Hard drives have been getting bigger (capacity-wise) and cheaper over the past decade which is great news for everyone. Toshiba predicts that in 2012 that over 2 zettabytes (2 trillion gigabytes!) of data will be created and replicated (double from 2010). While costs are going down, data growth is still a challenge for data centers and IT administrators.

The past few years have had some pretty exciting challenges for the IT industry with great new technologies emerging and new trends as businesses try to shave costs as the economy ebbs and flows. One of the trends we are seeing is very consistent rate of data growth. On average, data capacity needs in businesses are growing (as much as 40%-60% per year) which means data centers and offsite storage centers need to account for that as well.

This is not just something data centers need to account for, but businesses as well. If you are planning to implement a new server, data growth needs to be considered. You'll want your infrastructure to be very flexible so it can withstand your needs. If your storage infrastructure isn't flexible enough to contend with your data capacity growth, you could get hampered with expensive upgrade costs.

Data Capacity < Data Growth Needs

With cheaper hard drives with bigger capacities, doesn't this level out the playing field? For a lot of data centers, although growth was always planned, the high-rate of growth over the past year is forcing them to consider expanding and scaling up drastically. This raises costs despite the fact that hard drives are cheaper. Some of the other costs that are effected are network connectivity (more bandwidth is required to send and receive data), security, and system performance. All of these factor in and all of them have associated costs that, unlike the cost of a terrabyte of data, are all significant.

What to Expect

For the typical end-user, expect computers and devices with tons of storage, and cheap USB storage devices for home networks. For businesses who demand secure offsite storage for protecting their business, you might not see a huge decline in the cost per gig quite yet.

Is your business looking to upgrade your servers to keep up with your ever-growing data capacity needs? Be sure to contact Paradigm to make sure all of your ducks are in a row when it comes to flexibility and scalability. Give us a call at (603) 647-8614 and we'll be happy to review your needs and goals.