It’s about evolution not revolution, says Lenovo
CIOs have a storage problem, and the reason can seem pretty obvious.
AI is transforming the technology industry, and by implication, every other industry. AI relies on vast amounts of data, which means that storage has a massive part to play in every company’s ability to keep up.
After all, according to Lenovo’s CIO Playbook report, data quality issues are the top inhibitor to AI projects meeting expectations.
There’s one problem with this answer: It only captures part of the picture.
CIOs are also grappling with myriad other challenges. One of the biggest is the upheaval to their virtualization strategies caused by Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware at the close of 2023, and its subsequent licensing and pricing changes.
This has left CIOs contemplating three main options, says Stuart McRae, executive director and GM, data storage solutions at Lenovo. Number one is to adapt to the changes and stick with VMware, optimizing their systems as far as possible to ensure they harvest maximum value from those more expensive licenses.
Another option is to look at alternative platforms to handle at least some of their virtualization workloads. Or they can simply jump the VMware ship entirely.
But options two and three will mean radically overhauling their infrastructure either to support new platforms or get the most from their legacy systems.
So, AI and virtualization are both forcing technology leaders to take a long hard look at their storage strategies. And, says McRae, these are not discrete challenges. Rather, they are intimately related.
This is because, as Lenovo’s CIO Playbook makes clear, tech leaders are not just looking to experiment with AI or start deploying the technology. The pressure is on to produce business outcomes, in areas such as customer experience, business growth, productivity and efficiency. At the same time, they are looking to make decision-making data-driven.
And this will mean their core legacy platforms, such as SAP, Oracle, and in-house applications will come into play, McRae says. This is where that corporate data lives after all.
“They still have those systems,” he says. “AI will become embedded in many of those systems, and they will want to use that data to support their efforts in their RAG models.”
Storage is a real-world problem
It is precisely these systems that are running on enterprise virtualization platforms, so to develop AI strategies that deliver real world business value, CIOs need to get their virtualization strategy in order too. That means storage infrastructure that can deliver for both AI and virtualization.
One thing that is clear, McRae says, is that enterprise’s AI and virtualization storage will overwhelmingly be on-prem or co-located. These are core systems with critical data, and companies need to have hands-on control over them. Lenovo’s research shows that less than a quarter of enterprises are taking a “mainly” public cloud approach to their infrastructure for AI workloads.
But McRae explains, “If you look at the storage that customers have acquired and deployed in the last five years, 80 percent of that is hard drive-based storage.”
“The challenge with AI, especially from their storage infrastructure, is a lot of their storage is old and it doesn’t have the performance and resiliency to support their AI investments on the compute GPU side.”
From a technology point of view, a shift to flash is the obvious solution. The advantages from a performance point of view are straightforward when it comes to AI applications. AI relies on data, which in most enterprises will flow from established applications and systems. Moreover, having GPUs idling while waiting for data is massively wasteful. NVIDIA’s top-end GPUs consume roughly the same amount of energy as a domestic household does annually.
But there are broader data management implications as well. “If I want to use more of my data than maybe I did in the past, in a traditional model where they may have hot, warm, and cold data, they may want to make that data all more performant,” says McRae.
This even extends to backup and archive, he says. “We see customers moving backup data to flash for faster recovery.”
Flash offers other substantial power and footprint advantages as well. The highest capacity HDD announced at the time of writing is around 36TB, while enterprise-class SSDs range over 100TB. More importantly SSDs draw far less power than their moving part cousins.
This becomes critical given the concerns about overall datacenter power consumption and cooling requirements, and the challenges many organizations will face simply finding space for their infrastructure.
McRae says a key focus for Lenovo is to enable unified storage, “where customers can unify their file, block and object data on one platform and make that performant.”
That has a direct benefit for AI applications, allowing enterprises to extract value from the entirety of their data. But it also has a broader management impact by removing further complexity.
“They don’t have different kits running different storage solutions, and so that gives them all the advantages of a unified backup and recovery strategy,” he says.
But modern flash-based systems offer resiliency benefits as well. McRae says a contemporary 20TB hard drive can take five to seven days to rebuild in the event of a failure. A flash drive will take maybe 30 hours.
Securing the future
In a similar vein, as AI becomes more closely intertwined with the broader, virtualized enterprise landscape, security becomes critical.
As McRae points out, while niche storage platforms might have a role to play in hyperscalers’ datacenters where the underlying LLMs are developed and trained, this is less likely to be the case for AI-enriched enterprise computing.
“When you’re deploying AI in your enterprise, that is your enterprise data, and other applications are using that data. It requires enterprise resiliency and security.”
With Lenovo’s range, AI has a critical role to play in managing storage itself. Along with features such as immutable copies and snapshots, for example, “Having storage that provides autonomous, AI-driven ransomware protection to detect any anomalies or that something bad’s happening is really important for that data.”
So, it certainly makes sense for technology leaders to modernize their storage infrastructure. The question remains: Just how much storage will they need?
This is where Lenovo’s managed services offerings and its TruScale strategy come into play. They allow storage and other infrastructure to be procured on an OpEx, consumption-based basis, and for capacity to be unlocked and scaled up or down– over time.
“Every business is different based on their own capital model and structure,” says McRae. “But the consumption models work well for uncertain application and deployment rollouts.”
After all, most customers are only just beginning to roll out new virtualization and AI workloads. “We typically learn stuff as we start deploying it,” says McRae. “And it may not act exactly like we had planned. That flexibility and ability to scale performance and capacity is really important.”
Equally important, he says, is being able to call on experts who understand both the technology and the specifics of individual businesses. So, while AI can appear a purely technological play, McRae says its network of business partners is critical to its customers’ success.
“Working with a trusted business partner who’s going to have the day-to-day interaction with the customer and knowledge of their business is really important.” he adds.
AI will undoubtedly be revolutionary in the amount of data it requires, while VMware’s license changes have set off a revolution in their own way. But McRae says that data size apart, storage vendors need to ensure that upgrading enterprise storage to keep pace isn’t a dramatic step change.
“Your normal enterprise is going to go buy or license a model to use, and they’re going to go buy or license a vector database to pair it with it, and they’re going to get the tools to go do that,” he concludes. “So that’s what we have to make easy.”
Making modern IT easy means providing a storage infrastructure that offers end-to-end solutions encompassing storage, GPU, and computing capabilities that integrate to handle both AI and other applications using enterprise data. With over four decades’ experience in the technology sector, Lenovo is presenting itself as a go-to partner that will keep its customers at the cutting edge in fast-moving times.
Sponsored by Lenovo.
