There’s a reason an entire industry is devoted to storage management: No matter what changes have been wrought by hardware and software providers and designers, it’s just not an easy task.
Performance, provisioning, access control—whatever the task may be—managing business storage is a chore. Perhaps it’s the continually changing nature of storage, in performance, capacity, and technologies, or simply the way storage gets used. Effectively managing large amounts of storage has become a specialist role involving not just the right software but detailed knowledge of the storage environment and the way it is being used by those responsible for maintaining and managing the storage and data.
It’s not even the amount of data that’s the primary issue; it’s how much more complicated storage solutions have become. Some things have been evolutionary—the migration from rotating media to all-flash arrays, for example. And some have been revolutionary, as software-defined storage was followed up with composable infrastructures and hyperconverged systems, all of which are often components of the software-defined data center.
And if you’re thinking that the cloud is the solution, it isn’t. It has become part of the problem as business realizes that hybrid cloud environments—where applications and storage reside on premises, in colocation data centers, and in public and private clouds—is well on its way to becoming the standard for leading-edge business computing environment. And this puts your storage elements in multiple locations with different performance and sometimes conflicting sets of demands.
By its very nature, artificial intelligence and machine learning are natural solutions to the problems of storage management. The complex tasks and analysis required in defining a flexible storage solution and maintaining and managing that solution play to the strengths of AI and ML. In our report from Ars Technica, Jim Salter looks at the state of business storage today and explains how the future of storage management lies in advances in AI and the benefits this progression will bring to business in efficiency and effectiveness.
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