Data storage a growth industry

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): What has the ongoing information technology revolution -- or digital revolution, if you like -- produced? For sure, it has produced a very large number of spectacularly rich people, each of whom has breathtaking amount of money. For example, Fortune reported last month that, at the last count, Bill Gates' wealth stood at US$ 104 billion (and he's only 44 years old). There are also many other billionaires under 40 years of age, and most of them, as Fortune noted, "are on the Net". And don't forget Prince Alwaleed bin Talal from Saudi Arabia, who may be the richest investor outside of the US. He invests in companies like Apple, Motorola, American Online, Teledesic -- some of the digital industry's icons.

Besides a lot of rich people, the digital revolution has produced -- and will surely continue to produce -- incredible amounts of digital data, which needs some place to reside.

Technology has been helping small companies compete against giants like Barnes & Nobles, Sears, Toys R Us and others. Big companies woke up in alarm and then used the same technology to snatch market share back from the new kids on the block. And suddenly we have so many companies, both online and otherwise, competing to get our attention, our business and to retain us as their happy customers.

In order to achieve these objectives, companies utilize all kinds of applications: Data warehousing, data mining, knowledge management, business intelligence, customer relationship management, sales force automation, you name it. All these applications capture and store data incessantly, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That is why they accumulate much data. One such company, Deutsche Telecom, recently announced its plan to build a 100 terabyte data warehouse with the help of IBM.

Deutsche Telecom, the German telecommunications services company, will store all customer data and call records in the data warehouse. These data will then be used for CRM (customer relationship management) purposes. When the data warehouse project is completed in 18 months, it may be the largest in the world.

Add to the trend growing new businesses such as online storage services, application services and imaging, and you'll understand why data storage requirements will continue to climb.

Incidentally, what is a terabyte? A TB is 1000 GB, which is a 1000 MB, which is a 1000 KB. So, if a 3.5 diskette can hold a 1.4 MB of data, one TB of data would require more than 800 million diskettes.

Different sizes

Ronnie A. Dumaguin from PT Pratesis, an expanding local company that will shortly plunge into the business of providing storage solutions, explained to me that there are basically five different categories of storage requirements. Our PCs certainly require a hard disk, but even at 30 GB this requirement is peanuts. You can simply go to Gajah Mada Plaza or Mal Mangga Dua, buy a high capacity Quantum or Seagate hard disk and install it yourself at home.

The Windows NT environment is where storage requirement begins to matter, as workgroup or small and medium businesses need manageable and reliable storage devices. Their needs may be met by fast RAID systems that are attached to servers.

Then there is the UNIX and mid-range category, which may involve UNIX and midrange computers such as the highly popular AS/400. Finally, there is the enterprise level storage solution, such as the one used by Deutsche Telecom or First Union Bank (last January, First Union announced its plan to build a 27 TB data warehouse).

Pratesis will be focusing on the needs of companies that will deploy midrange systems such as the AS/400. Large enterprises will have to go with the leaders in the enterprise segment such as EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM and StorageTek. IBM itself recognized the potential of this market quite early on and invested US$ 1 billion in 1998 for the development of enterprise storage technology.

In the past people thought that distributed computing was the way to go. However, they have found out that centralization would mean economies of scale, better manageability and better control. Today, centralized data processing and storage is another factor that drives the growth of storage capacity requirement.

Also, when a company has multiterabyte of data, the next thing it has to worry about is to make sure that the data will not be lost if -- or when -- a disaster strikes. Therefore, we can imagine that a 50 terabyte data warehouse will also need at least another 50 terabyte of storage capacity for the backup. Now we begin to see the magnitude of the growth.

Fortunately, storage technology itself has not been standing still, either. Actually, compared to the speed at which CPU has increased, storage capacity has been increasing at a faster rate. Hard disk capacity, for example, has been doubling every 12 months. Today, for example, it will be difficult for you to find a brand new hard disk with a storage capacity of less than 6 GB (if a store offers you one, it may be a used one).

And the technology for managing storage media has also been progressing rapidly. Earlier this year IBM introduced its Storage Area Network, or SAN, solutions. SAN is another common term that you will be hearing quite often, just like LAN and WAN. In the meantime, Hewlett-Packard, another player in the storage industry, provided the storage management solution called SureStore E SAN Manager LM.

So, folks, if you think the 16 GB hard disk in your new notebook is too big, think again. It's nothing compared to what we see enterprises will be using in the future. All because the information revolution is producing data, data and more data.