If you thought an increasingly paperless business world and tougher data retention policies were causing a data explosion, you were right - or at least, partly right.

Today, another trend is causing storage to multiply at shocking rates: the ever-rising adoption of digital content and the businesses based on storing and sharing that data. Terabytes aren’t good enough for some of today’s content-driven businesses. They need an extremely different storage solution for immense amounts of data.

The answer is extreme scale storage, and it’s about to change everything.

Think Snapfish, Google, YouTube. These companies are based on the ability to store vast amounts of user-generated, rich digital content and make it available whenever and wherever users want it. A decade ago, user-generated content wouldn't have powered one of these businesses. Today, consumer-generated data is fuelling explosive demand for Web 2.0 applications and other storage-intensive business models.

In 2007, consumers captured 5.6 billion gigabytes of video worldwide, a 59 percent increase over 2006, according to analyst firm IDC.¹ By 2011, IDC expects consumer-captured video to reach over 15.3 billion gigabytes.²

Rising resolution rates, the proliferation of capture devices and more users all play a part. According to the Open Handset Alliance, nearly 3 billion people worldwide - half of the world’s population - own mobile phones.³ In 2007, 62 percent of mobile phone shipments (700 million units) were camera phones, 70 percent with one megapixel or higher resolution, according to IDC.⁴

In the US, 62 percent of households own digital cameras and take an average of 28 photos per month, according to independent analyst firm Forrester.⁵ Thirty percent of US camera owners use photo sharing sites to store, share, organise and print their snaps, according to Forrester.⁶

But extreme storage needs extend far beyond the consumer electronics space.

United Kingdom police officers capture video evidence through digital cameras integrated into their helmets, while the rest of the country is monitored by some 4 million closed-circuit surveillance cameras. ⁷

Digital animation studios are generating terabytes and petabytes of data as they transition to high-definition and beyond to 3D. Oil and gas exploration companies are modelling the ocean floor. Genomic researchers are sequencing billions of DNA base pairs in search of answers and cures.

All these activities are generating gargantuan amounts of data, data that must be stored and accessed on demand, data that must be able to grow quickly and that must be stored far more affordably and simply than ever before.

Really big storage systems have been available for years. Designed for demanding corporate environments, these systems have generally been a poor fit for extremely large environments where cost is a major concern. When users are doing little more than uploading and downloading files, there's no reason (and no budget) to pay for features that will go unused.

Faced with this situation, some early businesses simply built their own custom storage systems from scratch. Today, business models which weren’t possible just a few years ago are being made possible by emerging extreme storage systems that meet the needs of file-intensive endeavours:

• Extremely scalable - Extreme storage must scale two ways, by performance and by capacity, making it flexible enough to change with rapidly shifting needs.
• Affordable - New Internet-enabled business models require extreme storage at a fraction of the traditional cost per gigabyte.
• Simple - To keep operational costs down and make new business models possible, administrators must be able to manage multiple petabytes of data.

With solutions based on HP StorageWorks Scalable Network Attached Storage (NAS), HP has already begun to address the escalating need for large scale file-based storage today and beyond.

HP’s Scalable NAS Digital Media Solution has helped businesses meet extreme storage needs head on.

The photo sharing Web site Snapfish, for example, uses HP’s solution to store the photos of more than 50 million registered users and handle explosive year-over-year data growth. The HP solution has given Crest Animation a unified, high-performance, highly reliable storage infrastructure free of bottlenecks. The company can now handle more animation jobs simultaneously and has also been able to move into the lucrative high definition and 2K animation fields.

What is more, now, with the introduction of HP StorageWorks 9100 Extreme Data Storage System, turn-key extreme scale file storage has come into its own. The Extreme Data Storage System can feed content-hungry digital media and Web 2.0 applications with terabyte- and petabyte-level storage scaling coupled with independent performance scaling and simple management at a fraction of the cost of traditional enterprise class storage systems.

With extreme scale file storage, you don't have to be Google, you don't have to be YouTube, you don't even have to be Snapfish to build a business on today's immense amounts of data.

¹ Christopher Chute, 'Worldwide consumer Video Content and Archive 2007-2011 Forecast: The Video Bible', IDC, Framingham, Mass., US, December 2007 (IDC #210035, v.1, Tab: Markets)
² Ibid.
³ Open Handset Alliance, http://www.openhandsetalliance.com/oha_overview.html, accessed 16th April 2008
⁴ Christopher Chute and Chris Hazelton, 'Worldwide Camera Phone and Videophone 2007-2011 Forecast', IDC, Framingham, Mass., US, September 2007 (IDC #208561, v.1, Tab: Markets)
⁵ J.P. Gownder and Alexander Hesse, 'US Digital Camera Owners Move Photos Online', Forrester Research, Cambridge, Mass., US 2nd April 2008
⁶ Ibid.
⁷ 'Britain straps video cameras to police helmets: Officials say move will reduce paperwork, help prosecute criminals, ' Associated Press, 13 July 2007, MSNBC, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19750278/, accessed 16th April 2008

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