The start of a new year is an opportunity for businesses to take stock and evaluate the effectiveness of their data storage. As the world continues to generate record volumes of data, driven in part by the evolving capabilities of AI, it is more important than ever that organizations ensure they protect themselves against future storage challenges.
With data volumes increasing, the industry will face two major challenges in 2025: a looming data shortage crisis and the environmental impact of data centers. However, there are steps organizations can take to address these challenges.
Global data explosion will cause data shortage crisis
The world is creating unprecedented volumes of data, and there are no signs of slowing down anytime soon. For reference, in 2028, up to 400 zettabytes will be generated, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24%.
To put the magnitude of this quantity into perspective, consider how many grains of sand there are on all the world’s beaches – in theory, the latest research indicates there are more than seven sextillion. Research by the California Institute of Technology equates a single zettabyte of information to exactly the amount of sand on the world’s beaches. Multiplied by four hundred, we can begin to understand the amount of data that will be generated and processed by the world’s computers in 2028 alone.
As the development of AI tools continues to mature and gain momentum globally, the value of data will increase, leading us to store more data, over longer periods of time. However, the installed base of storage is only expected to have a CAGR of 17%, which is a significantly slower pace than the growth in data generated. Since it takes an entire year to build a hard drive, the disparity in growth rates will then disrupt the global balance of storage supply and demand, causing a data shortage crisis.
In the future, organizations will likely become less experimental and more strategic in their use of AI. To address this looming storage crisis, companies will need to start developing long-term capacity plans now, to ensure an adequate supply of storage and fully monetize investments in AI infrastructure.
Storage innovation is imperative to address the data center crisis and protect the planet
As the global data boom continues unabated, it will eventually reach the point where data centers are overwhelmed. Electricity demand from commercial data is expected to increase sixfold over the next ten years, according to the UK’s National Grid. This increase in demand will clearly impact data center capacity and performance, leading to a shortage of resources.
However, there are a number of obstacles to solving this problem, including financial, regulatory and environmental hurdles. These barriers will increasingly challenge and oppose the need for greater physical space and capacity for data centers.
Advances in AI are expected to be a key driver of future data center demand, according to CBRE. To manage the growing need for energy density, high-performance computing will require rapid innovation in data center design and technology.
That being said, IT innovation is not enough to address this data shortage. Implementing higher-area-density hard drives, which increase the amount of data stored on a given unit of storage media, can enable greater data capacity in data centers. Investing in these drives can help data centers avoid the need to build new data storage sites, leading to significant total cost of ownership savings and reducing the future environmental impacts of new centers.
Meeting the challenges in 2025
As we look ahead to the year ahead and the potential obstacles that could impact business operations, there are key actions organizations should implement now to get a head start.
Businesses must prioritize developing robust long-term capacity plans, to minimize future disruption caused by rapid global data growth. There are also huge benefits to investing in improved AI infrastructure and higher areal density hard drives, to effectively meet the impact of growing demand on data centers.
As we end this year and approach the next, and as organizations develop their business plans for 2025, it is essential that they consider implementing effective data storage solutions for the good of their performance, their results and the planet.
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