Hidden in Plain Sight – The key to finding insights in unstructured data

In the first of two articles on unlocking business value from unstructured data, we looked at how the pace of data growth and the explosion in unstructured data types have forced enterprises to rethink IT strategies and reshape their investment plans. Over the next five years, unstructured data volumes will account for a massive 80% of every organization’s data growth, according to IDC. It’s not surprising that, facing this tsunami of unstructured data, over 70% of IT leaders have accelerated their digital transformation plans and reweighted investments toward projects that help transform the business and away from maintenance of current systems and processes.

Organizations are increasingly turning to modern, robust data infrastructure to manage, protect, and extract value from their unstructured data. Solutions that pair a secure, reliable hardware layer with an intelligent software layer can significantly speed time to insight.

It’s all about understanding what’s in your data

Let’s begin at the beginning — with the data itself. Data is now a strategic asset for every organization. It’s critical to unlocking business insight — the more you have of it and the faster you can analyze it, the greater your potential business advantage. Data is driving new business use cases and powering entirely new customer experiences. Looking ahead, data is the fuel propelling enterprises into the era of enterprise AI.

A few examples quickly highlight data’s essential value: in healthcare, data is key to personalized medicine and medical imaging; in financial services, to fraud detection and records preservation; in retail, to video surveillance and understanding shopping patterns. The list goes on, with data driving new and divergent demands on IT in every industry.

Seeking the simplicity of a single solution

Imagine a solution that’s capable of handling the data challenges presented by the diversity of unstructured data today. Ideally, one system would have the performance, capacity, and extensibility to support any of the myriad unstructured data use cases that organizations may encounter.

Such a solution would need to:

• Be optimized for large and small unstructured data use cases via a balanced, high-throughput design in order to handle data ingest, data transfer, and persistence of data-at-rest equally well.
• Deliver flexible configurations that enable the right mix of compute, network, and storage resources depending on your use case requirements, including a broad range of media options.
• Provide end-to-end security, not only for your data via data-at-rest encryption, but for the hardware itself, through protections in the supply chain, firmware, and system configuration.
• Build AI-driven intelligence into every aspect of the infrastructure, with 24×7 active health monitoring and deep visibility across the environment.
• Offer a high-density, easily serviceable solution that enables choice in storage media while retaining a compact footprint in a standard rack-depth chassis.

A pioneering platform for data-driven use cases

In the unstructured data space, customers continue to turn to high performance, high density, and highly resilient systems. HPE Apollo 4000 features all of the capabilities outlined above in a system optimized for unstructured data.

But that’s just the beginning. HPE Apollo 4000 offers three additional features that put it far ahead of other unstructured data solutions in the marketplace:

• The first is HPE InfoSight, the industry’s most advanced AI for infrastructure. HPE InfoSight’s machine intelligence predicts and prevents problems across the IT stack and delivers critical insights that take the guesswork out of managing infrastructure. Enjoy predictive resource planning, global visibility and analytics, and support case automation as you accelerate your unstructured data workloads.
• The second is HPE Apollo 4000’s integration with Pensando, a powerful distributed services platform that delivers a centrally-managed, hardware-accelerated suite of software-defined, scale-out network and security services at the server level. Pensando eliminates both traditional bottlenecks and discrete appliances for security and network functions and is available in every HPE Apollo 4000 system.
• The final advantage, which we discussed at greater length in the previous article, is a powerful set of integrations with scale-out data platforms from Scality, Qumulo, and Cohesity that deliver, respectively, a limitless pool of object storage; scale-out file storage that eliminates data blindness; and unified data management for non-latency sensitive workloads. Together, these integrations provide highly efficient storage and management of all your unstructured data, regardless of type.

Stay focused on driving value from your data

Today, every organization is planning and/or building data-driven use cases that are now — or will very soon be — critical to their business. That’s forcing a broad rethink among IT leaders as to how best to meet new unstructured data demands. But one thing is clear: the sooner IT can find and deploy data-intensive, optimized solutions, the faster organizations can focus on driving value from their data.

Learn more about the density-optimized HPE Apollo 4000

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About Sandeep Singh

^{Sandeep is Vice President of Storage Marketing at HPE. He is a 15-year veteran of the storage industry with first-hand experience in driving innovation in data storage. Sandeep joined HPE from Pure Storage, where he led product marketing from pre-IPO $100M run rate to a public company with greater than $1B in revenue. Prior to Pure, Sandeep led product management & strategy for 3PAR from pre-revenue to greater than $1B in revenue – including four-year tenure at HP post-3PAR acquisition. Sandeep holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from UC, San Diego and an MBA from Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley.}