Source:- informationweek.com
AI and machine learning are powered by lots of data, so much so that one futurist thinks today’s cloud architectures aren’t enough.
Businesses must continually evolve their data storage strategies to keep pace with emerging data usage requirements. Most of today’s enterprises now have a hybrid cloud architecture. However, as they move more data and workloads to the cloud, they may be in for a surprise when it comes to production-level artificial intelligence and machine learning. Specifically, storing the requisite data may become too expensive to be practical.
In fact, futurist Tom Koulopoulos thinks AI and machine learning will drive the next wave of data storage innovations out of necessity. That’s the premise for his latest book, The Bottomless Cloud.
“One of the Achille’s heels of AI and machine learning is their voracious appetite for data,” said Koulopoulos.”The problem is that learning has a certain cost associated with it, and in case of AI and machine learning it’s how much it costs to capture, transfer, and store data.”
For example, file systems and storage software provider Tuxera estimates that one autonomous car generates between 11 terabytes and 192 TB of data per day.
“According to Google, a Waymo generates 2 TB of information in a single day. I imagine it will be more like 20 TB per day when they’re fully autonomous,” said Koulopoulos. “Even at 2 TB per day, over a single year, you’d end up with about $3 million-plus dollars of storage costs in Amazon, Google or Microsoft cloud. $3 million dollars [worth of storage costs] for a $30,000 Tesla doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
Who will sow the seeds of economic change
Koulopoulos expects startups to lead the next wave of storage innovations rather than the incumbents. For example, cloud startup Wasabi, one of his clients, promises an 80% reduction in storage costs, up to 6 times the speed of Amazon S3, free egress and 11 9s of data durability.
Although the AWS and Microsoft Azure teams were invited to share their views on the future of storage for this story, both declined to participate.
Naturally, Amazon, Google and Microsoft are well aware of the startup activity in the space.