Storage Management

CIOs Struggling With Data Growth

You’ve been warned. CIOUpdate guest columnist – Doug Balog, vice president for IBM System Storage with responsibility for IBM's storage strategy and product plans – says data growth is out of control. So what’s a CIO to do? Figure out a way to store less data in a more intelligent fashion. One thing is clear, a lack of action is not an option.

“The world is drowning in data. Soon, it's estimated there will be 1 trillion Internet-connected devices in the world. Every day, 15 petabytes (1015 or 1,000,000,000,000,000) of new information is generated -- eight times more than the information in all the libraries in the United States. This year the amount of digital information generated is expected to reach 988 exabytes (1018 or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000). This is equivalent to the amount of information if books were stacked from the Sun to Pluto and back.

“It's no wonder then that companies across the board are looking to store less data, place it intelligently and fully leverage their existing assets. I am responsible for IBM (NYSE: IBM) Storage business strategy and products plans, so of course I could give you a check-list of the "must have" storage technologies, but I'll defer to your technical teams to come up with the right mix of solutions that will solve your company's data problem. What I can say with some degree of unbiased confidence, however, is the lack of action is not an option for any CIO. The problem is not going away and data growth will only continue to increase.

“True, storage innovators are trying to keep pace; providing companies with the ability to store data on an unprecedented scale. However, in an interconnected and instrumented world where trillions of sophisticated digital devices communicate every second and supercomputers are capable of generating more than a quadrillion (either 1015 or 1024 depending on what scale you use and where you live ... but really whose counting!) calculations per second, for the foreseeable future we will not be getting ahead of this tide of data. The research firm IDC says that the world’s data already exceeds available storage space and demand for storage capacity will continue to grow at a compound annual growth rate of nearly 50 percent in the next three years.”