A video in your hand = several videos in a server

This report from Knowledge Networks shows that 2/3rds of 18-35 year-0lds in the U.S. carry a video-enabled mobile device.  23% of them carry an Apple video iPod, up from just 5% in 2006.

All of these video-enabled content consumers aren’t watching videos today.  But their devices are ready for the inevitable shift in behavior that will drive more and more video snacking.

Video is the killer app of information over the next decade.  Broad adoption plus higher and higher resolution will create an avalanche of content that will require one heck of a lot of storage devices to make them available.

Where will it all sit? Mobile devices will use mostly flash.  PCs will use mostly disk, with a wee bit of SSD. And data centers that store, manage and serve up all of this content will be mostly disk.

The first two categories are the visible ‘tip of the iceberg’ in data.  Massive quantities of storage comprise the rest, quietly accumulating in datacenters to make it all possible.  And every video that’s served up on a cell phone requires several copies on servers in multiple locations.

That’s why enterprise drives of the “terabyte” variety like the Seagate Constellation family are getting more and more popular.  Even the highest performance drives like the Seagate Cheetah and Savvio drives are approaching theterabyte threshold.

Expect to see continuing, relentless growth in storage demand driven by the video consumption phenomenon.