Episode Details

Artificial intelligence reshapes enterprise storage infrastructure, transforming passive data repositories into active platforms that power AI applications. Vishal Sinha explains how storage evolution, data consolidation, and security challenges define the new data-ready era.

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Video transcript:

Vishal Sinha: If you look at traditionally, applications and users were creating data which used to get stored in storage.

Jason Lopez: As artificial intelligence accelerates, the infrastructure we usually think of, running in the background, is undergoing its most profound transformation yet.

Vishal Sinha: Now, it’s the other way around. Now applications are using the data to build intelligence out of it and power those applications. So things have completely flipped in more recent days with storage. In the era of intersection between infrastructure and intelligence. We need infrastructure to run all the AI applications and workloads, and then you need data to power the intelligence for applications. 

[Related: Data Management Strategies for the AI Era]

Vishal Sinha: Virtualization really transformed compute. Earlier, compute was tied to a server. You had to buy a server or a desktop or a laptop to get the compute. Now, virtualization made compute portable. You could move compute around as VMs or containers. And this change really paved the way for everything software defined. So that was one big transformation that happened around 2000 to 2005 time frame. After that, the cloud transformation, that has been a big one. It has really democratized infrastructure. Today, if you want to build a new app, you don’t have to build a data center to build that app. You can directly go to the cloud and build that app. Though it has created some more work, like now you have to manage the cost, you have to manage the security, you have to manage the networking. So it has added some complexity, but definitely it has made the infrastructure more accessible to everyone. And I would say the latest one is the AI. This is a brand new one. It is going to change things significantly. Even for us, the entire software stack will change to support AI. So this is still playing out. We’ll see how that evolves over time.

[Related: IT Leaders Modernize Infrastructure to Run AI]

Vishal Sinha: AI needs data and it needs a data-ready platform. And that’s where we see that in order to make a data-ready platform, you need to provide certain capabilities. First, being able to consolidate the data from different sources and bring it all together. The second piece is around making the data clean so that it can be consumed by the AI LLMs. And then the third part is providing fine-grained permissions so that LLMs learn only from the data it is supposed to. So clearly lots of transformation from a passive data repo for files, images, audio, video, to becoming a full data platform to power AI-powered applications. So that’s the big change that we are seeing.

Ken Kaplan: Talking about the new trends, what was it like before?

Vishal Sinha: Yeah, storage was a passive data repo like where customers put their files, their pictures, their videos, their audio. So it was truly looked at as a passive infrastructure mostly for storing data. And now it’s very different because now it’s an active part of an AI stack like where it needs to power all these applications with the data that it stores.

Ken K