Dell’s Inside Enterprise IT blog has identified “10 Trends to watch carefully.” The post is from the Gartner Data Center conference that wraps up today in Las Vegas. One of the biggest and most important trends? The coming “data deluge” that will pile onto company IT departments like a load of bricks.
Over the next five years, enterprise data growth will increase by a whopping 650%. And here’s the kicker: 80% of this data will be unstructured. That means emails, documents, photos, and all the other files not in databases. The answer, according to the experts: attack with virtualization and deduplication.
Might we also suggest that a combination of content-aware deduplication and compression would yield even better results? The modern enterprise is dealing with all manner of data. These are the types of files that often stymie traditional block-level dedupe. What can it do with images, video, audio–not to mention compound documents such as PDFs and Zip files? Often, very little.
As we showed at a recent event, Tech Field Day, Ocarina reduced the toughest data sets by an average of about 30%. (Final results will be out soon.) In fact, the only ones that stymied the system were those that were deliberately encrypted using unusual or outdated methods–not a typical use case to say the least!
What this means is that over the next few years, the flow of data will not only increase, but it will become far more complex to handle. If you think about the speed of innovation, there’s a strong chance that there will be files we aren’t even aware exist yet. What do you think? How is your enterprise handling unstructured data now? What will it do differently in the next five years? Comments encouraged!
