The exponential growth of data will force businesses to change the ways in which they manage their data, says Inana Nkanza, country manager of EMC SA.
At the same time, Grant Rau, business development manager at Kingston SA, believes USB 3.0 will become an industry standard this year, and that adoption of solid state drives (SSDs) will reach a tipping point.
Similarly, Steven Ambrose, MD of Strategy Worx, says smaller, faster and solid state-based storage will become mainstream.
According to Nkanza, the volume of data available exceeds the capacity of traditional storage systems. He explains that, a few years ago, people referred to gigabytes, while today, they refer to terabytes as small systems, noting that petabyte systems are becoming the norm. Nkanza, quoting the IDC, says the world’s volume of information is more than doubling every two years.
“I believe 2012 is the year for organisations to take a long, hard look at how they approach big data,” says Nkanza, adding that users will no longer be able to put all their useful information into one data warehouse. He suggests this could result in data warehouses that bring together information from multiple sources, replacing the single data warehouse model.
Deloitte defines big data as a reference to datasets whose size is beyond the ability of commonly used software tools to capture, manage and process within a tolerable elapsed time. The company adds that big data sizes are constantly moving target, currently ranging from a few terabytes to many petabytes of data in a single dataset.
According to Nkanza, big data is one of the major drivers of change in the storage industry. He says that the volume, variety and velocity of data present many opportunities.
The high volume of data is forcing businesses to change the way they manage and extract value from data.
Regarding variety, he says that with the advent of big data, organisations need to make sense of many different data forms. “This makes it necessary to re-look at the entire data management strategy,” he says.
Finally, Nkanza says the velocity of data growth is exponential. “Every year, we generate ever-increasing data loads that organisations have to store, manage and analyse, while simultaneously trying to reduce their IT overheads,” he says.
SSD surge
Rau believes that, in the second half of 2012, mass adoption of SSDs will reach a tipping point. He says last year saw a steady increase in SSD sales, adding that the increased interest was primarily newly ‘tech-savvy’ consumers and not only tech enthusiasts.
“The value of adding an SSD to a lagging computer is now in the thoughts of many mainstream consumers,” Rau explains. He says these drives are no longer considered a premium upgrade, but are rather viewed as essential ones.
Furthermore, says Rau, the floods in Thailand will continue to affect the supply of hard disk drives. He says this will accelerate SSD demand from original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), and particularly from notebook manufacturers. “As the SSD continues to offer a higher return on investment for performance and durability, companies will opt for the SSD as their preferred upgrade path when upgrading or renewing their legacy systems,” suggests Rau.
Ambrose also believes the hard drive shortage will spur SSD growth. He says that the recent shortage and price increases of hard drives, as well as the growth of public cloud-based services such as Facebook and Google+, will lead to “dramatic growth in ultra-fast, lower capacity, 128GB to 512GB solid state discs”.
Ambrose also argues that lower capacity SSDs will be used for mobile storage. He says that once the speed, reliability and ruggedness of an SSD is combined with essentially unlimited cloud storage, as well as the apps that use cloud storage on smart mobile devices, lower capacity SSDs will become the mobile storage device of choice.
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