Storage requirements to increase 500 percent by 2010

Research published by IDC estimates that global data storage requirements will increase from 161 billion gigabytes in 2006 to 988 billion gigabytes in 2010.

The report, entitled The Expanding Digital Universe: A Forecast of Information Growth Through 2010, says 70 percent of that total will be generated by individuals.

But while businesses may not be responsible for creating the information, hosting companies, telcos and security vendors will assume responsibility for transmitting, encrypting and storing 85 percent of it, IDC adds.

On the face of it, storage vendor EMC, which sponsored the report, has a lot to gain from selling increased volumes of high-capacity hardware that will surely be needed to accommodate all of that data.

But EMC’s UK marketing director, Nigel Ghent, insists the company is also looking at ways to reduce data volumes at source and help companies and individuals move it around and manage it more efficiently.

“The way we address information needs to change, and the first thing that companies need to do is understand the nature and priority of the data they are storing,” Ghent said.

EMC recently acquired Avamar, a company that has developed software that reduces the amount of disk space needed for backups by stripping out repeated information.

Content management and classification systems that mine unstructured data to decide what information needs to be kept long-term or discarded can also help businesses offset growing physical storage requirements.