Relentless digital data growth is inevitable as data has become critical to all aspects of human life and it promises to play a much greater role in the future. The amount of data created over the next three years will exceed the total amount of data created over the past 30 years.
Most of this data is piling up as archival and cold data waiting to have its potential value unlocked. This accelerated transformation has been increased by the global COVID-19 pandemic, which caused an upsurge in working-from-home, relying heavily on internet-based applications and video communication in an “everything digital” work environment. Nearly 80% of all data is archival or cold with most being stored in the traditional file format, which is facing scaling limits, and the relatively new, fast-growing object format which provides limitless scaling.
This enormous growth is the product of generational and new internet-based applications including surveillance, cloud and edge computing, high-performance computing (HPC), the Internet of Things (IoT), social media, entertainment and many more.
Data storage has therefore become far more than a megatrend – it can be viewed as a measure of the progress of humanity, cutting across all walks of life, public and private organizations, and every aspect of the economy. New storage technologies and architectures must be created in response to the growing need for highly scalable capacity at minimal cost for large enterprise, webscale and hyperscale data centers (HSDCs).
As a result, today’s enormous archives will command a much more intelligent solution that leverages the advanced capabilities of intelligent data management software and high-availability, scaleout hardware. A compelling digital archive strategy has become a lifeline for enterprise, webscale and HSDCs continued growth. Fortunately, the dawn of a new class of object storage for cold data has arrived.