Digital transformation has always, at its core, been about leveraging technology to improve the human experience. Today, it’s inspiring to see analytics and AI being used to augment people’s creativity, capabilities, and experiences.
But as innovation ramps up, so does data and our demands on it. More than ever before, speed is key to these initiatives. And when there’s speed, incredible possibilities follow. Here’s a look at how three organizations are using AI and analytics to change the world (and change lives) through groundbreaking innovations with Pure Storage® FlashBlade®.
Augmenting Human Capabilities with Intelligence from the Air
Smart Digital Sales and Holding GmbH (SDSH) leverages unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), remote sensing, digitization, big data, analytics, and AI in its drone applications and services, applying insights from its drone imaging to areas including agriculture and forestry, surveying, insurance, public safety, and disaster control—to name a few.
As SDSH’s high-end drones go about their work, they generate and record unstructured data from lasers, thermal imaging, and cameras in flight at a rate of 50MB of image data per second. Because a single drone flight takes around an hour, it can produce up to 180GB of data. In total, the company’s flights generate nearly one petabyte of image and measurement data every year.
Internally, SDSH uses analytics and AI for pattern recognition to turn this rich data into actionable insights. In particular, the company’s solutions help clients pull off major feats with incredible efficiency and accuracy—many contributing to human safety and well-being.
When there’s this much at stake—from evaluating environmental disaster scenarios to identifying defects or maintenance on traffic routes and power grids—a high-performance IT infrastructure is critical. While clients rely on analytics from SDSH to make the world a safer place, SDSH relies on FlashBlade to deliver the high levels of performance needed for its most complex analytics and AI.
See how SDSH delivers breakthrough innovations using the fast storage capabilities of FlashBlade.
Speeding Botanical Research to Further Environmental Conservation
Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore is a top-rated, research-intensive public university in Singapore that houses the incredibly impressive High Performance Computing Centre (HPCC). This large-scale computing facility processes data for projects ranging from genome sequencing to weather analysis.
It’s a workhorse. At any point in time, NTU Singapore runs at least a million input/output operations per second (IOPS) and up to eight different workloads. Case in point: A project to catalog botanical diversity aims to analyze the genomes of over 1,000 plant species. Not only does the data help researchers studying environmental conservation and climate change, but it could also reveal important insights into plants’ potential for medical and pharmaceutical use.
NTU Singapore’s teams have been comparing DNA sequences for overlaps and predicting the genes in the sequences, piece by piece. Yet, with over a trillion possible combinations, genome assembly is one of the most computationally intensive processes the HPCC supports. To put a dent in their work, the team needed a faster analytics platform—one that could make 20 years of work happen in months.
With FlashBlade, NTU Singapore can perform concurrent analyses running up to four jobs in parallel. As a result, the team has already reached its halfway point after just 18 months—and they’re just scratching the surface of the possibilities.
Using Advanced Analytics to Power the Fight for Global Health
Within McMaster University, the McArthur Lab oversees a global database that curates data, models, and algorithms associated with superbugs—all with the goal of battling pressing concerns such as antimicrobial resistance or the emergence of new coronaviruses.
The lab’s database processes 600 to 1,000 superbugs each day, yet sequencing a single pathogen from one patient can take up to three hours. That was daunting, given that there could be hundreds of thousands of pathogens to process at any given time. To harness the power of PacBio—a new generation of gene sequencing systems—to speed up this work, the McArthur Lab needed more powerful underlying storage.
The lab turned to FlashBlade, a unified fast file and object (UFFO) storage platform. FlashBlade empowers the McArthur Lab team to seamlessly handle the highly complex processes associated with genomic data sets. As a result, data that formerly took up to two days to analyze can now be processed in three hours or less—generating rapid insights that have the potential to save lives.
Real-world Innovation with FlashBlade from Pure Storage
Over and over, we’re seeing firsthand how FlashBlade enables organizations to simplify their operations and leverage advanced analytics and AI to rapidly generate new insights and transform legacy infrastructure. For analytics, in particular, FlashBlade offers:
- Support for various analytics tools, from ingest to visualization, to help you gain real-time results at any scale, for both structured and unstructured data.
- An emphasis on simplicity, disaggregating compute from storage to provide an efficient platform for hosting multiple analytics applications, concurrently supporting large user populations, and easily scaling with data growth.
- Fast object storage, allowing cloud applications to run with exceptional consistency and performance.
- Pure’s Evergreen™ subscription model, simplifying purchasing and upgrades and freeing budget for areas critical for analytics (such as compute), either locally or in the cloud.
The results shared above are inspiring—and they’re only a few examples of what innovators can do with the right resources in place. FlashBlade fast file and object storage goes beyond what traditional scale-out NAS can do, providing massive throughput and parallelism with consistent multidimensional performance.
Learn how an easy-to-deploy, high-performance, agile data experience with Pure FlashBlade can supercharge the delivery of real-time, modern analytics and AI.
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