The era of digital business transformation has been in full thrust in 2019, as emerging applications and data center infrastructure refreshes have been top of mind for digital stakeholders.
In this year-end recap, I summarize digital use cases, vertical applications, and cloud architecture options for your perusal, matched with the key Western Digital product and technological announcements we made throughout the year.
The stakes are high! Infrastructure architects that fail to understand and evaluate the latest in storage options risk cost overruns, needless OPEX overhead, risk losing out on the next greatest innovation.
Data center storage options are evolving to keep up with data center demands of the digital era – emerging SSD form factors, SSD write endurance levels, capacity point increases, host-side FTL optimizations, HDD gains (areal density, SMR) – to address performance at scale at better infrastructure TCO.
Western Digital’s 2019 new products and technology explainer videos, data sheets, news, and other resources are all here in this compendium blog for the following topics.
AI/ML
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning workloads span data ingest, data preparation, training clusters, inference, and data archive. Use case deployments across vertical applications typically require high reliability and low-latency performance for accuracy or to avoid false positives.
Aligning AI/ML workloads to the appropriate SSD or HDD options can help assure successful production rollouts and keep infrastructure costs in line with budget expectations.
| AI/ML Pipeline Stage | Storage I/O Patterns |
|---|---|
| Ingest | High-Bandwidth Throughput |
| Data Preparation | High-Bandwidth Throughput, varying file sizes |
| Training Cluster | Low-latency, High-Bandwidth, small random I/O |
| Deployment/Inference | Very Low-Latency, mixed read/write |
| Archive Data | High-Bandwidth Throughput, sequential write streams |
2019 Western Digital Product and Technological announcements to consider for certain pipeline stages of AI/ML:
Analytics
Analytics is top of mind for digital stakeholders to provide the insight for critical business decision making. Whether it’s real-time, historical, or augmented to transactions, e.g., logistics, supply chain, or e-commerce, we have the new products to enable scalable data mining.
Cloud-based Media & Entertainment workflows and digital content creation pipelines enable the global content creation process for video, entertainment, gaming, and other monetization of rich media.
CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) at the edge are critical for the delivery of streaming video, audio, app updates, VR/online gaming downloads. SSD low latency for better end-experiences, storage cost optimizations are important for the deployment of read-intensive infrastructure for CDN edge delivery/Points of Presence (PoPs).
In-Memory Applications
In-Memory computing delivers deliver faster performance for DRAM-based configurations.
Western Digital announced its partnership with AMD® for EPYC™- based, greater scalability and deeper insight for memory-centric applications at a better TCO than 100% server DRAM/DIMMs using memory extension.
Redis, DevOps, databases, and key-value stores are prime candidates for the Memory Extension solution.
Cloud Architectures
Cloud architectures continue to proliferate at hyperscalers, private cloud, multi-cloud/hybrid cloud, and for edge data centers.
Driven by TCO at scale and performance, this year’s announcements enable cloud architects to address latency, scale, and an overall TCO (based on $/IOPS, $/throughput, etc.), density, power efficiency, and the right amount of endurance for specific workloads.
HPC
On-premises and Cloud-based HPC (High Performance Computing) workloads for scientific computing, government labs, and academia continue to push the limits of performance of scale to uncover discoveries in biosciences, weather/climate study, engineering, and other disciplines.
Whether for infrastructure refresh or new cloud-based HPC architectures, this year’s announcements will be of high interest to HPC stakeholders for OPEX and CAPEX efficiency.
Industrial IoT
Industrial asset monitoring, operational monitoring, and PLM digital twins are key to IIoT platforms, applications, and OT use cases.
OT and IT groups that are responsible for scalable IoT platforms are going to want to evaluate storage options and technology to enable reliable systems at the best possible TCO.
Databases
Database and Analytics stakeholders who are developing cloud-architectures to run mission-critical databases and analytics will want to consider the latest SSD options from Western Digital to scale latency-sensitive transactional databases.
Provisioned IOPS at cloud services continue to grow to enable the proliferation of cloud-based databases and applications.
We look forward to working with you in 2020!