Storing, preserving, and protecting digital assets is proving to be one of the most significant challenges facing IT today. Growth of unstructured data – data not stored in conventional database systems – is accelerating dramatically, fueled by high-definition everything and new data-hungry applications that depend on unstructured data.
Research firm IDC predicts many organizations will experience up to 80 percent yearly growth in unstructured data.1 At this rate, many IT groups will be fast approaching petabyte-scale storage capacity shortly. Conventional storage systems were simply not designed to cost-effectively manage this much data, and, when demand crosses the petabyte threshold, public cloud storage services can also get very costly, very quickly. Object-based storage systems are designed to serve petabyte-scale storage and beyond. These systems can be ideal for unstructured data and are being used by web-scale cloud storage service providers to support their own backend infrastructure needs.
