Chaos to calm: Your data growth story

If you face these scenarios, you're not alone. Data growth is exploding, with no slowdown in sight. It can create and is creating infrastructure management chaos.

According to IDC, unstructured data is forecast to exceed 175ZB by 2025, with a growth rate of 530% from 2018. It's near impossible to wrap our collective minds around the amount of data that is being generated. It's a balancing act of "How much data do I need to keep?" with "How much data can I afford to keep?"

This unstructured data (meaning text, files, images, music, notes, articles, and so on) now makes up 80% of all data. And on top of that statistic, studies show that 80% of that data hasn't been accessed in over a year (making it cold data). But this cold data remains on expensive storage, taking up management cycles and consuming a high-performance storage footprint.

So, what's the answer? You can't delete the data, because you might need it for compliance, audits, recovery, and so on. You can't spin it off to tape in some remote mountain archive, because your users will demand seamless access if they ever do need that data. You can't buy more storage to fit it all in, because you don't have an unlimited budget. So, just exactly how do you balance storage utilization, user access to cold data if needed, and a limited budget? How can you control the chaos?

The industry's answer is storage tiering.