Access and Feeds

Storage: World's Data Doubles every 18 Months

By Dick Weisinger

For the past three years IDC Research has been counting how much digital data exists in the world, and they’ve found that in each of those years their estimates for the year has needed to be revised upwards.  New numbers are in now for the year 2008 — and the total came in at 487 exabytes — 73 percent higher than the number for 2007.

IDC calculates the number by looking at all possbile data-creating devices, which include digital camera, mobile devices, RFID readers, medical scanners, and just about anything nowadays.  Next they multiply each type of device by the estimated amount of data that the device can store.  And then add it all up.

Some storage space can be saved by using techniques like storage virtualization that allows for better utilization of disk drives, and data de-duplication which can remove multiple copies of the same document or data which is being stored.  But these are only tiny bandaids to a problem that is rapidly growing.

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