* Study predicts there to be 988 billion gigabytes of digital information by 2010
IDC last week released a study showing as much as 988 billion gigabytes of digital information will be produced by 2010.
The study, commissioned by EMC, showed that the primary drivers for this increase in data are rich media, user-generated content and 1.6 billion Internet users.
In 2006, the amount of digital content was 161 billion gigabytes (161 exabytes). That is 3 million times the information contained in all the books ever written. IDC is predicting that this amount of data will increase six-fold between now and 2010. While most of the data – nearly 70% – will be created by individuals, organizations will be responsible for protecting and securing 85% of it.
Digital images from cameras, cell phones and medical scanners will comprise the largest component of this data. IDC forecasts that more than 500 billion images will be captured by digital cameras and phones by 2010.
The study also highlighted that the number of e-mail mailboxes has grown from 253 million in 1998 to 1.6 million in 2006, and that the e-mail traffic from one person to another – excluding spam – accounted for 6 exabytes. The IDC study also said that there will be 250 million instant messaging accounts by 2010.
More than 95% of the data is unstructured, consisting of Word files, Excel spreadsheets and PDF files. Only one-fifth of the data is subject to compliance and regulations and less than 10% of the data is classified.
The complete study can be found here.
Storage in the news:
* Storewiz announced the STN-6000 storage compression appliance. The appliance sits in front of network-attached storage devices, where it compresses the data before it is stored on the array. The STN-6300 and STN-6500 are suited for departmental, remote office and enterprise network use.
* Watch “Attack of the 1 Terabyte Baby” on YouTube. The video was created by Dell and shows the effect of a single e-mail being sent to others.
* Imation introduced a RFID-based removable data storage tracking system that allows IT administrators to monitor and track the location of in-transit tape cartridges. The DataGuard rf Tape Tracking System uses specially designed RFID-enabled labels affixed to each tape cartridge, allowing administrators to check in and check out each cartridge.
* Isilon unveiled a storage utility called MigrationIQ that enables automated data migration between multiple tiers of clustered storage. MigrationIQ automates digital content migration from production environments to near-line or archive clustered storage using policy-based migration tools.
* Agami Systems rolled out new iSCSI capabilities for its network-attached storage appliances. The Agami Information Server (AIS) 3000 and 6000 now support both file- and block-based data in a single platform, allowing users to use NAS for file sharing and iSCSI for database and e-mail applications. The servers support as many as 256 iSCSI targets and 1,024 volumes, and are expected to be available by the end of this month, starting at $25,000.
