For decades, enterprise object storage has been primarily used for archive and backup purposes – a vital yet unglamorous component of a data infrastructure, essential to ensuring business continuity. Life in this scenario was uncomplicated; the primary focus was on building large-scale, sequential processing capabilities, prioritizing reliability, stability, and scalability above all else.
However, the sudden emergence of trendy cloud-based workloads and generative artificial intelligence sent shockwaves through the existing equilibrium.
These workloads necessitate exceptional efficiency and submillisecond latency, often thriving in network-attached storage (NAS) and storage area network (SAN) settings. Despite this, the demand for scalability that allows retailers to store hundreds of thousands, if not billions, of data records with richly detailed metadata has propelled object storage into a prime destination.
In recent years, corporate entities have developed a sophisticated grasp of building scalable cloud infrastructures using native cloud services like Amazon S3; they are now seeking to bring these capabilities in-house by establishing hybrid clouds that seamlessly integrate on-premises and cloud-based resources. This development necessitated the integration of S3-compatible object storage with knowledge management capabilities across a wider range of environments, including on-premises, edge, containerized settings, and public cloud providers themselves. The preservation of intellectual property and seamless information mobility are vital considerations for companies evaluating cloud-based solutions for storing unstructured data.
Come up All-Flash Architectures
The initial responses to these new efficiency demands were the introduction of flash-enhanced storage options among existing providers’ portfolios, as well as the debut of all-flash, NVMe-based solutions by innovative newcomers in the market. Significant enhancements enabled increased uptake of object storage across AI/ML and knowledge lake ecosystems.
Quick Isn’t All the things
Despite the need for speed, top distributors in this space were also able to leverage business administration skills on these new architectures, incorporating features such as seamless replication, robust ransomware security, complete S3 protocol compliance, and extensive partner certifications to ensure seamless integration with existing customer investments. Distributors are increasingly providing certifications for machine learning (ML) expertise, catering to the growing demand for proficient professionals in this field. PyTorch stands out as a leading framework for building and training machine learning models, with undeniable prominence in this domain.
Object Storage Options
As distributors adapted to emerging architectures, customer demands shifted focus towards enhancing knowledge management capacities to minimize overall costs associated with high-performance hardware.
Knowledge doesn’t always need to be constantly updated in order to remain relevant. As knowledge ages, it’s common for information originally required to operate efficiently during its initial stages to become less frequently utilized or even abandoned altogether over time. Distributors leveraging automated storage optimization through knowledge entry profiling enable seamless migration of data to more valuable tiers, freeing up performance-hungry infrastructure for newer, high-priority information while maintaining centralized control and management within a unified namespace. With the increasing trend of hybrid clouds, many providers now enable seamless integration between on-premises storage tiers and public cloud services, allowing customers to leverage the benefits of both environments within a unified management framework.
As object storage plays an increasingly pivotal role in supporting a growing array of high-stakes operations, safeguarding against ransomware threats at the storage level has become an imperative requirement. Distributors that invest in such enhancements will be well-positioned to meet these demands for the year ahead.
To effectively navigate the multitude of distributors offering object storage solutions, it’s crucial for prospective customers to gain a thorough comprehension of their organization’s specific requirements for unstructured data, as well as the distinct approaches employed by each distributor in implementing their respective architectures.
Subsequent Steps
To stay ahead of the curve in studying extra, consider exploring GigaOm’s informative articles on object storage key standards and Radar stories for valuable insights.
These narratives provide a comprehensive understanding of the market, outlining the key benchmarks that must be considered when resolving a purchase order, as well as how various suppliers perform against these standards.
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