An estimated 40 zettabytes (43 trillion gigabytes) of data will be created by 2020 (an increase of 300 times the amount of data in circulation in 2005), at a rate of 2.5 quintillion bytes per day.1 “The explosion in big data is both good news and bad news,” says James D’Arezzo, CEO of Condusiv Technologies. “It will make possible advances in dozens of fields, but it will also present serious challenges to the economy’s already overburdened IT sector.” D’Arezzo, whose company is a world leader in I/O reduction and SQL database performance, adds, “Collecting data won’t be much of a problem. The real issue will be storage, accessibility and performance.”
A major contributor to the boom in data collection and analysis, notes D’Arezzo, is the Internet of Things (IoT), through which devices—refrigerators, automobiles, home security systems, health monitors, etc.—communicate with one another and with computer systems. According to experts in the data center services industry, the next decade will be an inflection point in digitization, in which the growth of hyper cloud providers will mushroom to meet the demand created—in part—by the IoT.2
One field being heavily impacted by both the IoT and the need for big data analytics is healthcare. More digital tools are being brought into health IT ecosystems for both patients and clinicians to use. More medical images, which take up a tremendous amount of storage space, are also being produced. Human genome sets alone consist of hundreds of gigabytes, and the amount of sequence data is doubling every seven to nine months. Meanwhile, many healthcare institutions cannot afford the cost or lack the space to add enough physical servers to keep up with the demands of big data.3
In the business sector, a major across-the-board function—marketing—has gone from being a largely analog and promotional activity to a heavily digitized means of delivering business growth. In the process, marketing has come to rival, and may soon surpass, traditional IT as a center for technology spend. A recent Gartner Group study suggests that marketing leaders now devote a portion of their expense budget to technology equal to 3.24% of total enterprise revenue, just barely behind the current CIO technology spend of 3.4% of revenue.4
Social media companies, most of whose business models are centered around the sale and use of data analytics, are both major users of, and investors in, infrastructure designed to keep up with the burgeoning universe of data. It has been estimated that Facebook, for example, spends somewhere above $1.5 billion per month on hosting-related costs.5
All told, it is estimated that 86 million U.S. workers now perform jobs that require the regular use of a computer6. A recent survey of global IT managers suggests that degraded system performance due to slow processing of database applications costs each of these workers an average of fifteen minutes per day7; at the current median salary of $58,000, that represents an annual time loss equivalent to $1,812 per worker, or almost $156 billion across the economy. Given the pressures of the big data boom, that productivity loss may soon increase dramatically. But it will not increase evenly, and those who fail to recoup endangered productivity will soon face a steepening competitive disadvantage.
“To keep up, not just with the overall demands of big data but with their nimblest competitors, organizations will have to get the most out of their IT technology,” says D’Arezzo. “Part of the solution may be buying new hardware, but there are quicker and more cost-effective things IT system managers can do. One is to implement software that reduces input and output, which can improve performance dramatically. We are the world leader in this area, and we have seen users of our software solutions more than double the I/O capability of storage and servers, including SQL servers, in their current configurations.”
About Condusiv® Technologies
Condusiv Technologies is the world leader in software-only storage performance solutions for virtual and physical server environments, enabling systems to process more data in less time for faster application performance. Condusiv guarantees to solve the toughest application performance challenges with faster-than-new performance via V-locity® for virtual servers or Diskeeper® or SSDkeeper® for physical servers and PCs. With over 100 million licenses sold, Condusiv solutions are used by 90% of the Fortune 1000 and almost three-quarters of the Forbes Global 100 to increase business productivity and reduce data center costs while extending the life of existing hardware. Condusiv Chief Executive Officer Jim D’Arezzo has had a long and distinguished career in high technology.
Condusiv was founded in 1981 by Craig Jensen as Diskeeper Corporation. Jensen authored Diskeeper, which became the best-selling defragmentation software of all time. Over 37 years, he has taken the thought leadership in file system management and caching and transformed it into enterprise software. For more information, visit www.condusiv.com.
- Lambert, Liam, “Transformation Will Sweep Information Technology,” Market Mogul, August 21, 2017.
- Lima, João Marques, “‘I See The Next Decade As The Inflexion Point In Our Digital Era,’ Says CEO of Global Data Centres,” Data Economy, April 25, 2018.
- O’Dowd, Elizabeth, “What are HIT Infrastructure Requirements for Healthcare Big Data?”, HIT Infrastructure, April 18, 2018.
- Pemberton, Chris, “2016-2017 Gartner CMO Spend Survey Reveals the CMO’s Growing Mandate,” Gartner Group, January 10, 2017.
- Xavier, Andrew, “How much does Facebook spend annually on hosting-related costs,” quora.com, March 13, 2016.
- Pew Research Center, “The State of American Jobs,” October 6, 2016.
- “Condusiv Releases Its 2017 I/O Performance Survey Results from over 1400 IT Professionals,” broadwayworld.com, August 16, 2017
