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Business leaders tend to look at artificial intelligence (AI) as limitless in its transformative potential. But like any technology, AI runs on real-world resources.
As organizations invest in their AI infrastructure, one critical element they can’t afford to overlook is storage. Energy-intensive data centers supporting large language models and databases require a tremendous volume of storage capacity, while working within the increasingly difficult space and power constraints—and scaling with legacy storage infrastructure simply isn’t practical.
Future-proofing your AI capabilities requires a whole new approach to storage. Organizations need high-capacity solid-state drives (SSDs) to build an AI infrastructure robust enough to support their ambitions for transformation.
The capabilities of legacy data center hard disk drives (HDDs) fall short of SSDs on capacity, performance, power efficiency, scalability, and reliability for storing more data in less physical space. And because HDDs are less power-efficient than SSDs, leading your digital transformation on legacy infrastructure simply might not be feasible.
Strategic Infrastructure in the AI Era
As businesses race to incorporate the power of AI, the strategic importance of storage infrastructure cannot be overstated. AI workloads require tremendous power to operate, and their intensive storage requirements can vary throughout each phase of the AI data pipeline. One of the primary challenges for AI adopters is selecting the best storage solutions to best suit their AI workloads to maximize efficiency and output.
The integration of AI into your business operations can present a complex set of challenges. Organizations are under pressure to capitalize on AI advancements while optimizing their investments and ensuring infrastructure efficiency. High-density SSDs are becoming the de facto standard for AI, because they outperform HDDs on a number of fronts: SSDs offer higher capacities in smaller drives, better power efficiency, greater performance, and ultimately maximize GPU utilization as well as space and power efficiency to allow for more GPUs.
While HDDs may seem like the economical option, the long-run costs of implementing them can be significant. Over a five-year horizon, the costs of adopting SSDs may be lower, because their vastly superior performance means they spend less time operating than HDDs and consume less energy.
A Tailored Storage Approach
Storage, a critical component of every organization’s AI strategy, often gets overlooked. Underestimating the impact storage can have on overall AI architecture efficiency can lead to underutilizing your GPUs or your power limitation. This oversight could lead to a larger rip-and-replace of your entire storage architecture sooner than you might expect.
A strategic best practice centers on the deployment of tailored storage solutions that align with the specific utilization requirements of different AI workloads. Enterprise-level organizations need to support AI with storage that maximizes GPU utilization, enhances 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 prep, training, checkpointing and inference. Customized storage infrastructure can help your organization overcome power and space constraints, optimize AI performance, and boost the return on investment from your AI initiatives.
Providing a Competitive Edge
High-capacity SSDs are a must for storage of the large data sets that train and feed AI. Organizations can gain competitive advantages with data storage solutions optimized for maximizing GPU utilization. SSDs support demanding AI workloads with high performance and reliability. They also can help you accelerate training, improve inferencing, and execute other critical data management processes.
One leading Chinese cloud service provider, Kingsoft Cloud, enhanced its storage architecture to meet the demands of AI workloads by upgrading its legacy HDDs to SSDs. The switch enabled Kingsoft to significantly improve its bandwidth and performance. SSDs’ balance of performance, cost, and utilization efficiency enables Kingsoft to provide high-performance object storage services to its customers.
CoreWeave, a specialized cloud provider, has grown rapidly with a focus on product scalability and reliability. It offers an efficient, high-performance platform for AI workloads thanks, in part, to advanced SSD storage solutions. SSDs also enabled CoreWeave to build a specialized cloud stack for AI training clusters, including initial provisioning, health checks, orchestration, and scheduling.
Storage is also critical for using the power of Big Data. An estimated 2.5 quintillion bytes worth of data are generated every day, and that data needs to be stored, accessed, and analyzed to support AI. In edge computing, where an increasing number of applications are running, servers can quickly become overwhelmed. SSDs provide a dependable and cost-effective solution.
Cheetah RAID‘s high-performance Raptor server is equipped with SSDs that enable it to overcome data bottlenecks and enable AI applications at the edge. The Raptor features scalable storage, rugged design, and flexibility, helping its customer organizations process terabytes of data and support real-time AI workloads in challenging environments.
Size and durability matter at the edge. The small form factor and reliability of SSDs optimize operation in compact edge servers. By combining Cheetah RAID’s expertise in edge computing with sophisticated storage, organizations can effectively deploy AI applications at remote locations to unlock new possibilities for data collection, scalability, analysis, and automation.
Organizations implementing AI solutions with advanced storage technology can add value by partnering with customer-centric storage vendors that deliver a deep understanding of the rapidly evolving AI landscape.
The Storage Imperative
As organizations’ AI ambitions grow, storage infrastructure is increasingly a strategic imperative that companies need to consider from the get-go. Embracing AI requires storage partners that offer a comprehensive product portfolio, superior performance, and industry-leading quality and reliability. SSDs that help overcome bottlenecks in the AI data pipeline, enable organizations to unlock their full potential of AI to grow their business at scale.
Solidigm SSDs help Kingsoft Cloud, CoreWeave, Cheetah RAID, and other competitive organizations transform their business by strengthening their AI infrastructure while increasing energy efficiency and lowering their operating costs.
Learn more about the role of storage in AI and why so many of the top AI companies are choosing Solidigm.
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