Preparing Your Data Centre for AI
AI is set to remain the leading technology through 2025, with adoption continuing to grow substantially worldwide. According to McKinsey's Global Survey on AI, in 2024 72% of organisations globally had integrated AI technology into at least one business function.
When it comes to data creation and storage, AI presents a conundrum. Its effectiveness relies on the availability of vast datasets to improve training and performance. In turn it is then responsible for an unprecedented surge in data creation. As the technology evolves, the demand for even larger datasets to improve training and performance intensifies. As more models and AI applications are deployed at scale, data growth skyrockets.
It creates an insatiable demand for data storage capacity and an urgent challenge to store the massive exabytes of data.
Meanwhile, research shows that data is growing faster than the world's ability to store it. IDC estimates that by 2028, 394ZB of data will be generated, with a CAGR of 24%. AI expected to account for 10% of all data generated by 2025 - a significant increase from under 1% today. However, the storage install base is forecasted to grow at a CAGR of just 17%, a much slower pace than the exponential growth in data creation.
Scale, TCO, and Sustainability
Until recently the focus of enterprises, cloud and data centres has been on acquiring the right data and scaling computing power to support AI usage and data demands.
Now the urgent challenge lies in storing the massive exabytes of data and upgrading the data infrastructure to address the challenges of scale, TCO and sustainability. However, building, operating and growing data centres is a significant challenge. That's largely because the cost of building a data centre ranges from US$1 to 1.5 billion, and organisations must also contend with resource limitations around available space, along with electricity and budgetary constraints.
Advanced areal density is the solution. While adding more drives can help scale data centre capacity, each additional drive required larger capital investments and increases operational cost and natural resources. Advancing areal density with HAMR technology, which allows more data to be stored on a single disk platter, is the key addressing the demands of ever-growing cloud ecosystems and the vast amounts of data it will inevitably generate.
That's because denser hard drives enable greater storage capacity within the same data centre footprint, increasing data capacity while reducing power consumption and contributing to sustainability goals. This allows data centre operators to store more exabytes without requiring additional space, power, or natural resources – resulting in significant TCO savings, including both acquisition and operational costs.
For example, the average capacity of a hard drive in the large-scale data centres is 16TB. Upgrading from a 16TB conventional perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) drive with a 1.78TB/ disk areal density to a 30TB drive with 3TB/disk areal density nearly double the capacity in the same footprint, delivering 45% power savings and a 55% reduction in embodied carbon per TB. This allows data centres to significantly lower storage acquisition and operational cost while also achieving sustainability goals.
The Future for All Data-Hungry Applications
Data-hungry applications will greatly benefit from advancements in areal density. These applications include machine learning models that require vast datasets for training, video streaming services that need to store and deliver 4K and 8K content, and medical research databases that accumulate large- scale genomic sequences.
The advantages of areal density advancements will extend across wide range of applications, from multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments to high-capacity and mid-range capacity storage needs. Data-intensive applications will increasingly rely on the efficient, high-capacity solutions.
Looking to the future, the ability to store, access, and leverage vast quantities of data will be pivotal in driving innovation, creating new opportunities, and unlocking the full potential of the digital age. Advances in areal density technologies will be fundamental to bridging the massive gap between data created and data stored in the most efficient manner, allowing organisations to scale for emerging data intensive applications and explosive data growth.
