The world we all live in is advancing faster than we can sometimes contemplate.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one prime example of this. 10 years ago, who'd have thought that cars that do the driving for us would be so popular already! The thousands of sensors linked to software used to autonomously control modern vehicles, while controlling them away from danger, is just one example of the AI in the world we live in today.
AI is everywhere and something we don't all realise - a recent survey found that 33% of people believe they use technology that utilises AI in their day to day lives... but this figure is actually closer to around 78%.
In simple terms, AI offers the ability to make machines think like humans, who don't sleep, eat, takes breaks and has the answer to every question you could ever ask - delivered much, much faster. Scary. But so powerful and beneficial to our daily lives.
Another great example of AI, which positively impacts us all, is cancer research and recognition. Helping to limit traditional invasive surgery and medication, healthcare experts can now utilise and analyse genome sequencing far more than they could, say even a year ago, due to the ever-expanding capabilities of AI. How they can now compare terabytes of image slices, not just of the single images themselves, but comparing these with thousands of other images from patients across the globe (and its metadata), then suddenly you have a much clearer picture of possible treatments, very fast, all based on the vast amounts of research data collated across the globe and locally - incredible progress.
Finally, we also see the power of AI interacting with our daily online activity, helping us to make positive decisions:
- Virtual travel booking agent
- AI is able to respond to questions and provide valuable information to customers, even when a customer service rep is not available.
- Improves personalisation, tailors recommendations and guarantees fast response times.
- Save businesses time and money, while potentially eliminating human error and allowing tasks to be performed quickly, at any time of the day.
- Social media monitoring
- Tools can be trained to leverage individual behaviors, preferences, beliefs, and interests to personalise experiences.
- Makes relevant and accurate predictions about everything from what product an individual wants to buy next to which ad campaign to run.
- Analyse millions of digital conversations in real time.
- Identify hidden relationships between individuals and their online groups.
- Recognise patterns of conversations with search filters to predict an individuals next move.
- Conversational marketing bot
- Improve customer response time to real-time information.
- Create customer loyalty.
- Predicts patterns with potential customers and what successful interactions look like and can be copied.
Together, these are great examples of where AI is making a hugely positive impact on us all.
So, how does COOLSPIRiT & Pure Storage deliver knowledge, insight and business outcomes with the power of AI & Analytics?
Where does AI generally offer the most beneficial outcome? Big data... so let's use that topic to help understand the possible benefits.
Firstly, modern data analytics can be challenging without underlying data platforms that can keep pace and this is where technology from Pure can help business leader and organisations thrive. When organisations have either been managing and analysing big data for some time or only just begun the journey, it is critical they advance their journey continuously or they risk losing their competitive edge.
Organisations with experience have a strong handle on their data and are aware of what to capture and analyse next. More importantly, they use advanced analytics capabilities to derive actionable insights from their big data in real-time, applying those insights as quickly as possible to drive innovation. In addition to having a defined, modern data analytics strategy, these organisations tend to be well along in their digital transformation journey or accelerating it. That’s usually a critical differentiator between organisations that can get only so far with big data projects and those that actively derive and use data insights to:
- Improve operational efficiencies and user experiences
- Enhance compliance, regulatory, and security processes
- Develop new products and revenue streams
Having a strong technology foundation is key to achieve the above - including high-performing flash-storage - which supports varied, robust, and mature analytics programs with real-time or streaming analytics. This is key to any business managing Big Data and was recently highlighted in an Enterprise Strategy Group study, which found that organisations with the highest analytics maturity capability are 3.2 times more likely to outperform on customer satisfaction compared with organisations with less mature analytics programs - allowing positive and powerful outcomes beyond just increased revenue potential.
With the family of products from Pure which includes, FlashBlade and the Evergreen program, you can gain:
- High-performance storage for a path to faster insights: Bringing faster insights with real-time analytics can seize potential business opportunities more quickly. A storage solution with high throughput can support a large number of users with massively concurrent connections and consistent performance at scale.
- Agility to help you keep pace with changing data and applications: Workloads and operational requirements are changing all the time (by the hour in some cases). And administrators are so busy, they just don’t have the time to manually tune systems in response to those constant changes. Plus, that process is far from agile—and by no means a good use of data architects’ valuable time. Pure FlashBlade can support variable data patterns and scale with multiple workloads.
- Cloud-optimized infrastructure for powering modern analytics apps: Enhance your analytics capabilities with an on-premises storage foundation that offers cloud benefits with on-premises ownership and control - with key characteristics of a cloud-optimized storage solution, such as unified fast file and object storage. Now analytics teams can experience radically faster query performance and deliver rapid insights.
- Match your data storage to your consumption model to keep costs down: A modern data analytics platform needs to stay modern. Otherwise, you risk hitting a wall with your efforts to keep raising the bar on your data analytics maturity level. And, of course, you only want to pay for the IT resources you consume as you scale up and down in response to ever-changing business needs. Stay up-to-date while keeping costs low with a subscription model.
- Minimize the impact of outages to maximize uptime: Data-driven organisations required high-impact insights to be put into action at lightning speed. They can’t afford any downtime -planned or unplanned - Pure's technology delivers this.
Together we can help you and your plan to increase analytics maturity and tackle your most challenging modern data requirements. A unified fast file and object storage delivers cloud-like simplicity and agility with consistent high performance and control. With the correct data storage solution, we can help you make better, faster decision.
Oh, and one final thing, let's not forget all this delivers acceleration of your applications...
When discussing the example of big data processing, a series of steps are undertaken by data engineers and data scientists on a daily basis:
- Initial data work
- Create consumable data formats
- Deliver accurate data
- Deliver outcomes
As you can imagine with the above small file performance of the storage tier is critical as many types of inputs, including text, audio, or images will be natively stored as small files. If the storage tier does not handle small files well, an extra step will be required to pre-process and group samples into larger files. Most legacy scale-out storage systems are not built for small file performance, however, Flashblade from Pure is and makes building, operating, and growing an AI system easier for the following reasons:
- Performance: With over 15GB/s of random read bandwidth per chassis and up to 75GB/s total, the FlashBlade can support the concurrent requirements of an end-to-end AI workflow.
- Small-file handling: The ability to randomly read small files (50KB) at 10GB/s from a single FlashBlade chassis (50GB/s with 75 blades) means that no extra effort required to aggregate individual data points to make larger, storage-friendly files.
- Scalability: Start off with a small system and then add a blade to increase capacity and performance as either the dataset grows or the throughput requirements grow.
- Native object support (S3): Input data can be stored as either files or objects.
- Simple administration: No need to tune performance for large or small files and no need to provision filesystems.
- Non-Disruptive Upgrade (NDU) everything: Software upgrades and hardware expansion can happen anytime, even during production model training.
- Ease of management: Pure1, our cloud-based management and support platform, allows users to monitor storage from any device and provides predictive support to identify and fix issues before they become impactful. With Pure1, users can focus on understanding data and not on administering storage.
- Built for the future: Purpose-built for flash to easily leverage new generations of NAND technology: density, cost, and speed.
To put it more simply, with technology from Pure Storage and the use of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, if your business needs to bring an application to market then use AI & MI to accelerate its design and testing - they will recognising patterns and find anomalies so much faster than a human. Imagine if you're working on a piece of code when designing an app and trying to resolve an error – with AI you will be able to spot the problem and fix it 5 times quicker than without... Is that not a better world to be in?
In the data-driven world we live in… make everything better for your organisation and your customers, with mature analytics capabilities:
- 4.8x Increase Revenue: Organisations are more likely to have 15% or more of revenue from new products.
- 3.2x Improved Customer Satisfaction: Drive customer retention due to higher satisfaction scores vs. competitors/peers
- 2.4x Enhanced Operational Excellence: More likely to increase revenue per employee
We hope you have found this blog useful and inspires you to make infrastructure changes that will deliver tangible business benefits. Intelligent infrastructure methods used to deliver data insight is a must for all organisations looking to keep their competitive edge.
If you would like to talk simply call our expert team on 01246 454 222 or email hello@coolspirit.co.uk
