2007 Roundup: Data explosion to continue

Storage companies set for a bumper 2008

Ian Williams, vnunet.com 24 Dec 2007

2007 saw the demand for storage soar in every conceivable sector.

Hitachi shipped 1TB hard drives in the first quarter, followed by announcements later in the year that it expected to be making 4TB drives by 2011 using a new technology to help avoid problems such as magnetic avalanche.

Rival Fujitsu revealed a few months later that it would be cramming 1TB of data into a standard laptop hard drive, while Buffalo Technology came to market with what it claimed was the first external portable hard drive with a capacity of 320GB.

Storage also began to feature commonly in other devices such as mobile phones, as several new handsets packed 8GB of storage, and even TVs started shipping with hard drives built in.

The huge increase in portable media consumption saw customers flocking to the tills to purchase ever cheaper and larger memory cards, creating a market worth around $7bn.

2007 also saw the birth of commercially available solid state hard drives (SSDs) based on Flash memory rather than spinning disks.

Although still quite pricey and limited to around 32GB, the market is growing rapidly with vendors such as Alienware offering SSD as an option in new PCs and the likes of Hitachi promising 128GB SSDs around May 2008.

Manufacturers are still staking their territory in the SSD market, which is expected to do particularly well for faster and more reliable data storage in notebooks.

In fact practically unlimited levels of data storage have become so common that companies are having to find ways other than sheer volume to differentiate themselves either through green initiatives, storage density or other unique features.

Despite a security hiccup of its own, Seagate has warned that this proliferation of storage options has serious ramifications for company security.

"Today sensitive data and intellectual property can travel as email attachments, downloads from a business portal, or on a device in the user's pocket," said Ian O'Leary, corporate communications director for Seagate in EMEA.

"Data is everywhere and more vulnerable than ever. Loss or compromise of that data can be expensive and can negatively impact productivity and corporate image."

As demonstrated by some of the high profile data losses in 2007, security has to be top of the agenda in 2008. Security, surveillance and Full Disk Encryption will be some of the biggest discussion topics in the coming year.

The rise in data storage regulations, coupled with the increasing use of virtualisation, has seen enterprise storage climb dramatically as well.

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