With the Internet economy - and its offspring, the Information Age - catching on, we are witnessing an unprecedented amount of `fat pipes` coming out of every crevice at companies around the world. These communication pipes presumably all have to go somewhere, or have a communication reason - and this is good news for the booming digital storage market as the putative Information Age appears to brings with it a concomitant demand for more digital storage.
This is the viewpoint of Douglas Reed, managing director of network integrator and Internet Service Provider (ISP), Data Pro, a company within the JSE Securities Exchange listed Control Instruments group.
"As companies continue to build their networks, storage companies are assisting to install a wide array of IT systems, including corporate enterprise and customer-centric systems, to streamlining media files on huge off-site server farms, or newly-developed in-house servers. "In order to effectively appreciate the Herculean nature of these burgeoning databases, one has to imagine that 1 terabyte of information is the equivalent of 1 billion business letters, which would require 150 million miles of shelf space. It is mind-boggling to think of the storage space that would be required if we were not installing sophisticated databases. And there are not just a handful of databases in the terabyte range - there are many - and they are growing."
In order for companies to keep up with this massive storage demand, network capacity at the average company will have to double every year - at least for the next few years, according to the Storage Networking Industry Association.
"The global network storage industry seems to be the place to be right now. This market will, according to the latest research from IDC, triple its capacity over the next two years to an awe-inspiring 2.2 exabytes."
For the uninitiated, one exabyte is equal to one million terabytes.
Reed said that expanding storage to such an extent is naturally an expensive past-time. But the lion`s share of the cost does not come from hardware - as one might expect - it`s system management where the real bite is taken out of company coffers.
For every dollar spent on storage only nine cents goes into the cost of upgrading hardware in a storage system. The remainder goes to management, support and software. In total, worldwide storage services are expected to account for more than $40 billion in revenue by 2003, while software and hardware are expected to represent a spend of $12 billion and $7 billion, respectively.
"If anyone was wondering why there is such a hype about the Information Age, they only need to consider one of its ramifications - storage demand - in order to get an inkling of what it means to the way we conduct business. Given the latest statistics, we can truly say that the Information Age is upon us. If not the Information Age, then certainly the age of digital storage..."
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