The AI Edge towards Analysing Unstructured Data

Authored by Nikhil Madan, General Manager (India and South-East Asia), Unstructured Data Solutions, Dell EMC

The detonation of unstructured data is opening doors for organizations to unlock their capabilities towards effective data solutions that enable digital transformation. Many organizations today are poised to accelerate business outcomes with powerful, NextGen unstructured data applications in areas such as data analytics and artificial intelligence. Organizations are in the race to find newer ways that enable faster decisions, and insights from customer needs, behaviours and profitability. The biggest challenges lie on “how to harness unstructured data” especially with a surge in digital and social media space. Organizations are keen to garner a complete-end-to-end view of their customers, and their ability to utilize unstructured data in a reasonable and realistic manner for business outcomes. 

There are many emerging solutions that give meaning to unstructured data. The ability lies in transforming it into something that is usable and actionable. Some of the technological advancements that aid organizations to converge structured and unstructured data to overcome barriers include: 

• Text Mining and Natural Language Processing (NLP): Effectively used by organizations to tap unstructured data to analyse customer feedback including emails, blogs, comments and queries, that extract meaningful insights. 

• Artificial Intelligence: An algorithm-based approach as opposed to standard predictive analytics techniques. 

• Machine Learning: Enables processing of huge volumes of customer-centric data, i.e. calls, email and chat. 

• High-Performance Computing: Organizations have moved from their traditional computing systems to process huge volume of unstructured data coupled with velocity demands. As the algorithms increasingly become complex in nature, the need for execution tilts towards higher computing power to be effective. 

Organizations are also being pressed to limit capital equipment purchases and contain IT operating costs. Despite this environment organizations need to manage the growing volumes of unstructured data for business efficiency. 

In such a complex environment, it is critical that companies be able to rely on specific product environment. Over the last few years, Dell EMC have established a strong partnership to help organizations fast-track their AI initiatives. 

The Dell EMC Isilon addresses these challenges by delivering extreme performance and efficiency to support demanding unstructured data workloads. Additionally, it goes the extra mile to offer organizations a holistic data view across file and cloud storage, and allows end users to locate, use and extract value from their file-based data wherever it resides. 

Dell EMC Isilon is a proven solution to handle unstructured data prevalent across different workflows. The Isilon storage architecture automatically aligns application needs with performance, capacity, and economics. As performance and capacity demands increase, both can be scaled simply and non-disruptively, allowing applications and users to continue working. 

Dell EMC Isilon OneFS operating system powers all Dell EMC Isilon scale-out NAS storage solutions and features¹: 

• A high degree of scalability, with grow-as-you-go flexibility 

• High efficiency to reduce costs 

• Multi-protocol support to maximize operational flexibility

• Enterprise data protection and resiliency

• Robust security options 

Dell EMC and NVIDIA are at the forefront of AI providing the technology to help organizations accelerate their AI initiatives. The duo offers flexibility and informed choice across an extensive portfolio that provide the foundation for successful AI solutions which drive the development of advanced DL software frameworks, deliver massively parallel compute in the form of NVIDIA Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) for parallel model training, and scale-out file systems to support the concurrency, performance, and Petabyte scale of the unstructured image and video data sets. With this technology integration, Dell EMC Isilon All-Flash scale-out NAS storage delivers the scale (up to 33 PB), performance (up to 540 GB/s), and concurrency (up to millions of connections) to eliminate the storage I/O bottleneck keeping the most data hungry compute layers fed to accelerate AI workloads at scale. 

Recognizing the critical benefits of unstructured data, Dell Technologies have already made significant investment in research and development to solve complex challenges.

Technology advancements in managing unstructured data analytics are aiding organizations across industries to understand customer DNA. 

AI and data management have served as two rising pillars of analytics. However, with increased computing-power and advanced techniques, unstructured data is emerging as the third pillar.