Image by: http://electrokami.com/

“By 2016, annual global IP traffic is forecast to be 1.3 zettabytes”

That according to the latest  Cisco^® Visual Networking Index (VNI) Forecast (2011-2016).

What’s more, between 2015 & 2016, the increase of global traffic is more than 330 exabytes, almost equal to the total amount of global traffic in 2011 (369 exabytes). The report goes into greater detail as to the main reasons for this growth and they seem elementary:

1. More devices
2. More users
3. Faster internet speeds
4. More video
5. More connectivity (Wi-fi)

So the internet is going to quadruple in the next 4 years because there are more people watching video on more gadgets, from more places, at higher speeds?  Makes sense to me….seems obvious.

We could apply the same thinking to storage.

The demand for storage is going to quadruple by 2016 because video is inherently higher capacity, more people with more devices getting online from more places and at higher speeds means there will be to be a heck of a lot more storage in the cloud…could we even say 4x as much?

Probably…

If we had 1200 Exabytes in 2010, with projections ranging from 7,000 Exabytes to 35,000 Exabytes by 2020 (I know that’s a big range…it depends on who you ask). At a bare minimum, storage capacity demand will increase almost 6x by 2020, so could we say 4x by 2016….maybe….pretty darn close.

I love these head scratching, eye-opening stats relative to the networking space that Cisco puts out, because growth like that has to be good for storage of all shapes and sizes….of course the bigger the better. By 2016, maybe we’ll arrive at HAMR (heat assisted magnetic recording).  Too bad the surge is happening before that technology is baked.  That just means more and more drives shipped between now and then.

Got any cool stats you want to share?

Related Posts:

A 60 Terabyte time crunch…the clock is ticking

Paving the way for big hard drive capacity gains

Why is the gap widening? Connected devices to storage devices.

We used to rely solely on location and whether they had a BBB logo on their ad.  Today, we find restaurants, plumbers, electricians, etc. by searching digital sites like Angie’s List, check-ins on Foursquare, or reviews on Yelp. Or, we simply ask our massive networks of “friends” or “followers” on Facebook and Twitter. One thing that digital has brought us is more educated decision making – be it a place to grab dinner, or a business to have fix that leaky faucet.

On the flip side, you used to rely on the phonebook to find the number of a classmate, or a neighbor.  Have you ever tried this online?  Search your own name, and you get dozens of sites that have your name, phone number, address, kids’ names…more than you could possibly need…that is if all you were looking for were their digits. Yes, going digital has made replication and redistribution of information much, much easier.  And this could be viewed as a positive, or a negative.

You used to be able to simply place a call, maybe fill out a form (on paper) requesting your phone number not be listed, and that pretty much guaranteed some privacy. If they weren’t listed, their was no way to get their number.  You had to know someone, who knows someone, that went to school with that person’s second cousin first removed, before you got what you were looking for.

Today, all you need is a name and maybe a Facebook account. After all, Facebook has decreased the 7 degrees of separation to 3.74. 

Yes, these are the times in which we live.  Millions upon billions of hard drives scattered in computers and servers around the world feeding other computers and servers around the world, what one 1,000+ page book used to do. Why wait for such information to be delivered to your doorstep?  Just type it into Google.

Do you still use the phonebook? My grandma does.

Related Posts:

RIP Yellow Pages? Phone books re-shape themselves for life after listings

Magazines from print to floppy to cloud.

PaaS: Pizza-as-a-Service with the push of a [fridge magnet]

Google asks us to fill in the blank: “The Internet is the power to________”

Image by: CNBC

There’s something about that familiar, albeit annoying, clicking sound you hear from behind you at the movie theater. Maybe we are so used to it, that we don’t even hear it anymore.

Or, maybe we don’t hear it anymore, because it isn’t there.

The transition from analog to digital has been a long time coming in the movie biz.  In the days of old, film canisters were shipped from production studio to theaters across the country. Today, they ship encrypted hard drives. This according to a post on BuzzFeed:

“Digital conversion and projection is already common in chain theaters across the country, with 27,000 screens in the U.S. (over two thirds) converted to digital. The switch started in earnest last year after major studios like 20th Century Fox privately notified theater owners in December 2011 of the coming new world order.  And at CinemaCon this year, Fox’s master plan was announced: all digital, no film by 2013.”

The question being…do you care?

I rarely head to the theater anymore, and if I do, it’s most likely for my kids, or for a movie that has to be seen on a large scale…case in point the Avengers, Avatar, Titanic…any of the top 5 movies of all time in terms of ticket revenue. But, based on the post on Buzz Feed, many movie purists do care because going digital has implications…I’ll let you form your own opinion…check out the post – it’s a good read.

More often than not, digital is better, but many can make the argument for analog as well whether it’s record albums or 35mm film.  I guess it comes down to what you’re most passionate about, and no amount of digitization is going to change that.

The clicking sound at the movie theater…it is going away whether we like it or not.

So do you care?

Related Posts:

Remember when print was higher res than digital?

Be Kind and Rewind

Remembering Encyclopedia Britannica. “Stay out of the living room!”

Image by: http://thoughtsareatrain.blogspot.com/

Via @computerworld, “The maximum areal densities of hard disk drives are expected to more than double by 2016, according to an IHS iSuppli report on the memory and storage market.”

Seagate has already projected that with the new HAMR technology coming out, a 60TB 3.5-inch drive is not out of the question, and it will happen in the next 4 years.  Capacity has and may always be the measuring stick for how hard drive suppliers are measured against each other in terms of technical “leadership.”  But, let’s face it, there are many other innovations in drive design, firmware design, and features that will ultimately lead to whether you are #1, #2, or #3 in terms of shipments.  Being first is a nicety. A short-lived blip on the media’s radar screen that comes and goes with what seems to be a blink of the eye.  Being the best in terms of quality, ease of use, and performance is the ultimate measuring stick.

When I think of a 60TB hard drive and what it would mean in terms of RAID rebuilds, I get about as excited as the guy in the photo.

Imagine what it would take to rebuild a disk array should a drive fail.  In today’s world, with 3TB drives, it can take days…yes days.  According to a yobitech blog, “The Perfect Storm even with RAID 6 protection looks like this…Higher Capacity Drives = longer rebuild times: The industry has released 3TB drives. Depending on SAN vendor, this will vary. I have seen 6 days for a rebuild of a 2TB drive.”

Granted, not everyone has a RAID 5 or RAID 6 system in their home, but most businesses do, and time is money. But as capacity demands grow in the home and office, higher capacity hard drives are a welcome sight to meet that demand, but like I said above, capacity is only part of the equation.  It’s the quality, features, firmware, performance that end up mattering more in the long run.

Good thing the RAID rebuild nightmare is being met head-on. Seagate has been working on a feature in its enterprise drives appropriately named RAID Rebuild for the past couple years.  Seagate has been relatively quiet about this new feature, working behind the scenes with customers and partners on ways to best implement the feature – to make it a standard.

The sooner the better, because 60TB drives are on the horizon…tick, tick, tick.

Related Posts:

Growing hard drive capacity is infectious

Paving the way for big hard drive capacity gains

Seagate clears the air on HAMR vs BPM

Storage capacity science…take it with a grain of salt

A 3000TB hard drive?…it comes all down to chemistry

HAMR follows PMR to keep disks driving

The Internet Archive’s Brewster Kahle, left, and David Rinehart with servers loaded with Seagate hard drives.

At the site of a former church in San Francisco’s Richmond neighborhood, Seagate is helping preserve the Internet’s past and ensuring that its vast resources remain easily accessible to future generations.

Servers, hard drives, digital scanners and other high-tech tools blend seamlessly with the building’s still-intact stained-glass windows and pews.

During a recent tour of the Internet Archive, founder Brewster Kahle showed off a server room loaded with three petabytes’ worth of Seagate storage—“enough room to store all the books in the Library of Congress, many times over,” said Kahle. A petabyte is equal to 1 million gigabytes, or about 1,000 terabytes.

Earlier this year, the Internet Archive purchased 1,000 Seagate 3TB  hard drives and installed them in several rack-mounted servers. Each server is embedded with blue lights that blink non-stop, signaling each time someone uploads or downloads a file from the Internet Archive.

Those files could be digitized books, videos, TV news broadcasts, movies, web pages and more. The non-profit organization (it’s funded from foundation grants and donations) has evolved considerably since it began operations in 1996—and its storage needs have grown exponentially.

Reliable, Power-Efficient Storage

An employee scans a book at the Internet Archive, where more than 1,000 books are digitized each day.

“What was important to us when we purchased Seagate’s drives is that they were reliable, inexpensive and power-efficient,” Kahle explained. “If you’re going to entrust the heritage of your culture to a storage medium, you really need to have those characteristics. Seagate’s drives have performed very well for us.”

The Internet Archive’s storage workload is intense. Some 2 million people use the Archive’s online material each day. One of its most popular resources is The Wayback Machine, which lets users browse a database of more than 160 billion web pages going back to 1996. That tool receives about 1,000 queries from around the globe each second.

The Archive currently uses more than 12 petabytes of storage—a mixture of Seagate and other hard drive brands—and that number, like the Internet itself, keeps expanding.

“There’s an exponential increase in the World Wide Web, with video taking up more and more of our storage needs,” Kahle said. “As long as companies like Seagate continue to increase storage densities, cultural institutions like the Internet Archive should not only be able to keep that data safe but keep it accessible to everyone.”

Universal Access

Universal accessibility to the Internet Archive is “hugely important” to Kahle and his 150 employees—along with ensuring that all of that content is preserved for future generations to enjoy. He sees the Archive as a kind of “Library of Alexandria 2.0.”

“All libraries live in the shadow of the Library of Alexandria,” Kahle explained. “It was the center of learning of the ancient world. It wasn’t just a great collection; it was where new ideas came about. People came together and they learned from each other. We’re seeing some of the same things on the Internet, by giving people access to information.”

That information can be fleeting, however.

“The average life of a web page is about 100 days—before it’s either changed or disappears,” Kahle said. “It’s fantastic how much information is available at our fingertips now, but it’s also highly volatile. We support universal access to all knowledge. And we want to make sure that knowledge doesn’t disappear into the past.”

Preserving the massive amounts of digital information available on the Net—and making it more accessible—is a daunting goal. It’s one that Kahle and his team hope others will continue working toward well into the future.

“No one’s here for the money,” said David Rinehart, a digital artist. “We all love this place, and we have a passion for what we’re doing. This isn’t a 10-year project. It’s infinite.” —By Steve Pipe

Related Posts:

Have you preserved your kids’ content lately?

Seagate Helps the GRAMMYs Preserve a Rich Musical Legacy

Save the Music, Preserve Our Culture

Preserving the Past for the Future

Image by: http://www.arteater.com.au/

This post by the The Signal blog on the US Library of Congress website got me thinking about how we use storage…and if I am doing enough to preserve the content I create be it digital or even analog.

Today, we use local storage in our system for running applications, creating documents, editing videos or photos, etc., In addition, we may have additional external storage, or even cloud storage  for:

• Organization:  Categorizing storage device by member of the family, or content type: music, videos, etc.
• Mobilization: Having the ability to access files from anywhere at anytime.
• Protection: Backup…say no more.

What we don’t necessarily have is any storage dedicated to preservation.

The Signal blog describes the need as: “If we want any of these born digital objects to stick around, the ones created on a flatbed scanner or the ones created with a digital camera, we need to be thinking about digital preservation. Beyond the fact that digitization is not digital preservation,  digitization always results in the creation of a new digital object. If we want to have any access to that new digital object in the future we need to be actively thinking about digital preservation.”

That goes for every photo developed and placed in photo albums (yes – 3 ring binders), every newspaper clipping of the Chicago Bulls run of 6 consecutive titles in the 90s, every report card, poem, drawing, painting, story, and book report my kids did in school.  The scary thought is that I have not done any of this…most of this stuff in packed in waterproof plastic bins in the basement, or under some bed…not exactly the preservation we are talking about.

The challenge being…do I have the digital storage, much less the time to do it?  I go back to the 12 months it took me to rip my CD collection one by one to MP3 years ago.  I did it because, there was immediate benefit. Once digitized, I could access the music faster, and on almost any digital music device. But it wasn’t for preservation … I consider keeping the CDs my way of preserving my collection.

When it comes to the truly analog content…the report cards, artwork, newspaper headlines, etc. The benefit is not near term, it’s long term, and that is the dilemma. But if you think about what the future holds for making the effort, it sounds a whole lot more meaningful a project to start sooner.  With digitally preserved content, we could give content a much longer lifespan…one that can be enjoyed by my kids’ kids. And that makes the effort and commitment worth it.

How have you digitally preserved your content?

Wow – there was a time when print was higher res than digital, and this print isn’t even that great in terms of clarity.

Take a trip down memory lane with this little nugget:  101 Classic Computer Ads.

Guest post by Greg Schulz or StorageIO

This follows the first of a two-part series on my latest experiences with Hybrid Hard Disk Drives (HHDD’s) and Solid State Devices (SSD’s). In my ongoing last momentus moment post I discussed what I have done with HHDD’s and setting the stage for expanded SSD use. I have the newer HHDD’s, e.g. Seagate Momentus XT II 750GB (8GB SLC nand flash) installed and have since bought another from Amazon as well as having some of the older 500GB (4GB SLC nand flash) in various systems. Those are all functioning great, however still waiting and looking forward to the rumored firmware enhancements to boost write capabilities.

This brings me up to the latest momentus moment which now includes SSD’s.

Well its two years later and I now have a 256GB (usable capacity is lower) Samsung SSD that I bought from Amazon.com and installed in one of my laptops and just as when I made the first switch to HHDD’s, I also have a backup copy/clone to fall back to in case of emergency.

Was it worth the wait? Yes, particularly using the HHDD’s to bridge the gap and enable some productivity gain which more than paid for them based on some different projects. I’m already seeing productivity improvements that will make future upgrades more easy to justify (to myself).

I deviated from my strategy a bit and installed the SSD about six months earlier than I was planning to do so because of a physical barrier. That physical barrier was my new traveling laptop only accepts 7mm height 2.5 inch small form factor devices and the 750GB HHDD that I had planned on installing was 2.5mm to thick which pushed up the SSD installation.

What will become of the 750GB HHDD? Its being redeployed to help speed up file serving, backups and other functions.

Will I replace the HHDD’s in my other workstations and laptops now with SSD’s? Across the board no, not yet, however there is one other system that is a prime candidate to maybe upgrade in a month or two (maybe less).

Will I stick with the Samsung SSD’s or look at other options? I’m keeping my options open and using this as a gauge to test and compare other options in a real world working environment as opposed to a lab bench test simulation. In other words, taking the next step past the lab test and product reviews, gaining comfort and confidence and then trying out with real use activity.

What will happen in the future as I install more SSD’s and have surplus HHDD’s? Redeployed them of course into file or NAS servers, backup targets that in turn will replace HDD’s that will either get retired, or redeployed to replace older, smaller capacity, higher cost to handle HDD’s used for offsite protection.

I tried using the software that came with the SSD to do the cloning and should have known better, however wanted to see what the latest version of ghost was like (it was a waste of time to be polite). Instead I used Seagate Discwizard (aka Acronis) which requires at least one Seagate product (source or target) for cloning.

Cloning from the Seagate HHDD that have been previously cloned from the Hitachi HDD that came with the laptop, was a none issue. However, I wanted to see what would happen if I attached the Samsung SSD to the Seagate Goflex cable and clone directly from the Hitachi HDD, it worked. Hence another reason to have some of the Seagate Goflex cables (USB and eSATA) like the ones I bought at Amazon.com around in your toolbox.

While I do not have concrete empirical numbers to share, cloning from a HDD to a SSD is shall we say fast, however, what’s really fun to watch is cloning from a HHDD to a SSD using an eSata (GoFlex) connector adapter. The reason I say that it is fun is that you don’t have to sit and wait for hours, it’s not minutes to move 100s of GBs, however you can very much see the progress bar move at a good pace.

Also, I put the HHDD on an eSata port and try that out as a backup or data dump target if you have the need for speed, capacity and cost effectiveness, yes its fast, has lots of capacity and so forth. Now if Seagate and Synology or EMC Iomega would get their acts together and add support for the HHDD’s in those different unified SMB and SOHO NAS solutions, that would be way cool.

Will I be racing to put SSD’s in my other laptops or workstations soon? Probably not as there are things in the works and working their way into and through the market place that I wanted to wait for, and thus will wait for now, that is unless a more interesting opportunity pops up.

Note:  For clarification, Greg refers to Seagate’s solid state hybrid drives (SSHD) as hybrid hard disk drives (HHDD). They are one in the same.

Related StorageIO Hybrid Posts:

More Storage IO momentus HHDD and SSD moments part I
New Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid drive (SSD and HDD)
Other Momentus XT moments posts here here, here, here and here

Cloud storage is everywhere…and the competition for your files is heating up now that Facebook is in the running.

Some may argue that Facebook has always been in the cloud storage space.  It was just focused on photo sharing.  After all, 250 Million photos are uploaded a day to Facebook, and that is some serious online storage, but let’s get down to brass tacks on this whole cloud storage craze…the purpose.

Each cloud storage provider has a purpose in their message – something of value they offer a consumer or business for storing their files in the provider’s data center cloud.  For many, it may be data protection or backup, for others their message may be around personal mobility, collaboration, syncing, or sharing.  Some may offer a combination of all of the above.

Based on the comparison, the most common “marketing messages” :  share, simple, secure, and perhaps sync.  Obviously, these words were not created in a vacuum. There are plenty of really smart people at these companies, with all kinds of research to support the messages they have developed for their cloud storage offering.  For consumers, my bet is on those with the most “simplistic” message:  Google, DropBox, and Apple…with Facebook being the one I am leaning towards the most for 5 simple reasons:

1. Facebook doesn’t need a tagline or special messaging because…
2. they have the installed base which means…
3. they have the daily traffic and integration with our devices & apps , so…
4. they can provide us a one-stop-shop, meaning…
5. sharing, securing, even syncing our content should be relatively simple.

Of course, Apple and Google can say the same thing…hence we’re back to the big 3.

If you had to pick one…who would you choose?

Related Posts:

Network storage, cloud storage, removable storage…floppy disk?

Why trust will reign supreme in a broader storage war

What would/could you do with 5GB of free storage?

Image by: http://askq8.com/blogs

Here’s a concept:  what if your hard drive grew more capacity on its own? This discovery is all over the news – if you travel in the high profile, fast moving world of data storage

That is what scientists from the University of Leeds in the UK and the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology are working on. According to an ExtremeTech article, “researchers identified and extracted the protein responsible for converting iron into magnetite — Mms6.” Granted, the research has only proven to match the capacity Seagate’s recent demonstration of HAMR (Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording) of 1TB per square inch. But, as the ExtremeTech article points out…

“the real appeal here is that we might eventually be able to grow non-volatile storage, rather than manufacture it. Imagine if your computer had a hard drive that simply grew another platter when it approached capacity; imagine if repartitioning a hard drive actually split your hard drive platter into multiple fragments, which could then be re-grown to become complete platters.”

It’s safe to assume, the technology may not be cheap, but in terms of scaling to your storage needs, it seems much more appealing for a drive to simply expand on its own versus you having to upgrade your storage, or add more storage as your capacity needs grow.  Of course, there are numerous variables at play here. The same variables that go into designing a hard drive whether its Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR), Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR), or this new concept of bacterial magnetic recording…I’ll call it BMR for consistency’s sake.

Reliability is the number one variable, and what goes into designing a single hard drive (and even moreso, different types of hard drives — desktop, laptop, enterprise, consumer electronics) is painstakingly technical.  Hundreds of thousands of hours and tens of millions of dollars go into ensuring the product will operate at a wide range of temperatures, altitudes, humidity levels, and workloads, not to mention with thousands of different applications, in hundreds of different systems, and for hundreds of thousands of consecutive hours of operation.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the innovation and science that is being applied to making hard drives bigger, faster, more reliable, cost effective, and sustainable, and given the growth of data, there seems to be a lot of investment in the areas of science needed to advance drive technology.  Here is what we have seen just in the past year:

• Bacterial magnetic recording
• HAMR
• Superman Crystals
• Molecule-sized magnets

Data growth is a powerful thing…it’s driving some of the world’s top research institutions to find new and better ways of storing information. And considering the amount of data we are generating, it’s a welcome sight. Let’s not get too excited though.  Research and discovery is one thing, putting the technology into real world use is where the magic really happens.

Do you want bacteria growing in your PC?

Related Posts:

Paving the way for big hard drive capacity gains

Seagate clears the air on HAMR vs BPM

Storage capacity science…take it with a grain of salt

A 3000TB hard drive?…it comes all down to chemistry

HAMR follows PMR to keep disks driving