Why You Should Embrace the Data Storage Renaissance

What keeps us on earth? What keeps the earth rotating around the sun? Gravity, you say.

Data also has “gravity”.  a16z partner Peter Levine said it in on a recent a16z Podcast: The Storage Renaissance. “Data has to live somewhere and be made accessible. It might not be sexy, but storage and cloud computing is what makes the world go round.”

At ActionIQ, we help technologists evolve the foundation of their data infrastructure. Today, most enterprises move data manually from one silo to another and then combine them in order to conduct analysis. This takes significant time and effort, which decreases the value of data. However, we have now reached the storage renaissance, which solves the fundamental issues of big data storage: performance, cost and scalability.

It makes sense. Computers wouldn’t be valuable without the capacity to store and retrieve data. In fact, without storage, we’d have no data, databases, or analytics. That’s why any company competing on data, should listen to this podcast to understand how the future of storage will impact their business.

Storage is no longer IT’s problem. Storage is critical for marketers, analysts, and technologists alike—and for marketing applications.

But storage is often the most difficult component to get right, especially as big data rapidly evolves. The good news is that the storage renaissance offers a transformation for how computing and business applications will work in the near future.

What exactly is the storage renaissance? Here’s how the a16z Podcast speakers Peter Levine, Haoyuan Li, and Mike Matchett describe it:

• As new data streams emerge (e.g. sensors collect data from self-driving cars), so much new data will be retrieved that we’ll have a different order of magnitude. In-memory processing—where data lives in the memory—is the solution.
• As a result, memory architecture will evolve. The new frontier is in-memory storage, which is faster and more affordable than today’s solutions, including SSD or HDD.
• Machine learning is an artificial intelligence (AI) technique that enables computers to learn without being explicitly programmed. To unlock the power of machine learning, computation must be done in-memory, accelerating analysis on iterative data sets in a shorter time frame.

Big data, in-memory storage and AI are the pillars of ActionIQ. We believe that customer data is a company’s most valuable asset. To unlock the value of this data, companies must own their own data, process it faster and make it more accessible to the business.  Read our recent blog post for a quick recap on the evolution of big data.