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How AI Is Reshaping Storage Technologies

September 14, 2020

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) enables machines to think like a human being. Companies cutting across industries are trying to leverage this trait to enhance their products and stay ahead of their competitors using better insights. Apt utilization of AI and getting the most out of the insights it generates can overhaul almost any broken business.

AI should be able to expand from edge to inference in a simple and cost-effective infrastructure. But AI-enabled systems face major challenges in storage and deployment. Could AI itself help address these challenges?

Data is the fuel that powers AI. The problem is, it can become trapped or stored in a way that makes it difficult or costly to access, maintain, or expand.

AI is only as good as the data that it relies on. Businesses must entirely realize the data they generate, the usefulness of the data, elimination of unwanted data, and the lifespan of that data. Businesses should also be able to organize the data, including pit-stops for compliance checks, data optimization, data cataloging, and data governance. All of these are formidable challenges.

This is where AI-enabled storages could come into the picture. AI-enabled storage provides real-time continuous updates from various enterprise data sources, optimizes it, and does other intelligent automated work on it without any human intervention.

So, the question that arises is – what are the advantages of AI-enabled storage? Let us dig deeper.

Since data is the fuel for AI, it follows that legacy data storage systems need to be transformed into a smarter storage solution with capabilities like deep learning and GPU processors to be able to drive real-time insights. This can drive some key advantages from AI-enabled storage.

  1. Scalability: AI systems need to process vast amounts of data in a short timeframe. This data volume drives significant storage demands. Managing these data sets requires a storage system that can scale without limits or auto-scale intelligently as per the requirements. This is easily possible with AI-enabled cloud storage.
  2. Shared Data Stores: In a data-rich world, shared data is infinitely more valuable than stored data. AI-enabled storage uses modern analytics and AI workloads, delivering scale-out storage platforms that drive downtime to insights for data-driven businesses.
  3. Data Insights: AI-enabled storages use various analytics tools and processes that deliver ultra-fast, high-performance data insights about billions of stored objects and files. These data insights are useful for businesses for making major business decisions.
  4. Reporting and Alerting: AI-enabled storages help build reports on the data functions and insights delivered. They enable the configuration of alerting systems to tackle data storage failure or data anomaly situations. One of the intelligent reporting systems enabled by AI storage is Power BI by Microsoft. This promotes Learning Data Lifecycles and helps regulate the storage of specific types of data in the best way possible.
  5. Failure Prediction: Storage failures can have a huge impact on productivity. When there is a failure, you must find what data was lost (if any) and then restore the data either from a backup or copy. This takes time and hinders productivity. Failure detection and restoring data from the point of failure can be easily done with AI-enabled data storage.
  6. Cost-effective: AI-enabled storage helps identify the usefulness of and the patterns in which stored data is used. This helps in making major decisions to select the type of storage, crucial data, and unwanted data. This, in turn, helps organizations invest in data storage capacity wisely and save costs associated with storing huge terabytes of data.

The various benefits of using AI-enabled storage over normal cloud storage are:

  • AI-enabled storage helps deploy cost-effective Software-defined Storage. This allows the storing of data in a way that its power can be easily unleashed by customers for various insight-led actions.
  • Another advantage of AI-enabled storage over normal cloud storage is the automation of functions associated with infrastructure, capacity, and storage management and maintenance.
  • AI-enabled storage has a more agile and flexible architecture.
  • It can intelligently control access rights, dynamically re-route data center data, and automatically regulate data center cooling, thereby optimizing energy consumption.
  • AI enhances the security and reliability of storage. AI-enabled storage has smart security features to detect data/packet loss during transit or within data centers. This helps prevent data loss, increases availability, and turnaround speed during downtime.
  • Neural storage is yet another emerging advantage of AI-enabled storage. In neural class storage, the storage can recognize and respond to problems and opportunities without human intervention.

To conclude, as the needs of AI make storage systems grow larger, the ability of human engineers to manage, monitor, and maintain large-scale data storage becomes a bottleneck in scalability and efficient operations. While companies can harvest tons of data through these storage systems and applications, generating actionable information becomes difficult without using an intelligent and automated storage system that can self-predict and analyze real-time data.

Further Reading: Artificial Intelligence is a game changer for major industry segments such as IT, software, medical sciences, travel, hospitality, retail, and more. AI is helping in process optimization & automation, data management, and improved efficiency. This podcast explains about how AI and storage are connected and in what ways AI is helping Storage solutions.


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