MinIO Unveils AIStor: A Potential Object Storage Game-Changer
SALT LAKE CITY — A recent survey of over 650 IT leaders by cloud object-storage company MiniO found that “Object storage is the dominant storage type today.” To be precise,70% of their data is in object storage. That’s not just MinIO blowing its own horn. Unstructured data fuels AI. That’s before you add video, audio, images, log files, telemetry data, and time series data.
So, to address this need, at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America, MinIO launched AIStor. This is the next step in the evolution of MinIO’s Enterprise Object Store. Its mission is to explore strange new exascale data and to boldly deal with AI workloads’ exascale data challenges where no storage system has gone before.
At AIStor’s heart is a new Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 application programming interface (API) called promptObject. This innovative feature allows users to interact with unstructured objects, like engaging with a large language model (LLM), effectively shifting the storage paradigm from “PUT and GET” to “PUT and PROMPT.”
What that means In practice, the company claims developers can build applications with promptObject through function calling with additional logic. This can be combined with chained functions with multiple objects addressed at the same time. For example, when querying a stored MRI scan, one can ask, “Where is the abnormality?” or “Which region shows the most inflammation?” and promptObject will show it.
AIStor also now supports S3 over Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA). This enables users to leverage their high-speed Ethernet investments for fast S3 object access. Since speed is essential for AI applications, this is a big deal.
MinIO’s New AIHub
This release is not just for AWS users. In AIStor, MiniO is also introducing AIHub. This is a private Hugging Face API-compatible repository. It enables enterprises to create their own data and model repositories on private clouds or air-gapped environments, significantly reducing the risk of sensitive data or model leaks.
To help you manage this updated program, the release also includes a completely redesigned user interface with extensive capabilities for Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Information Lifecycle Management, all accessible through a single pane of glass.
If you’re using AMD EPYC processors, either in-house or on a cloud, MiniO has optimized AIStor to take advantage of this chip family’s high core density and storage performance. Additionally, MinIO has partnered with Intel to serve as the core object store for Intel Tiber AI Cloud, an end-to-end AI development platform.
AB Periasamy, co-founder and CEO at MinIO, emphasized the significance of this release, stating, “The launch of AIStor is an important milestone for MinIO. Our object store is the standard in the private cloud, and the features we have built into AIStor reflect the needs of our most demanding and ambitious customers”.
As AI continues to reshape technology, MinIO’s AIStor stands poised to play a crucial role in enabling enterprises to harness AI and ML initiatives’ full potential. In a business game where speed is all, MiniO AIStor may well reach warp speeds.