How to build a strategy for your unstructured data and AI storage needs

Learn how HPE addresses diverse unstructured data and AI storage needs with a holistic approach and a rich, comprehensive portfolio of purpose-built solutions. – By David Yu, HPE Storage Product Marketing

First, a personal word to our blog readers

There’s a saying that goes, “When one door opens, another one closes.” I am about to walk through an exciting new door, as I close the door on my time here at HPE as a permanent employee. This will be my last blog here on Around the Storage Block. I have decided to call it a career. As I ride off into the sunset to explore new happy trails, it’s natural to reflect on an entire career spent in data storage.

The timing is right for me. I’ve witnessed the advancements and changing competitive and technological landscape of storage – from  tape to spinning disks to SSDs and all the management software that accompanied the storage hierarchy and its trajectory. The interactions between storage, computing, and networking have been amazing to see. I lived through storage history, and now, with ultra-high-performance GPUs, we are in the dawn of a new era, the age of AI. Those who will succeed in this new age will be the ones who have the appropriate infrastructure to support the entire spectrum of unstructured data and AI storage needs. You can bet I will continue to keep an eye on the dynamic changes in store.

Now I’ll get back to the topic at hand.

The challenges of unstructured data and AI storage

The rise of Generative AI further expands the hope of new outcomes, including diagnosis and treatment in healthcare, fraud detection and investment analysis in finance, broad adoption of autonomous driving, personalized learning for education, more efficient manufacturing and farming, and cybersecurity. The power of AI can accelerate discovery, innovation, and time to market for breakthrough products as it goes beyond the bounds of human capacity, speed, and accuracy.

However, AI and the accompanying boundless growth of unstructured data introduce additional stresses on organizational adoption, deployment, and operational capabilities. Yes, your organization wants to leverage the power of AI but you may not know how to deal with these additional stresses. Unstructured data growth can get out of control and quickly become unmanageable, and defining a clear strategy for unstructured data and AI storage needs is often difficult.

What makes an effective data strategy?

From the get-go, you must address questions such as:

• How do you select appropriate platforms and infrastructures that effectively meet the diverse needs of both your business and IT teams?
• How do you free your IT organization from being swamped with operational overhead so it can focus on strategic initiatives?
• How do you enhance the productivity of your business teams, data scientists, and end-users by freeing them from complex, hard-to-use unstructured data storage products? Are they having difficulty collaborating and sharing data because of storage silos?
• How can you keep your unstructured data storage infrastructure from becoming a bottleneck for your AI and data-intensive applications?
• Does your storage address the needs across the various stages of AI and their unique performance, capacity, scalability, and cost requirements?
• How can you get past using point products for unstructured data storage that cannot meet the entire spectrum of AI needs?
• Can your storage infrastructure support AI workloads across edge, cloud, and on-premises?
• Does your storage infrastructure have cyber resilience against threats such as ransomware, double extortion, and insider attacks?

The need to support both business and IT teams

Because data is vital for any enterprise, especially for AI, your infrastructure and platforms must support the diverse needs of both the business and IT teams, including digital initiatives, specific requirements of the various lines of business, and development and engineering requirements. Your infrastructure and platforms must also support the common needs of both the business and IT sides of the organization: analytics competence centers, operations, and cybersecurity.

If your infrastructure isn’t addressing all these needs, you can end up with the following issues:

For your business

• Lines of business cannot support many use cases, have a lack of synergy with IT, and end up with a shadow IT (a “do it yourself” approach) that leads to sprawl instead of an integrated IT approach.
• Digital initiatives are held back by a lack of comprehensive strategy for data and analytics and poor planning for the impact of new technologies on core IT.

For IT

• Development and Engineering see a poor alignment between IT and business and data engineers, with too many applications and tools.
• Platforms and infrastructures are limited to data collection and storage, and the challenge of meeting massive data processing requirements is further compounded by limited data management.

And issues affecting both business and IT teams

• Analytics competence centers end up with data silos, with partial integration between IT capabilities and data analytics.
• Operations experiences a lack of operational experience in new use cases, with limited automation in IT operations and inadequate financial models.
• Cybersecurity fails to address protection and compliance, with unclear governance of data privacy, ownership, and quality.

Enter HPE with a holistic approach

HPE addresses the diverse unstructured data and AI storage needs with a holistic approach. This means we’ll work with you to develop a data strategy and address your wide range of enterprise needs. The selection of platforms and infrastructures for unstructured data and AI storage is NOT trivial because of the diverse needs mentioned in the previous section. Storage is vital because data is vital, and many factors and tradeoffs have to be accounted for:

• Performance and capacity are unpredictable.
• Automated operation is critical and complex.
• Data security and privacy are of paramount importance.
• Unified access to all enterprise data is essential.

In most cases, your organization will end up with infrastructures that do not adequately support the distinctive needs of business or IT teams or the needs that they have in common. No single-point product will adequately cover the entire spectrum of unstructured data and AI needs.

As such, HPE will partner with you to assess your entire set of needs and propose a plan. This will be accomplished through doing a deep dive on technical storage infrastructure, engaging in an AI/HPC conversation to identify your key use cases, or doing a data strategy or assessment workshop to ensure that you are moving in the right direction. HPE is uniquely positioned to successfully achieve this because we have a rich unstructured data storage portfolio that addresses the wide range of enterprise needs with purpose-fit solutions.  

Imagine if you could gain all the capabilities you desire

Because HPE is focused on addressing needs of both your business and IT teams, where they are unique and where they overlap, the outcome will be an unstructured data storage infrastructure that will empower your organization to grow and scale in today’s AI age.

HPE will work with you to select the appropriate unstructured data storage solutions from our comprehensive portfolio to ensure that you cover all your bases. Even if you do not yet have a clear strategy for your unstructured data and AI needs, we will work with you to assess your requirements and deliver a proposal. The outcome will be not only higher efficiency and productivity for today but also headroom for growth as you progress on your AI journey and ramp up your AI initiatives. Whether your concerns are about performance, capacity, manageability, efficiency, productivity, scalability, cost, or a combination of all those factors, we will arrive at a comprehensive solution designed just for you.

Just think what your organization would be like if you had the following capabilities for your business and IT teams instead of the problematic scenarios described earlier.

For business

• Lines of business can effortlessly support a large number of use cases and achieve fast deployment of new services.
• Digital initiatives have unified access to all data, anywhere, simple addition of new data sources, and seamless support of distributed infrastructure.

For IT

• Development and Engineering teams have cloud-native app development, control of data source growth and sprawl, and accelerated development.
• Platforms and infrastructures are turnkey and scalable, optimized for AI edge and cloud.

And capabilities supporting both business and IT teams

• Analytics competence centers can support traditional and AI workloads at scale.
• Operations has simplicity, centralized management, cost-efficient consumption options, and hybrid cloud support.
• Cybersecurity is strengthened with ransomware protection, simplified and consistent policy enforcement, and strong governance and compliance.

Where to start

HPE will initiate a dialogue to gain an understanding of your overall requirements. Then, depending on your needs, the HPE team will propose having a follow-up meeting to accomplish one of the following:

• Assess your environment and needs through an in-depth workshop to come up with an effective data strategy for your organization based on the key results you want to achieve
• Discover your ROI with HPE Private Cloud for AI and HPE AI solutions if you want to explore AI hybrid cloud solutions.
• Explore HPE Storage solutions with a technical deep dive on our broad, modern portfolio of unstructured data solutions.

I truly believe this is the right approach to take for unstructured data and AI. Beyond selling point products, HPE wants to be a trusted advisor for your business, to help it grow as you progress in your AI journey. I can also sincerely say that HPE has a great company culture and amazing people, and it all spills over into how HPE treats its customers. The ultimate standard for HPE’s success is the success of our customers!    

HPE can help you define an effective strategy that leverages our comprehensive portfolio of unstructured data storage solutions to realize the promise of AI for your organization. With HPE, you can start your journey to AI success today.

As I sign off from Around the Storage Block for the last time, I wish you all the best!