At the Flash Memory Summit today, Sun's own Michael Cornwell delivered a keynote excoriating the overall direction of NAND flash and SSDs. In particular, he spoke of the "lithography death march" as NAND vendors push to deliver the most cost-efficient solution while making huge sacrifices in reliability and performance.

On Wednesday, August 12, I'll be giving two short talks as part of sessions on flash-enabled power savings and data center applications:

• 8:30 - 9:45 Power Saving Architectures Enabled by Smarter Software
• 3:15 - 4:30 The Need For Higher-Level Software for Flash

In the evening from 7:30 to 9:00, I'll be hosting a table discussion of software as it pertains to flash. We'll be talking about uses of flash such as the Hybrid Storage Pool, how software can enable the use of MLC flash in the enterprise, the role of the flash translation layer, and anything else that comes up.