Storage Changing So Fast It Even Obsoletes The Future.

Just one year ago the IT industry was totally focused on the implications of the year 2000 and the effects that changing to a new century would have on computer systems. The impact of that event proved far less than anticipated and a year later we shift our focus to more strategic issues, trends, and observations shaping the computing industry. In particular the value of data continues to grow almost exponentially every day. Data (and storage) have become the center of the IT universe, as the computers are now satellites to the data storage infrastructure. Let's review some key trends and observations (factoids) from a variety of sources that may help with storage and networking planning as the New Year begins.

The worldwide Gigabit Ethernet packet switch market reached over 810,000 ports shipped in 2Q 2000, according to Cahners In-Stat Group. The high-tech market research firm expects the overall Gigabit Ethernet switch market to reach almost 4 million units in ports shipped and $4 billion in end-use revenue for 2000, resulting in an all time high: over 200 percent greater than the total number of ports shipped in 1999.

The worldwide Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gigabit Ethernet market will reach over $24 billion in end-user sales by 2004, according to Cahners In-Stat Group. The high-tech market research firm predicts that this growth will result in a CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) of more than 55%. 2000 will be a record year for Gigabit Ethernet alone with In-Stat expecting it to grow over 200 percent to almost $4 billion.

The length of a single bit is [sim] 7.4 inches on optical fiber, a 10-bit byte is 6.2 feet long and a 4K block is 5 miles long on fiber.

According to a recently published 2000 report "High Availability and Data Protection Practices" from Strategic Research, by 2003, databases will control access to more than 65% of the network's shared data. This further drives the requirement for true heterogeneous and homogeneous data-sharing.

Jupiter Research has released a study with pulse-quickening projections about the growth of the business-to-business commerce market. Jupiter's prediction that B-to-B commerce will expand from $336 million this year to $6.3 trillion in 2005 is likely to raise the heart rate of even the most composed IT administrators as they try to figure out how to accommodate such exponential expansion.

However, Seagate Technology Inc. reckons this time it's got a larger lead on the competition, having taken the capacity on its Barracuda drives from 73GB to 180GB.

Europe's application service provider market will jump from a $275.1M market in 1999 to a $13.7B market in 2005, according to international marketing consulting company Frost & Sullivan.

The picture changed in 2000, according to Internet statistics published in Tele-Geography 2001, this year's compendium of industry statistics from the Washington, DC-based firm. From 1999 to 2000, Internet bandwidth connecting Asian countries grew faster than any other region-to-region route in the world--including Internet bandwidth connected to the U.S. That meant that 13.5 percent of Asia's international Internet capacity was in-region, up from 6.2 percent the previous year. The Asian Internet is becoming less and less U.S.-centric and regional interconnection is on the upswing.

By 2004, the Internet is expected to have nearly 730,000 users worldwide. An estimated 60% of the U.S. households and 85% of white-collar workers worldwide should be online. There are an estimated 17,000 dot-com companies today.

Traffic on the Internet presently doubles in just under three months.

Strategic Planning Observations from The IN_fusion Paradox

The price per unit of storage purchased is basically approaching zero in the next few years.

* Corollary 1 - Storage density (magnetic) increases between 60 and 100% every year.

* Corollary 2 - Storage pricing falls between 35-40% per year.

* Corollary 3 - Storage performance improves less than 10% per year.

* Corollary 4 - The value of data is growing exponentially.

* Corollary 5 - The cost of managing storage is 3 to 10 times greater than the cost of the hardware.

Note: Management costs include software and people costs.

The price of compute power is approaching zero in a slightly longer timeframe.

* Corollary 1 - The price of compute power falls between 25-35% per year.

* Corollary 2 - The density of transistors doubles every 18-24 months.

* Corollary 3 - The performance of computers is improving at 30-35% per year.

Global bandwidth is (at last) beginning a pricing slope that will see the price per unit also approach zero in a still slightly longer timeframe.

* Corollary 1 - Total global bandwidth is growing at nearly 10x per year.

* Corollary 2 - Optical data streams presently transfer at 10 Gbps and electronic switches deliver data-streams up to 2.5 Gbps.

* Corollary 3 - Bandwidth outside the computer (optical) is growing much faster than bandwidth inside the computer (electronic).

* Corollary 4 - Wireless (light and air) is using approximately 1% of the available frequency spectrum while price is now falling at 15%+ annually.

Depending on the report, we have a shortage of between 500,000 and one million IT workers in the U.S. as the year 2001 begins. Storage experts may become more important than even developers as the current storage explosion accelerates. This is the foremost factor driving outsourcing IT services and the xSP (Service Provider) movement.

Studies show that while 12% of businesses have an effective recovery program for their enterprise computing systems, the vast majority--or 82%--have ineffective recovery programs. The other 6% have only partially effective disaster recovery programs. The estimated average costs of system failures can be nearly fatal to some companies and often range to over $10 million per hour of downtime or lack of access to the IT function. Business resumption has become a fundamental component of IT strategy.

Approximately 10 percent of the digital data in the world reside on magnetic disk storage and an estimated 90 percent of digital storage resides on removable storage technologies such as magnetic tape, CDs, DVDs, and optical storage.

Other selected observations about storage and Information Technology from a variety of publications, market research data, and private sources include:

Today over 80% of the world's data are born digital, not on paper, fiche, charts, films, or maps meaning that its first occurrence is in a computer-generated format.

From the digital data explosion are estimates that 28% of today's data is created and read only once.

A yottabyte, the largest defined capacity measurement, is equal to 10 to the 24th (a septillion) power and a zettabyte is 10 to the 21st. A terabyte is 10 to the 12th power. The largest denomination above one million is the centillion, equal to 10 to the 303rd power.

All of the estimated 81.8 billion minutes (or 56,805,556 days) that were carried across the world's public telephone network in 1997 can now be transmitted over a single high-speed optical fiber in approximately eleven days. Private network minutes are not accounted for.

There are now over 1,000 Internet Service Providers (ISPs) worldwide. The U.S. has an estimated 1,000 Co-Lo sites, over 300 ASPs, and nearly 50 declared SSPs.

Ninety-four percent of the most visited websites in the world are in the U.S. and forty percent are in California.

The U.S. accounts for over 75% of the world's e-commerce revenue generated, estimated to be $120+B in 2000.

The average number of e-mail messages sent on an average day in the U.S. was 300 million in 1995, and will be about 3.5 billion this year. Estimates for daily e-mail traffic are expected to exceed 8 billion by year-end 2002. Fifteen years ago the Internet had only 1,000 host computers.

Electrical energy is generated mostly with coal (56%), nuclear (20%), hydroelectric (10%), and gas (10%). Electrical consumption grows at 3% per year with computers accounting for half of the growth. The question looming is when does electrical consumption costs surpass computer hardware costs?

Current fuel economy ratings show that it takes about one pound of coal to create, package, store, and move 2 megabytes of data. At 100 million Internet nodes, the electrical consumption would add up to 290 billion-kilowatt hours of demand, equal to about 8 percent of the total demand of the U.S. If one billion PCs were attached to the web, they would account for electrical demand equal to the total capacity of the U.S. today. According to the May 31, 1999 issue of Forbes Magazine, as much as 50% of the electrical output in the U.S. could be consumed by the Internet and non-networked computers.

One page of text requires 2,400 bytes of storage. An 8x10 color photo will use about 38 megabytes. A fingerprint takes 2MB per fingerprint set. Audio recording takes about 22MB to store 1 hour of a telephone conversation.

The changes in the IT industry are very difficult to keep up with yet a keen awareness of the dynamic storage networking movement is almost mandatory in order to make strategic decisions. Remember, in this business -- things are changing so fast that even the future is obsolete.