- Autonomous Driving and Artificial Intelligence: Storage to Steer Straight and Smart
By 2020, ten million cars on the road are expected to have self-driving features[1], reflecting the continuing move toward an IoT-based world and advances in artificial intelligence (AI). Designing autonomous vehicles requires the ability to harness massive amounts of camera and sensor data, analyze it and apply AI technology, and – as with any AI application – the more data it has, the smarter it can become. In the past, one of the biggest hurdles for AI was processing power, but storage has increasingly become the limiting factor. Traditional, general-purpose storage solutions can’t keep up with the performance requirements or provide the long-term data retention and access capabilities needed at an affordable price point. As a result, more enterprises will turn to specialized storage and data management solutions that can meet these challenges.
- Corporate Video: A Moving Picture is Worth a 100,000 Words or More
Video will take on a much larger role in the activities and processes of more and more organizations, such as enhancing teaching and guarding against malpractice claims in hospitals, improving quality control in manufacturing facilities and analyzing buyer behavior in retail stores. Companies will also continue to make video a bigger part of their training and service initiatives, echoing the trend of YouTube videos replacing written manuals in the consumer space. In fact, while the written word is far from obsolete, in many areas video will increasingly become the de facto communication platform. All of this will require greater collaboration between IT and line-of-business owners to ensure they have the storage and data management infrastructure that can support a video-dominant world as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible.
- Still the Bright Shiny Object (Storage)?
Object storage, with its extreme scalability and durability capabilities, provides access to large-scale data volumes at a lower price point than primary disk storage while also avoiding the increasing RAID re-build times associated with high-capacity disks. Object storage has played a foundational role in public cloud services for some time now, but expectations that it would become the dominant technology for large-scale data retention have not been borne out. In many cases, users are realizing that an intelligent file system and the latest tape storage technology can provide equivalent, or even better, performance at a lower cost. Moving forward, therefore, enterprises will primarily deploy object storage as the basis for their private clouds, with tape maintaining its role as the optimal technology for long-term, low-cost archive of large-scale unstructured data.
