The IT Nerd

Hammerspace has served up their 2024 Technology Predictions about important trends in data management, data storage, and AI. Molly Presley, SVP of Marketing, put these together and they’re very interesting to read.

1. Unstructured Data Sets Missing Link to Successful AI Data Pipelines
   Organizations will put distributed unstructured data sets to work to fortify their AI strategies and AI data pipelines while simultaneously achieving the performance and scale not found in traditional enterprise solutions. One of the biggest challenges facing organizations is putting distributed unstructured data sets to work in their AI strategies while simultaneously delivering the performance and scale not found in traditional enterprise solutions. It is critical that a data pipeline is designed to use all available compute power and can make data available to the cloud models such as those found in Databricks and Snowflake. In 2024, high-performance local read/write access to data that is orchestrated globally in real time, in a global data environment, will become indispensable and ubiquitous. 

2. Data Orchestration Takes Center Stage
   Organizations will start moving away from “store and copy” to a world of data orchestration. Driven by AI advancements, robust tools now exist to analyze data and tease out actionable insights. However, file storage infrastructure has not kept pace with these advancements. Unlike solutions that try to manage storage silos and distributed environments by moving file copies from one place to another, data orchestration helps organizations integrate data into a single namespace from different silos and locations and automates the placement of data when and where it’s most valuable, making it easier to analyze and derive insights. IT organizations need the flexibility to use all of their data – structured, semi-structured and unstructured – for iteration and may need to move different data sets to different models. The data orchestration model allows organizations to realize the benefits of eliminating copying data to new files and repositories – including reducing the time to inference from weeks to hours for large data environments.

3. Data Teams Embrace the Value of Metadata to Automate Data Management
   In 2024, data teams will increasingly use rich, actionable metadata to derive value from data. With the continued growth and business value of unstructured data across all industries, IT organizations must cope with increasing operational complexity when they manage digital assets that span multiple storage types, locations, and clouds. Wrangling data services across silos in a hybrid environment can be an extremely manual and risk-prone process, made more difficult by incompatibilities between different storage types. Metadata has the power to enable customers to solve these problems. Machine-generated metadata and data orchestration are crucial to data insights. 

4. We Finally Overcome the Data Silo Problem
   In 2024, organizations will increasingly adopt parallel global file systems to truly realize digital transformation. File systems are traditionally buried into a proprietary storage layer, which typically locks them and an organization’s data into a storage vendor platform. Moving the data from one vendor’s storage type to another, or to a different location or cloud, involves creating a new copy of both the file system metadata and the actual file essence. This proliferation of file copies and the complexity needed to initiate copy management across silos interrupts user access, and is a key problem that inhibits IT modernization and consolidation. The traditional paradigm of the file system trapped in vendor storage platforms is inconvenient within silos of a single data center. But the increasing migration to the cloud has dramatically compounded the problem, since it is typically difficult for enterprises with large volumes of unstructured data to move all of their files entirely to the cloud. Unlike solutions that try to manage storage silos and distributed environments by shuffling file copies from one place to another, a high performance parallel global file system that can span all storage types, from any vendor, and across one or more locations and clouds is more effective.           

This entry was posted on December 9, 2023 at 8:28 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Hammerspace. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.