schiff: Virtual production is this technique that has become popular in the past couple of years where you have an LED wall and the actors are in front of the LED wall and you're capturing that whole scene.

Diana Blass: At Orbital Studios in Los Angeles, producers are using Dell's PowerScale to render and transform petabytes of footage at high speed. Now imagine the efficiencies when incorporating Solidigm's 122 terabyte SSD, which can reportedly hold around 2,730 hours of 4K video footage.

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Greg Schiff: Given the amount of data that people are creating and having to manipulate these days, I just feel like that's a revolutionary thing.

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Diana Blass: The rise of AI is now making hot storage more valuable than ever, making hidden data instantly visible for the first time.

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Alan Bumgarner: We've talked to a lot of customers, like hospitals for instance, that have, you know, 30 or 40 years of CT scans or X rays. All this data is stored away in a hard disk drive array or even on tape, linear tape file systems that they can't use. And so what AI is going to allow you to do with retrieval, augmented generation is I can take all that data and I can create an index which is a vector index. The very simple way to think about it is it understands the relationship between each piece of data and each other piece of data. So when I ask it a question, it can return the right data to me to find something.

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Diana Blass: And that's where Dell's PowerScale, now integrated with Solidigm's 122 terabyte SSD, would come in. With PowerScale, hospitals get a unified high performance file system that can manage petabytes of unstructured data like imaging files, with the flexibility to scale across local cloud or hybrid environments. And with Solidigm's 122 terabyte SSD inside, they gain incredible density and speed in a compact footprint. Ideal for housing large vector indexes and delivering low latency performance for AI search.

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Alan Bumgarner: So if I have a lot of people that want to look at those X rays all at the same time concurrently, I'll have a graphics engine or a graphics cluster sitting in front of it so I can actually pull this data in a reasonable amount of time.

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Diana Blass: So if retrieval augmented AI lets us interact with decades of data in new ways. And this next use case shows what's possible when you design for those interactions from day one. And what's that look like? I think Brian Martin here from Signal 65 might have some answers. Brian, what are you doing right now?

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Brian Martin: Oh, I'm walking around in our lab in Colorado Springs.

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Diana Blass: Well, can you come back to Las Vegas for a second? I have some questions.

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Brian Martin: Sure. So what we've done is we're building a brand new liquid cooled lab for AI, predominantly AI workloads. And we decided that as we were doing that, we were going to incorporate AI into the design and construction and operation of that lab.

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Diana Blass: Here. Signal 65 is able to use insights from its data to better design the lab for its needs.

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Brian Martin: One of the things we discovered early on was the rows were too close together and some components were hard to get to.

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Diana Blass: The Solution uses Dell's PowerEdge 9680 as the AI compute engine. Here, data is processed, models are trained and simulations are run. It also uses Dell's power scale as the hot storage backbone, where all the unstructured data, telemetry, sensor inputs and simulation outputs are stored, retrieved and indexed in real time. Together they give Signal 65 the AI powered feedback needed to enhance the lab's design while it's still in planning. Now, how can that be enhanced with Solidigm's 122 terabyte SSD?

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Brian Martin: Think of all of the data we want to collect, all of the telemetry, the metrics that we can keep at a fine grain level for years.

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Diana Blass: So from a ship at sea to a lab in the cloud, the future of AI doesn't just think, it acts. And to make that future real, AI must go where the data lives. That's why we're seeing rapid innovation in how enterprises store and access information with NVME storage leading the charge, offering the performance and efficiency needed to power AI at scale. Because in this new era, it's not just about having data, it's about being ready to use it. Signing off for Connected, I'm Diana Blass.

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