By Owais Mohammed, Director Sales, MEA & India, Western Digital
The world is creating and consuming data at an unprecedented rate. Look at advancing technologies and applications like generative AI, which either requires humongous amounts of data to function or will generate colossal amounts of data. For example, by 2025, Gartner expects generative AI to account for 10% of all data produced, up from less than 1% today.
Aside from generative AI, whether we are counting the total number of steps taken in a day, shopping from our sofa, or just watching entertainment, every small activity creates a digital footprint or data. No wonder the volume of data continues to double every three years2. Interestingly, while the volume of data created is growing at warp speed, so is our ability to extract meaningful insights from it. As a result, data is growing in value too.
The growing value of data:
Organisations of all sizes, private and public, as well as governments around the globe, are increasingly realising the importance of data and are deriving value from it. For example, an over-the-top (OTT) media service player, looking at the data for a particular series- such as the number of times it is watched, if it is watched completely or left after a couple of episodes- can decide to invest in the next season or not. After all, these are extremely important decisions often requiring hundreds of millions in investments.
Organisations today understand that by collecting more data and extracting actionable insights from it they can improve their products and services and consequently attract more customers and retain the current ones.
However, to adapt to this era of data-driven decision-making, it is important to understand the different kinds of data and its purpose. This helps in storing and managing data better to derive more value from it. For example, fast data. This is where the data is flowing continuously at a high speed and requires fast processing for fast decision-making. This requires storage solutions based on flash or DRAM. Data management teams must decide where to store hot, warm, or cold data depending on how quickly and how often they need to access it.
Different kinds of data need different storage solutions:
While data analysis can extract insights that lead to better business decisions, efficiencies in productivity and automation, and even bring unexpected value, it can only be achieved when the data is captured, organized, and accessed reliably. For warm and cold data, Western Digital’s industry-leading, high-density hard drives with up to 22TB** help store massive amounts of data reliably, cost-effectively, and energy efficiently. They are designed for optimal low power supporting a variety of workloads. Moreover, ready-built storage platforms such as JBOD or ‘Just a Bunch of Disks’ address the ever-expanding storage needs. Western Digital Ultrastar® Data102 storage platform (JBOD) is configured with up to 102 HDDs in a compact and efficient form factor and offers up to 2.2PB of raw storage in 4U using the company’s 22TB HDDs. Powered with innovative ArcticFlow™ Thermal zone cooling technology and IsoVibe™ vibration Isolation technology, Western Digital’s JBOD offers more efficient cooling and reliability compared to competition enclosures. In a large data center with 20,000 drives, this could be as much as $300,000 in savings in energy costs*.
For Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) big data, and other demanding workloads, the data storage infrastructure should offer performance, reliability, and endurance that support and enable complex high-capacity performance workloads. NVMe™ Enterprise-class Solid State Drives (eSSDs) have emerged as the medium of choice to provide maximum throughput and transform data into actionable insights. For example, the new Ultrastar DC SN655 NVMe SSD from Western Digital offers high capacity and performance at scale for increasingly larger application workloads.
Storage is foundational in our data-driven world. When designing solutions and infrastructure, it is crucial to understand the data use case before investing in the right storage solution. Data’s digital footprint continues to expand exponentially, and so does its potential. Storage infrastructure companies must continue to innovate and introduce solutions to unlock data’s potential.
