The role of AI storage solutions is more critical than ever in today’s evolving artificial intelligence landscape.

With enterprises navigating increasingly complex datasets and energy-intensive workloads, innovations in storage technology are essential to support high-performance computing and AI, according to Sam Werner (pictured), vice president of product management at IBM Corp. The transformative potential of intelligent storage systems is reshaping how organizations optimize AI workloads and enhance overall performance.

IBM’s Sam Werner talks with theCUBE about innovative storage solutions’ impact on AI workloads and the future of scalable, efficient data management.

“You have to be able to store all this data very efficiently,” Werner said. “You’ve got to have low power and cooling costs because you have to make way for all the very power-hungry graphics processing units required to do AI and supercomputing. First of all, you have to have very efficient storage. It has to be super fast because you don’t want these GPUs sitting idle. They’re very expensive.”

Werner spoke with theCUBE Research’s Dave Vellante and John Furrier at SC24, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed innovative storage solutions, their impact on AI workloads and the future of scalable, efficient data management. (* Disclosure below.)

AI storage solutions for the modern era

IBM is evolving AI storage solutions with innovations such as Content-Aware Storage, which integrates intelligence directly into the system to optimize performance and reduce inefficiencies, according to Werner. This approach allows enterprises to perform real-time data optimization without duplicating datasets across systems, offering a significant advantage for scaling AI and high-performance workloads.

“We’re changing this paradigm completely,” Werner said. “Rather than bringing all your data and building this vector database, what if we did all of that in the storage, put accelerators in the storage products and actually did the vectorization as data changes? We know when the data changes here, right? So, we can actually vectorize it in real time.”

Active File Management, another key feature of IBM Storage Scale, simplifies data access across diverse storage systems, Werner noted. By providing a unified global namespace, enterprises can manage unstructured data without copying everything into a single storage pool, streamlining operations and improving accessibility.

“Rather than saying copy everything into one uber storage pool … we have something in Scale called Active File Management,” he said. “Scale has a global namespace. We give you one single namespace you can use everywhere and scale forever. Then, we can talk to all of your unstructured data sources using our Active File Management and cache the data in.”

As organizations face rising operational costs and sustainability challenges, energy efficiency is also a significant focus for IBM. With its AI storage solutions, including the IBM Storage Scale System 6000, IBM delivers high performance while consuming considerably less energy than competing systems, according to Werner.

“I challenge anybody watching this to go and look at the kilowatts required to run our Scale System 6000 versus the competitors,” he said. “Look at how much capacity you need to support … Nvidia published SuperPod specs or BasePOD specs. Look at our energy consumption versus the competition. We’re at least half, and, in a lot of cases, depending on which competitor, even more than that. That’s huge.”

As AI workloads grow, IBM continues to prioritize ease of use and automation. Realizing that skill shortages challenge many organizations, IBM works to integrate AI capabilities into its systems to simplify management and improve efficiency, Werner explained.

“We want to make it so it’s not just about supporting AI; it’s putting AI down into our products,” he said. “Automatic recovery, automatically diagnosing problems, telling you what issues need to be addressed without you having to have such a huge number of skills to support it.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of SC24:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for SC24. Neither Dell Technologies nor WekaIO Inc., the premier sponsors of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE