The world is in the midst of a global data storage crisis.
The datasphere is set to grow 300 percent by 2025, and there’s not enough space in the “cloud” to accommodate the “staggering amount.”
The stark warning comes from scientists at Aston University who are scrambling to develop a plan that doesn’t include building more servers, which currently consume 1.5 percent of the world’s electricity annually.
To address this problem, the team is developing new technology to pattern surfaces with channels less than five nanometers wide, about 10,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair.
The global datasphere is expected to grow by 300 percent by 2025. A report shows that estimated zettabytes (ZB), a measure of digital storage capacity, were just 45 ZB in 2019 but are projected to rise to 175 ZB by 2025
dr Matt Derry, who is leading the project, said in a statement: “Simply building new data centers without improving data storage technologies is not a viable solution.
“We increasingly face the risk of what is known as a data storage crisis, and improved data storage solutions are essential to keep up with the demands of the modern world.”
The world lives a digital lifestyle that produces vast amounts of data.
According to a report by the International Data Corporation (IDC), “The consequence of this increasing reliance on data will be a never-ending expansion in the size of the global datasphere.”
The report shows that estimated zettabytes (ZB), a measure of digital storage capacity, were just 45 ZB in 2019 but are expected to rise to 175 ZB by 2025.
A zettabyte equals one trillion gigabytes.
“If you could store the entire global datasphere on DVDs, you would have a stack of single-layer Blu-ray discs that could fly you 23 times to the moon or 222 times around the earth,” IDC said in the report.
The dramatic surge is imminent and Derry and his team are hoping to find a solution before time runs out.
dr Amit Kumar Sarkar, who recently joined the Aston University team, said: “We will use advanced polymer chemistry as a way to increase the amount of data that can be stored on storage media.
‘Increasing the efficiency of existing technologies will significantly reduce the need for costly and environmentally damaging construction of new ‘mega data centers’.
“The next three years will be crucial.”
In 2010, IDC showed that only 2ZB of data was created and replicated worldwide, but that was just three years after Apple released its first iPhone and just a year after Samsung launched it.
These two devices likely fueled the rate of data growth we’re seeing today.
The data shows an incredible jump from 41ZB to 64.2ZB between 2019 and 2020, driven by people working on personal devices while offices are closed.
IDC also predicts that by 2025, 80 percent of global data will be unstructured.
The problem is that there aren’t enough servers to handle the data surge
Because how and where we consume data has changed and will continue to change, reports Redgate.
IDC breaks this down into three categories: endpoints, edge, and core.
The endpoints are devices outside the networks, such as smartphones, sensors and wearable devices, and the edge includes servers in offices and data centers.
And at the core are enterprise and cloud provider data centers, where most of the processing and analytics are done.
IDC predicts that data collected at the edge across various IoT and sensor devices will grow at 33 percent annually and will account for 22 percent of the total global datasphere by 2025.
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