Struggling to meet AI’s data demands? Start with an AI-ready data infrastructure

As the world embraces artificial intelligence (AI), data has emerged as the most critical asset in driving innovation and efficiency. But true AI readiness starts with data readiness. Enterprises across industries are stepping up efforts to improve both data quality and processing efficiency to give their business a competitive advantage.

However, to unlock the full value of organizational data and power the expanding ecosystem of AI-driven technologies, data must be well-organized, accessible, and available in real time. As carriers of data, storage systems have become critical infrastructure for enterprises. The capacity, performance, and stability of storage systems will determine how well enterprises can leverage their data to achieve the intelligence-digitalization transformation they require.

Meeting data demands of AI-driven technologies

As data demands grow more complex, it has become increasingly challenging to ensure that storage systems can meet these evolving needs. “Organizations often face three major hurdles when it comes to AI—unpredictable model training and application development timelines, the lack of unified management and scheduling of data assets, and underutilized AI cluster resources,” says Michael Qiu, President of Huawei Global Data Storage Marketing & Solution Sales Dept at Huawei.

To address these issues, Huawei and Roland Berger introduced the concept of Future-proof Data Storage Power, which leverages the AI-ready data infrastructure to process and manage the ever-increasing volumes of data scale in the digital-intelligent era, simplifying and accelerating the adoption of AI applications.

While traditional storage emphasizes performance, reliability, and data paradigms, Future-proof Data Storage Power adds three new dimensions—scalability, data fabric, and sustainability—to build future-oriented AI storage that powers data awakening.

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How can enterprises build Future-proof Data Storage Power?

For enterprises striving to build Future-proof Data Storage Power, deploying AI-ready data infrastructure has become essential to improving strategic competitiveness. This advanced storage architecture creates a powerful data ecosystem to support the demands of AI workloads, delivers millisecond-level latency, and ensures seamless data flow across applications and environments.

Many organizations are already reaping the benefits. KocSistem, a well-known IT service provider in Türkiye, adopted Huawei’s all-flash high-end storage solution and achieved a 33% boost in storage performance—meeting critical requirements for high performance, reliability, and stability while enhancing the customer experience. Similarly, the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center in Poland built a high-reliability, high-performance HPC platform using Huawei’s high-performance storage, unlocking the full potential of its high-value scientific research data.

Building a future-proof data storage solution

Aligned with the vision of Future-proof Data Storage Power, at its 4th Huawei Innovative Data Infrastructure Forum, Huawei launched the AI Data Lake Solution to help enterprises overcome the limitations of traditional data infrastructure and deploy AI services more efficiently. “The solution provides key capabilities including data aggregation, model enablement, and data mobility, as well as extreme performance, to help enterprises break the limitations of traditional data infrastructure and deploy AI services more efficiently,” says Qiu.

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From data storage to data management and resource management, the AI Data Lake is made up of products like the OceanStor A series high-performance AI storage for large AI model training, the OceanStor Pacific All-Flash Scale-Out Storage for data analysis, and the OceanProtect Backup Storage for data backup. All of these solutions empower enterprises to fully leverage their data assets, streamline AI workflows, and accelerate transformation across diverse application scenarios.

Qiu takes the healthcare sector as an example, whereby a hospital in China partnered with Huawei to develop a pathology AI model based on the AI Data Lake Solution, reducing data preparation time by 80%. “The AI Data Lake Solution also supported the pathology AI model to cut diagnosis and report generation to just 15 seconds,” he says. With Huawei’s OceanStor Pacific scale-out storage delivering 90 GB/s throughput and enabling retrieval of 1,000 pathology slides per second, the hospital improved both diagnostic speed and accuracy.

“To stay competitive in this AI era, AI-ready data infrastructure is no longer optional, but has become a critical necessity,” says Qiu. “Our mission in building Future-proof Data Storage Power is to help all industries fully embrace the AI era, unlocking the value of every bit of data.”

Interviewee:

Michael Qiu

President, Global Data Storage Marketing & Solution Sales Dept, Huawei

• Over 25 years at Huawei and extensive experience in industry solutions for Enterprise and Carrier ICT transformation.
• Provide consulting service to storage at the executive level for digital transformation and ICT strategy landing.