Physical Space has its Limitations – Trend #2
Over the last 25 years, businesses have gone from being paper based to fully automated and paperless. Computerized systems were termed as back office automation systems almost strictly used for payroll, accounting, and related business management tools.
Again, thanks to Moore’s Law, the business process has been captured in software and automated, for most any type of business practice. If it doesn’t exist, it can be made to suit specific needs at a whim…practically.
The simple and highly accelerated acceptance of the Internet has in itself, exponentially increased this paper to paperless transformation. Communications is the greatest driver here. Using the Internet, instant 24×7 availability and customer services are available, thereby expanding a business’s relative hours of operation, without the high cost of more employees, building costs, insurance, etc. Business automation is, and has been, king for more than 15 years.
So, what we have is an immense data explosion. In 2003, the world created and stored 5 Exabytes (each Exabyte is 1 million terabytes) of new data. A recent study by the Enterprise Strategy Group predicted that governments and corporations will store over 25 Exabytes of data by the year 2010, and they were right, we evidently beat that in 2009 and storage manufacturers are looking at the next level, Zetabytes, coming our way in the next 5 years or so. The trend of data growth within organizations is continuing, exponentially. In 2006, the storage industry shipped as much storage in one month as it did in the entire year of 2000. It’s been said that storage requirements will continue to rise at a rate of 50%, minimum, per year for the next 5 years.
The result is that a huge number of servers have been put into use over the past 10 years, which is causing a real estate problem for companies. Datacenter space is limited and expansion is not at all easy. This is making way for storage virtualization as well, but I’ll address this specifically in another post.
Virtualization, by offering effective and highly efficient server consolidation by hosting multiple operating systems on a single physical server, is the driver for recovering that datacenter real estate they are spending so much money on maintaining and expanding. In this case, virtualization really allows you to spend less and get much more for it over time, at many levels.
Take a look at your server room or datacenter; if you’re near capacity, you need virtualization!
Trend 3 is on its way later this week…
