The start of a new year gives companies the opportunity to take stock and evaluate the effectiveness of their data storage. As the world continues to generate record amounts of data, particularly through the development of AI capabilities, it is more important than ever that the organization ensures that they protect against future storage challenges.
With increasing data volumes, the industry faces two key challenges in 2025: an impending data shortage crisis and the environmental impact of data centers. However, there are steps organizations can take to navigate these challenges.
The explosion of global data will cause a data shortage crisis
The world is creating data at unprecedented rates, with no signs of slowing down. For reference, by 2028 as many as 400 zettabytes will be generated at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24%.
To put into perspective just how large this amount is, consider how many grains of sand there are on all the world’s beaches – in theory, the latest research suggests there are over seven six trillion. Research from the California Institute of Technology equates a single zettabyte of information to exactly this, the amount of sand across the world’s beaches. Now multiply that by four hundred and we can begin to understand how much data will be generated and processed by the world’s computers in 2028 alone.
As the development of AI tools continues to mature and grow in scale globally, the value of data will increase, leading us to store more data for longer periods of time. However, the warehouse install base is expected to have a CAGR of only 17%, which is a significantly slower pace than the growth in data being generated. Since it takes a full year to build a hard drive, the difference in growth rates will subsequently upset the global storage supply and demand equilibrium, causing a data shortage crisis.
Looking ahead, organizations are likely to become less experimental and more strategic in their use of artificial intelligence. Navigating this looming inventory crisis will require companies to begin building long-term capacity plans now to ensure adequate inventory supply and fully monetize investments in AI infrastructure.
Storage innovation is imperative to tackle the data center crisis and protect the planet
As the global data boom continues unabated, it will eventually reach the point where data centers will be overwhelmed. According to the UK’s National Grid, power demand from commercial data is expected to increase sixfold within the next 10 years. This increase in demand will clearly affect the capabilities and performance of data centers, resulting in a crunch in resources.
However, there are a number of barriers to tackling this problem, including financial, regulatory and environmental obstacles. These barriers will increasingly challenge and oppose the need for greater physical data center space and capacity.
According to CBRE, AI advancements are specifically expected to be a major driver of future data center demand. To address the increasing need for power density, high-performance computing will require rapid innovation in data center design and technology.
That said, it’s not just innovation in computing that’s needed to help solve this data crunch. The implementation of higher areal density hard drives, which expand the amount of data stored on a given unit of storage media, can enable greater data capacity in data centers. Investing in these drives can help data centers avoid the need to build new data storage locations, resulting in significant TCO savings and reducing the future environmental impacts of new centers.
Navigate the challenges of 2025
As we look to the coming year and the potential obstacles that could impact business operations, there are key actions that organizations should implement now to stay ahead of the curve.
Companies should prioritize building robust long-term capacity plans to minimize the future disruption caused by rapid global data growth. There are also big benefits to investing in improved AI infrastructure and higher areal density hard drives to effectively tackle the impact of increased demand on data centers.
As we end this year and approach the next, and as organizations map out their business plans for 2025, it is critical that they help implement effective data storage solutions to benefit their performance, bottom line and the planet.
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