Dell EMC PowerScale helps derive insights from unstructured data: Amit Luthra

Unstructured data (UDS) holds a huge potential for business leaders, which will help them to understand business results, anticipate what’s coming as well as act quickly on risk and opportunity. Dell Technologies is launching Dell EMC PowerScale family of storage systems engineered with industry-leading storage software and server hardware for setting a new industry standard.

Here Amit Luthra, Director and GM, Data Center Solutions, Dell Technologies India, tells us more. Excerpts from an interview:

DQ: How can enterprises better use UDS?

Amit Luthra: To being with, let me share a background on the journey of data and its utilization. Currently, we are rapidly transitioning into an era driven mostly by data. Organizations are adopting digital transformation like never before, creating an ever-growing data sphere. In fact, as per IDC, by 2025 the collective sum of the world’s data will be around 175 zettabytes (ZB).

Traditionally, data used to be held in structured datasets. However, in this digital age, we are now witnessing a shift. As sources of data generation have doubled, organizations are increasingly accessing unstructured data from diverse origins, often in large amounts. This is because unstructured data holds huge potential to help businesses grow and develop in this ever-evolving competitive world, bringing them one step closer to achieve business results, anticipate what’s coming, and act quickly on risk and opportunity. This ultimately helps in providing a clearer picture of how to meet organizational goals and customer expectations.

However, making sense of all this unstructured data sets isn’t an easy task for any business. It requires a great deal of planning as well as deployment of innovative technology solutions to process the data in the correct manner, before monetizing it.

Therefore, for businesses to better use unstructured data, they require the right storage solutions with a new set of capabilities that will help them bring structure, to their unstructured data. This will give them the capability to handle this data, anywhere, anytime, with intelligent insights.

It will also help them to unlock the structure within their data and to address the challenges with the help of unstructured data management. This is where Dell Technologies plays a crucial role. With our industry leading storage portfolio, we help our customers to extract maximum insights from unstructured data, in the most efficient manner.

DQ: How does UDS play an underlining role in effectively deploying new-age tech like IoT and AI?

Amit Luthra: Over time, the data landscape has evolved with changing market dynamics and the evolving needs of the customers. A shift can be traced as more and more unstructured data is being generated, when compared to structured data.  Therefore, organizations are looking for different ways to get more out of their data.

This is where UDS and new-age tech like AI, go hand in hand. This is because, unlike structured data which can be analyzed as simply as running a report within a relational database, unstructured data requires artificial intelligence (AI) tools to extract deep, meaningful insights and a high-performance storage solution to meet availability needs.

Another alignment of USD with emerging technologies, is the fact that all those images, videos, emails, texts and social media content, data from Internet of Things (IoT) devices has increased the explosion of UDS. Hence, as organizations look to transform their businesses with AI and machine learning, there’s no doubt that unstructured data — and how to store it — will be at the center of that conversation.

DQ: How will UDS help verticals like government institutions, healthcare, manufacturing, etc., to understand their data better, and eventually undertake projects like smart cities, healthcare analysis etc.?

Amit Luthra: Today about 80% of the data in any business is unstructured, as majority of them are human-generated. Most of the sectors, be it healthcare or manufacturing or any government agency, falls in this bracket where-in their entire business operations are dependent on human-generated data sets. This leads to a greater challenge for them to analyze and interpret this data.

For instance, in a healthcare facility, patient data is not available in a single form, rather distributed against several forms like vital signs, lab results, patient lifestyle data, physician notes, various x-ray imagery, and many more. Similar is the case in a smart city. The connected devices are generating traffic data, sanitization data, water management data, etc. and all of these are being generated across multiple locations.

Here, unstructured data solutions will enable organizations with a ground-breaking platform that will not only allow them to stream-line data sets, but will also help them to assemble data from multiple locations from the edge, core, or cloud, at any given point.

It provides them with the flexibility of a software-defined architecture with accelerated hardware innovations to harness the value of data and undertake projects such as smart cities, advanced healthcare analysis, automated manufacturing, and many more.

The solutions collect all the available unstructured data sets in one place and process them to derive the maximum out of it to fulfill the customized needs and requirements of the end consumers.

DQ: Could you share a brief about Dell Technologies’ new offering, the Dell EMC PowerScale?

Amit Luthra: Dell EMC PowerScale is a family of storage systems engineered with industry-leading storage software and server hardware to set a new industry standard for organizations to capture and capitalize on unstructured data, such as documents, images, videos, and social media content.

This storage solution runs on the next generation of OneFS, the operating system best known for powering Dell EMC Isilon. The PowerScale family features new 1U PowerEdge-based PowerScale nodes and existing Isilon all-flash, hybrid, and archive nodes running the PowerScale OneFS 9.0 operating system.

Moreover, it delivers the performance that customers would expect, depending on various workloads, be it of analytics, digital media, healthcare, or life science etc. This all-new Dell EMC PowerScale not only allows organizations to unlock the potential of their unstructured data but also enables them to make better business decisions, ultimately reading to better RoI.

The formidable platforms form the foundation of storing unstructured data and software-defined architecture, which will help our customers to easily handle today’s data challenges without losing sight of the future. Hence, we are excited to launch this new offering and look forward to the positive results it will lead to.

DQ: What are the benefits customers can avail on basis of deploying Dell EMC PowerScale solutions?

Amit Luthra: Dell Technologies has always been at the forefront in delivering best-in-class innovative technology to its customers. In our attempt to further strengthen this commitment, we have launched this new solution for unstructured data -- Dell EMC PowerScale, keeping in mind the rising concerns of businesses to successfully derive insights from the explosion of unstructured data.

It is a modern infrastructure platform, engineered and built from the ground up with superior technology and expertise to address the challenges of the data era.

Additionally, customers can deploy PowerScale across edge, core, and cloud environments, empowering organizations to capture data, wherever it’s being generated, at scale. It also enables them to streamline their storage infrastructure by consolidating large-scale unstructured data assets, thus eliminating silos of storage.

PowerScale can start small and grow to a massive petabyte-scale, all while ensuring simple deployment, making it easy-to-use. It features including, scalability without disruption, intelligent automation, increasing resiliency and efficiency allows customers process hundreds of terabytes of raw data without disruption.

PowerScale provides an exemplary analysis of data sets, helping them meet their data management requirements. At the current time when businesses are working with flat IT budgets, this solution is ideal.