PA Consulting’s IT transformation expert, Andrew Larssen, discusses the advantages of computational storage and why organisations should use it.
Handling data at the network edge is not a new idea, but it is becoming more important as organisations grapple with growing data volumes and the need to process information quickly.
Computational storage is, however, a relatively new way to tackle that challenge.
Andrew says: “We are seeing a gradual increase in capabilities – it’s not revolution, but evolutionary changes. As it becomes more mainstream, we’ll see the technology being used more widely, in pre-processing, compression, encryption and deduplication, or searching data, rather than having to load the data into a CPU.”
Commenting on storage, Andrew says: “Storage is cheap at the moment, and there are applications with a lot of repetition, especially when you move to ‘data lake’ quantities. So if you can do compression and deduplication [in the storage layer], you will see big gains from it.”
Andrew expects to see uptake of computational storage by streaming services, for video compression, and content distribution networks (CDNs). He also predicts growth in database accelerators, for Postgres and MySQL.
“The technology is still niche,” he adds. “Unless it is fundamental to your business, you’re probably not going to deploy it. It might be cheaper to double the amount of general compute you are using. When that is unachievable, that is when you need to think outside the box.”
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