Unstructured Data

While it’s easy to query or run a report on the structured data within a relational database, extracting value from unstructured data is far more difficult. A simple content search on textual data may return some interesting information, but nothing with the depth and the comprehensiveness of traditional analytics performed on structured content. Yet unstructured data makes up roughly 80% of an organization’s entire data set, and the volume of unstructured data tends to double each year. To exploit the value in unstructured data and use it as a competitive differentiator, organizations need tools to perform far more sophisticated and all-encompassing analysis on these unique data sets.

Artificial intelligence (AI) offers some answers. AI tools have become extremely adept at analyzing text for meaning and classifying it accurately, and machines can sift through thousands or millions of records much faster than humans can. AI can evaluate tone and sentiment in textual content and use predictive models to anticipate likely outcomes. 

But running and managing AI and deep learning (DL) technologies requires storage solutions with massive parallel file I/O, and traditional solutions simply can’t keep up. As the number of concurrent computer threads grow, bottlenecks become an issue as storage performance suffers and data-starved GPUs and CPUs become underutilized.

As the #1 family of scale-out network-attached storage systems in the industry, the Dell EMC Isilon distributed file system products provide a highly effective and cost-efficient way to manage unstructured data. With options for all-flash, hybrid storage and archive NAS platforms, Dell EMC Isilon makes it easy to scale and manage storage environments, no matter how large your unstructured data sets become.

The Dell EMC Isilon product family includes:

• Dell EMC Isilon All-Flash - powered by the Isilon OneFS operating system, this all-flash, scale-out storage architecture speeds access to massive amounts of unstructured data while dramatically minimizing cost and complexity. A highly dense design contains four nodes within a single 4U chassis, delivering extreme performance and efficiency for most demanding unstructured data applications and workloads.
• Dell EMC Isilon Hybrid – using a highly versatile but simple scale-out storage architecture, Isilon hybrid storage provides remarkable flexibility while striking a balance between large capacity and high-performance storage.
• Dell EMC Isilon Archive – Dell EMC offers two highly efficient and massively scalable archive solutions, including an ideal active archive storage that combines near-primary accessibility with value and ease-of-use, and a deep archive storage that safeguards data efficiently for long-term retention.

As storage solutions and the enterprise IT landscape continued to change rapidly, IT teams are under pressure to introduce new technologies like Dell EMC Isilon while continuing to manage existing servers, storage and networking with increasingly tighter budgets.

Dell EMC enterprise-class support can help to relieve the pressure by enabling IT teams to offload both routine and critical support tasks. Dell EMC ProSupport Enterprise Suite provides access to a team of Dell EMC experts to reduce IT complexity and enable IT teams to focus on other strategic priorities.

The ProSupport Enterprise Suite helps organizations:

• Optimize critical systems and improve IT performance and stability while freeing up staff to innovate the business.
• Minimize disruptions with 24/7 access to specialized support engineers who can quickly diagnose issues and provide personalized guidance to keep problems from impacting the business.
• Keep hardware and software running smoothly through proactive and preventive technologies that keep IT teams ahead of issues.

What is unstructured data?

Unstructured data is essentially any data that isn’t contained within a database. Unstructured data may include text, email, social media posts, presentations, images, video files and even application logs.

What is the value of unstructured data?

Because it makes up approximately 80% of an organization’s entire data set, it’s believed that unstructured data holds vast amounts of insight and intelligence about the organization, its customers and partners and its marketplace.

What is the challenge of unstructured data?

Unstructured data is, by its very nature, highly difficult to analyze and extract actionable intelligence from. And because unstructured data is doubling roughly every year, the cost of storing it and managing it can increase rapidly as well.

Why is all-flash storage ideally suited to manage unstructured data?

The artificial intelligence (AI) tools that are best suited to analyzing unstructured data require extreme performance capabilities that only an all-flash storage environment can deliver. Without a high-speed, high-performing storage solution, AI/analytics jobs will quickly create bottlenecks that slow the pace of innovation and cause other systems to be underutilized.