Big Data's Impact On Storage

As data continues to grow exponentially, data center managers--globally and in India--are facing huge challenges to efficiently manage their data and storage. According to a study by IDC in association with EMC, digital information in India will grow from 40,000 petabytes to 2.3 million petabytes over the decade 2010 to 2020--twice as fast as the worldwide rate. As a result, enterprises of all sizes--small, medium, and large--will face an increasing challenge to store, protect, and manage the rapidly growing digital information, and comply with backup requirements.

This explosion of data, referred to as big data in contemporary lingo, has created both the need and appetite for innovation in the storage arena. And so you have technologies such as multi-tiered storage, fluid data, and storage virtualization. The other need for efficient data management stems from the very nature of any data, which tends to lose its importance over time. There is a constant need to archive the old and keep the latest or most important data readily available. It is believed that data access follows the 80/20 rule--the most recent 20% of the data attracts 80% of the access.

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