In a recent Search Storage article, Simon Robinson, Principal Analyst at the firm ESG, delves into the rapid evolution of object storage from a niche technology to a leading contender for the data foundation of the AI era. As organizations grapple with the explosive growth of data fueled by AI, advanced analytics, and ever-expanding data lakes, Robinson highlights the hunt for modern storage architectures that can keep pace.
Object Storage as Primary Storage for AI
According to Robinson, object storage is shedding its reputation as an archive-only platform, propelled by a new wave of innovation. Leading vendors are unveiling high-performance, massively scalable object platforms that can serve as the primary data store for even the most demanding AI and analytics workloads.
Propelled by recent advances such as GPUDirect for Object Storage, this evolution positions object storage to potentially displace legacy file storage systems in cutting-edge AI infrastructure.
Here is a summary of the key points from the article:
- The rapid growth of AI, advanced analytics, and data lakes is driving innovation in storage technologies, particularly object storage. Object storage has evolved over time to meet changing needs.
- Early object storage emerged in the early 2000s as a cost-effective way to store large amounts of immutable data for compliance. It enabled greater scalability and richer metadata than file systems.
- The next wave of object storage growth came in the mid-late 2000s, driven by the explosion of digital content, smartphones, social media, and public cloud. Amazon S3 was instrumental in establishing object storage as the foundation of the cloud.
- In the public cloud, object storage usage has skyrocketed, underpinning web-scale apps and data lakes.
- A new phase of on-prem object storage innovation, including GPUDirect for Object Storage, aims to boost performance so it can play a larger role, even supporting high-performance AI workloads as an alternative to file systems.
- Recent innovations make it a good time for organizations to reevaluate object storage for modernizing their data architecture and supporting large-scale analytics and AI initiatives. The role of object storage is evolving to provide new alternatives.
Object Storage: It’s Where the Data Is
Beyond these compelling points, we believe there’s a very simple driver for object storage in AI: It’s where the data is. The majority of the world’s data today resides on object storage, with approximately a quadrillion objects now under management across cloud platforms. As enterprises seek to expand their training data sets, integrating with that massive data set is a compelling driver for joining object storage and AI.
A pioneer in object storage, Cloudian has been at the forefront of object storage evolution. With our HyperStore platform, Cloudian has demonstrated that object storage can deliver the scalability, performance, and simplicity needed to serve as the foundation for modern AI and analytics workloads.
Now with cutting-edge technologies like NVIDIA’s GPUDirect Storage, Cloudian is enabling direct, high-speed data transfer between storage and GPU memory, eliminating performance bottlenecks. As AI continues to push the boundaries of what’s possible, Cloudian is committed to providing the agile, high-performance data foundation organizations need to turn their AI ambitions into reality.
Read the Enterprise Strategy Group article here.
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