Storage in the Big Data Era
Today’s information environment is under tremendous pressure from the inside due to rampant data growth. According to IDC’s 2011 Digital Universe Study, more than 1.8 trillion gigabytes of data was stored in 500 quadrillion files, a volume that is more than doubling every two years. Over the next decade, the amount of data managed within enterprise data centers is expected to increase by 50 times, while the number of unstructured data files is expected to balloon by 75 times.
At the same time, the information management environment is under pressure from the outside thanks to mandates to cut costs while improving service delivery. Although the cost per gigabyte for data storage has plummeted, the money spent in creating, storing and managing data has increased 50 percent to $4 trillion, and is expected to reach $5.2 trillion by 2015.
Organizations seeking to rein in data storage costs need fluid salability that eliminates underutilized systems. They need to unify storage subsystems in a common pool in order to successfully manage ever-increasing data storage demands. At the same time, they need to optimize the information management environment by moving data to the appropriate platform for both performance and cost savings.
The cloud is expected to play a key role in the optimized information management environment. IDC forecasts that by 2016 public cloud services will account for 16 percent of IT spending for basic storage. Cloud services will grow five times faster than the IT industry overall as organizations accelerate their shift to the consumption model. Clearly, storage in the big data era will increasingly take place in the cloud.
