Data volumes 'continuing to rise' - Data & Server Racks

Demand for data cabinets could continue to rise as businesses generate ever-greater volumes of information, it has been suggested.

Dominic Pollard, editor at the Big Data Insight Group, said there are now examples of big data "everywhere you look", as more companies seek business insight through statistics.

"One thing goes without saying, the amount of data that we are generating and storing is increasing exponentially," he stated.

"Exactly how much by is a matter of contrasting stats and figures, but one of the most commonly stated facts is that today we generat as much electronic data every single day as everything that had been created prior to 2003."

Mr Pollard said the main contributing factor to this has been the explosion of consumer activity online, through laptops, PCs, tablets and smartphones.

"To add some context - every minute of every day, we upload 48 hours of video footage to YouTube, make around 47,000 downloads from Apple's App Store, send over 200 million emails and issue 100,000 tweets," he noted.

The commentator said that these numbers are rising all the time, meaning that the amount of data generated and stored in 2012 may look comparatively tiny in a couple of years.

"As well as this user-generated data, 'the internet of things' is also having an already huge and growing influence on our swelling data banks," Mr Pollard stated.

"It is becoming increasingly commonplace for manufactured products - anything from the kettle to the motor car, posters on billboards to the beer taps in bars - to contain sensors, which provide real-time data feeds back to the user or the manufacturer about the performance, status, location and so forth of that product."

He said this helps the company to re-engineer their product designs to fix flaws, get a feeling for which elements of the products users like and dislike, carry out predictive maintenance by pre-empting any flaws, or build an understanding of the environment that the goods are featured in.

"The benefits being realised by the early pace setters in this arena will surely inspire the rest of the pack to promptly follow suit, increasing the world's collective data stores," Mr Pollard claimed.

He said it is likely that new sources and methods of data collation will materialise all of the time, and ways of storing, accessing and analysing these mounds of data will improve more or less at a similar pace.

"The scalability that cloud offers - both from a storage and computer power perspective - will also be hugely significant in ensuring that people do not drown in the sea of information," Mr Pollard added.

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