Worldwide the flow of information is accelerating at a mind-boggling rate. With rapid rise of digital culture in today’s world of Internet and e-commerce, data demands may soon outstrip storage capacity. Corporate data is more than doubling every year. Few years ago, it was hard to imagine gigabytes of storage on a PC. Now we are already talking about 50 GB, and soon it will be 100 GB. With the arrival of broadband, billions and trillions of bytes of digital video and data will require to be stored. This may lead us to the age of petabytes. Today, two petabytes is enough to store all the information of the US academic libraries. Terabytes can store all the printed material in a couple of university libraries.

Over the last decade, the amount of data per square inch of a magnetic disk has grown 133 times to 8 GB per square inch. Simultaneously, the price per megabyte has steadily fallen, from $1.04 per megabyte in 1995 to 13 cent per megabyte now.

Moore’s Law establishes an elasticity of demand for silicon chips of about 1.5 to 1, which means that for every percent drop in the price of a processor, there is a 1.5 percent increase in unit demand. For bandwidth, the ratio is 2.5 to 1. But for storage, it is actually 4 to 1, which means that for every percent decrease in the price for storage, there is a 4 percent increase in demand.

With storage explosion and its changing economics, storage is undoubtedly becoming a commodity too, much like bandwidth.

With a shortage of skilled IT professionals and increasing cost and complexity of storage management—both hardware and software—businesses are going to invest in outsourced data storage centres. There are many reasons for companies to consider outsourcing their storage needs. There is huge surge in the amount of data that corporations are creating and that needs to be stored. To a large extent, it is also due to emergence of e-commerce.

High volume e-commerce sites need larger and faster storage systems. Without reliable storage, they could be forced offline several times a year, costing them millions. Similarly, storage capacity is critical to portals like MSN and Yahoo. They need to ensure that the largest possible audience is able to access their content and services uninterruptedly.

Information is being used today to remain ahead of the competition. Better information leads to better customer understanding and service as well as better supply chains, and in the end more success. The customers expect to be able to get online anytime: 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That means, the systems need to be accessible and available all the time.

There are a number of Internet companies that keep track of users’ buying patterns and modify their online offers accordingly. They collect enormous information and store it because it is cost-effective to do so. One of the best examples is Amazon.com, which can keep track of the books the customers have bought and made recommendation about.

Data (and the need to store and retrieve it) will thus continue to be a competitive weapon.

Market demands have fuelled the need for improvement in storage technologies to keep pace with the rapidly escalating storage boom. Advances in magnetic and optical technologies as well as "networked storage" promise to make prospects much brighter. Until the arrival of the magnetic disk drive in the mid-1950s, data was stored on magnetic tapes. Unlike tape, these spinning magnetic disks were able to store large amount of data in very compact space. The magnetic density on a hard disk drive has climbed steadily since the 1950s. It has grown from .06 GB/sq. inch to 8 GB/sq. inch just in the past decade. Magnetic disk drive technology has thus fared well so far and has exceeded expectations by increasing its density as well as dropping its cost substantially.

But magnetic storage may run out of room. We are likely to turn again to optical technologies, much like in the case of fibre optics. For instance, holography—using lasers and light photons—can store immense amount of data in three dimensions. However, with IBM demonstrating storage of 35 GB/sq. inch of a disk drive, and current high cost of optical storage—several times more than magnetic—magnetic media will continue to dominate for sometime. The enhanced intelligence or processing power will enable the magnetic storage devices to sort, store, and retrieve larger amount of data faster.

One of the biggest developments in storage technology has been "networked storage"—big shift from storing data on hard disks to the network itself as a network resource. It has made the process of storing data much faster, cost-effective and also efficient and simpler for the user. However, there are security issues, which need to be addressed.

Though not mature as yet, holography has been in existence since 1948 and has enormous potential. Right now, holographic or laser optical storage has ability to store gigabytes and even terabytes of data in a much faster and efficient manner than magnetic storage technologies. Holograms are expected to handle terabytes of data storage that companies will need to run their businesses. These technologies are especially important to handle the massive amount of data expected as High Definition Television (HDTV) images are sent across networks. Large HDTV files require 20 times more storage space than a typical movie on laser disk.

A hologram is like a three-dimension few millimeters thick photograph. Light from a laser is split into two beams, one being the signal (which carries the data) and the second is the reference. Data is recorded through the signal beam. When the two beams overlap and create a hologram—an interference pattern consisting of light bands of varying degrees of brightness—information is recorded as pages of binary data onto a photosensitive media. And that is why it is able to store data much faster. Data can be read from a holographic storage device at the rate of 1Gbps. For example, a frame of a movie is stored instantly on the optical recording media compared to magnetic data points that make up the entire image in the frame.

Holographic disks are expected to be able to store 125 GB of data on a removable 5.25-inch disk. 27 DVD disks (4.7 GB per disk) would be required to hold the same amount of data. Next generation holographic devices will be able to store a single terabyte of data with about 150 times the transfer rate of DVD.

But holography has its shortcoming too. Holograms are not digital files, which means that a lot of digital processing must be done to convert them for use on a computer. Reading of data from holograms is going to be a big challenge. Another problem is that small irregularities in the recording medium can distort the image. However, technology is hopefully going to address the issues.