With three times higher capacity than the current 4G standard, 5G will generate exciting possibilities for the industry, including the delivery of on-site live event experiences, collaborative multiplayer online gaming on a larger scale and more cooperative media production services.

However, the industry will have to concurrently handle higher download speeds, growing data volumes, and ever-increasing demands for storage.

Current Storage Systems Need To Evolve For Today’s Hybrid Cloud World

It’s widely accepted that data volumes are growing, and will continue to grow, at an exponential rate. According to IDC, the amount of data created will reach 163 zettabytes by 2025, an increase of nearly 4,000 percent in little more than a decade¹. 

The problem extends beyond just volume. Data is now no longer confined to data centres, but can exist anywhere in the hybrid clouds, and is also increasingly being created and used at the edge of the network. For businesses to extract value from data, the latter needs to be readily available when and where it is needed; otherwise, data access takes more time, using more resources, decreasing efficiency and driving up costs, as well as eroding the customer experience.

Many current storage models are not designed to be deployed under these circumstances, which means that the process of moving data through the network or into and out of cloud services is subject to degradation or interruption.

It’s time for a new kind of storage that can automatically provide the insights needed to optimize data placement, as well as predict and prevent problems.

Next-generation Storage Technology Is Intelligent

Intelligent storage from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) OEM Solutions comprises data centre storage hardware and cloud storage services that collect data from your IT environment and apply artificial intelligence (AI) to manage it. These intelligent storage technologies – collectively known as HPE InfoSight – continuously learn in their hybrid cloud surroundings to precisely understand your workload needs, move data to where it needs to be, and align costs to business value, all in real time.

HPE InfoSight continuously monitors your infrastructure data for patterns and events matching signatures that identify developing problems or opportunities for improvement. As new problems are detected, it can provide automated guidance to help you understand exactly what the problem is, where it lies, and how to resolve it — even if it lies outside the realm of storage.

The benefits of intelligent storage speak for themselves: users report 79 percent lower operational expenses² and a 20x reduction in cloud storage and transfer costs due to efficient data reduction³.

At the same time, it is important to not view the storage challenge as a silo. Future-proofing your business goes beyond just adding more storage technology – it’s about better data management.

The OEMs that will gain substantially are those that can help their customers better manage, transfer and store data. They will enable high-quality content, from more sources, consistently and at scale across multiple network technologies including 5G. One of the best and fastest ways to achieve this is to create an innovative edge solution.

Use New Edge Technologies To Drive Innovations That Meet Market Demands

The edge can use AI, machine learning and automation to continuously learn, predict, and adapt to changes, needs, and threats in real time. This allows communications, media and entertainment organizations to act locally, in the moment, in context.

By developing products that take data center-level compute to the edge, your customers can minimize latency, which improves the viewer experience, reduces bandwidth, lowers costs, reduces threats, avoids duplication, improves reliability, and maintains compliance.

Having identified the edge opportunity early on, HPE OEM Solutions has already made large investments to lead the market in edge technology, and offers the full spectrum of rugged, edge-to-cloud products that are easy to manage and designed to flourish, even in the harsh edge environments where cameras are often in use.

Leading communications, media and entertainment OEMs like Nokia and Imagine Communications are partnering with HPE OEM Solutions to benefit from plug-and-play edge technology, OEM-specific expertise and 24/7 global support to bring solutions to market. These partnerships have already resulted in cutting-edge products tailored to current market needs.

Another of our broadcast partners, Starfish Technologies – as a result of collaborating with HPE OEM Solutions – has broadened its solutions portfolio and taken its business global.

Starfish Technologies: Creating A New Content Delivery Model

To compete in a crowded market and expand its business, Starfish needs to deliver turnkey, integrated digital video solutions while reducing operational costs and improving customer satisfaction.

Since teaming up with HPE OEM Solutions, Starfish is now able to offer solutions that enable digital streaming on multiple platforms, advert insertion, system monitoring and compliance recording – all of which are consolidated on high-quality HPE OEM Solutions servers configured to address the unique needs of each customer. 

By delivering software bundled and configured on high-quality HPE servers, Starfish has lowered implementation and support costs per customer by 20 percent⁴.

By partnering with HPE OEM Solutions, your OEM business too can:

• Innovate faster: Using HPE OEM Solutions’ existing components as building blocks allows you to focus on the value-add features and capabilities of your final product or service, and speed time to market.
• Power edge analytics: Edge solutions allow you to optimize capabilities and processes at the edge to create a more intelligent content management and delivery model. The data center-level performance and data handling of HPE Edgeline Converged Edge Systems enables deeper real-time analysis of operational data. Meanwhile, HPE OEM Solutions’ fully integrated edge-to-cloud architecture allows your customers to generate timely and efficient decisions at the edge, and better analyze and connect data to enhance organizational-level decisions.
• Minimize risk: HPE Edgeline Converged Edge Systems enable data center-level compute and management directly at the edge. This helps reduce traffic to the data center, giving hackers fewer interception opportunities. Also, the data that is transferred can be stored in HPE Gen 10 servers, which are the world’s most secure industry standard servers.
• Benefit from AI-driven storage: Unlock the full potential of all your data with the world’s most intelligent storage, which precisely understands different workload needs, moves data to where it needs to be, aligns costs to business value, and can self-adjust in real time.
• Gain from global support: HPE Pointnext Services offers 24/7 global support, from design and implementation through to on-going customer care. Most crucially, Pointnext helps you develop the right consumption model. HPE OEM Solutions can deliver on-premise models with pay-per-use pricing, end-to-end lifecycle management, and capacity planning and management. This means you only pay for what you use, allowing you to focus on your apps and data, rather than your infrastructure. HPE OEM Solutions also has a number of partnerships to extend this model to off-premise providers.

The communications, media and entertainment industry is looking for OEMs to provide robust technology for the upcoming 5G era. Few companies can take on the 5G challenge on their own, which makes partnerships even more crucial, especially if OEMs want to create relevant, market-ready solutions quickly, securely and efficiently.

¹ The Economist, ‘Data is giving rise to a new economy,’ May 6, 2017.

² Enterprise Strategy Group, “Assessing the Financial Impact of HPE InfoSight Predictive Analytics: A Quantitative Analysis of HPE Customers,” Adam DeMattia, Sept 2017.

³ Illustrates potential savings based on HPE customer surveys.

⁴ https://h20195.www2.hpe.com/v2/getdocument.aspx?docname=a00009096enw