Silk - kn

This article originally appeared on FlashDBA

At Silk, we believe the best outcomes happen when technology innovation is paired with strong, empowered partnerships. This year at Silk’s Sales Kickoff (SKO), we had the opportunity to recognize exactly that.

This article originally appeared on FlashDBA

This article originally appeared on FlashDBA

Artificial intelligence (AI) inference is where artificial intelligence delivers real business impact – or quietly fails. As AI systems move from experimentation into production, the challenge is no longer model training or accuracy. It is inference latency.  

Clinical AI is rapidly moving from experimentation into the core of healthcare operations. What once lived in research environments or offline analytics is now embedded directly into clinical workflows. Imaging analysis, diagnostics, operational intelligence, and real-time decision support increasingly operate alongside electronic health records and other systems of record. 

For decades, healthcare IT leaders have evaluated data infrastructure through an operational lens – cost, efficiency, and compliance. Healthcare data performance mattered, but largely as a backend concern. Latency was inconvenient. Downtime was disruptive. Storage limitations were frustrating.

Cloud storage has come a long way. What began as a simple replacement for on-premises disks has evolved into a sprawling ecosystem of tiers, performance classes, snapshots, APIs, and data services. Yet despite all this progress, enterprises still face a familiar set of challenges: inconsistent performance, rising costs, operational complexity, and growing data sprawl.

In the fast-evolving healthcare landscape, innovation is not just an option – it’s a necessity. Sentara Health, a leading healthcare provider with 12 hospitals and over 300 care sites, is at the forefront of this innovation by integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into its care delivery processes. Guided by a commitment to patient-centric care, Sentara is revolutionizing how data is used to empower clinicians, enhance operations, and provide better outcomes for patients. At the core of this transformation is Sentara’s partnership with Silk, a Virtual Storage Area Network (Virtual SAN) that is purpose-built for the cloud.

Microsoft Ignite made one thing unmistakably clear: we’re entering the era of the AI-first enterprise. Every product, every workload, and every piece of infrastructure is being reshaped around AI acceleration. Whether you’re building customer-facing applications, running mission-critical databases, or storing decades of historical data, the expectations around speed, flexibility, and scale have completely changed.