Suresh Rajgopal

The rapid advancement of AI is significantly increasing demands on compute, memory and the storage infrastructure. As NVMe storage evolves to meet these needs, it is experiencing a bifurcation in requirements. On one end, workloads such as model training, checkpointing, and key-value (KV) cache tiering are driving the need for line-rate saturating SSDs with near-GPU and HPC attachment. On the other end, the rise of multi-stage inference, synthetic data generation, and post-training optimization is fueling demand for dense, high-capacity disaggregated storage solutions — effectively displacing traditional rotating media in the nearline tier of the datacenter. This paper explores the architectural considerations across both ends of this spectrum, including Gen6 performance, indirection unit (IU) selection, power monitoring for energy efficiency, liquid cooled thermal design, and strategies for enabling high capacity through form factor and packaging choices. We demonstrate how thoughtful design decisions can unlock the full potential of storage systems in addressing the evolving challenges of AI workloads.

Suresh Rajgopal

SSD Systems Architect - DMTS

Micron Technology