Data storage consumes an estimated 4% of the global electrical energy supply, and the demand for data storage will accelerate for the foreseeable future. We need innovations in storage software and hardware to enable economical, resilient, and environmentally sustainable data management.
The Need for Sustainable Storage
Everybody has lost valuable data, due to various reasons. Most of this can never be recreated in whole or in part. In NASA's case, valuable technical design data stored on 7-track magnetic tape has been lost, due to the unavailability of still-functioning tape drives.'i' This will soon be the case for data stored on floppy disks. (When was the last time you saw an 8-inch floppy disk reader?)
Another major storage problem is power demand. Within the data center, storage typically accounts for a significant portion of that electricity. Overall, Data storage consumes an estimated 4% of the global electrical energy supply, and the demand for data storage will accelerate for the foreseeable future with the coming Data Tsunami. Thus, sustainability matters when it comes to enterprise storage.
The whole area of IT storage is buzzing with innovation, as startups and incumbents race to provide the capacity needed in a world exploding with unstructured data.
Chatbot technology, the I/O speed to get data into memory, the memory capacity needed, and the software to provide, manage, and analyze vast lakes of data all create massive opportunities.
Growing amounts of data need storing, managing, and analyzing, and that is driving technology developments at all levels of the IT storage stack.
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