With the popularity of rich media, the proliferation of mobile devices and the digitization of content, there has been and continues to be exponential growth in the quantity of unstructured data that IT is managing. In fact, IDC predicts that all data will grow to 40 zettabytes by 2020, resulting in a 50-fold growth from the beginning of 2010. 90% of this data growth will be unstructured. The growth is not slowing down; in fact, it continues to accelerate in size and scope.
This explosive growth in data and content is simply not sustainable for current NAS and SAN infrastructures. Backups and restores are taking longer. Migrating data from older storage systems to new storage systems are labor intensive and expensive. Provisioning storage for users is more frequent and time consuming.
Not only does all this unstructured data increase the cost of managing the infrastructure, it also impacts the internal consumers of storage. Most IT organizations are faced with a flat to declining storage budget and are forced to manage the ever-increasing storage with the same or reduced IT resources. In short, the costs and complexity of traditional storage systems continue to increase. A radical change in storage infrastructure is needed if enterprise IT is ever going to tame the data explosion.
