Scality today revealed it has developed a set of artificial intelligence (AI) agents capable of automating a wide range of storage management tasks.
Paul Speciale, chief marketing officer for Scality, said the Scality Autonomous Data Infrastructure (ADI) platform embeds an engine for AI agents, dubbed Guardian, in its RING or ARTESCA object storage systems. This is meant to eliminate the need for IT administrators to, for example, rebalance how data has been distributed.
Other tasks that can be performed by AI agents include expanding the size of a system or upgrading to a new version of the platform. Additionally, Scality has included a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server through which third-party AI agents can access data or manage the platform.
Scality is also making the software that drives Scality ADI available for inspection to provide organizations with transparency into how those AI agents are automating those tasks.
The overall goal is to provide IT teams with an object storage platform that, with the advent of agentic AI, doesn’t necessarily require the expertise of a dedicated storage management expert to deploy and manage, said Speciale.
Regardless of who manages the underlying storage platform, the need for AI agents to implement best practices to help keep costs under control is only going to increase as shortages continue to drive the cost of flash memory higher, he added.
There is, of course, in the age of AI no correlation between the size of an organization and how much data it may need to store. The challenge is that many organizations can’t necessarily afford to hire and retain storage specialists. AI agents are now making it possible for IT generalists to successfully deploy and manage object storage systems at a time when qualified object storage specialists are still often difficult to find and retain, noted Speciale.
Naturally, the volume of data that each organization will need to manage is going to vary widely, but a recent Futurum Group report forecasts the global data intelligence, analytics, and infrastructure (DIAI) market is projected to grow at a 17% compound annual growth rate through 2028 off a base of $541.1 billion in 2026 to exceed $1.2 trillion by 2031.
Demand for data integration tools and storage platforms will grow at a slower 12% and 11% rate, respectively, in 2026. However, as the volume of data being generated using AI tools continues to increase, the data storage platform market will be growing at a rate of 18% by 2030, according to the report.
Obviously, the pace at which organizations are likely to acquire new storage systems will also vary, but the one thing that is certain is most will be upgrading these systems both in the cloud and in on-premises IT environments in the AI era. The only thing that remains to be seen is how well that goal might be achieved in ways that, hopefully, don’t increase the cost of storage to a point where it becomes unsustainable to support workloads that are only becoming more data-intensive with each passing day.
