Analysts project storage growth

According to an article by Chris Mellor :

The Enterprise Strategy Group is forcasting a sixfold growth in file archive capacity, from a little over 10,000PB in 2008 to 62,000PB in 2012

This seems to one of the few bright spots I have seen in the last few months when it comes to economic growth . I see a few interesting points that this growth will have on ever tightening IT budgets.

1) If budgets remain tight, customers will have to seek cost savings on legacy equipment to purchase new hardware to handle the growth. Many OEM’s raise support prices on legacy equipment as an incentive to current customers to purchase new equipment. Since budgets are tight customers will be seeking more third party support to reduce their operating expenses on their legacy equipment. That should be good for Zerowait.

2) Customers will be looking for better ways to manage their RAID arrays to gain more efficiencies out of current hardware. Whether they choose compression techniques or de-duplication technologies, Storage Resource Management is still going to be a headache.

3) My recent overseas trip clearly demonstrated that customers around the world are seeking ways to squeeze more out of their storage budgets. Large international companies and smaller regional enterprises are looking at which state or country is offering the lowest cost data center.
Clearly storing and serving more data is going to take more power, and therefore there are advantages for storing data in locations that offer cheap, reliable and abundant electrical power and connectivity.

Most of the companies we deal with have three tiers of data – Primary, Secondary and Tertiary data sets. Primary data needs to be ‘connectivity near’ the users but as data gets less critical it can be ‘connectivity farther’ away.

In the future we may see more data centers in low cost locations being filled with high availability legacy equipment that is cheaper to maintain than new equipment for the secondary and tertiary data sets.

Economics will force folks to ask “why are we serving data from the most expensive locations?”

If headlines like the one below continue companies are going to have to cut costs to survive:

Unemployment flirts with an ugly truth–the possibility of hitting a new post-Depression high.

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