Data-intensive workloads: A prime candidate for unified data storage

As workloads grow increasingly demanding, more and more organizations find their infrastructures straining to keep up. How can you balance on-premises storage with cloud workloads, data security with data availability, and performance with cost?

In a recent InfoBrief (sponsored by NetApp), Modern Data-Intensive Workloads Drive the Need to Consider Unifying Storage Infrastructure, IDC looks at unified data storage to handle that delicate balancing act.

“Unified data storage can benefit modern workloads, including AI and analytics, by helping reduce infrastructure complexity and providing a consistent model for data management, security, and governance.”

—Carol Sliwa, Research Director, Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and Technologies Group, IDC

So, why is unified data storage right for data-intensive workloads?

Traditional storage systems were developed for traditional enterprise applications. That’s great, but what happens when you have more workloads of different types, including increasingly data-intensive workloads like generative AI (GenAI)?

Unified data storage provides the unified control that you need to manage all workloads—any data, any place – without silos. That means you have the flexibility to choose the workloads that you need in the location that works best for your business.

Now that you have the flexibility to store any data, any place, you might be wondering how you do it without massive complexity and costs.

Unified data storage streamlines data management with a single storage OS for all your data. And with unified control, you have complete visibility into your environment to spot opportunities for optimization so that you can reduce costs.

With data-intensive workloads, scalability is everything. Let’s look again at GenAI as an example. With GenAI applications, you need the scalability to support rapid data processing and analytics. Anything less, and you’re not reaching the full potential of GenAI.

Unified data storage solutions are designed to scale effortlessly, without having to overhaul your infrastructure. When you can store any data any place with unified control, you future-proof your storage investment and stay ahead as your workloads become increasingly data-intensive.

At NetApp, we have expanded what it means to be truly unified—beyond just block and file protocols. The new way to unified means a single operating environment for any data type, workload, or application, with the flexibility and consolidated control that you need for intelligent, data-driven decision-making.

Explore NetApp^® unified data storage solutions to see how you can build a flexible, efficient, and scalable infrastructure to power even the most data-intensive workloads.