IT departments have for years faced a tough challenge in balancing their organisations' growing needs for more information storage capacity against the cost of the storage.
This process was one that could could be tackled and planned for in a reasonable fashion when the bulk of this load was made up of structured data - well-ordered information stored in databases and typically used during transactions.
However, the tide has turned, with the volume of unstructured data now exceeding structured data, and this gap looks set to widen even further.
According to the IDC Enterprise Disk Storage Consumption Model report released at the end of 2008, transactional data is still projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21.8 per cent, but unstructured data in traditional data centres is expected to achieve a CAGR of 61.7 per cent.
According to industry insiders there are three major drivers behind the explosion of unstructured data volumes.
'The increase in governance and compliance regulations, particularly around disaster recovery, has meant that many companies have had to dramatically increase their storage capacity,' said Gabriel Leung, general manager of EMC Hong Kong.
'Companies are finding that more information, and more copies of that information, needs to be stored, particularly in the finance sector. This is a trend that we see growing in the future.'
