The incredible shrinking petabyte: how compression technologies are helping store more data in less space

Computer Technology Review, June, 2004 by Richard Gadomski

It's not hard to envision how such increased use across the industry will generate hundreds of millions of digital images each year requiring terabytes of data.

Another application of compression technology will be seen in Disaster Recovery implementations. More and more companies today are seeing the need to protect business critical data and to implement disaster recovery solutions. Seventy percent of companies go out of business after a major data loss. Data storage media companies are providing the high quality tapes to back up data in case of system failures; and compression technology will make this even more feasible and easily deployable for businesses of all sizes. Clearly, compression technologies will shape removable data storage systems for years to come.

The extraordinary capacities and levels of performance that can be achieved through the breakthrough in compression technology come at a time when the corporate demand for data storage solutions seems insatiable. Ten years ago, the concept of a terabyte seemed foreign. Today, a terabyte represents the entire digitized x-ray library at a single, large hospital.

Not to let physical limits hold the industry down, new storage technologies are emerging to match the accelerating digitalization and global sharing of information. Some have estimated that by 2010 we could see media capable of handling more than 10 tera-bytes of information in a single cartridge. To put that in perspective, that's the equivalent of 2000 full-length feature movies stored on a single cartridge.

All in all, the journey from those first 32,000-pound systems of the 1950s to the palm-sized computing and storage technology of tape cartridges, DVDs, CDs and USB drives today has been an incredible achievement with an ongoing legacy. In the future, data compression and coating technology will lead to products that meet the ever-growing data demands and ensure the continued growth and leadership of the data storage media business.

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RELATED ARTICLE: Next-Generation Tapes Change the Rules

For years, tape technology lagged the technological progress and innovation of disk drives. In the late '90s, the magnetic tape industry began to respond by delivering numerous and significant design improvements. By 2000, magnetic tape cartridge capacity had surpassed the capacity of the largest disk drive for the first time ever. Historically, the preferred choice for backup, recovery and archiving, recent tape enhancements have positioned tape for a variety of new applications. Even with the advent of low-cost disk arrays entering the backup and recovery market, today there is no truly cost-effective storage strategy without a tape component.

Excerpted from Storage: New Game, New Rules by Fred Moore, president of Horison Information Strategies (www.horison.com)

Richard Gadomski is vice president of marketing, recording media division, Fuji Photo Film U.S.A., Inc. (Valhalla, NY)