Storage. When you think about it, that’s a pretty accurate description for what storage means in the IT industry. Storing stuff, data in its various constituent forms, such as documents, e-mails, audio, images or video.
Each year, businesses, organisations and people, store more and more stuff. Sometimes, they throw a tiny bit of that stuff out but the space they regain is frequently refilled more quickly than it can be deleted.
The solution, so far, has been to throw more storage at the problem. It still is. According to a story on TechCentral, IDC reported that worldwide data storage hardware sales rose by 41.4% in the first quarter of 2015 and 28.3 exabytes of capacity were shipped. Right now, many of us have a hard time getting our heads around an exabyte in much the same way as people 30 years ago had a hard time imagining a gigabyte. But if things keep going the way they are, I think it won’t be long before we’ll be quite comfortable using the word ‘exabyte’ in polite conversation.
Why is this? Maybe it’s much easier to learn how to express a new measurement of storage than to try and work out how to stop the inexorable rise in capacity that has plagued the industry for so many years.
Sort it out
But you have to admit, it’s a strange state of affairs. Storage companies like to use terms like ‘data deluge’ or ‘data tsunami’ to describe the situation that confronts so many of their customers. They urge companies to protect themselves not only by increasing capacity but also by adding technologies such as Big Data and data management to enable customers to make sense of the data they’re struggling to keep pace with.
Now while on the surface it’s great to see storage companies produce technologies that claim to enable customers to generate some kind of value after the fact out of the bewildering amounts of data they are being forced to store, I can’t help wondering if this is the right way to go about it. Essentially, it’s an admission that storage capacity will never stop growing and that customers will live constantly under the shadow of a looming data tsunami. In other words, the only course open to them is to throw the data wheat and chaff into a giant warehouse and then try and separate them afterwards. Even then, there’s no guarantee that they can dispose of the chaff.
That’s not how it should work. To quote the passage from the bible (Matthew 3:12) that gives us the expression: “He will thoroughly clear His threshing floor; and He will gather His wheat into the barn, but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.” In other words, people should be able to separate the useful from the useless before they store it away.
The problem is that while this is the intuitively correct way to do things, the IT industry and storage vendors are currently only capable of providing a counter-intuitive solution to the problem. Yet, if the wheat is not separated from the chaff, it is unfit for human consumption because chaff is indigestible by humans. The triumph of the IT industry and the storage vendors has been to convince customers that the chaff can be removed after they have consumed it.
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