Disk costs spinning out of control | | 2008-06-25 | | In 2007, businesses spent approximately $1.3 billion on powering and cooling according to a report by industry analysts IDC.
This figure is set to rise to $1.8 billion by the end of this year and to over $2 billion in 2009 increasing pressure on the industry to adopt greater energy efficiency.
With more than 49 million hard disk drives in external storage arrays in use by businesses around the world, the number is expected to increase eight fold by 2011.
Dave Reinsel, group vice president for storage and semiconductors at IDC noted "Data centre storage requirements are growing by 50 to 55 per cent a year, but hard drive capacities are only growing by 30 to 35 per cent a year. In order to keep up with this growth, you either have to put in more and more drives or look for alternatives to stave off buying new drives."
Although, to date, considerably more expensive than spinning disks, NAND flash-based solid-state storage which contains no moving parts is widely seen as a solution. HP, Sun and EMC have all announced flash drive development initiatives in recent months.
Other technologies recommended by Reinsel include data deduplication, thin provisioning and compression. He also suggested that IT managers turn to smaller disk drives and adopt a tiered storage architecture.
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