SNIA Developer Conference September 15-17, 2025 | Santa Clara, CA
Eric Ries
Chairman of the Software-Enabled Flash Project and SVP
KIOXIA America
Eric is the Chairman of the governing board for the Software-Enabled Flash Project where he helps guide the project as it advances an innovative way of making flash even simpler for developers to use and deploy by enabling it for software control. Eric is also a Sr. Vice President in the Memory and Storage Strategy Division of KIOXIA America, Inc.
Related Sessions
Maximizing Flash Value with the Software-Enabled Flash™ SDK
The hyperscale cloud innovates through relentless optimization. Cloud providers are always looking for ways to maximize the efficiency of every hardware and software component they deploy. To help them achieve that goal, KIOXIA released the open source Software-Enabled Flash™ API, which redefines the relationship between the host and flash devices, and allows cloud-scale users to unlock the most value from their flash. By removing the impediment of legacy protocols used by current designs, and architecting a completely new way of using flash, Software-Enabled Flash technology delivers software-defined flash to hyperscale users.
Collaborating with hyperscale developers, KIOXIA made Software-Enabled Flash technology more powerful and easier to use with a new, higher-level SDK. This new SDK enables low-code prototyping and evaluation by providing high-level abstractions to speed application development and flash deployment. It enhances the Software-Enabled Flash ecosystem with a reference flash translation layer (FTL) and virtual I/O (VIRTIO) device, as well as command-line management and testing utilities. It also preserves full access to the low-level Software-Enabled Flash API primitives: workload isolation, quality of service management, latency outcome control, generation and vendor abstraction, and flash management offload. KIOXIA will present this new SDK and describe how it can be used by developers to solve storage challenges, and help derive the maximum value of deployed flash, at hyperscale.
Software-Enabled Flash™ Has Arrived
Software-Enabled Flash™ technology is being developed to allow storage developers to maximize the value of flash deployed in their data centers. It makes flash storage software-defined by redefining the relationship between the host and solid-state storage. Purpose-built, media-centric hardware focused on cloud-scale requirements, combined with an open source API and SDK, give developers tools to define latency outcomes, tenant isolation, control flash background processes, and build their own application-centric storage protocols. The Software-Enabled Flash Project, under the Linux Foundation, was formed to advance this new technology and encourage collaboration and innovation in a vendor neutral forum. Learn about this new open source project, details of the Software-Enabled Flash technology, and the progress of groundbreaking engineering sample drives implementing this new, developer-focused paradigm.
Software-Enabled Flash™ For Storage Developers
Software-Enabled Flash™ is a new storage paradigm engineered as a vendor neutral Linux Foundation project. This technology is dedicated to delivering the full power and flexibility of software-definable flash to developers. It is built on a hardware architecture focused on low-level flash management and abstraction, combined with an open-source, host-based software stack optimized for data placement control, latency prioritization, and protocol creation. Hardware from KIOXIA implementing this new Software-Enabled Flash technology will be sampling soon with select customers. Learn about the technical capabilities and data center level benefits of this revolutionary technology, and the hardware and software that makes it possible.