GenAI, LlMS, And Agents Are Transforming Storage
Blocks&Files, Wednesday, January 22nd, 2025
GenAI is washing through the IT world like water flooding across a landscape when a dam breaches. It is being viewed by many suppliers as an epoch-changing event, similar to the arrival of the internet, and feared by some as a potential dotcom bubble-like event.
Be that as it may, IT storage is being strongly altered by AI, from the memory-storage interface upward, as the rising tide of GenAI lifts all storage boats. A look at the storage world reveals six ways GenAI is transforming the world of block, file, and object storage.
At its lowest level, where storage systems talk to a server's memory, the arrival of NVIDIA GPUs with their high-bandwidth memory (HBM) has put a premium on file storage system and array controller processors and their DRAM just getting out of the way, and letting NVMe flash drives connect directly to a GPU's memory to transfer data at high speed using remote direct memory access and the GPUDirect protocol.