This article was originally posted by Dell Technologies on their website.
Facing an explosion of unstructured data, organisations of all sizes are looking for ways to effectively and cost-efficiently store unstructured data and unlock the insight and intelligence buried within it. Unstructured data is essentially anything that’s not in a structured database – everything from email, images and documents to videos, social media content and application-related data like logs.
Finding a solution for managing unstructured data has been a challenge. Next-generation applications that could handle rapidly growing unstructured data typically require the extreme performance of all-flash storage, but budget pressures have made it hard for organisations to commit to the new capital and operating expenses that these powerful systems require.
Isilon provides a powerful scale-out file storage solution that is easy to scale and use, no matter how much unstructured data your environment must manage.
The challenge of unstructured data
While it’s easy to query or run a report on the structured data within a relational database, extracting value from unstructured data is far more difficult. A simple content search on textual data may return some interesting information, but nothing with the depth and the comprehensiveness of traditional analytics performed on structured content. Yet unstructured data makes up roughly 80% of an organisation’s entire data set, and the volume of unstructured data tends to double each year. To exploit the value in unstructured data and use it as a competitive differentiator, organisations need tools to perform far more sophisticated and all-encompassing analysis on these unique data sets.
Artificial intelligence (AI) offers some answers. AI tools have become extremely adept at analysing text for meaning and classifying it accurately, and machines can sift through thousands or millions of records much faster than humans can. AI can evaluate tone and sentiment in textual content and use predictive models to anticipate likely outcomes.
But running and managing AI and deep learning (DL) technologies requires storage solutions with massive parallel file I/O, and traditional solutions simply can’t keep up. As the number of concurrent computer threads grow, bottlenecks become an issue as storage performance suffers and data-starved GPUs and CPUs become underutilised.
Isilon: built to tame unstructured data
As the #1 family of scale-out network-attached storage systems in the industry, the Isilon distributed file system products provide a highly effective and cost-efficient way to manage unstructured data. With options for all-flash, hybrid storage and archive NAS platforms, Isilon makes it easy to scale and manage storage environments, no matter how large your unstructured data sets become.
The Isilon product family includes:
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- Isilon All-Flash – powered by the Isilon OneFS operating system, this all-flash, scale-out storage architecture speeds access to massive amounts of unstructured data while dramatically minimizing cost and complexity. A highly dense design contains four nodes within a single 4U chassis, delivering extreme performance and efficiency for most demanding unstructured data applications and workloads.
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- Isilon Hybrid – using a highly versatile but simple scale-out storage architecture, Isilon hybrid storage provides remarkable flexibility while striking a balance between large capacity and high-performance storage.
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- Isilon Archive – Dell Technologies offers two highly efficient and massively scalable archive solutions, including an ideal active archive storage that combines near-primary accessibility with value and ease-of-use, and a deep archive storage that safeguards data efficiently for long-term retention.
Redefining AI and DL for unstructured data
Isilon delivers the extreme performance and concurrency in scale to accommodate the most data-hungry analytic algorithms for unlocking intelligence from unstructured data. The Isilon product family delivers:
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- Faster analytics. Isilon’s all-flash performance and massive parallelism enable hundreds of concurrent data connections with consistent responses, eliminating I/O bottlenecks and accelerating cycles of learning to deliver faster analytics and accelerate innovation.
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- Effortless scalability. Isilon can seamlessly scale from tens of terabytes to 68 PB and boasts up to 80% storage utilization with a 75% reduction in data center footprint.
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- Simpler management. Isilon’s advanced features help to simplify compliance, security, protection and data management.
Support for Dell unstructured data solutions
As storage solutions and the enterprise IT landscape continued to change rapidly, IT teams are under pressure to introduce new technologies like Isilon while continuing to manage existing servers, storage and networking with increasingly tighter budgets.
Dell enterprise-class support can help to relieve the pressure by enabling IT teams to offload both routine and critical support tasks. Dell ProSupport Enterprise Suite provides access to a team of Dell experts to reduce IT complexity and enable IT teams to focus on other strategic priorities.
The ProSupport Enterprise Suite helps organizations:
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- Optimize critical systems and improve IT performance and stability while freeing up staff to innovate the business.
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- Minimize disruptions with 24/7 access to specialized support engineers who can quickly diagnose issues and provide personalized guidance to keep problems from impacting the business.
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- Keep hardware and software running smoothly through proactive and preventive technologies that keep IT teams ahead of issues.
FAQs:
What is unstructured data?
Unstructured data is essentially any data that isn’t contained within a database. Unstructured data may include text, email, social media posts, presentations, images, video files and even application logs.
What is the value of unstructured data?
Because it makes up approximately 80% of an organisation’s entire data set, it’s believed that unstructured data holds vast amounts of insight and intelligence about the organisation, its customers and partners and its marketplace.
What is the challenge of unstructured data?
Unstructured data is, by its very nature, highly difficult to analyse and extract actionable intelligence from. And because unstructured data is doubling roughly every year, the cost of storing it and managing it can increase rapidly as well.
Why is all-flash storage ideally suited to manage unstructured data?
The artificial intelligence (AI) tools that are best suited to analysing unstructured data require extreme performance capabilities that only an all-flash storage environment can deliver. Without a high-speed, high-performing storage solution, AI/analytics jobs will quickly create bottlenecks that slow the pace of innovation and cause other systems to be underutilised.
You can read the original post by Dell Technologies here.