This morning on 702 Sydney I’m talking to Linda Mottram on the decidedly unsexy topic of storage – hard drives, cloud computing and the struggle to keep up with ever expanding file sizes of documents, photos and downloads.
It’s an opportunity to revisit the How Much Data Does The Internet Need topic which I covered for Radio National last year, although almost certainly that needs updating.
Earlier this year networking vendor Cisco released its 2013 Virtual Networking Index which forecast global data traffic growing fourteen fold over the next five years.
Those bytes slopping around the internet have to come to rest on someone’s hard drive and this is what’s driving the storage crisis.
Yesterday US business site Venture Beat had an op-ed by an executive from Seagate, the world’s biggest hard drive manufacturer where he discussed the storage challenges with a claim from industry consultants IDC that worldwide computer storage is 2.7 zettabytes.
A zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes, or ten followed by twenty zeros – it’s the equivalent of a billion one terabyte hard drives that are standard on most cheap desktop computers.
Where those hard drives are located is the big challenge, is it on your laptop, smartphone or on a somewhere on a cloud service?
The other big challenge is what do you do with all this information – which is where the Big Data discussion comes in.
While data storage is a mundane topic, it’s a big one that matters. I hope you can tune in.
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