ioFABRIC Applies AI to Minimize Data Storage Costs

Every time an IT organization adds another cloud, container or type of virtual machine to an environment, it exacerbates an already complex set of storage management challenges. To help relieve that headache, ioFABRIC has updated a data fabric spanning all those platforms to include artificial intelligence (AI) technologies that automatically identify the lowest cost storage option available that meets the performance requirements defined in a policy set by an IT administrator.

Andrew Flint, vice president of marketing for ioFABRIC, says rather than having to rely on storage administrators to figure all that out for each application workload, ioFABRIC Vicinity 3.0 now makes it possible to apply machine learning algorithms and other forms of AI to automate storage cost optimization across multiple platform options.

“Basically, you can set it and forget it,” says Flint.

Flint says ioFABRIC also includes tools for detecting ransomware attacks as well as employing snapshots and replication in a way that makes data continuously available across multiple sites. That capability eliminates the need to manage specific recovery time and point objectives, says Flint.

In general, Flint says, ioFABRIC provides a vendor-neutral approach to managing storage that prevents IT organizations from ever having to be locked into a single storage system. In addition, Flint notes that ioFABRIC has already been tested to work against emerging storage technologies such as NVMe hosts and 3D X Point non-volatile memory that are expected to become more prevalent in 2018.

Organizations that have dedicated storage management specialists are becoming increasingly rare. These days, IT generalists are employing higher levels of automation to manage compute, storage and even networking tasks. The challenge now is figuring out a way to apply a common means for automating those functions across as many heterogeneous systems as possible.