The Petabyte Is Coming
By Kim Renay Anderson, TechWeb News
techweb.com
The petabyte is making its way into the storage industry.
What's a petabyte? It's a measure of memory or storage capacity equal to 1,024 terabytes.
That sounds like a lot?but not for long. The demand for storage is growing so fast that if it takes a company one year to use one terabyte of storage today, it will take only 30 days to use the same capacity in 2002, according to a Yankee Group study. In 2003, it will take one day to use one terabyte of storage; and in 2004, just one tenth of a day, the study said.
Hoping to cash in on the storage explosion and create a niche market for itself, Cereva Networks has created a yet to be named petabyte-class disk array.
Cereva said it has not priced the product yet, but will begin a test trial in June or July.
David Domeshek, a spokesman for Cereva, Marlborough, Mass., said the disk array is aimed at helping ISPs and other service providers easily and quickly scale their storage capacity.
"For example, if Victoria's Secret is hosting an online show, they need the ability to accommodate a huge volume of visitors and data transfer requirements," said Domeshek.
Despite the current small market, at least 200 companies will need a petabyte hard drive two to three years from now, said Steve Duplessie, analyst at the Enterprise Storage Group, Milford, Mass.
"This will always be a niche product because it is a very specialized product on the very high-end market," he said. "As traditional brick and mortar companies like Ford go online, they will really explode the capacity for storage online."
Spending on disk storage should reach $53.3 billion by 2004, nearly twice the amount spent in 1999, according to an IDC study. But based on the average of all studies predicting the revenue for disk storage for 2001, it will be a $70 billion market this year, said Ed Broderick, analyst at the Robert Francis Group, Hopewell Junction, N.Y.
"The need for petabyte storage devices is three to five years away, but already some companies' storage budget is out of control," said Broderick. "A lot of Fortune 50 companies?if you added up all the storage in their data center?they are over a petabyte already."
William Hurley, analyst at the Yankee Group predicts Cereva's petabyte hard drive will initially be geared more to Internet and data centers and less toward enterprise data centers. However, as storage equipment becomes more "friendly"?able to interface with a variety of networks?enterprise data centers will adopt it, he said. |
