If you ever have had doubts about the accuracy of all of those predictions about the future of computing being up in the clouds, consider this: according to a new report from IDC, in 2010 the amount of all the digital information produced on Earth will grow to 1.2 zettabytes, a convenient unit of data measurement that equals a staggering 1.2 trillion gigabytes of information.
The same report estimates that in 2009, nearly 35 percent of the digital information created could not be stored, because there simply was not enough storage media available on the planet. If that figure were applied to the estimated amount of 2010 data, that means that 420 billion gigabytes of data will never get permanently stored.
Looking at the oncoming deluge of information, it's hard to imagine how it could live anywhere else but the cloud.
That's the conclusion of HyperStratus CEO Bernard Golden, who approached the topic of big data in a recent blog posting for CIO Magazine.
In his blog, Golden makes the analytical jump that the shortfall of available storage means that computer users will need to work with data in different ways.
"I just don't see most companies funding an ever-increasing number of storage devices and employees to manage them, i.e., most companies can't afford the projected growth of storage, so they won't go down the road of on-site storage. Long before they get to the logical conclusion of how much investment, capital, and headcount is required to manage the increased storage, they'll turn to specialized providers who have figured out how to manage enormous amounts of storage more cost-effectively," Golden writes.
Since he helms HyperStratus, Golden has good perspective on how all of this new data will alter the IT landscape. HyperStratus is a consulting firm that provides clients with the tools and knowledge they need to implement cloud-based solutions. This can be anything from educating clients on the potential of cloud computing to the full-on design and implementation of a cloud-based architecture, Golden explained in an interview last week.
Big data is a topic, therefore, Golden is keenly interested in, since he sees it as one of the, if you'll pardon the term, big drivers for a move to cloud computing. In the two years since HyperStratus launched, the consulting firm has seen some clear patterns in reasons to move to the cloud, big data included.
Another significant motivator, Golden said, is the business agility the cloud brings to a firm that deploys cloud apps or storage. "If a company says, 'we want to do something,' they don't have to wait weeks or months to implement a solution," Golden explained, while waiting for infrastructure to be put into place. With existing public cloud solutions, infrastructure can be added in almost turn-key fashion.
Golden also sees the flexibility of application architectures delivering a strong motivator to move to the cloud. Application migration and design is much less of a issue given this flexibility, he added.
The maturity of systems management and monitoring, Golden said, was also a prime factor in cloud growth. When systems management can be handled across so many environments, the IT management costs of the cloud tend to drop.
The benefits of cloud computing are easy to spot in a Amazon Web Services (AWS) case study about The Silicon Valley Education Foundation (SVEF), which Golden highlighted in our discussion.
The SVEF was serving a popular web-based content management system, Lessonopoly, to nearly 13,000 teachers in Silicon Valley. That kind of success came with a problem: Lessonopoly was initially served up from a single server. It was a matter of time before hardware failure would bring this popular service crashing to a screeching halt. But, as a non-profit, the SVEF wasn't exactly rolling in dough and could not afford to spend any more on IT then they already had.
“We found that AWS was anywhere from 40% to 65% less expensive than the co-location alternative, not to mention the additional robustness offered by AWS in terms of redundant storage and multiple location availability, as well as the unlimited scalability AWS provides,” Golden said in the case study. Clearly, delivering the higher availability of redundant deployment and reducing costs by even 40 percent is noteworthy.
For Golden, this was the aha moment for him, when he realized that cloud solutions could address the needs of a robust environment without the need to add a lot of hardware or software to the equation.
If the predicted IDC trends are accurate, then the skills offered HyperStratus becomes even more pertinent, because the ability to manage such a flood of data is clearly a job for the cloud.