Latest / Technology Now / How is AI changing the way we store data?
Transcript
- MICHAEL BIRD Good morning, Sam. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. How do you like to store information at home? like do you have a hard drive? Do you store stuff in the cloud? Are you sort of a printer out and file it kind of person? SAM JARRELL I think it kind of depends on what it is. Like I put some stuff in like the cloud, but I have like some things like home movies and stuff like that on a hard drive. I think even today, like going back to like writing stuff down is almost a little bit more safe. If it's like really, really important. What about you? What do you use? I feel like you probably have like multiple hard drive backups of literally everything. MICHAEL BIRD I feel so seen. I, yeah, I have a NAS network, networked attached storage, which has, four hard drives in a raid. I live by the rule of three, which is you have three copies of any file you don't wanna lose. So now Sam, while these sort of backup methods might work for regular, everyday people like us, when you scale it up, the quantities of data that you have to store in organizations and the methods you have to use to store it properly can become significantly more complicated. So this week we are diving into the topic of data storage and in particular data storage in the world of ai. I'm Michael Bird SAM JARRELL I'm Sam Jarrell MICHAEL BIRD And welcome to Technology Now from HPE. MICHAEL BIRD now Sam, we've talked a lot about, storage on this podcast over the years. how you store data, where you store data, that sort of thing. But do you know how much data we are creating nowadays? SAM JARRELL I'm sure it's gonna be like some sort of made up term plus the word bite. I'll be fun and we'll call it a Zita Beta byte. MICHAEL BIRD dodecahedron bite? SAM JARRELL Yeah. dodecahedron. I like that one better. MICHAEL BIRD Okay. Dodecahedron bite. Now, according to research from Petroc Taylor in 2025 and published on Statista by the year 2020, we were creating and utilizing over 64 zetabytes. There's the word Sam, zetabytes of data. And in 2022, that number had risen to over 100 zetabytes and predictions put last year's data at over 180 zetabytes . Now to put that completely, arbitrary word into perspective, the latest smartphones can have, one terabyte of storage. And to get to 180 zetabytes, you would need over 100 billion smartphones . Sam, that's a lot of smartphones, and we have of course, linked to all of these stats as well as all of the other sources in the show notes. SAM JARRELL Call that big data. My goodness. That's, a lot of phones. That's a lot of data. I'm sure not all of it is like high quality data either. MICHAEL BIRD now, Sam, most of the data we create and use isn't designed to be stored long term. Uh, it's often used at the time of creation and then discarded. However, as the use of things like artificial intelligence continues to rise, this is beginning to change because as you well know, So Sam, as you know, AI both uses and can also create huge amounts of data, which needs to be stored and then processed. And organizations often don't want to dispose of this data until they can confirm they no longer need it. So, to find out more about data storage in this era of ai, I spoke to Jim O’Dorisio senior Vice president and general manager, HPE Storage. SAM JARRELL But before we speak to Jim about modern day storage technology, I want to take a look at how we got here, and some of the designs which didn’t quite make the cut. It’s time for… Technology Then. SAM JARRELL The art of storing data goes back to the birth of civilisation itself, we’ve always needed ways to record information right. Books, libraries and clay tablets were all ways in which people could preserve knowledge but digital memory is, obviously a much more recent concept. Michael, do you know what was the first fully electronic memory and do you want to guess when it might have turned up? MICHAEL BIRD I'm gonna say, I'm gonna say 30, 30 something thirties around that SAM JARRELL Not a terrible guess Well computers were beginning to come into their own post world war two but the mechanical memory which was made of moving parts was causing progress to stall until two researchers, Freddie Williams and Tom Kilburn, in Manchester, England created… a tube. But this tube was special. Inspired by cathode ray tube storage which Williams had seen during a trip to America, the Williams-Kilburn tube became the first entirely electronic memory and it worked by storing bits as dots on the surface of the tube . Like with a cathode ray tube in a TV, the Williams-Kilburn tube required constant refreshing by the cathode ray to stop the dots fading and disappearing Information on the tube could be read using a metal pickup plate near the screen which would detect a change in electrical charge when the cathode ray swept across the screen however the Williams-Kilburn tube faced a few issues which would, eventually, turn out to be insurmountable. To keep it working, a Williams-Kilburn tube would have to be hand tuned, frequently. They were also notoriously sensitive to the environment and could be interfered with easily so while they were excellent when they worked, their unreliability was a huge issue so even though they were so good that they were used at, for example, Los Alamos , the Williams-Kilburn tube finally fell out of favour and was replaced by magnetic core memory MICHAEL BIRD Yeah, I think storage is something that you want to be somewhat reliable. Now today, we use semiconductor memory – you might have heard of DRAM, or Dynamic Random Access Memory but the world is still changing faster and faster. So, to find out more about where we currently stand, I spoke to Jim O’Dorisio, Senior Vice President and General Manager HPE Storage and the first thing I asked him was how storage has had to evolve in the past decade. JIM O'DORISIO it has been an interesting, ride to be honest. if you think about 10 years ago there was a major move of workloads into the public cloud. so there's a major, uh, migration of workloads along with it storage into the public cloud. Um, at the same time there's been this explosion of data, and structured data in particular. it's estimated, that about 200 zetabytes of information would be created in 2025 alone. It's mind boggling, right? But as that's happened and storage is becoming more intelligent and it's having to become much more, performant, workloads are being moved out of the public cloud and back on-premise because there's data sovereignty issues. There's security, there's performance. And then with the age of AI, it's much more important for our enterprise customers to have, sovereignty over their own data. MICHAEL BIRD And you talked about, petabytes and petabytes of data. Has the type of data we are creating changed, are we, creating more unstructured data? JIM O'DORISIO Well, and if you think about, customer data, if you think about audio and video, all of the data that gets generated, from a social media perspective, but increasingly it's a richer data set that we interact with our customers. With all that data is getting stored, everything that might have been, paper transactions 20 years ago. Is now digitally transacted. So all of that data's available, accessible, and really, available for insights to be extracted from. MICHAEL BIRD and presumably the rise of AI has had quite an impact on just the sheer amount of data we are creating. JIM O'DORISIO Yeah, sure it does. and it has a huge impact on what we save because, obviously storage has become much more efficient and much more intelligent. So you, can automatically store more, solid state, devices, flash devices, they're faster, they're more- reliable. they're getting larger and larger. the ability to store massive amounts of data efficiently is increasing, every year. and as such, customers can store more data, and they can contemplate what they want to do with the data and how they can leverage it for competitive advantage. MICHAEL BIRD and how, did the migration to cloud and I suppose perhaps the migration in some instances away from cloud storage, how has that impacted the way that we think about storage? JIM O'DORISIO You know, I think initially, everything was going to the cloud and I think there's a bit of an equilibrium now. but AI in particular is forcing customers to consider. pulling data back into on-premises because, there's, the ability to operate on the data with the security, the performance has placed new requirements. And so you are seeing some element of data moving from the cloud back into on-premise locations MICHAEL BIRD Alright, I wanna dive into AI in a bit more detail, it's still the buzzword at the moment, isn't it? And so why, when we think about AI is storage so critical? JIM O'DORISIO Well certainly the sheer amount of data, that's -being generated is critical. But the ability for storage to evolve and become much more intelligent, in supporting these AI workloads is becoming much more critical. and you know, from a, from an intelligence perspective, we're talking about being able to add metadata as the data is stored on the storage layer. MICHAEL BIRD Right. Okay. JIM O'DORISIO Right. And certainly, you know, the ability to do things like calculate vector embeddings as the data's being stored, because then the data's ready for AI operations as it lands on media. And that's a huge advantage. MICHAEL BIRD so what we're saying is actually you're taking that piece of data you are. Loading a load of metadata lots of additional information, which the AI algorithm can use to do something with. And it can do that faster. JIM O'DORISIO do it faster because, the idea of the intelligent storage layer allows the data to be AI ready. in the past, if you had a less intelligent storage layer, you would have another post-processing activity. you would store the data and then you would run it through, a GPU and you would calculate vector embeddings, and you would do those sorts of things that would allow you to do, inferencing and rag across your data. those sorts of things can be done as the data's storedwith an intelligent data storage platform. like the ones we have here at HPE. MICHAEL BIRD Are there different categories of data which we discussed before all being used here? Or does AI focus on just like sort of one or two of them? JIM O'DORISIO I think, we're talking mostly about unstructured data. and it could be anything from contracts to, analysis of contracts, PDF files, multimodal data, data that has audio and video. MICHAEL BIRD stuff that traditionally. before ai it would be a very manual job sense of JIM O'DORISIO extremely manual and, limiting in terms of the kinds of value that you would get out of the data and the speed at which you could, derive those insights. MICHAEL BIRD So storage is sort of the foundation that AI is built on. JIM O'DORISIO Well, increasingly it's super important because, we started off with GPUs and, compute nodes, in servers, and that continues to exist, but now companies like HP are building intelligence into the data storage layer. it's becoming essential because, it allows the processing of the information and the value of the data being extracted to happen that much more efficiently and that much quicker. So it's very foundational at this point. and as we talk about zetabytes of data, being, created yearly, it's important that we have a flexible infrastructure that it exists. We talked about data has gravity, that we can deploy that infrastructure where the data exists, where the data is being generated. That we have the processing of that data, local to where the data exists. so having this flexible, powerful infrastructure and really relying on the intelligence that the storage layer can deliver, is absolutely essential. MICHAEL BIRD so we sort of talked about storage, helping with ai, but how can AI be used to sort of improve storage? JIM O'DORISIO absolutely.at HPE, we literally use Agentic AI in our storage products and it's used to improve the operational efficiency of our storage. It's usedTo do things like improve the proactive support experience for our customers. it's used to solve problems before customers even experience the problem. I like to say some of the best, AI that we've written and language models we've written here at, at HPE actually are running in our storage layer. MICHAEL BIRD and that's sort of doing the jobs that previously would be, again, pretty time consuming, JIM O'DORISIO less proactive, you know, less efficient resolution of challenges for customers. And increasingly, customers want this self-healing, self-managed infrastructure. and having, AI built into the storage layer allows that to become, more of a reality. Yeah. Not MICHAEL BIRD Yeah. And not just your disc driver's about to fail. More intelligent than that. JIM O'DORISIO Yeah. Right. Exactly. Right. Yeah. MICHAEL BIRD Because that's what it used to be. It used to be a, your disc driver's about to fail and you go, oh, this is JIM O'DORISIO or, or it fails and, and you, and you log a case and somebody shows up. but now, much more proactively, you know, we're looking at a lot, of data, minute by minute to predict what's gonna happen as opposed to waiting for it to happen. MICHAEL BIRD and I suppose is there looking at trends in how say, I dunno, a storage array is being filled up. for some reason there's one site that's generating lots of data. So maybe actually on that site, wanna increase the storage in that? JIM O'DORISIO what we've built into our systems is the ability to identify performance hotspots, to do trending analysis. To understand this noisy neighbor problem where you might have certain, workloads that are impacting the performance of storage and then making automated recommendations to customers to how to modify, to get better efficiency out of the storage MICHAEL BIRD Right, right. Okay. Basically make the most of the investment. You've, Got JIM O'DORISIO Really, giving the customer the information, that they need to be as proactive with their infrastructure as they possibly can be. MICHAEL BIRD because I think, you know. maybe two decades ago, there was a sense of just buyers, just buy as much as you think you might need. It wasn't particularly intelligent, I realize we're just talking pure storage here. But I suppose actually if you could be more efficient with it, you could make more of your money or JIM O'DORISIO it's all about efficiency because, enterprise budgets are not increasing. we have to carve out funding to go do AI projects, And so it's that much more critical for the infrastructure, to run efficiently and to really provide the kind of ROIA customer requires. MICHAEL BIRD Can I talk data sovereignty? Yeah. how are storage and sovereignty linked? It feels like a very obvious question JIM O'DORISIO you know, sovereignty is becoming much more important, especially in the age of AI and especially in Europe, where, rules and regulations at a country level prevent data from leaving, the country that it was created in. And so, having a storage infrastructure that's flexible, that can be, local to where the data is generated is absolutely critical. and from an HPE perspective, we're doing a really good job of that. MICHAEL BIRD And do you expect to see more. conversations around sovereignty in the future. and if so, how will we respond in terms of the way that we create things, you know, that the products that we are creating, how, how will that maybe perhaps change JIM O'DORISIO from a sovereignty perspective? I think we can expect more, concerns and more regulations around sovereignty. as the world becomes much more complex and countries are much more concerned about, data leaving, their borders. so I think, from that perspective, our ability to deliver our management capabilities that run locally, it creates a particular challenge for some of the public cloud providers because, their infrastructure exists, in virtual places. and it's. Very difficult sometimes to ensure the data doesn't leave a particular country. And I think it has the effect of driving, critical content back on premises because organizations can control it there. They know where it was created. They know where it's stored, and, they can, put compliance around. MICHAEL BIRD and will, there be more, I know emphasis on, say. Reporting on that data. JIM O'DORISIO I think based on the way you've built your infrastructure, it's very auditable. you know where your infrastructure is, the arrays, sit within your data center, or they sit within multiple data centers. All within your country. I mean, if it's under a customer's control, then it's very easy to determine when you get in a scenario in a public cloud where you're pushing t common thing. MICHAEL BIRD Alright I wanna ask the question that every technologist hates to be asked, which is, where do you see the world of storage in say, five or 10 years time? JIM O'DORISIO over the next five to 10 years, you're gonna see faster, solid state disc drives. You're gonna see more intelligence built into storage. you're gonna see larger and larger capacities over the next five to 10 years, and you're also gonna see a lot of advanced development around things that probably won't come to market in 10 years. but you'll see a lot of advanced development around, holographic storage, around DNA storage. but you'll see a lot of development in those dimensions, yes. MICHAEL BIRD because Moore's law has only got, I'm guessing with storage. we're miniaturizing, miniaturizing, miniaturizing. We're talking flash storage JIM O'DORISIO Oh, well, obviously,as you think about, the efficiencies of NAND and the ability to store more and more, data in smaller and smaller footprints, you're gonna see capacities continue to accelerate. So you're gonna see performance capacity, grow. which along with the intelligence that will continue to build into the storage layer to support these, these AI workloads. MICHAEL BIRD Will we start to see water cooled storage, do you think? JIM O'DORISIO Oh, absolutely. I mean, certainly we have, at HPE, we have water cooled racks, we have water cooled everything. And I think, as you build more intelligence into the storage layer, you know, you'll see GPUs running in storage. and you'll get to a scale where, you know, water cooling will likely become much more prevalent, even at the storage layer. MICHAEL BIRD Jim, thank you so much for coming on to Technology Now JIM O'DORISIO Thank you. Thank you very much. SAM JARRELL Wow. the idea of holographic and DNA storage is pretty crazy to me. MICHAEL BIRD Yeah, I thought the same thing. we did an episode, where we talked to a researcher who was doing DNA storage. And, I wanna come on to different storage methods in a bit, but, my big takeaway, which I think we all know and we've talked about. Many times before is AI is all about the data. we talk about good data in good data, out, bad data in, bad data out, but like fundamentally, you need somewhere to store all that data and you need to process all that data. And we did an episode, a few weeks ago, where we talked about networking and talked about how like networking needs to be running really efficiently. And this conversation, the same is true of storage. SAM JARRELL Yeah, that's true. Basically, it seemed as though storage with AI was getting closer and closer to the time of the creation of data to leveraging it efficiently. And so that to me just sounded a lot like the edge, which we normally think of in the context of networking. So it's all kind of starting to become the same thing to some degree, especially once you start talking about using GPUs in storage. It all seems like networking, storage and AI and compute are all just one kind of cohesive thing at a certain point. MICHAEL BIRD Yeah. I remember storage array, like one of the big selling points is it will let you know before a component fails. And, I think Jim said, it'll call up the supplier and it'll say, my about hard drive is about to fail and one will get shipped out to you. And that was sort of the extent of the intelligence, but actually that's just like one element of it. There's so much more that could be optimized, could be tweaked, could be fixed. and again, just like as you talked about, Networking and compute. Actually managing that infrastructure can be quite a burden, to IT departments. Again, as Jim said, the budgets haven't got any bigger, so we have to do more with less. SAM JARRELL Yeah, that's true. I love what you brought up though about it letting you know about support and whatnot. Like at the time I could see where that felt very, very useful. But any more like the standard changes, right? Like now I imagine as they have these different self-healing, products and storage arrays that it's like, don't just tell me do something about it. Do it right now yourself. MICHAEL BIRD Yeah. Just, just go and do it. Yeah. And, and, the, I think the conversation at the top of the show that we talked about, storage, needing to be more intelligent in the world of ai, and essentially like loading metadata onto the data. He used the phrase vector embedding, it's a metadata. It's a piece of information that will go with whatever it is to make processing that data even faster. And again, we've talked about this on the show before. AI is about speed. AI is about making the most of the resources that you have. SAM JARRELL That makes me happy, actually, because it makes me think of maybe like there's a whole sustainability component to all of this too, because in the past you would just buy lots and lots and lots and lots of physical storage, or you'd expand endlessly into the public cloud, which was also costly and crazy. But now you're at least optimizing everything so that you're using exactly what you need and not necessarily going overboard with what you don't MICHAEL BIRD So, as you said at the top of the show, Sam, technologies can rise and fall as times and systems changed and actually that touches on one of the things I really wanted to ask Jim about. SAM JARRELL Oh yeah? What’s that, Michael? MICHAEL BIRD Well, I wanted to know if Jim thinks that hard drives or disappear one day. 'cause you know, we're sort of, it's all flash storage now, isn't it? JIM O'DORISIO I mean, uh, I think there's gonna come a point in time. It it, it's interesting question because, um, 25 years ago, if you would've asked me, would tape still be around? I would've said, uh, probably not. MICHAEL BIRD But it still is. JIM O'DORISIO It still is at, at, it still is. And, and, uh, you know, and I've, I've heard it said that, uh, tape is dying, uh, at a glacial pace, right? So I think there's, there, there's maybe a parallel there from spinning disc, but at some level it'll become, you know, too inefficient to make spinning discs because there's a lot of technology there. And as the, and as the footprint shrinks down, uh, uh, from an SSD perspective, and you could store more and more information. I think the, the prices will start to converge and, and at some point it won't make as much sense. MICHAEL BIRD Interesting. Interesting. Do you think it'll die a death at a glacier or past too? JIM O'DORISIO I think it'll take some time. It, it's not gonna be next. It's not gonna be this year or next. SAM JARRELL Okay that brings us to the end of Technology Now for this week. Thank you to our guest, Jim O’Dorisio And of course, to our listeners. Thank you so much for joining us. MICHAEL BIRD If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please do let us know – rate and review us wherever you listen to episodes and if you want to get in contact with us, send us an email to technology now AT hpe.com and don’t forget to subscribe so you can listen first every week. Technology Now is hosted by Sam Jarrell and myself, Michael Bird This episode was produced by Harry Lampert and Izzie Clarke with production support from Alysha Kempson-Taylor, Beckie Bird, Drew Leitzow, Alissa Mitry, and Renee Edwards. Our theme music was composed by Greg Hooper. SAM JARRELL Our social editorial team is Rebecca Wissinger, Judy-Anne Goldman and Jacqueline Green and our social media designers are Alejandra Garcia, and Ambar Maldonado. MICHAEL BIRD Technology Now is a Fresh Air Production for Hewlett Packard Enterprise. (and) we’ll see you next week. Cheers! SAM JARRELL Bye y’all