The Cloud Blog

Do you remember that Isuzu ad from the ’90s where the schoolteacher was commanding his students to “stay within the lines, the lines are our friends“? The ad goes on to show a schoolgirl breaking the rules as a child (coloring outside the lines) and later becoming a wild adult driving her SUV offroad. So, what does this have to do with storage? Well, as data consumers, we’re all coloring outside the lines — that is, generating and consuming unstructured content.

In fact, as many may have already guessed, unstructured content is well outstripping data that “stays within the lines” (i.e. databases, email) and will continue its rampant growth as we continue to diversify our use of information technology to blog, tweet, FaceBook, YouTube and MySpace our way into the next exabyte growth of content. Business users aren’t immune, by the way, and in fact generate their fair share of unstructured content. Don’t forget that PowerPoints, Word documents, Visios, Acrobat PDFs, and so forth also fall into the category of “unstructured” content. And don’t forget that the social and rich media portals are being increasingly tapped by the Fortune 500 to connect with their customers (witness the number of corporate videos also on YouTube — those source video files are also kept; more content!). Had an X-Ray lately? Then you’ll know that your Electronic Medical Records are consuming their fair share of cyberspace (and Bill Burns expounds on this and more in his blog here). This definitely isn’t a “stay within the lines” scenario for our data.

A lot has been done to drive down the cost of the equipment over the last few years: bringing once “desktop” technology (such as SATA) into corporate datacenters, leveraging volume production principles to drive down manufacturing costs, and so on. But as IDC also shows (management cost growth chart), there’s a growing gap — managing the infrastructure which we so readily populate with content. In fact, their research shows that while hardware costs have generally balanced against data growth, the management costs of these assets are getting increasingly larger. Clearly, much needs to be done to keep the data world in equilibrium. We have an insatiable appetite for data — and certainly never want to REMOVE any of it — so keeping an eye towards better ways to manage ever increasing quantities is an imperative.

So here we are in the “unstructured” world, and this blog will touch on things in this fun ecosystem — what HDS calls “File and Content.” I would love to hear from you - so stay tuned!