Business leaders tend to believe that the transformative potential of artificial intelligence (AI) is limitless. But like any technology, AI runs on real-world resources.
One of the key elements that organizations cannot overlook when investing in AI infrastructure is storage. Energy-intensive data centers that support large language models and databases require vast amounts of storage capacity, while operating within increasingly difficult space and power constraints, making traditional storage It is not practical to scale using infrastructure.
Future-proofing AI capabilities requires an entirely new approach to storage. Organizations need high-capacity solid-state drives (SSDs) to build AI infrastructures robust enough to support their transformational ambitions.
Traditional data center hard disk drives (HDDs) offer less capacity, performance, power efficiency, scalability, and reliability than SSDs to store more data in less physical space. HDDs are also less power efficient than SSDs, so leading digital transformation on legacy infrastructure may simply not be practical.
Strategic infrastructure in the AI era
As enterprises race to embrace the power of AI, the strategic importance of storage infrastructure cannot be overstated. AI workloads require significant power to operate, and their intensive storage requirements can change throughout each phase of the AI data pipeline. One of the key challenges for AI adopters is choosing the best storage solution for their AI workloads to maximize efficiency and output.
Integrating AI into business operations can pose a complex set of challenges. Organizations are under pressure to leverage advances in AI while optimizing investments and ensuring infrastructure efficiency. High-density SSDs are becoming the de-facto standard for AI as they outperform HDDs in many ways. SSDs offer higher capacity in smaller drives, improve power efficiency and performance, and ultimately maximize GPU utilization and space and power efficiency. Allows you to use more GPUs.
HDDs may seem like an economical choice, but the long-term costs of implementation can be significant. Because SSDs have such superior performance that they operate for less time and consume less energy than HDDs, they can potentially be cheaper to deploy over a five-year period.
Customized storage approach
A critical element of any organization’s AI strategy, storage is often overlooked. Underestimating the impact of storage on the overall efficiency of your AI architecture can lead to GPU underutilization and power limitations. This oversight could result in a major replacement of the entire storage architecture sooner than expected.
Strategic best practices center on deploying storage solutions that are tailored to the specific usage requirements of different AI workloads. Enterprise-level organizations need to support AI with storage that maximizes GPU utilization, improves power efficiency, and ensures scalability.
Key elements of a viable solution range from high-capacity drives for data ingestion and archiving to high-performance SSDs for demanding AI tasks such as data preparation, training, checkpointing, and inference. Customized storage infrastructure helps organizations overcome power and space constraints, optimize AI performance, and increase return on investment from AI initiatives.
Providing a competitive edge
High-capacity SSDs are essential for storage of large data sets that train and feed AI. Organizations can gain a competitive advantage with data storage solutions that are optimized to maximize GPU utilization. SSDs support demanding AI workloads with high performance and reliability. It also helps accelerate training, improve inference, and perform other important data management processes.
Kingsoft Cloud, one of China’s leading cloud service providers, enhanced its storage architecture to meet the demands of AI workloads by upgrading legacy HDDs to SSDs. This switch allowed Kingsoft to significantly increase bandwidth and performance. SSD’s balance of performance, cost, and usage efficiency allows Kingsoft to provide high-performance object storage services to its customers.
CoreWeave, a specialized cloud provider, has grown rapidly by focusing on the scalability and reliability of its products. Provides an efficient and high-performance platform for AI workloads thanks to advanced SSD storage solutions. SSD also allows CoreWeave to build a specialized cloud stack for AI training clusters, including initial provisioning, health checks, orchestration, and scheduling.
Storage is also important to harnessing the power of big data. An estimated 2.5 quintillion bytes worth of data is generated every day and must be stored, accessed, and analyzed to support AI. Edge computing increases the number of applications running and can quickly overload servers. SSDs provide a reliable and cost-effective solution.
Cheetah RAID’s high-performance Raptor servers are equipped with SSDs to overcome data bottlenecks and enable AI applications at the edge. Raptor provides scalable storage, robust design, and flexibility to enable customer organizations to process terabytes of data and support real-time AI workloads in challenging environments.
Size and durability are important at the edge. The small form factor and reliability of SSDs make them optimized for operation in compact edge servers. By combining Cheetah RAID’s edge computing expertise and advanced storage, organizations can effectively deploy AI applications to remote locations and unlock new possibilities for data collection, scalability, analytics, and automation. can.
Organizations implementing AI solutions using advanced storage technologies can add value by partnering with a customer-centric storage vendor that deeply understands the rapidly evolving AI landscape.
Storage requirements
As organizations’ AI ambitions grow, storage infrastructure has become a strategic imperative that businesses need to consider from the beginning. Deploying AI requires a storage partner that offers a comprehensive product portfolio, superior performance, and industry-leading quality and reliability. SSDs help overcome bottlenecks in AI data pipelines, allowing organizations to unlock the full potential of AI and grow their businesses at scale.
Solidigm SSDs help competitive organizations like Kingsoft Cloud, CoreWeave, Cheetah RAID, and others transform their businesses by increasing energy efficiency and reducing operating costs while powering their AI infrastructure.
Learn more about the role of storage in AI and why many of the top AI companies choose Solidigm.
