IDC’s Storage Paradox
Software, Technology March 6th, 2007
Tom Foremski points to a recent IDC study over at Silicon Valley Watcher: IDC: We face a looming crisis – we won’t have anywhere to store hundreds of exabytes of data.
The title says it all. According to IDC’s estimates, the world will produce 988 exabytes of data in 2010 – but only 601 exabytes of storage will be available.
Oops, if this is true, I’m in trouble with my push for on-demand.
But somehow I’m not worried:
- Last I checked, data storage was not a natural resource, it is manufactured. Why wouldn’t market forces take care of balancing demand and supply?
- Just where exactly would the excess “data” exist? Right now I am typing this post – but if I don’t save / post / send it, it does not get stored, it won’t become data – it won’t exist at all. (for simplicity forget caching and autosave). Does IDC count our thoughts as data?
Something does not compute.
(Disclaimer: I have not seen the original report, only secondary sources, like the AP news item referred above)
Update (3/06): It’s worth pointing out that the move to an on-demand model will actually reduce storage requirements: since we work natively online, it will be easier to share / link, we don’t have to send redundant copies of the same file.
Tags: storage, data storage, idc, research, analysts
Zoli Erdos
Mate – are you sure you’re OK? You didn’t mention Zoho in this post so I just wanted to check
Zoli,
I’m happy to send you the full report and the executive summary. Please drop me an email when you get a moment.
This reminds me of http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=4497
Dan Farber wrote that according to an IBM study, “the world’s information base will double every 11 hours”. If that’s the case, on Jan 1, 2011, we’ll need 1976 exabytes of storage. And by that evening, 3952 exabytes…
[...] of this presentation at ISP's and all hops it goes through. Not that I ever bought into IDC's Storage Paradox, but this is clearly a very wasteful [...]
I would like to say that I learned about the IDC storage paradox on Zoli Erdos’ blog. Zoli mentions this Associated Press article, which cites IDC’s estimate that “the world had 185 exabytes of storage available last year and will have 601 exabytes in 2010. But the amount of stuff generated is expected to jump from 161 exabytes last year to 988 exabytes in 2010″.
[...] of this presentation at ISP's and all hops it goes through. Not that I ever bought into IDC's Storage Paradox, but this is clearly a very wasteful [...]