We live in a world where 72% of businesses now use AI. This has led to a race for effective AI infrastructure, with storage being a vital component of this. Most business leaders understand data is critical for AI outcomes but are only now discovering the vital role storage plays in enhancing the quality of AI applications through extended data retention.
The AI data explosion is driving both unprecedented innovation and complexity. As AI continues to proliferate across diverse environments and industries, the demand for storage increases, highlighting the need for comprehensive solutions that ensure data integrity and trustworthy AI applications. Organisations that recognise that feeding AI’s insatiable data appetite is only one part of the equation will gain a competitive advantage – maximising the capabilities of that data in a sustainable manner will ultimately determine success in the evolving digital landscape.
Hard drives are an essential component of data management, and the latest technologies mean an ideal balance of storage capacity and affordability. The resilience and scalability of hard drives make them indispensable in meeting the skyrocketing demands of AI. There is a symbiotic relationship between data, AI and storage, and understanding the integral role of storage will help businesses harness the full potential of their data.
Navigating the data surge
As businesses increasingly start to use multimodal LLMs and vision models, as well as meet compliance and regional mandates, data becomes richer and more complex. While cloud lies at the heart of AI innovation, the edge and endpoint create huge data volumes for workloads, such as scientific research and visual effects. Local storage is essential for speed, security, and compliance. As AI proliferates, storage will be needed everywhere — in every use case and location — to handle massive datasets and ensure AI is trustworthy.
Data centres are at the heart of the digital world, housing the massive amounts of data that power AI applications. 90% of data centres worldwide use hard drives to store and manage data efficiently. The design and operation of data centres have advanced to address growing AI demands, with a focus on energy efficiency and scalable storage architectures.
Hard drives as the solution
Hard drives are indispensable in AI storage clusters due to their scalability, cost efficiency, and sustainability. 90% of enterprise exabyte workloads include AI data retention, analytics, and backup, which require high capacity, yet relatively moderate data processing time. Hard drives are best suited to handle these workloads, due to their cost-per-terabyte advantage.
Recent advancements in hard drive areal density have improved both total cost of ownership and sustainability. Companies have increased storage capacity in the same footprint, reducing power consumption and embodied carbon per terabyte. These innovations make hard drives essential and cost efficient for delivering the AI exabytes to data centres handling diverse workloads across a range of industries.
Enhancing AI through storage
To exploit AI’s full potential, companies need cost-effective, scalable storage solutions for long-term data retention and access. Proactive storage capacity planning and strategic sourcing is critical for enterprises to unlock the full value of AI data. Businesses with the competitive edge are those that can boost storage capacity dramatically while cutting the total cost of ownership and resource impact. Simply fast-feeding huge amounts of data to AI applications is not enough – only those business leaders who maximise that data’s capabilities efficiently and sustainably will be ahead of the game.
Companies across industries and sectors are starting to successfully invest in and integrate innovative storage solutions into their IT strategies to enrich their AI capabilities. For instance, retailers are using high-capacity hard drives to store and analyse customer data to deliver bespoke shopping experiences and manage inventory more efficiently. In healthcare, organisations are using scalable storage to manage enormous quantities of patient data, supporting AI-driven diagnostics and treatment plans.
The way ahead
Organisations need to invest in scalable hard drive technology to ensure the effective management of surging data demand. By investing in an ecosystem where storage capabilities evolve alongside AI innovations, organisations can streamline their operations and unlock new avenues for growth and profit. Business leaders that embrace sustainable, smart storage strategies will lead the way in harnessing the true power of AI.
