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World is running out of storage, warns Intel

By Barry Collins in Brussels

Posted on 4 May 2010 at 14:19

Intel has warned that the world is generating more data than it has the storage capacity to hold.

Speaking at the company's European Research conference here in Brussels, Intel fellow Jim Held claimed that data storage was growing at a rate of 60% per year.

"Vast amounts of data are being created at an increasing rate, already more than we can handle," Held warned. "In 2007, we estimated that we didn't have the storage to keep all of it."

Vast amounts of data are being created at an increasing rate, already more than we can handle

Held - who somewhat ironically holds the job title of director of tera-scale computing at Intel - claimed the rapid data growth meant that the world would soon be entering the "yottabyte era", which is equal to one quadrillion gigabytes.

"We've already gone up into the zettabyte range [roughly 1,000,000,000,000 gigabytes]," Held said. "We will have to go to the yottabyte pretty soon".

Held claimed an increasing reliance on internet services, the proliferation of data-gathering sensors in smartphones and growing corporate demand was responsible for the exponential growth in data.

"Walmart adds a billion rows per minute to its database," he said. "YouTube contains about as much data as all the commercial networks broadcast in a year. The LHC [Large Hadron Collider] can generate terabytes of data per second."

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User comments

I can help

I've got a spare 315Mb HDD he can have for free if that will help him out.

By JStairmand on 4 May 2010

315mb? what an odd sized hard drive.

By anthonysjones on 4 May 2010

In the not to distant past my company had a 12GB server, oh yes!!! At this time we kept essential work on it and archived the rest on CD or tape etc... This was great as it forced people to be organised however the replacement server gave us 200GB of space and so started the lazyness. There are projects on there dating back 4 years now! My other issue is email. For example if I send a 1MB attachment to a team of ten people for discussion there are now ten copies of that 1mb file in the world i.e. 10MB, and then I get replys going back and forward with the attachment so the file is duplicated time and time again and in todays blame culture its guaranteed that email will be saved on everyone's computer. So now if we multiple the amount of files by the amount of contacts and again by the amount of responses suddenly we have a ruddy lot of data for no good reason. So yes I agree data storage is becoming a problem and for no good reason.

By anthonysjones on 4 May 2010

It was only about ten or twenty years ago that the story was going round that people ought to be devoting their energies to creating as much data as they could, because the speed of the CPUs that were then being sold was outstripping the capacity of the software to clog them up - hence the need for more data to balance things out.

A more relevant point that Intel should have made is that the world is running out of the capability to back up the data we have already...

By JohnGray7581 on 4 May 2010

The Blame Game

I blame the Megapixel war fought by the digital camera makers.Take 1 Raw Image with an Canon EOS 5D Mk 2 and you will be looking at a file size of around 65mb..Thats just for 1 shot !!! Even your common or Garden point and shoot nowdays has a 12 megapixel sensor.All those photos have to be stored somewhere.

By Jaberwocky on 4 May 2010

I blaim it all on Stephen Fry's tweets, if you're looking to save storage, start there

By pauld1024 on 4 May 2010

Logging everything everyone does will really help...

Thanks Digitial Economy Bill!

By cheysuli on 4 May 2010

Weeding Required

Is this a case of quantity over quality?
How much of this data is Junk Mail or meaningless?
Do we store it eternally.

Get rid of the flotsam of the Digital Ocean!

By lenmontieth on 5 May 2010

@anthonyjones

Exchange used to use "single instance storage" - an attachment was only kept on the server once, and everyone included in the email used that one copy.

The latest version of Exchange no longer includes that function, so things are now exactly as you describe - a completely pointless waste of space.

By alynsparkes on 5 May 2010

Not just Exchange

Lots of mail systems allow that option. The basic problem becomes that the instance store is then the thing that grows beyond management.

By Steve_Cassidy on 5 May 2010

Chuck out the chintz

Clothes manufacturers are also producing more than I can fit in my wardrobe - I don't need bigger wardrobes.

By circusfrog on 6 May 2010

Chuck out the chintz

Clothes manufacturers are also producing more than I can fit in my wardrobe - I don't need bigger wardrobes.

By circusfrog on 6 May 2010

Training article required.

Following on from Homer's "Press Anykey to continue...Where's the AnyKey?" training program we bring you "Delete - The adventures of a recycle Bin"

By Gindylow on 6 May 2010

Don't back up (some of it)

There comes a point where archives take so much time to weed out we just back them up to a bigger disk, a slippery slope. There should be some way to make user think about the junk they save to their "Cheap Disk Space"
limit quotas to business value. E.G.
DRC (Disaster-Recovery-Critical) 2G.
SBF (Standard-Business-Files) 10G.
NBAA (No-Backup-At-All) 100G
Then wait for the "I saved the database to NBAA because SBF was full of my holiday pictures...."

By Powernumpty on 6 May 2010

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