FINAL WORD
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Enabling smart data
management to extract
business value
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is in the business of delivering breakthrough
technologies helping customers transform industries, markets and lives.
Intelligent CIO talks to Marc Waters, Managing Director UK, Ireland, Middle East
and Africa, HPE, about the future of data management, operating at the Edge
and the pace of technical innovation.
What are the expectations of data
management in the next 12 months?
Data is vital for every single organisation,
so companies are now looking at their data
management platforms and strategies and
considering how to move data. I think the
expectations of data management are surrounding
how you move data from the Edge to the cloud.
We see what we call data gravity which means that
the size of the data centre is so huge that it becomes
hard to move data. This is particularly when you start
applying intelligence to video, for example. What
you don’t want is for your data centre to get so huge
that gravity holds data back from being moved to a
different location to analyse it before moving it back.
Firstly, it becomes slower and then the cost of maths
of doing it becomes prohibitive so we see the need to
analyse data at the point of leave and at the point of
action where there are large sets and then you manage
and move back only the data that you need into
your cloud-enabled environment, rather than moving
everything back.
So, your data management platforms enabling
that is really important. So, what we consider now is
how intelligence has become embedded in the very
fabric of a storage environment to enable smart
data management.
We have a piece of software called HPE Infosight which
looks at where data’s being pulled from, how it’s being
used, what the best way of managing that data is
in a much more automated fashion. My expectation
is that intelligence will continue to transform data
management from the Edge to the cloud.
How important is operating at the Edge?
I’d say it’s vital. I’d say it’s non-negotiable. Right
now, a lot of the data sets we work with or that other
companies work with are getting bigger, however, they
are still nowhere near the size they’re going to be in
even three years’ time.
At the moment, there’s a lot of fibre and a lot of
connectivity so it quite often makes sense to move your
data to your compute. As data sets get bigger, as data
gravity takes hold, the cost maths equation completely
changes and you start to move your compute to your
data – that is operating at the Edge. And then we get
to things like autonomous driving for example – if
you’re in a car that’s being autonomously driven,
where do you want the decisions to be made by that
car and by that AI? You’d want it to be made right at
the car’s location.
Do you think businesses are aware of the
implications of using Smart Technologies?
I think people are maturing to it now. There was
certainly a period where it was cool to say you were
going ‘cloud-first’ and then you ask what they mean
by that and what they’re solving from that, and people
find it quite hard to answer.
I’ve seen two approaches, I’ve seen scenarios where
companies will ask what a public cloud would offer
them, what’s good about it and where the value lies.
They ask what’s good about their environment, what
workloads they can put there to extract value from
their business.
We’ve got very peaky workloads where the demand is
unsure, yet there is huge value to be derived from that.
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