The future of data storage evolves in the era of artificial intelligence

2024 promises to be a year of profound change in the technology and data landscape. As generative AI becomes more prevalent, data storage solutions will become central, driving the success of AI applications and revolutionizing data center infrastructure. In addition, with the continuous advancement of hard disk technology, enterprises will enjoy greater storage capacity, while also making significant progress in sustainable development, bringing a greener outlook for the future of the digital world.

According to forecasts, by 2026, more than 80% of enterprises are expected to utilize generative artificial intelligence, which is much higher than the level of less than 5% at the beginning of 2023. Currently, 55% of organizations are piloting or producing AI, and it is expected that within the next two years, generative AI will account for 10% of all data, up from less than 1% today. This shows that generative artificial intelligence will play an increasingly important role in enterprises, and its application scope will continue to expand.

As data continues to grow, data centers and enterprises will be under pressure to move to high-density hard drive storage to ensure that the value of the data is retained. This will enable them to store raw data sets and process valuable insights generated by AI and LLM.

The future of enterprises requires the accumulation of operational data to educate artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning models. Enterprises are expected to focus more on training models using internal and external data sources and leveraging proprietary information to gain competitive advantage.

The push for artificial intelligence is expected to lead to an increase in corporate IT spending, especially as hyperscale technology giants will increase their investment in cloud capacity to meet the needs of artificial intelligence programs. At the same time, demand for data storage will also increase in the enterprise sector as they gain an edge over the competition through AI-driven improvements to increase productivity and efficiency.

According to the latest predictions, 2024 will bring about major changes as data center infrastructure is upgraded and hard drive area density increases. Currently, about 90% of data in cloud data centers is stored on hard drives. However, as data center equipment approaches its natural refresh cycle, it is expected that older, lower-capacity drives will be replaced by higher-capacity drives. This trend will drive the capacity expansion and performance improvement of data centers to meet the growing demand for data storage. Therefore, by 2024, we can expect significant changes in the field of data center infrastructure.

The emergence of HAMR (heat-assisted magnetic recording) technology will revolutionize data center storage by 2024. Currently, the average capacity of hard drives based on traditional PMR technology is 16TB. In contrast, HAMR technology will enable data center managers to deploy 30TB high-density drives, resulting in significant power and space savings and improved total cost of ownership (TCO) efficiency. This includes reducing CPU and RAM usage and even reducing floor space. HAMR technology will also help data center operators further reduce their carbon footprint through more durable, energy-efficient storage. Therefore, the introduction of HAMR technology will bring huge benefits to data centers, improve storage efficiency and reduce environmental impact.

Nonetheless, in the data center, exponential growth of data will drive demand for high-capacity hard drives in 2024, and their synergy with flash memory will continue to support modern workloads. Hard drive storage offers massive data storage at less than one-fifth the cost per bit of comparable all-flash solutions, a value gap that will mean that over the next decade the two technologies will coexist and serve different storage needs. Hard drives excel at storing large amounts of data, while flash memory is better suited for applications that require fast access and high performance. Therefore, data centers will continue to use a combination of hard drives and flash memory for efficient data storage and processing.

The above is the detailed content of The future of data storage evolves in the era of artificial intelligence. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!