Global demand for storage space seems to be unquenchable, and doubles every 22 months, Steve Prentice, Gartner VP and director of research, told delegates at Gartner Symposium ITxpo 2005 in Cape Town yesterday.
Speaking on the future of IT, Prentice said shipments are expected to rise from 21 million terabytes in 2004, to more than 220 million terabytes in 2009 - an increase of 60% a year.
There are currently about 40 billion processors in the world, and by 2013 there will be about 200 billion processors in daily use, as the need for disk space capacity is inexhaustible, Prentice said.
He noted that computers and technology are no longer the preserve of the exclusive few, but accessible to all, and product features and functionality, even for so-called "business machines", will become more consumer-driven, evolving at the pace of consumer devices, and command consumer prices.
Prentice identified this as the 'consumerisation` of technology, demonstrating Moore`s Law at work in many IT and home environments.
He pointed out that it is already cheaper and more reliable to use micro-processors than electro-mechanical alternatives, and this will continue leading to an explosion in processor numbers.
The second trend highlighted by Prentice is the virtualisation of infrastructure, which implies the deployment of fewer physical devices.
Virtualisation of storage is well established, he said, adding that virtualisation of processing, supporting multiple virtual machines on a single processing engine, is also becoming mainstream.
Prentice commented that, by 2008, server utilisation rates could improve from 25% on average, to more than 40%.
These potential utilisation rates could mean that companies could require as much as 40% less server processing power, which would have dramatic ramifications for the server market and server vendors, he warned.
Virtualisation technology is already being deployed on PCs to create a virtual platform for installing software, making software images independent of underlying hardware, and thus easier to replicate and migrate, he stated.
The third trend identified by Prentice is pervasive (wireless) connectivity. A wide range of wireless technology is maturing, offering a variety of compromises on the range versus power versus bandwidth.
This allows for the development of hybrid networks, he said, such as near-field communications and ultra-wideband.
Standards under consideration occupy 500MHz to 1.9GHz, 20 to 80 times greater than the widest-band technologies in use today, Prentice said.
Future IT trends, he said, include quantum science, nanotechnology and peer-to-peer communications.
"For example, nanotechnology can change the way computers work. Limitations only exist in our imaginations."
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