DM Jan-Feb 2024

Dm STRATEGY: DATA MANAGEMENT
Data management crucial to AI/HPC strategies
Marco Pozzoni, EMEA
Storage Sales Director at
Lenovo, examines how
data management is
enabling organisations to
reap the benefits of AI
Every organisation today lives and
breathes data, and the pressure to
unlock value from this resource is
growing with each passing year. By 2025,
the world will produce 181 zettabytes of
data each year, with online consumption
having increased a staggering 30 percent
in the past year.
For business leaders, the challenge they
face is more complex than simply
keeping control of the data constantly
being harvested from everything from IoT
devices to medical scans: it's the ability to
sift through this tide of information for
useful insights at speed. Successful
business leaders will be those who can
act quickly to eliminate data silos,
deploying technologies such as AI and
machine learning at the edge to turn this
data into business value in real time.
Data management is increasingly
important in allowing business leaders to
monetise data at speed, bringing
together data from the cloud, onpremises
machines and at the edge, and
enabling business leaders to run AI
workloads. It's also powering innovative
research around the world, helping
unravel some of the thorniest issues
facing the human race. Data
management, high-performance
computing and artificial intelligence are
coming together to enable a new
breed of data-driven start-up which
is helping to break down
boundaries in emerging fields
such as personalised medicine.
Choosing the right data
management and storage
solutions has become
increasingly important for
businesses looking to
reap the benefits of
technologies such as
HPC and AI, with
the right solutions
offering the
simplicity, speed
and security which
can enable business
leaders to forge fearlessly into the future.
UNRAVELLING COMPLEXITY
The data management landscape which
most companies face has become
incredibly complex, with data coming
from everything from cameras in
warehouses to customer relationship
management (CRM) systems, and existing
across cloud and on-premises systems.
Business leaders also need to consider
the security of customer data. Despite
crackdowns by law enforcement in
Europe and the U.S., ransomware levels
have hit all-time highs in 2023, with 81%
of organisations saying they have been
affected at least once, according to
SpyCloud. The ability to secure data, and
defend against ransomware attacks, is
increasingly important.
Simplicity is key to securely extracting
value from data. Customers require data
management solutions which are
interoperable, so that vital insights are not
marooned in siloed systems or left
vulnerable. It's important to find solutions
that combine the simplicity and flexibility
of cloud with the security and high
performance of on-premises solutions.
Storage is becoming an increasingly
important consideration for business
leaders, having grown from being an
afterthought in the world of IT to being
an essential part of company
infrastructure. As the data generated by
businesses continues to grow, IT leaders
need to ensure they choose the right
storage technologies.
Standard hard disks are increasingly too
slow to deliver the performance required,
particularly when it comes to deploying
AI workloads at the edge. Flash solutions
can offer customers a rapid way to
deploy AI. Lenovo's solution includes
storage based on software-defined
storage principles. This concept enables
customers with data-hungry AI
workloads to scale up storage capacity
without sacrificing performance. Such
solutions will continue to grow in
32 January/February 2024 www.document-manager.com
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