Entries tagged as ‘content’
You can live forever digitally for a “nominal price”.
Here’s another contributor to the growth of content in the world: information immortality.
nEternity is offering to keep your digital life – photos, music, your blog – alive and available online forever – independent of your domain or the photo sharing service you’re using.
nEternity may or may not take off. More significant is the trend it points towards: the extension of the lifetime of digital data. Businesses will continue to lengthen their data’s life from here on.
The rules for data retention are changing as digital copies are increasingly the only copies that exist. This will create a new set of businesses focused on extending the life of digital records beyond the current technology on which they are stored. It makes today’s digital archives look downright transitory.
And you thought those backup tapes were troublesome…
Categories: Backup · Data Security · Digital Home · Industry trends
Tagged: archive, Backup, content, data, forever, insurance, nEternity, storage, tape
October 31, 2008 · 1 Comment
A company that lives on content grapples with storing it all
TechCrunch is watching Facebook struggle with success. Their astounding growth in unique visits and page views – up to 35 billion now – is creating a corresponding storage surge that’s sapping their cash. It’s not just new hardware either. Their electric bill is estimated at $1 million a month.
The big question is whether they can find an equation where the storage cost per new user is less than the revenue from that user.
Being the biggest isn’t always the best. Google makes it work. Facebook has to find their own formula to make their size and growth profitable. And quickly.
Other takeaways:
Categories: Cloud computing · Company Profiles · Storage Systems
Tagged: content, electricity costs, Facebook, FriendFeed, growth, Jeremaiah Owyang, storage, translation
1. HD broadcast/media is going mainstream. HD video takes 4 times the space of SD video on PCs, DVRs and the web infrastructure.
2. Higher fidelity music downloads. Apple and others race to make their music “better”, which means more megabytes per song.
3. Change in the personal media consumption model from “play” to “record”. We used to listen to phone messages, watch TV and play music. Now we archive emails, collect videos online and build a music library.
4. The expanding digital class in Brazil, Russia, India and China. Most of the planet’s population is in countries where millions of digital consumers will be created even in tough times.
5. Microsoft Vista traction. Vista is finally becoming the dominant OS. It’s a catalyst for consumer and business content.
6. Growth in home backup storage. Mainstream consumers are finally fearing the “digital housefire” enough to back up their PCs to external storage and online services.
7. Increasing mobile content consumption. iPhone and its peers multiply mobile video consumption, creating even more video to be kept somewhere.
8. Photo de-compression. More people are keeping their photos in “raw” format, taking up magnitudes more space. And megapixels continue to grow.
9. Increase in video downloads and views. Hulu.com, iTunes and Amazon Unbox are increasing video consumption for the web massses, which drives consumer and infrastructure storage.
10. The monetization of content. The 99 Cent Song and the Ten Dollar Movie have us all equating our content with cash, driving new demand to store and protect it more like money. That creates more copies.
11. Shift from data centers to the storage cloud. More efficient business storage models drive an increase in business content.
12. Server virtualization. “Free” servers are causing a huge increase in data center storage to support them.
13. Video surveillance. A behind-the-scenes digital video generator that is challenging HD consumer content in size and growth.
14. Increased use of data reduction practices like de-duplication. It’s not intuitive, but there’s evidence that more efficient content results in more, not less, content.
15. Increased financial regulation. The technological result will be more data saved for longer periods, and not just by banks.
16. More companies complying with information regulation. SOX and HIPAA data regulations are finally getting legs, driving more companies to store more to comply.
Digital content is no longer a discretionary item. That’s just as true for consumers as for businesses. Content and the storage to keep It will grow through whatever economic disruption awaits us in the coming year or two.
Categories: Industry trends
Tagged: Backup, cloud storage, content, downloads, growth, HD, HIPAA, photos, recession, server virtualization, SOX, storage, Surveillance, trends, video, virtualization
The Internet infrastructure is incredibly storage dense, and will become even more so
Historically, “infractructures” have been a means to get from here to there: railways, waterways, highways, pipelines, powerlines, phone lines. The build-out of the internet infrastructure looks different in one aspect: beyond the broadband “pipes”, there is a massive and growing storage base, housed in data centers, that accounts for a major part of this infrastructure’s investment.
The trend will continue as the pipes get bigger and the content gets “heavier” from higher resolution video content and growing message sizes. The internet relies on storage as much as connections. Keep your eyes peeled for growing opportunity with a “pure bytes” play in your solutions.
On a related note, Seagate was part of the UK Internet Awards the other night - congrats to UKFast, winner of the Seagate-sponsored Best Dedicated Hosting Award. UKFast is a great example of making the most of the newest infrastructure.
Categories: Datacenter · Industry trends
Tagged: content, infrastructure, internet, ISPA, Seagate, UK Internet Awards, UKFast
Look out world – here come digital downloads!
This post on Egypt’s problems with network outages seemed mundane when I first read it. But then I read between the lines: Movie downloads are seriously impacting a developing country’s day-to-day economy!
When I think of Egypt’s economy, digital entertainment doesn’t come to mind. Yet digital content has risen to a top economic priority due to unexpected but very understandable infrastructure problems. Why is this such a big deal? Because it’s evidence that third-world economies and their resulting digital needs will not lag the developed countires nearly as much as one might think.
The developing world is on a unique digital infrastructure path, bringing many poorer, high-population countries much more rapidly into the Digital World than their more economically developed brethren in the Americas, Asia and Europe.
This reminds me of conversations I had last week with our India team on the huge size of the Indian movie industry. It goes way beyond Bollywood. Indian production companies are today producing a disproportionate share of the world’s video content, and cinemas throughout India are converting to digital distribution at a rapid pace.
The lesson here is that the Digital Age is a global phenomenon that will be driven more and more by population size than by per capita income.
Categories: Industry trends · International
Tagged: Bollywood, content, developing countries, digital age, Egypt, India, undersea cables
Ann at GigaOm reviewed “The Big Switch”, Nick Carr’s follow-on to “Does IT Matter?”.
I agree that the Big Switch is a good thing. Change is always scary, but that doesn’t automatically make it ominous. Often, it is how we get from there to here.
Carr’s comparisons to Edison and the electic grid are telling. Content is the new electricity, and society’s consumption of the new “power” is spawning new information appliances and industries that will be the modern-day Frigidaires, General Electrics and PG&Es.
It’s all good for content-enabling companies that are ready to adapt and evolve!
Categories: Industry trends
Tagged: content, Does IT Matter?, GigaOm, Nick Carr, storage, The Big Switch
The easier it is to share content, the more valuable it becomes to the sharer.
The natural laws of content ownership are evolving in the Web 2.0 world. Robert Scoble sees this in his business. It’s playing out in the entertainment world with Digital Rights Management. The new paradox of content is that the easier it is to share, the more valuable it becomes to the sharer. And the more of it there is.
What it means to solution providers is that more efficient data management driven by data de-duplication, CDP, virtualization and other technologies will propagate data growth, not impede it. You’ll grow your storage business by helping your clients manage their information.
That’s why they call it Information Technology.
Categories: Business Solutions · Datacenter · Industry trends
Tagged: CDP, content, data de-duplication, data management, digital rights management, Robert Scoble, Web 2.0
