Is the collision between artificial intelligence and storage a new demand or a zero fire?

Nowadays, the rapid development of artificial intelligence has completely changed the way of human work, life and thinking, and also achieved a comprehensive leap in productivity and new changes in social governance. With the continuous breakthrough of computing power, the technology of artificial intelligence has become more and more mature, and more and more enterprises have begun to integrate AI technology into the industry.

However, in the process of adapting to the needs of the industry, artificial intelligence often appears slow heat. On the one hand, it lacks the demand entrance to realize technological subversion, on the other hand, it has to face the resistance brought by the offensive and defensive war of new technologies in the industry. As a traditional industry, even after a round of market reshuffle of software definition, hyper-convergence, cloud computing and other technologies, how will storage incite new market demand in the face of artificial intelligence technology?

Based on the market trend, on September 8th, ProphetStor Xianzhi Data, an industry software-defined storage and data service company, held its first official media meeting in Beijing. The conference was hosted by Song Jiayu, editor-in-chief of Storage Online, and invited many senior media people, such as Brother Donggua, Brother Watermelon, and Baboon, to open their minds in the form of interesting conversations, and to deeply discuss how artificial intelligence can be integrated into storage and how to further promote the development of artificial intelligence in the storage market.

This meeting is also the first appearance of some senior executives of the leading team of China District of Xianzhi Data. At the meeting, Li Xiaofang, Senior Director of the Beijing Representative Office of Centric Data, delivered a keynote speech on "When Artificial Intelligence Encounters Storage". By introducing the development history, main business and product solutions of Oracle Data, this paper shows the future market strategy of Oracle Data with artificial intelligence technology as its important development direction, and further expounds the innovative mode of the integration of artificial intelligence and storage.

Li Xiaofang, Senior Director of Xianzhi Data Beijing Representative Office

Li Xiaofang said that the company made clear the importance of artificial intelligence at the beginning of its establishment. The technical purpose of all products revolves around the core of "AI integrated into storage", and uses artificial intelligence to continuously innovate in storage system construction, operation and maintenance, storage system performance improvement and reliability improvement.

According to reports, Xianzhi Data currently has four products:

Federator: an out-of-band storage resource management platform, similar to OpenStack Cinder and EMC ViPR, but with extended intelligence. Storage resources are passive resources after all. If you want to achieve real on-demand scheduling, you must be able to predict in advance. Federator can identify the changing pattern of customer application load through machine learning, predict the changes of application performance and capacity requirements in advance, and allocate resources in place in advance.

Stellar Flash: all-flash array and mixed block storage array with intelligent prediction ability. Functions include intelligent caching with traffic model module (TMM) and elastic resource control (ERC) technology; Monitor and warn disk failures, and plan to repair data in advance according to resources and business load; Support local deduplication and compression technologies.

DR Prophet: A business-oriented data protection solution based on Federator platform, aiming at complex and changeable cloud data center scenarios. The main functions include configurable automatic data protection, application-aware data protection, mirror disk fault tolerance and local protection, and non-destructive disaster drills.

Disk Prophet: Intelligent Fault Data Analysis Solution. Its function is disk fault prediction, that is, fortune telling for the disk. It comprehensively uses a lot of machine learning and detailed knowledge of disk failure, aiming at using artificial intelligence technology to realize accurate fault prediction, eliminate unpredictable QoS fluctuation caused by disk failure, and improve data reliability and resource efficiency.

Zhang Guangbin, author of Enterprise Records and Big Story, Dongguage, He Xiaofeng, technical community of Rizhilu, and Bao Yun, Guo Tao, China (from left to right).

At the meeting, Zhang Guangbin, the enterprise recorder, He Xiaofeng, the technical community of Rizhilu, Dongguage, the author of Big Story, and Guo Tao, Bao Yun, China participated in an interesting dialogue as guests. The dialogue deeply discussed "Has the storage industry gone downhill?" And "Is AI over-hyped?" Two questions. The first question revolves around "whether the storage industry is dying", and discusses whether the future development of the storage industry, including traditional storage and new storage, is optimistic under the crush of the Internet, and how to realize the value differentiation of storage. It also pointed out that the only way out for storage is intelligence, and storage needs business awareness.

And "Is AI over-hyped?" On the topic, the four guests first expounded their views on the definition of AI scope, and pointed out that excessive hype of new technologies is a necessary process, and their difference lies in whether they can survive. They also discussed whether artificial intelligence has practical value in the industry and the integration form between industry and artificial intelligence.

According to the market demand and development trend, the first intelligent data shows that the specific practice of the company's products can be roughly divided into two stages for the integration of AI and storage:

The first stage is to intelligently predict the performance and space resource requirements in advance and deploy them in advance, which is the intelligent ability provided by Federator products. This intelligent component actually embodies a new storage resource management mode.

Therefore, the second stage of the combination of AI and storage is that the storage device itself can build a new type of intelligent storage with the help of AI technology. The introduction of intelligent fault data analysis solution Disk Prophet aims to help secondary storage transform into three-dimensional intelligent storage. Because of the predictive ability, the random event of disk failure can be turned into a predetermined event, which greatly reduces the redundancy and breaks the dilemma that the reliability and performance of secondary storage cannot be saved.

Dong Weiyuan, general manager of Xianzhi Data in China, said in the final meeting summary that Xianzhi Data will focus more on the field of storage and AI in the future, and extend it to the field of operation and maintenance, and help the operation and maintenance personnel to optimize the storage operation and maintenance process and automate the storage system management with the existing technology of AI. With the continuous development of technology, there will be a new combination of industry division of labor in the future. Under the change of the new industry structure, Xianzhi Data will be a cross-border enterprise between artificial intelligence, storage and operation and maintenance.