Date: 6/3/07
Author:  Michelle Kessler
Source: USA TODAY

He counted e-mail, spreadsheets and the other data collected by most corporate computer systems. Then there was the new digital data created by consumers. (Take digital cameras: More than 32 million are expected to be sold this year, says the Consumer Electronics Association trade group.)

But then Gantz realized that he had to look deeper. Digital photos aren't just snapped by traditional cameras — they're also taken by millions of security cameras and camera cellphones, for example.

Gantz ultimately calculated that 161 exabytes of digital data — or about 161 billion GB — were generated in 2006. And the amount is expected to rise fast.

Market opportunity

Technology companies see dollar signs in the data flood. Five storage companies — Isilon Systems, Double-Take Software, CommVault Systems, Mellanox Technologies and Riverbed Technology — have filed for initial public stock offerings (IPOs) in recent months. Riverbed's shares alone have risen more than 200% since they were first offered in September.

Established companies are investing, too. Hewlett-Packard announced plans to acquire storage-software maker PolyServe last week. Storage giant EMC has made several acquisitions, including its $2.1 billion purchase of RSA Security last year.

"It's an opportunity," says Tim Diefenthaler, senior director at PC maker Gateway, which just released a new line of storage products.

Where to put it?

"We are creating more digital information than we can store," says EMC Executive Vice President Mark Lewis.

This year, for the first time, there won't be enough storage capacity in the world to hold all the stuff being created, Gantz says. That doesn't mean the world is likely to run out of storage soon. "A lot of things don't need to be stored," he says.

Many personal e-mails are deleted as soon as they're read, and recorded digital TV programs deleted as soon as they're viewed.

But if supply ever runs low, companies will feel the pinch. Government regulations, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, are requiring firms to save more information than ever. Some companies retain copies of every e-mail.

For now, available storage is getting cheaper and more accessible. In 1990, a typical gigabyte of storage cost about $20,000, EMC's Lewis says. It's down to less than $1 today, he says.

Searching for stuff

Finding the right document in a huge stash of digital data is like "finding a needle in a haystack," says HP Vice President Mark Hudson. And the problem is only going to get worse as the amount of data increases, he says.

HP and others are working on solutions. Some software tools for businesses work well, says tech analyst Roger Kay at Endpoint Technologies Associates. But for the most part, the industry is "just at the beginning of dealing with this," he says. "And we're drowning in information."

But Gantz is confident that technology will help. "In the future, things will be easier to find," he says.

Preserving for posterity

Print photographs from the 1800s are still viewable today. But floppy disks from the 1980s are very difficult to read.

As digital technology continues to evolve, there's a risk that "your great-grandkids won't be able to see your wedding pictures," Kay says.

To preserve data, businesses and consumers will probably have to periodically copy it from obsolete storage drives onto newer ones, he says.

And backups will become increasingly important. Consumers often store their digital music and photos on a single PC, EMC's Lewis says. But as that data collection grows, "People are going to have to start realizing that they have thousands of dollars tied up in digital information," he says.

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