There has been more information produced in the last 30 years than during the previous 5,000. A weekday edition of The New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime during the 17th-century England. The information supply available to us doubles every five years -- Richard Saul Wurman, Information Anxiety.
Observations such as Wurman’s highlights why we feel as though we are suffering from information overload, why information is increasingly valuable to individuals and organizations and why computer storage is growing is becoming so vital.
But his statements also beg the question…Where is all of this information coming from?
We aren’t creating new words. We aren’t developing that many new ideas. Instead, information is being replicated, distributed and manipulated. To make this data manageable and useful, we have developed "meta data" –data about data. In recent years, available data and the need for data has increased at an accelerated pace, and as Wurman notes … it will continue to increase.
To understand the volume, the use and value of the data to an organization, consider:
• No technology in history has grown as quickly as the Internet. Backbone bandwidth demand has been doubling, not every 18 months as with Moore’s law, but every 3.5 months. That’s a 10X growth or 1,000% a year. Voice grows at 8 percent. By next year, half of the bandwidth in the world will be Internet. Half everything else. By 2003, the Internet will be more than 90% of the bandwidth. By 2004, more than 99%. While adding new subscribers has driven Internet growth to date, next we're going to move audio, video & multimedia data to the Internet
• According to Forrester Research, Web commerce will grow from $14.8 billion in 1999 to $500 billion in 2001. Cost savings globally through business use of e-commerce will rise from $17 billion in 1998 to $175 trillion in 2002. The number of devices accessing the Web will grow from 32 million worldwide in 1996 to more than 300 million by 2001. Users will grow from 28 million in that year to more than 500 million in 2001.
• Every time a customer can get support through a Web-based support system, the cost is microscopic compared to a voice-response unit or human intervention according to META Group. The typical customer service transaction is $5 for a live call center agent, 50 cents for voice response and a few cents on the Web.
• Firms that have implemented Web-based activities are increasing productivity and reducing costs including:
Intel’s Web-based automation has relieved 200 sales clerks from entering data so they can concentrate on analyzing sales trends and working with customers as customers input their own requirements and orders
Cisco handles 75% of their sales online. 45% of the orders never touch an employee’s hands, going directly to manufacturing partners. As a result of their Web-based activities, productivity has improved 20% over the past two years.
Intel, Dell and Cisco produce over $70 million in sales online business every day
$800 million plane tickets sold over Web in '98. This will climb to $8.9 billion in 2002...Jupiter Communications. On-line book sales will grow from $216 million to $2.2 billion
National Semi saves $20 million a year by steering distributors to order product on-line.
Boeing books $100 million in spare parts from airlines in '97.
• Email, which has flattened organizations and improved internal and external communications, has also increased the volume of data sent and received:
Some 3.4 trillion email messages were delivered in the U.S. in 1998
Daily the total number of e-mail messages sent by U.S. Internet users is 2.1 billion
Another 3.7 billion “commercial” email messages are sent daily – more than 96% represent spam
105 million Americans use email at least occasionally
High-tech workers get more than 200 messages per day
On average, people receive twice as many emails as they send
Communications technology is rapidly changing the speed, direction and amount of information flow, even as it alters work roles all across organizations. -- Rich Tetzeli, Surviving Information Overload, Fortune Magazine, July 11, 1994.
All of these new applications require a lot more storage and a lot more availability. While the storage initiative decision used to be made on the basis of cost per MB, determinations will be made on the basis of information/data management costs. Managing Terabytes of data on fluid magnetic media is a never-ending challenge and ongoing cost, whereas management cost on stable optical media – CD, DVD or MO – with automation software is more predictable, more projectable…and the cost/MB is lower.
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How Does Our Storage Volume Grow? - To learn more about this author, visit Andy Marken's Website.
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