300,000 beautiful Petabytes (and mostly enterprise)

It’s a good time to be an enterprise hard drive company…

IDC’s John Rydning, IDC research director for drives told eWeek that over the next 5 years, the industry will ship more than 300,000 Petabytes of disk based storage. That’s:

~300,000,000 Terabytes
~300,000,000,000 Gigabytes
~300,000,000,000,000 Megabytes

Why so much, and why mostly enterprise drives? 4 things – my 4 “C’s” for what’s driving enterprise hard drive storage:

Cloud
Face it, the cloud is here to stay, and it’s only going to get bigger. Sure there are some issues to iron out like security and peace of mind, but more and more applications and content resides in the cloud already. One great example is social media. The meteoric growth of Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. has shown what consumers are comfortable with doing online…mostly sharing content, ideas, and opinions.  On the commercial side, there’s managed services like backup and disaster recovery and application development that have been much of what the cloud has been about in the early days. As the cloud matures and innovation in security and delivery take hold, the greater the need for the real estate to store, protect, and secure content and information, and there is no better vehicle to do this today (or in the next 5 years) than enterprise hard drives.

Communication
The way we communicate in our personal lives and in business is becoming more and more virtual.  We already have email. Add to that the previously mentioned social media. Feeds, tweets, texts, blogs, comments, reviews, etc though small in individual terms, when multiplied by the growing number of users worldwide are quite large in totality. And everything we say online is stored somewhere, mirrored, backed-up, and archived. A virtual fingerprint of our online existence is not crazy, and once again, enterprise class drives are the most reliable way to do so.

Content
One word sums this up – video. Video is large. Video requires speed. It needs to be replicated to serve more users, and it needs to be backed-up and archived.  Need I say more?

Cost
Look out hard drives, here comes SSD! Not quite the threat it has been touted as over the past year. Sure, it has it’s place in the enterprise space, and it’s place is delivery. Delivery requires speed, and there is no faster storage technology today than SSD. Where SSD cannot compete is cost/terabyte. The sheer size and scope of content being created, stored, and protected be it the cloud, communication, or video multiplied by the number of consumers and businesses generating it, there is not a more cost effective means of long term storage available than the enterprise hard drive.

Rydning goes on to tell eWeek that more petbytes of enterprise storage will ship in the next 2 years than the previous 20.

What do you see driving this demand?

Image by: Gizmodo