Object storage vendors turn to analytics, AI, machine learning Posted on : Apr 14 - 2020

The view of object stores as nothing more than cheap and deep storage is changing, as the technology finds its way into AI, machine learning and analytics use cases.

Nvidia's recent acquisition of SwiftStack to bolster its artificial intelligence stack underscored the ways that object storage is expanding beyond backing up and archiving cold data.

High-performance object stores are taking on artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, analytics and container-based workloads, as enterprises try to gain insight into their unstructured data. Some use fast flash storage to accelerate small-file throughput. SwiftStack claimed GPU servers working in parallel could access petabytes of data stored on spinning disk-based object clusters at a rate of more than 100 GBps.

The fresh use cases stand in contrast to the traditional view of object stores as cheap-and-deep repositories for cold or cool data that IT organizations want to move off faster, more expensive storage tiers. Object stores could scale out to commodity server hardware to keep up with rapid unstructured data growth.

Amita Potnis, a research director at IDC's enterprise infrastructure practice, predicted that backup and archive would continue to be the "bread-and-butter" use case for object storage for a long time. But she noted that online surveys and phone interviews with cloud providers and enterprises have shown demand and a gradual ramp in adoption of object storage for purposes such as AI and big data analytics.

Ramping up for AI, analytics

Potnis said more vendors have been turning their focus to those use cases during the past 12 to 18 months. She said newer players such as MinIO and OpenIO are also targeting the big data analytics and AI space.

"It's slow and steady moving in that direction," Potnis said. "These are workloads where the amount of data generated and stored is extremely high, and the use of object storage is more viable because of its proven scale and economics. What people are working on now is performance. That was the part that was lacking."

Enrico Signoretti, a research analyst at GigaOm, said many established vendors would not be able to grow or compete without making radical changes to their object storage. Signoretti predicted a string of announcements focusing on new use cases and at least one more object storage acquisition before the end of 2020. View More