Continued Need for HDD Data Storage in this Increasingly Data-Centric Era

Continued Need for HDD Data Storage in this Increasingly Data-Centric Era

According to IDC projections, by 2025 the quantity of data that our society generates each year will come to a staggering 175ZBytes. Though smartphone usage, cloud services and suchlike have already led to a significant rise in data volumes over the last decade, the roll-out of IoT infrastructure, more sophisticated levels of factory automation and smart homes/buildings are going to take this even further. Changes underway within the automotive sector will also be a major contributor to heightened data volumes. Each autonomous vehicle on our roads will be responsible for generating several TBytes worth of data each day. Though edge-based data storage will be of value in situations where rapid responsiveness is needed, having a centralised resource will still be essential in the vast majority of cases. By transferring data from its origins to central data centres, it can be merged with data from other sources - thereby allowing more comprehensive analysis to be undertaken and appropriate strategies to be formulated. Data storage implementations need to have scope for the ramping up of capacity, in order that they can keep pace with demands. At the same time, the unit costs need to be low enough to keep the financial investments involved acceptable.

Toshiba has published a white paper which uses the work the company has done with CERN (the European particle research centre located just outside Geneva) to illustrate the key dynamics currently driving data storage innovation and deployment. It gives details of how Toshiba was instrumental in addressing CERN’s huge data storage requirements, installing a total 100,000 HDDs so that a total capacity of 350PBytes could be achieved. Through an attractive price per capacity ratio, which draws directly on Toshiba’s established high volume production facilities, CERN was able to implement a storage system that was very cost-effective. Furthermore, the far lower annualised failure rate (AFR) that these HDDs are able to offer, means that long-term operational reliability can be maintained and ongoing replacement work avoided.   

You can find out more about Toshiba’s work with CERN by downloading the whitepaper:

Click here to download the whitepaper

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