Date storage growth by unit of Zettabytes, Video is the major factor

Date: 10/10/2013
Since the starting of digital data storage, that is from 1957 to 2010 a total digital data of one Zettabyte is created, but now a digital data of Zettabyte is expected to be created in just one year from 2015 to 2016. You can see the massive amount of growth in digital data creation. The exponential growth is mainly due to growth in multimedia digital data creation, more of high definition video. IHS says a data of 413 Petabytes (PB) is produced in just one day by all the new video surveillance cameras installed worldwide in 2013. This is really the big data, compared to the megabytes and gigabytes created just a few years back.

If you're in the storage industry, this is a very good news because there is a requirement of huge storage capacities both for personal as well as enterprise storage and also cloud. Though Flash memory density is increasing, and cost is falling, NAND flash memory not going to fill the demand gap. The magnetic disk storage will remain the main storage for some more years. Optical disk storage also continue to stay as important option for backup. At personal device level, the amount of storage in their own device is reduced but is stored elsewhere using cloud-based storage services. Irrespective of this trend, the per capita storage is growing exponentially.

The growth of high definition video cameras use in Security surveillance is an important trigger in the growth of storage. IHS says with shipments of such IP-based security cameras continuing to rise, the daily data dump is expected to more than double in just four years, expanding to 859 PB in 2017.

“HD-compliant products are set to account for an increasing share of video surveillance camera shipments during the next four years,” said Sam Grinter, senior surveillance analyst at IHS. “These cameras are gaining acceptance because the quality of their video can be superior to standard-resolution products that formerly dominated the market. But because each HD camera produces far more data than each standard-definition camera, the quantity of data generated by the surveillance market is growing to massive proportions.”

IHS shares below points on technologies adopted to accommodate and mitigate the rising tide of data:

For one, new data compression algorithms should help cut down on the quantity of data. For example, the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard—also known as H.265—has been claimed to double the data compression ratio when compared to H.264, which should reduce the amount of data produced per camera in the coming years.

Another promising development is video content analysis (VCA). VCA can be used to reduce the amount of time a video surveillance camera is recording by using virtual tripwires and no-entry zones. Virtual tripwires and no-entry zones can trigger a camera to record once a predefined event has occurred, such as a person entering a parking lot.

This means than only important events will be recorded by video surveillance cameras, rather than simply recording continuously. As deployments of VCA increase, the technology has the potential to reduce the amount of data produced per camera.

The final area of innovation is in hard disk drives (HDDs), where capacities are increasing. While the amount of data produced per camera is expanding, so is capacity to record that data—either on site or via networked systems.

So a disk drive of 1 Petabyte and Exabyte is no big deal in coming years.