Five Data Storage Predictions for 2012

To many IT professionals, the data storage process is considered boring. Issues related to I/O performance will get their attention, but actually managing the storing of data tends to appeal to a narrow subset of the IT community.

IBM, however, says data storage is about to have a breakout year, largely because data is now getting the respect it deserves as a business asset. Here are five macro trends for 2012 that will change the way people think about data storage forever.

Click through for five data storage predictions for 2012, as identified by IBM.

Slide 1

Since the early 1990s, an increasing proportion of data created and used has been in the form of digital data. The volume of digital data is expected to grow to 2.7 zettabytes in 2012 — up 48 percent from 2011.

New research shows storage mediums, such as Racetrack memory that combines the benefits of magnetic hard drives and solid-state memory, can be vastly denser than they are today. Additionally, new form factors such as solid-state disks will help provide more stable, longer-term preservation of data, and the promise of “the cloud” allows access to data anywhere, anytime.

Slide 2

Data curation is the active and ongoing management of data throughout its lifecycle. This smarter data categorization adds value that will help glean new opportunities, improve the sharing of information and preserve data for later reuse.

However, there’s also a lot of work involved in selecting, appraising and organizing data to make them accessible and interpretable. The key is bringing data sets together, organizing them and linking them to related documents and tools. If data can be stored in a way that provides context, organizations can find new and useful ways to use that data.

Slide 3

With the information that historical trending analytics and infrastructure analytics provides, you can index and search in a more intelligent way than ever before. By performing analytics on stored data, in backup and archive, you can draw business insight from that data, no matter where it exists.

Through intelligent storage and data retrieval systems, you can learn more from the information you have today and improve service to customers or open new revenue streams by leveraging data in new ways.

Slide 4

As our digital and data-driven universe expands, certain industries, such as health care and entertainment, are able to reach new levels of innovation by having the capacity to house, organize and instantaneously access information.

For example, even one 300-bed hospital may generate 30 terabytes of data per year. Those figures will only grow with higher-resolution medical imaging, and new tools or services such as making electronic health care records available online.

Slide 5

Businesses are turning into data hoarders and spending too much time and money collecting useless or bad data, potentially leading to misguided business decisions. This practice can be changed with simple policy decisions and by implementing existing capabilities in technologies that exist in smarter storage, but companies are hesitant to delete any data (and many times duplicate data) due to the fear of needing specific data down the line for business analytics or compliance purposes.

Part of the solution starts with eliminating the copies. Nearly 75 percent of the data that exists today is a copy (IDC). By deleting and disabling redundant information, organizations are investing in data quality and availability for content that matters to the business.