The recent times have seen an increased momentum and renewed focus on digital inclusion and digital empowerment to catalyse the growth of the country.
The recent times have seen an increased momentum and renewed focus on digital inclusion and digital empowerment to catalyse the growth of the country. The voluble discussion around Digital India, smart cities, how to increase Internet penetration, boosting broadband and mobile internet speeds and numerous such focal areas make us think and examine the impact of encompassing digitization on data growth and data storage.
A 2014 digital universe study, The Digital Universe of Opportunities: Rich Data and the Increasing Value of the Internet of Things, carried out by IDC and commissioned by EMC highlights that the digital universe is more than doubling itself every two years. The same study says that from 4.4 billion terabytes (TB) in 2013, the digital universe will expand to an astounding 44 billion TB in 2020. It means that it will take much more than 7.3 billion hard drives of the current highest capacity of 6TB available with us to accommodate that magnitude of data. Overwhelming, isn’t it? It reminds me of Disney’s Uncle Scrooge’s unfathomable treasure fortress. In this case the gold coins being replaced by innumerable stacks and stacks of hard drives and other storage devices clasping irreplaceable data. Of course, different analyst firms and researchers will have different ways of calculations and analogies.
In order to define what the future of digital storage will look like, let’s first look at how the digital storage landscape has emerged in the past few decades. In 1956, IBM earned the distinction of introducing the world’s first magnetic hard disk known as RAMAC 305 (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control). The drive needed to be carried in trucks and other big transport vehicles and could hold up to 5MB of data. Interested companies were believed to lease the “system” at about US $3200 per month that will roughly be equal to US $28000 in today’s time using a CPI (consumer price index) inflation calculator provided by the Bureau of Labour Statistics. If we were to convert that into Indian currency, it would be approximately Rs 18 lakh. It means we would have been spending Rs 3.6 lakh per month to lease 1 MB storage space. Think about it.
The 1970s and early 1980s were an era of expensive and limited-capacity hard drives with most large-scale data storage systems relying on clunky, magnetic tape reels that ran on machines that could easily fill a small room. In 1988, the first 3.5-inch hard drive (as we know it today) appeared and continued to improve throughout the 90’s. By 1996, modern hard drives were common in many business computers and early laptops and PCs; however, their capacity was limited, and topped-out at about 10 GB. The 2000’s and beyond saw a great acceleration (over a million-fold) in hard drive capacities, while reduction in cost per GB.
Today, hard drive manufacturers offer hard drives in a variety of sizes and capacities. Hard drives remain a cost-effective and reliable medium for data storage—from personal computers to large-scale enterprise systems. In fact, more global corporations and governments depend on hard drives to store their critical data than any other form factor.
Let’s analyse some of the key factors that are driving the massive data growth and changes in the storage technology that we see today:
Continued handheld penetration: According to Mary Meeker’s 2015 Internet Report, India is one of the leading markets in Internet and smartphone growth. A recently announced joint report by MAIT and IMRB underscore that there was an 88 percent growth in the smartphones and tablets market from Rs 34,900 crore in 2013-2014 to Rs 65,815 crore in 2014-2015, and this growth is expected to continue at 27 percent in 2015-2016.
Innovation moving to new, “thinner” content creation devices: People are demanding light and “easy to carry” content creation devices such as smartphones and phablets.
Enterprise storage consumption rate outgrowing enterprise: The growth of the data is believed to be outpacing the growth of the company in many cases. The datacenter is now being looked at as “web-scale” rather than just “enterprise-scale”.
Evolving acceptance of “central” storage: With so much data and information lying across so many devices and platforms, centralizing data either in the form of personal cloud for consumers and private or public cloud for enterprises is the key to managing and accessing data more conveniently.
Companies need “efficient” data storage: Web-scale datacenters are expensive to operate. Power efficiency, for example, is a major consideration in the design of these massive datacenters.
We believe that with the increasing penetration of “mobile” computing devices, growing importance of Internet of Things (IoT), security and surveillance taking a prominence in the social safety agenda resulting in huge amounts of surveillance data, emergence of smart homes with “connected” devices, there is and will be huge dependence on “smart” data storage solutions. The storage providers will have to “embrace the future” now and expedite accordingly. While all new developments and growing complexities in the digital storage technology will continue to make storage more compact, efficient, and affordable, the future will be about catering to the most basic demand “I want that data right now.”
The author of this article, Khwaja Saifuddin, is Senior Director - South Asia, Middle East and Africa, Western Digital
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
 "Data Storage")
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
)
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
)
)
)
)
)
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}