Vighnesh: How Gen AI is impacting the data surge in India, especially in terms of necessitating advanced storage solutions to accommodate escalating data volumes and improve scalability?
Sameer Bhatia: Generative AI actively generates new data, contributing to a rapid increase in data volume. As Gen AI applications generate more rich media content, the data growth will become exponential. On top of that, with Gen AI, businesses and organisations will be required to retain source data, AI model versions and inference outputs longer for regulatory purposes and to find the value in previously untapped proprietary data.
The success of AI fundamentally relies on data, which fuels machine learning and enables precise predictions. Larger and more comprehensive data sets are believed to enhance AI outcomes. As the value of data rises, there will be an increased need to store it for longer periods. IDC predicted 394ZB data growth by 2028, double in size between 5 years. This projection does not include the potential growth from multimodality large-language models (LLM).
This transformation will significantly impact the data landscape in India, driving additional exabyte growth and emphasising the need for advanced storage solutions to effectively manage and retain this data. As data volumes expanding rapidly, existing storage will soon be inadequate. Organisations must invest in upgrading the data storage infrastructure to keep pace with this exponential data growth while addressing challenges related to scale, total cost of ownership and sustainability.
Vighnesh: How is the rise of AI and the need for real-time, personalised applications driving the demand for hybrid infrastructure and storage solutions both in the cloud and at the edge?
Sameer Bhatia: As AI going everywhere, storage will also be needed everywhere to handle and retrieve massive datasets that feed AI models, turning them into accurate and reliable tools. While the cloud has already been the epicentre of AI progress, the rise of real-time and personalised use cases is shifting AI applications and services to edge and endpoint.
The cloud, which relies on hard drives for 90% of its storage, provides the flexibility for businesses to explore and validate innovative AI inference services and applications. Cloud environments will continue to train foundational models and support many compute-intensive workloads originating at the edge. As data growth from local devices worldwide, coupled with the need to maintain data sovereignty, there is also an increasing shift of latency-sensitive AI applications to the edge and endpoint.
Hybrid infrastructure which combines the best of both edge and cloud, meets the growing demands for immediate data processing and expansive data storage for AI and real-time and personalised applications. It allows for flexible data management strategies that optimize for speed, cost and scalability.
Vighnesh: How does Seagate’s role in product innovation within the storage industry contribute to redefining operational efficiency, performance benchmarks, and the overall landscape of data storage and management in India?
Sameer Bhatia: As data becomes the new gold in the AI era, enterprises and individuals are tasked to scale their data storage infrastructure to effectively stored and utilized to enable insights and ensure data integrity, all while maintaining better control of TCO and sustainability goals. Areal density plays a crucial role in maximizing storage efficiency while addressing these challenges.
While adding more drives may help when scaling data centre capacity, it is not necessarily the most efficient approach. The more drives that are added, the larger capital investment required, there is also greater impact on operational cost and natural resources. Advancing areal density is the simplest and most elegant way. A denser hard drive allows for more storage within the same slot or data centre, increasing data capacity while consuming less power and helping achieve sustainability goals.
Seagate Mozaic 3+ platform represents a significant breakthrough in areal density advancement. It incorporates Seagate’s unique implementation of HAMR, along with a collection of other breakthrough nanoscales technologies, to deliver mass-capacity storage at unprecedented areal densities of 3TB per disk and beyond. The platform realizes substantial gains in storage TCO by lowering acquisition and operational costs and contributes sustainability goals.
For an example, with an existing installation of a 100PB, upgrading from Seagate Exos X10 (10TB) to Exos Mozaic 3+ 30TB hard drives results in 60% space and power savings. Alternatively, data centres would realize triple the capacity (300PB) if they choose to keep the space and power constant. This consolidation leads to a significant savings in operational expenditure, including power, cooling, CPU, RAM and floor space costs.
Seagate Mozaic 3+ signifies more than just a technological advance, it is a forward-thinking solution that empowers cloud and enterprise data centres in India and globally to meet the requirement of scale, TCO and sustainability and reinforces hard drives’ vital role in data centres environment in the years to come.
Vighnesh: What is Seagate’s plan for AI in terms of unlocking new possibilities and impacting the creation and application of new technologies and markets according to the “AI Applications” section?
Sameer Bhatia: There is no doubt that storage is the key to capturing the full potential of AI. Just as AI upholds the future of technology and innovation, data upholds AI, and storage upholds data.
Seagate Mozaic 3+ platform enables substantial gains in storage capacity without increasing the footprint has revolutionizes data storage and management by offering improved efficiency and lower operational costs, paving the way for future advancements in storage technology tailored to meet the demands of increasing data volumes in the AI era.
Seagate is committed to continuing to advance storage architecture to help organisations stay ahead in the AI race, thereby driving innovation and business success. Our focus remains on further increasing capacity per disk, enhancing data reliability and performance and reducing environmental impact to support the AI-driven demand for mass capacity with more efficient and cost-effective data storage solutions. Looking ahead, Mozaic 3+ storage technology will also support various applications, spanning enterprise, edge, NAS and VIA markets. Our roadmap aims to achieve 4TB+ and 5TB+ per platter in the coming years and it is already showing great internal results in the labs.
Sameer Bhatia, Director of Asia Pacific Consumer Business Group and Country Manager for India & SAARC
