More Data Driving Improvements to Disk Technology
According to a recent study conducted by the University of California at Berkeley, each year approximately 5 exabytes of new information is produced. And ninety-two percent of that information is stored on magnetic media, mostly hard disk drives. Indeed, businesses today are gathering and storing more data than ever before. Multi-terabyte databases supporting data warehouses, and even OLTP systems, are quite common. Some organizations are even approaching a petabyte of data under management.
Why so much data? Well, there are several factors contributing to this explosion of data. On the one hand, technology drives this demand for storage. Database technology has advanced to be better able to store and manage unstructured data. Whereas structured data is the data that most database professionals are familiar with (numbers, characters, and dates), unstructured data is basically anything else. This can mean everything from text files to images, audio files, and videos. When unstructured data is added to the mix data management becomes more complicated because unstructured data is usually large and unwieldy as compared to numeric and alphanumeric data. Additionally, different mechanisms are required to access and modify this data, complicating program development and database administration.
The Internet also drive this phenomenon. The Internet connects people to data in ways never before dreamed of. This demand causes more data to be stored and made available to them. It also creates more data in the form of clickstream processing and such. At any rate, the technologies and events driving data growth abound: data warehousing, RFID, regulatory compliance requirements, workflow process logging and mining, and so on.
With all of this data growth the need to store data more effectively and efficiently is contantly under pressure. Today, Computerworld announced that the first drives to use perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology to pack more data into less space are out.
This is one example of how storage technology and data processing techniques will be changing to support our rapidly growing desire for more and more data. Others include:
How do you plan to support the continuing data onslaught?
