Data Centre Magazine December 2021 | Page 50

Cold Storage is so

Hot Right Now

As data sets grow in size , the industry is seeing a rise in the use of “ cold storage ” as a cost-effective way to store vast amounts of unstructured data
WRITTEN BY : HARRY MENEAR

The exponential growth of data has the potential to be a pretty dire stumbling block for enterprises , government organisations , and data centre operators . The amount of data being generated around the world every day is estimated to be around 2.5 quintillion bytes ( that ’ s 2.5 with 18 zeros on the end ) - roughly equivalent to 7.5 million terabytes , or 937.5 billion HD copies of Dances With Wolves starring Kevin Costner . That figure is increasing at an alarming rate each year , with the total data created , copied , stored , analysed , and consumed in 2025 estimated to hit 181 zettabytes . You don ’ t want to know how many millennia worth of Kevin Costner movies that equates to .

To complicate matters further , all that data is becoming increasingly valuable . Go back a decade , and the vast majority of information gathered by sensors , programs , and the like was discarded . Now , data means money . The more data you have , the more you can analyse it to track and predict trends , schedule maintenance ,
50 December 2021