Flash Memory Summit announces the Inaugural SuperWomen in Flash Leadership Award

Honors Amber Huffman, Intel Fellow

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SANTA CLARA, CA – August 9, 2018 – Flash Memory Summit (FMS) and the Evaluator Group today announced Amber Huffman winner of the inaugural SuperWomen in Flash Leadership Award. A respected authority on storage architecture with over 20 patents, Huffman has led impressive advances in solid state storage including the NVM Express interface, the Open NAND Flash Interface, and the Serial ATA interface. The new SuperWomen in Flash Leadership Award recognizes women who make invaluable contributions to the flash memory ecosystem and who serve as role models for women in leadership.

According to Chuck Sobey, Flash Memory Summit Conference Chairperson, “Amber Huffman embodies the spirit of this prestigious new award. She has spent her career driving change and innovation in solid state storage, leading diverse coalitions to define new standards, and inspiring and mentoring the next generation of women and minorities.”

“I’m honored to receive this inaugural award, which recognizes two decades of collaborative work with inclusive male leaders and female trailblazers to change the landscape of storage,” said Huffman. “I’m passionate about bringing many more diverse technologist voices to the table to have richer conversations that unlock the next wave of innovation.”

SuperWomen in Flash

SuperWomen in Flash was formed four years ago to promote and celebrate the success of women in the flash memory industry with the goal of encouraging more women to enter and succeed in our marketplace. It is supported by a broad group of women and vendors including IBM and Intel. In its fourth year, it draws all genders and nationalities that are interested in expanding the enthusiasm and devotion in the data storage industry.

“The SuperWomen in Flash Leadership Award furthers our purpose, recognizing women who have shown outstanding leadership in the growth, development and use of flash and related technologies and systems,” said Camberley Bates, Managing Director of Evaluator Group and founding chair of SuperWomen. “We are very pleased to recognize Amber Huffman, clearly a leader in the data storage industry.”

An Intel Fellow and the director of storage interfaces in the Data Center Group at Intel Corporation, Huffman has used her expertise and influence to lead Intel and the storage industry toward the definition and adoption of fast, streamlined, highly power-managed and low-latency storage interfaces. Her leadership role in industry standards efforts is exemplified by forming, technically leading, and chairing NVM Express which is the basis of today’s leadership in solid state drives. Huffman continues to serve as President of NVM Express, Inc. and also leads the technical work, as the technology has scaled with more than 100 member companies and billions of NVMe drives sold in the market throughout the Cloud, Enterprise, and Client market segments.

Huffman has devoted her career to storage interfaces since joining Intel in 1998. Her early work focused on Serial ATA (SATA) technology, the storage interface standard for most hard drives. Huffman led the development of the Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI), which remains the standard programming interface for SATA today. Subsequently, she led the technical and industry development of ONFI, which standardizes the NAND Flash memory component interface and enables customers to use Flash from various hardware vendors. As with AHCI and NVMe, she served as lead author and editor on the ONFI industry specification.

Huffman earned a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from the University of Michigan and a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University. She has been granted more than 20 patents in storage architecture and was named an Intel Fellow in 2016, just the fifth woman named in Intel’s 48 year history.

About Evaluator Group

Evaluator Group Inc. is dedicated to helping IT professionals and vendors create and implement strategies that make the most of the value of their IT infrastructure and digital information. Evaluator Group services deliver in-depth, unbiased analysis on storage architectures, infrastructures and management for IT professionals. Since 1997, Evaluator Group has provided services for thousands of end users and vendor professionals through product and market evaluations, competitive analysis and education. www.evaluatorgroup.com; follow us on Twitter @evaluator_group

About the Flash Memory Summit

Flash Memory Summit, produced by Conference ConCepts, showcases the mainstream applications, key technologies, and leading vendors that are driving the multi-billion dollar non-volatile memory and SSD markets. FMS is now the world’s largest event featuring the trends, innovations, and influencers driving the adoption of flash memory in demanding enterprise storage applications, as well as in smartphones, tablets, and mobile and embedded systems.

Media Contacts

Dan Chmielewski +1.949.231.2965
Suzanne Tuchler +1.408.307.6900
Flash Memory Summit
[email protected]

Camberley Bates
Evaluator Group
+1.303.956.4284
[email protected]