75% of data is replicated
With ever increasing amounts of data being produced globally each day, players within the IT industry are beginning to question how this information will be stored in years to come and, more importantly, what information is essential to preserve.
According to IBM, 15 petabytes (1 petabyte is equivalent to 1000 terabytes) of information is created globally each day. Contributing most significantly to this are social networking websites such as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook as well as large financial institutions and businesses.
This means that, at a static rate, the world produces roughly 5500 petabytes of new information each year.
At this rate it will soon become vital to identify which information needs to be withheld and which can simply be erased. According to Arvind Krishna, General Manager of Information Management at IBM, 75% of all data created today is replicated, meaning that in time
the majority of this could potentially be removed from data warehouses.
Shifts in storage technology
The watershed moment for the assessment of which data should or shouldn’t be kept will take place when newer forms of storage outstrip current technologies believes Anant Jihngran, Chief Technology Officer of Information Management at IBM.
“When the data formats change then you have to perform the curation of what is important and what is not important,” said Jihngran.
In the past few years several possible replacements for current magnetic storage methods have come forward, most noticeably holographic storage.
Magnetic storage devices rely on information being stored on the surface of a recording medium, in a linear format. Holographic storage however utilises the entire storage medium by recording data in a parallel fashion using light. This allows significantly more information to be stored while using the same physical area.
Earlier this year General Electric announced the development of holographic disks which would allow for 500GB of data to be stored on them. These are due to become available in 2011 and are just one example of future changes in data storage.
In order to prepare for an inevitable shift in data formats businesses should assess and manage their data in a more timely fashion believes Alan Ganek, Vice President of Strategy and Technology at IBM. This would ensure that essential data is not lost when data storage trends change.
Despite the ever increasing levels of data being produced globally, up to 85% of computing capacity worldwide sits idle for the majority of its life cycle says Krishna. For this reason he encouraged institutions to take a closer look at how efficiently their data is stored and managed.
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