M+E Daily

There’s a growing demand in the IT sector for faster performance and greater capacity because we’re clearly in the middle of a “data explosion,” and all that data must be stored, processed, analyzed, shared and “leveraged for business advantage,” according to G-Technology parent company Western Digital (WD).

That’s what WD said in its introduction to a Nov. 15 webinar on “The Future of Digital Storage” that also featured representatives from research company IDC and Ovation Data. Big data is expected to reach 44 zettabytes by 2020, WD projected.

It’s a “changing world of data that we live in today,” Dave Tang, SVP and GM of Data Center Systems at WD, said during the webinar. He added: “Data is affecting our lives in many, many ways, and one of the aspects that’s changing is access to data. So, increasingly, we have access to more and more data from more and more places. Mobility is helping to transform that.” He pointed to his smartphones and all the applications he had on it, saying: “I have more apps on my smartphone now than I had combined on all PCs that I’ve ever owned.” That displays the power that mobile devices have today and the “amount of information and data that they have access to,” he said.

In addition, “the longevity of data is becoming more and more important,” he said, pointing to the importance of being able to access older data quickly. The “tendency to put that data onto devices or systems that take a long time to retrieve from or [put] it in a warehouse where it takes a very long time to retrieve data is becoming obsolete,” he said. In addition to mobile devices, our data is being generated by machines today including sensors from the Internet of Things, he went on to say. Data is also being used in real-time today via artificial intelligence and machine learning, he said.

All of that is “presenting tremendous value” to our lives today, he said, but added: “In order to take advantage of them, we need highly scalable environments – cloud-scale environments – to be able to store, access and manage all of this data.”

Looking at the amount of data that’s being created today, “it’s growing at a tremendous rate,” he said, explaining that it’s “doubling every two years” – a more than 40% annual growth rate. All that data isn’t necessarily valuable or worth storing, he noted. However, the portion of the data that is valuable is “growing at an even faster rate” – 50% year-over-year, he said. If we look at the amount of storage capacity that’s being made available to store all the data, “it’s falling short – and that shortfall is getting bigger and bigger as time goes on,” he said. Therefore, “we need different methods – more effective, more efficient methods” to store the data, he said.

To help meet today’s data storage challenges, WD said it introduced the ActiveScale P100 system, a plug-and-play object storage system. ActiveScale P100 is the company’s latest integrated storage system, it said in a Nov. 15 news release, adding that it “disrupts the economics of scaling capacity into petabytes, and enables the creation of massive data storage repositories across both on-premise and hosted cloud architectures.”

Also on the webinar, Eric Burgener, research director for IDC’s Storage Practice, said his company believes “hybrid cloud is the future for IT,” adding: “If you look 10 years out, all successful organizations will have strong hybrid cloud environments in place.” He also predicted that, “going forward, companies that do not use big data to inform their business decisions will be missing out and ultimately are going to be out-competed” by rivals that do use such technologies.

Tape continues to be “the only reliable” storage medium for high capacities and the ability to store in diverse locations and in a static condition, Bo Kennedy, OvationData IT infrastructure director, said. But his company’s customers have increasingly been asking to access their data instantly and tape is just not “practical,” he said. Customers also want to access their data cheaply and done correctly, he said, adding that WD’s Active Archive System has been the solution for OvationData.