Need for data storage just grows and grows

By ADAM GIFFORD

So you think the internet is overhyped? You look at the share prices for technology companies going south during the past couple of of weeks and think, about time?

Consider then the thoughts of Mike Ruettgers, chairman and chief executive of the computer storage company EMC.

His company takes bog-standard disk drives, tests them until they bleed, jams them by the hundred into refrigerator-sized cabinets, wraps lots of smart software around them, tests them some more and sells them for lots of money.

Doing that successfully drove EMC's share price up more than 10,000-fold during the 1990s, and it continues to grow.

EMC storage is considered one of the standard foundations for an internet-ready company, along with Oracle databases, Cisco networking technology and Sun servers.

Mr Ruettgers told Oracle's Open World conference in San Francisco last week that whatever the sharemarket thinks this week, the demand for those technologies is continuing to grow.

"There's a global torrent of data" that needs to be moved, managed, processed and stored.

Mr Ruettgers said that when considering technology, people overestimate near-term growth and underestimate long-term growth.

Four distinct shifts in information technology can be identified, each one generating a 10-fold increase in information created and industry value.

The first wave, the large systems that emerged in the 1970s, created about 10 million users worth of information. The value of the industry creating those systems was about $US80 billion ($190 billion), the bulk of which went to IBM.

The next wave, PC-centric computing, produced a 10-fold increase in the amount of information being generated.

There was also a 10-fold increase in the value of the industry supplying the technology to $US800 billion, with Intel and Microsoft the big winners.

Mr Ruettgers said network-centred computing is already set to surpass PC-centric computing, and the 10-fold increase will drive the eventual value of the industry to $US8 trillion.

He said a "dot com" internet company doubles the amount of data it holds every 90 days. Global 2000 companies used to double their data every year. Now they're moving towards dot com rates of data aggregation.

"Companies have been playing defence. They now realise you have to play offence to win," Mr Ruettgers said.

Playing offence means finding technical and management skills, commodities which are in short supply around the world. That is driving a move to centralise management and storage of data.

Storage is now measured not in gigabytes or terabytes (1000 gigabytes) but by petabytes (1000 terabytes). Some estimates put the demand for corporate data storage at 10,000 petabytes by 2005.

The research firm Dataquest estimates 57,000 petabytes will be stored by 2004.

Where will this data go? "It will be held at large corporations, large service centres," Mr Ruettgers said. "By 2005, the only scale will be large scale. There will be global infrastructure, there will be storage on nodes, so you can move this around seamlessly."