According to Dean Downes, director of ICT for the schools, in a non-corporate setting it’s almost impossible to gauge how quickly demand for storage will increase. Every time Justin Bieber comes to town storage demand rockets, just as it does when the girls return from a school holiday and want to load all their photos onto the school system to share with friends.
Smartphones with cameras that can capture still and video images are leading to an enormous surge in personal data volumes. According to Gartner worldwide consumer digital storage needs will grow from 329 exabytes in 2011 to 4.1 zettabytes in 2016.
Meanwhile the average household storage system will grow from 464 gigabytes 3.3 terabytes in the same period according to the industry analyst.
While consumer generated content is already creating storage challenges for the Queensland based girls schools, they are creating some of their own headaches by encouraging students and teachers to create and integrate high definition video, and for the last two years decided not to erase any of the content created by the graduating crop of year 12 girls, hoping that one day it might be able to offer access to that content to school alumni.
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Speaking at a storage round table event organized by Dell in Sydney this week, Mr Downes wasn’t the only IT manager faced with exploding demand for data, although he was the only one apparently subject to the vagaries of American teen idols.
Followmont Transport, a Queensland based transport company, currently has a 180 Tbyte three tier storage system, but reported it is seeing its data reserves grow 3 per cent a month; Ricoh’s Australian data collection meanwhile grows about 60 Gbyte a day; while Centric Wealth is experiencing 20 per cent data growth each year.
