Robots, Drones and Self-Driving Cars: Emerging Use Cases for Data Center SSDs from Core to Edge

Humans are generating and consuming data like never before. Across the world, and in every industry, data never sleeps. Every minute:

• 66K Instagram pics are uploaded

• $500,000 worth of Venmo or AWS transactions are processed

• 6 million Google searches are performed

While we have been producing more data year-over-year, usage has changed in the last few years. Now, instead of producing it in temporary caches and then overwriting it, we are storing this new data at unprecedented rates. Most of that data will be stored in the cloud or at the edge¹.

Solidigm has identified three emerging use cases spanning core and edge that demonstrate how density and endurance requirements are shaping up in real-world applications.

For advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS), commonly referred to as autonomous driving, a massive amount of data logging and detection work needs to take place. SSDs are the right choice here given their superior shock and vibration specifications and their capabilities. Bumps and road imperfections demand this type of edge-storage application.

Robotic systems, drones, and satellite image analysis create real-time data. For example, John Deere offers a See & Spray^TM feature for agricultural use that captures 20 images per second per crop while the vehicle is moving. These images are then compared against 1 million stored images to understand the area that needs to be sprayed. This is assisted by an onboard camera capturing images every moment, accounting for 6TB/day of storage needed per sprayer². 

At the core data centers, object storage is the solution for unstructured data. Imagine a user needing to expand to cover a 5PB data pool. Dell EMC’s F600 or F900 systems are excellent installations to address that. The Dell F900 can house almost a petabyte of storage. According to Dell’s own field trace data analysis, they could extract 14 years of drive life from some of the deployed D5-P5316 drives³. 

There is an increasing need for dedicated swim lanes for storage use cases. Which SSD you choose for your application will depend on your target drive writes per day (DWPD) as well as your workload; write-heavy, read-heavy, or some mixture of both. One size does not fit all, and the best results will come from weighing multiple factors as you plan your storage solution build.

For more detail about these use cases and how to choose the right storage solution for the application you want to run, visit our Insights page for a more in-depth version of this article written by Tahmid Rahman, Data Center Director of Product Marketing at Solidigm.

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References:

[1] https://www.red-gate.com/blog/database-development/whats-the-real-story-behind-the-explosive-growth-of-data

[2] https://www.deere.com/en/sprayers/see-spray-ultimate/

[3]  https://www.storagereview.com/review/dell-powerscale-benefitting-from-qlc-ssd-economics-and-performance