Storage Projects Rise in Importance

Found on Computerworld on Monday, 31 December 2007
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In 2008, almost every sector will continue the battle with data overload. Entertainment powerhouses - from television stations to big-name amusement parks - will struggle to house huge media files or to manage the data necessary to track customer spending trends.

According to Milford, Mass.-based analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group Inc., private-sector archive capacity will hit an eye-popping 27,000 petabytes by 2010. Skyrocketing rates of e-mail growth account for much of this figure.

To combat spiraling data overload, corporate IT leaders will scour the market for ways to centralize storage and they will pursue options such as clustered architectures and unified storage-area networks (SAN). Data-pruning techniques, including the use of thin provisioning and data de-duplication tools, will also be high on 2008 corporate storage wish lists, according to Forrester Research Inc. analyst Andrew Reichman.

As long as people will keep on sending some useless Powerpoint attachments to keep others from working, data storage will increase (I hope they don't include spam in the archives). Anyway, dupes are a problem: everybody who keeps on saving this and that image will end up with quite a few of them. Now it would be so easy to do a MD5 check if those images would be identical; but sadly, the same images are always different in their checksums.