Author|Jia Guipeng
A few days ago, a research report released by McKinsey showed that generative AI is expected to contribute $7 trillion to the global economy by 2030. There is no doubt that generative AI will impact a wide range of industries in the future.
At the same time, as datasets grow larger and models become more complex, storage needs to be able to scale efficiently to meet these demands, ensuring GPU adaptability and maintaining high utilization, enabling AI technology to achieve optimal efficiency at every stage of the workflow. Against this backdrop, Hitachi Vantara has begun to fully embrace the AI era and continues to deploy AI-related technologies to accelerate the improvement of data storage capabilities.
However, we found that many companies are still in the early stages of AI adoption, and in an interview with Matthew Hardman, CTO of Hitachi Vantara Asia Pacific, said: "These companies have not yet figured out what typical use cases are, or which use cases they are going to adopt; It's just that many companies in the market are talking about AI, and they believe that they can't lag behind the trend of using AI to innovate, so they have begun to embrace AI. ”
(Matthew Hardman, Chief Technology Officer, Hitachi Vantara Asia Pacific)
So, in the era of AI, how can enterprises better build AI capabilities? And how do you maximize the value of your data?
Build AI capabilities with GPUs
The emergence of technologies such as generative AI has led to an explosion in data processing demand, and many companies are struggling to keep up with this trend. Hitachi Vantara is also constantly changing, for example, not long ago, they announced a partnership with NVIDIA to create the next generation of transformative AI solutions.
Based on the collaboration, Hitachi Vantara has developed a portfolio of solutions called Hitachi iQ that drive targeted AI outcomes by layering industry-specific capabilities across its AI solution stack to deliver more defined and relevant outcomes to the enterprise.
Hitachi iQ is not a single product, but a combination of technologies and services designed to help customers solve a wide variety of problems and needs related to GPU-driven workloads.
Notably, Hitachi iQ combines the unique strengths of Hitachi Group and Hitachi Vantara to accelerate GPU-based workloads through a combination of hardware and software.
"Hitachi iQ supports GPU platforms or GPU workloads that are not limited to AI," said Matthew Hardman. He used customer examples from the manufacturing industry to detail the benefits of Hitachi iQ.
For example, a manufacturing customer has a large Hadoop environment with more than 20 compute nodes and needs to process large amounts of data. With the Hitachi iQ solution, the company was able to reduce the amount of data that would have taken more than 20 nodes to one compute node and two GPUs, reducing processing time from an average of 263 minutes to one minute, and reducing software licensing fees from $7.5 million to $1.5 million. This saves a lot of time and money costs for the customer.
Matthew Hardman believes that when choosing AI technology, users should not chase after AI just because it is a hot technology, but should decide whether to use AI based on their actual needs, and how to use AI to solve specific problems and quickly obtain beneficial results. Matthew Hardman said, "Hitachi Vantara's engineering and R&D teams and labs have a deep understanding of IT infrastructure across different industries, enabling users across a wide range of industries to support AI capabilities and help them find the right solutions in AI. ”
Notably, Hitachi Vantara not only provides the technology, but also engages in different industries, working with partners to develop next-generation AI models for customers in different industries, including transportation, manufacturing, energy, and consumer electronics. That's where Hitachi Vantara comes in.
How a hybrid cloud platform can be secure and high-performance
As we all know, in April of this year, Hitachi Vantara announced the completion of a strategic restructuring to focus on the development of hybrid cloud and generative AI technologies. The new organizational structure includes the strategic integration of Hitachi Vantara with Hitachi's IT Platform Product Management division, which has been responsible for the business development, R&D and production of Hitachi Group's data infrastructure solutions. The restructured Hitachi Vantara has extensive infrastructure and data storage experience in the manufacturing and hybrid cloud sectors.
In the hybrid cloud space, Hitachi Vantara has previously unified its portfolio as Virtual Storage Platform One (VSP One). This is a single hybrid cloud platform, and the purpose of this new platform is to simplify storage management, allowing users to unify and simplify the management of block, file, and object storage on a unified platform, and break down information silos with unified simplified management.
For enterprises entering the era of AI digital intelligence, the biggest challenge they face is that the data of the enterprise is stored in different places.
In this context, the VSP One platform allows users to manage all types of data in a unified manner, including structured, unstructured, block, file, object, mainframe, third-party storage, and more. Through a unified data plane and a unified management plane and control plane, the same set of tools is used to manage all types and sources of data, and all data types are covered by data fabric technology to solve the problem of data silos.
At the same time, when it comes to data security, Hitachi Vantara focuses not only on data security for large enterprises, but also for medium-sized and growing enterprises, which often lack a complete data security infrastructure and best practices, making them more likely to be targeted by cyber attacks and threatened by hackers.
"VSP One is not only a platform built by Hitachi Vantara, but also involves working closely with the entire ecosystem around the platform, including backup and data security solution providers such as Commvault, VM2020, Veeam and others," said Matthew Hardman. These partners work with us to build solutions based on their respective technologies based on the VSP One platform to help customers address a wide range of security threats. ”
Technology Vortex believes that from an overall perspective, VSP One integrates the innovation and strategy of Hitachi Vantara, realizes the unification and security of the technology stack through technological innovation, and brings a complete hybrid cloud data platform to users in various industries. This will also provide them with a good foundation for expanding their business and customers.
Write at the end
As more and more companies begin to apply AI technology, they need to seize the opportunity to experiment, find tools that are suitable for their own development process, and continuously learn from the experience and lessons learned from practice and improve them. We can see that in the AI era, Hitachi Vantara is still adhering to the original intention of innovation and ecology, and continues to work with partners to fuel the AI application of enterprises, and transfer the light and heat of data technology to thousands of industries.