Data storage market thrives as digital content continues to increase dramatically

The amount of data being created globally is increasingly dramatically. Just looking at social networking sites, the number of photos and videos uploaded by internet users has exploded in recent times, and this is just on the consumer side. Businesses big and small are also creating huge amounts of data, making storage a crucial issue. In order to cope with this, companies need better data storage solutions.

Huge increase expected in amount of data created

According to IDC, the information in the digital universe between 2009 and 2020 will grow by a factor of 44. Zeeshan Gaya, senior analyst for servers and storage systems, IDC MEA explains the scale of the problem: "We have a growing gap between the amount of digital content being created and the amount of available digital storage. IDC estimates that in 2009, if people had wanted to store every gigabyte of digital content created, they would have had a shortfall of around 35%. This gap is expected to grow to more than 60% over the next several years."

This boom in data levels over the past 10 years has made the data storage market a very attractive area for any IT company. And it is the big names which populate it. Both Oracle and IBM are heavily invested in the sector and provide staunch competition to EMC.

"End-user spending on external storage in 2010 is expected to increase significantly. In the longer term, the growth in end-user spending will come back to 'normal' single digits, and the overall enterprise storage systems market will reach $1.46bn by 2014 in MEA region," reveals Gaya.

"The external storage market has been picking up pace over the years as enterprises are either investing in in-house storage solutions or are outsourcing their data backup needs, as they look to improve their ability to recover from any disaster at the earliest to establish business continuity," he adds.

Big companies looking to exploit market

With the market proving to be so fruitful, it is no surprise that the bigger companies are looking to exploit it. "What you're seeing today is EMC 'doubling down' on its core franchise: storage. The technologies are changing, the use cases are changing and the consumption models are changing. These new products and capabilities put us in an excellent position to capitalise on the major trends in the IT industry and place us squarely at the intersection the biggest ones: cloud computing and big data," explains Joe Tucci, EMC chairman and CEO.

The new EMCVNXe series in particular targets the small and medium sized enterprises which have an increasing need for mass data storage. The starting price of under $10,000 reflects the market at which this series is targeted. "This is the most significant midrange announcement in EMC's 30-year history. It is a critical piece of EMC's strategy of architecting our storage solutions to be optimized for virtualized environments," says Rich Napolitano, president, Unified Storage Division at EMC.

Across the world, storage devices are being sold in increasing numbers, as the IDC has found. "Every year, the industry ships thousands of petabytes of new storage capacity, including hard disk drives, optical, tape, nonvolatile memory (flash), and volatile memory (DRAM). The total amount of storage capacity available is equal to all new shipments of storage plus all unused storage from previous years. While previously consumed storage could be overwritten, IDC assumes this capacity is reserved for what is already stored on the storage medium."