Data Storage Requirements to Explode by 2010

By Greg McNevin

July 12, 2007: According to the analysts at IDC, the next three years will see a phenomenal surge in demand for data storage, with the volume of digital information tipped to top 988 billion gigabytes by 2010.

Sponsored by EMC and titled "The Expanding Digital Universe: A Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2010," the study highlights the phenomenal expansion of data worldwide, which currently is estimated to be 161 billion gigabytes.

For a visual, IDC dryly notes that this figure roughly equals three times the amount of information contained in all books ever written, or to put it another way, is twelve stack of books reaching from earth to the sun.

"The year 2007 will be the first time the volume of information created will theoretically surpass available storage capacity," said David Reinsel, program director of storage research at IDC according to intergovworld.com. He adds that one shouldn’t worry though, claiming the report’s findings should work more as a wake-up call for us to embrace new technology, rather than a prediction that we’ll hit a capacity wall.

The two companies cited increasing digitisation of physical information and growing levels of internet access as drivers behind the data explosion, and naturally this has also lead to a massive increase in the amount of unstructured data such as images, music and video. IDC notes that 80 percent of organisational data is unstructured, compared to 95 percent of all information.

The report names virtualisation and data de-duplication as viable solutions to help organisations cope with this explosion in data, and it is organisations that will end up having to cope with it and the menagerie of security, compliance and privacy mandates that accompany large-scale data warehousing.

"It is important for enterprises to realize they will be trusted as stewards or custodians of this data," said Reinsel.

Aside from employing new technologies such as data de-duplication and virtualisation into backup procedures, when it comes to dealing with this exponentially growing problem, the report recommends that companies classify data according to importance, relevance, access required and compliance. After this, policies should be created and implemented for the storage, access and destruction of data across its lifecycle.

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