The Benefits of Dell PowerScale for AI

The rapid rise of artificial intelligence (AI) didn’t happen by accident. In fact, it can be argued there are four key drivers behind the technology’s emergence.

One is the massive increase in the amount of data in the past decade, an increase that shows no signs of slowing down. IDC has predicted that by 2025, global data will reach 163 zettabytes. 

To put that into perspective, here are some quick numbers: 

• A single terabyte is equal to 1,000 gigabytes
• A single zettabyte is roughly equivalent to one billion terabytes

That’s a lot of ones and zeros being produced each and every day, and all of it requires ongoing innovation in data storage. 

That’s where the second driver of AI comes in, which is the development of high–performance storage like network attached storage (NAS) technologies capable of scaling massively, along with the ability to remove I/O bottlenecks that have traditionally slowed data science.

Of course, storing all the data in the world means nothing if you can’t use it, which is why the capabilities of modern GPUs and CPUs are important. These compute sources are architected to be massively parallel, and they are able to provide the computational capacity to rapidly mine massive amounts of data sets.

Last but not least, there is the increase in AI innovation in general, with massive investments by companies into toolkits and models that make it far easier for organizations to quickly train machines to learn, make predictions, and evolve through data.

Putting AI to work effectively

With the number of options for powering AI workloads increases by the day, it can be hard for organizations to choose the right platform to go with—especially if they’re just beginning their AI journey.

One option we often recommend is Dell EMC Powerscale. Here’s why:

1. Scalability

The Dell EMC PowerScale and Isilon nodes leverage the PowerScale OneFS operating system, which provides a flexible NAS solution. It is also easy to install, can quickly scale both capacity and performance, and allows for a single admin to manage petabytes of data.

2. Portability

The lifeblood of AI is massive amounts of unstructured data. Storing all that information in the cloud is relatively easy, but it quickly becomes more complex—and expensive—to do so on premises or at the edge. PowerScale simplifies this process, while also allowing organizations to run a wide range of applications and workloads with multi-protocol data access.

3. Efficiency

The combination of OneFS and SmartDedupe in PowerScale can deliver up to 80 percent storage utilization. In addition, the F200, F600, F810 all-flash, and the H56oo hybrid platforms provide high-speed, inline data compression to improve storage optimization even more.

4. Security

Finally, OneFS’s software-defined architecture is enterprise-grade, which ensures the data availability, redundancy, security, and data protection wherever AI workloads are being run.

You can learn more about Dell EMC PowerScale here. And if you want to learn more about AI and its benefits, check out our free resource Accelerating Your Success with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. 

Note: This post was originally published in 2021 and has recently been updated.