The Data Affordability GAP Widens – Year by Year
In my last two blogs I reviewed data growth, IT budgets and storage efficiency. These are all inter-twined as we look toward economic and business recovery. The key in all this is “can we afford the data growth?” and if not, what can be done to lessen the impact as businesses drive toward recovery and financial health.
Let’s look at some of the facts that have been discussed:
- Data will continue to grow at a rate of 50% or more in 2011 and will require more storage to retain it.
- The cost of storage (per GB) continues to drop by 25%/yr
- IT budgets are improving by 3% on average in 2011.
When the growth rate of IT budgets and the decrease in storage cost/GB are compared against the overall storage growth, it becomes quickly apparent that there is a widening GAP between the needs and the ability to afford (fund) the costs of data growth. Consider the following scenarios:
- Data Growth will expand 10 – 20% per year from 50% yr/yr to more than 70% yr/yr by 2015.
- IT budgets will improve slowly as the economy improves.
- An average of 3% in 2011 may grow to 4-5% in 2012 and 6% or more in 2013!
Will it be enough to catch up with the Data Deluge (Forbes 2009) we are experiencing? The following graphic provides some perspective on the GAP that will result:
Some conclusions:
- There will be an increasingly larger GAP between the ability to fund (afford) the cost of data growth.
- Businesses will consume incremental IT budget just to attempt to keep up with the costs of data growth.
- In order to afford the GAP in data growth there will need to be additional budget funding which will take away scarce dollars from other business operations limiting the ability to grow, expand and compete.
Data Efficiency Leap
What will be needed is an effective way to drive significant data efficiency with respect to data growth. Data optimization technology has evolved beyond its initial use case in backup solutions to be applied to primary storage and beyond. The resulting reduction in storage consumption is dramatic and the impact of data optimization technology on business IT budgets cannot be understated. For example, if data can be optimized (reduced) by a factor of 2X to 4-8X, the costs associated with the storage spend will yield significant results. In fact, a recent piece in The Register 1/24/11 by Chris Mellor discusses that not using data optimization is like pouring budget $ down the drain! In order to prevent IT budget shortfalls resulting from data growth, optimization technology will offer significant budget relief and smaller shortfalls thus freeing up valuable resources that can be applied elsewhere..
The following graphic demonstrates this effect:
Every once in a while there is a significant development “that changes everything.” Today that significant development is the use of data optimization across the storage spectrum. As stated earlier, the initial deployment of data optimization technology, such as data deduplication and compression, were strictly for backup offerings, but that has all changed. Today’s extremely efficient data optimization technology does not negatively impact overall system performance, or existing processes, and performs at the I/O rates necessary for across the board storage (yes including primary storage) and can scale out to multiple PBs of storage.
Data optimization is the enabler that will deliver the affordability that is needed to solve today’s data growth conundrum. It enables the evolution of BIG DATA that is needed to help businesses dig out from the economics of the last few years and afford storage growth in the future.
BIG DATA will be the topic of my next blog. How having all that data can be a competitive differentiator and help leaders compete and gain market share rather than being a burden that cannot be afforded.
For a review of some of my recent blogs go to http://bit.ly/cSlkAI