The digital transformation wave is driving unprecedented growth in unstructured data, forcing organisations to prepare for an influx of data types that will challenge traditional data storage and management approaches.

IDC forecasts that data will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 21.2% over the next five years, reaching more than 221,000 exabytes by 2026. Remarkably, over 90% of this data, including video, photos, voice, and documents, will be unstructured.

Several factors are fuelling this data explosion:

  • AI and machine learning
  • Digital twins (virtual representations of physical objects or processes)
  • High-resolution 3D design
  • Rich digital experiences (e.g., interactive content)
  • Metaverse technologies
  • Augmented and virtual reality

So what?

Explosive unstructured data growth, real-time analytics demands, and hybrid cloud environments are pushing legacy systems to their limits.

Modern, software-defined architectures offer the scalability, performance, and flexibility needed to future-proof your infrastructure and turn data growth from a challenge into a competitive advantage.

Software-defined architectures

Software-defined storage provides the flexibility to deploy on various hardware platforms and in multiple environments.

This approach, exemplified by solutions like Dell PowerScale, enables easier scaling and management across hybrid infrastructures.

Scale-out design

Modern storage platforms must scale horizontally, allowing seamless capacity and performance expansion.

Scale-out architectures, like those employed in Dell PowerScale systems, let you start small and grow incrementally, adding nodes to the storage cluster as demand increases without disrupting operations or creating management silos.

Cloud-native capabilities

Storage systems must support containerised workloads and integrate with Kubernetes environments for compatibility with modern application architectures and deployment models. This goes beyond basic storage provision with:

  • Container Storage Interface (CSI) drivers for seamless volume management
  • Dynamic provisioning of storage resources based on application demands
  • Native support for stateful applications in containerised environments
  • Data protection and disaster recovery features tailored for containerised workloads
  • Performance optimisation for microservices architectures

Unified management

A unified management plane spanning on-premises and cloud deployments simplifies administration, provides comprehensive visibility across distributed infrastructure, and enables consistent policies and workflows.

Advanced solutions, like Dell’s APEX Console, offer a centralised interface for monitoring, provisioning, and orchestrating storage resources across hybrid environments.

Advanced data services

Modern storage platforms should offer built-in data reduction, cyber-resilience features, and intelligent tiering capabilities.

These services optimise costs, enhance security, and improve overall storage efficiency, especially with AI-driven data placement algorithms that automatically move data between performance and capacity tiers.

Predictive analytics are also critical for organisations of all sizes to enable proactive issue resolution and capacity planning.

Accelerated compute integration

Storage architectures must provide low latency and massive parallelism to fully leverage technologies like GPUs and FPGAs.

Integration points with accelerated compute platforms are crucial for AI and analytics workloads. Your solutions must keep pace with these specialised hardware accelerators’ immense data processing capabilities, ensuring that storage doesn’t become a bottleneck in high-performance computing environments.

Looking for help and advisc with your data storage stategy, please do get in touch.