Data Storage is one of the most debatable topic these days, as world faces a heavy crisis. With increase in the amount of data by 40%-60% every year, there is a heavy demand for data storage. The fact is undeniable that data stored in a magnetic disk can be compressed to a huge extent, however, they are limited. A report generated at Digital Universe 2014 organized by EMC Corporation states that the rate at which the amount of data is growing every year will lead to a number of difficulties ahead. According to a research conducted by them, the data generated in the year 2007 exceeded in the subsequent years and more than doubled in the year 2011. In other words, the digital data generated every year is exceeding the amount of storage space available and expanding them is a highly challenging task.

Impact on the market:

Data storage crisis has created a huge impact in business these days. The President of Oracle has estimated a huge explosion of data in the next few years. Mark Hurd, a former official in HP, claims that the main reason behind the explosion would be the boom in mobile devices. Data coming from those increases up to 40% each year and will possibly cause storage problems in the near future.

He also added, “” There is an exponential growth in data. In some cases up to 40%. This has continued causing problems for our customers and a huge economic pressure as well. Most of the customers are attempting to innovate while trying to cut costs””, he told to the Times. This has called for serious issues with relation to information storage management subsequently since the last decade.

Possible Solutions

Keeping the pace of data storage devices and enterprise storage system with the amount of data generated every day is a very difficult task, or almost impossible as per the according to few experts. But, there is a ray of hope with the advancement in science and technology which could bring feasible solutions. Although high end storage devices like solid state and optical devices have entered the market, magnetic storage devices like hard disks will continue to be at the top, storing majority of the world’s data since 1970s. However, with the compactness and advanced storing technology, SSDs and optical storage devices are expected to be the most preferred ones in the near future.

Cloud Services could also be a possible solution with minor optimizations in their filling system. Duplicated data will continue to be a huge challenge. For example, if a person sends a 5MB file to 1000 accounts, then the duplicated data occupies almost 5GB of space. Giants like Google and Dropbox are trying to reduce the redundancy levels stored in multiple accounts in the form of duplicated data.

The day is no longer when we will move from magnetic storage devices to other data storage systems. Scientists at Harvard have already found a way to store about 700 terabytes of data in single strand of synthesized DNA, that weighs only 1 gram.

Others are trying to find out a way to take things into ultimate extreme. Information that could be stored in bacteria or at sub-atomic levels. However, these suggestions are still fictions so far which could possibly eradicate the data storage issues that most of us are facing. This demand for storage resource management has given rise to multiple opportunities for data storage engineers.