By Sanjay Gupta
In our increasingly connected and ‘computed’ lives, storage is like money: there is hardly ever enough of it. In fact, when it comes to data storage, the term stupendous growth can be applied without sounding stupid or hyperbolic.
According to IDC’s sixth annual study of all the data generated worldwide, titled Digital Universe, there will be a fifty-fold growth from the beginning of 2010 to end-2020. And if you think such projections are over-hyped (as many indeed are), the research firm, which had forecast in 2007 the digital universe in 2010 to be 988 exabytes, later had to revise it upward to 1227 exabytes.
The study predicts that the digital universe in 2020 will comprise 40,000 exabytes—over 5200 GB for every human. Considering that people are already buying terabytes of disks for storing their own, personal digital universes, the prediction doesn’t seem unlikely.
What is difficult to say, however, is whether the enterprises, through whose networks much of this data will flow, will be able to prepare themselves well for a bloated world.
First and foremost, all this structured and unstructured data must be stored. Enterprises everywhere are saddled with a growing number of boxes and libraries. From old servers and desktops to tape libraries, from disk arrays and pen drives to SAN boxes, the data sprawl in all its Vs—volume, variety, velocity and value—is giving IT professionals migraines amid the multiple migrations.
And then, there are retrieval, archival and management issues. It is a perfect time to dust up the good old concept of information lifecycle management and show it some sunlight.
Significantly, the whole environment and the tools and techniques of storage management are in a state of evolution. Like in other areas of IT, here, too, certain game-changing technologies are emerging. For instance, as per the IDC study, nearly 40% of the information will be touched by cloud computing providers by 2020.
Another impact will be felt by the growing influence of consumers and how they interact with the brands they use (and abuse). What would have been irrelevant to store or think about only five years ago now may seem of great value. What could have been thrown away after a few months must be retained for several years due to regulatory compliance. What was stored on legacy hard disks may need to be moved to the nimbler flash-based drives. And so on.
There is no doubt storage is coming out of the hidden closets of enterprise IT function into the more action-packed arena, where it must get closer to applications than ever before.
Big data is already talk of the town, but wait until the Internet of things comes into full bloom. Watch this space.
– Sanjay Gupta
Editor, Express Computer
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