Publications
The Impacts of Generative AI on Enterprise Data – August 2024
This is the second paper I co-authored with John Monroe of Further Market Research. GenAI is the hottest topic in technology today. One of the industry leaders, ChatGPT exceeded 100 million users in less than three months after its introduction in November 2022. Never have we seen such dramatic growth and broad impact across widely different industries.
We interviewed five industry experts in diverse industries: scientific research, video surveillance, media and broadcast, and government records. We also spoke with a corporate vice president tasked with discovering AI startups ripe for investment, a consultant with extensive experience in high-performance computing (HPC) environments, and a senior researcher at a large corporation and focused on three key questions:
1. Major uses of GenAI: Which applications? How deployed?
2. Database size and annual growth rate before GenAI/after GenAI.
3. If there is a definitive difference, what causes the difference
We then projected enterprise storage shipments for HDDs, SSDs, tape storage, and emerging technologies through 2050. We estimate that while GenAI accelerates storage shipments and install base through 2030 with an annual shipment growth of 27.5% (2026-2030), it slows significantly to single-digit growth in the 2036-2050 period. A few factors reduce the growth rate, including the ability of the storage industry to supply the enormous quantities of storage devices needed, the utilization of GenAI to delete unneeded data, and the customer CFO’s unwillingness to continue to spend ever-growing amounts on storage technology. The white paper can be accessed at this link.
The Sustainable Preservation of Enterprise Data - February, 2024
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I co-authored this paper with John Monroe of Further Market Research; it examines the implications and opportunities created by the dramatic expansion of the amount of digital information stored on SSD, HDD, tape storage, and potentially new archive technologies. Link: The Sustainable Preservation of Enterprise Data
Improving Information Technology Sustainability With Modern Tape Storage - August, 2023
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Sustainability and CO2 emission reduction are a major challenge for the Information Technology (IT) industry. Driven by cloud computing, artificial intelligence, big data, and the expansion of 5G networks, industry analysts estimate that the amount of data stored may grow to 17 Zettabytes (ZB) by 2025. In this paper published in the SMPTE Motion Imaging Journal, August 2023 issue, I highlight how IT organizations have an opportunity to reduce their carbon footprint, improve sustainability and reduce expenses by migrating less frequently accessed from hard disk drive (HDD) based storage to modern tape storage. Follow this link to the paper link.
November, 2020
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Reducing carbon emissions is a significant global challenge. Many companies have decided they must incorporate carbon reductions into their strategies and have announced green initiatives. One opportunity for reducing energy consumption and resulting carbon emissions is moving inactive data from disk storage to tape storage. Industry analysts estimate that 60% of the data stored on disk storage is infrequently accessed. We estimate that by moving 10 PB of "cold data" that is growing 35% annually from disk to tape storage, an 87% reduction in carbon emission and an 86% reduction in TCO can be achieved over ten years. IT organizations have a significant opportunity to achieve meaningful carbon emissions reductions while lowering operational and capital expenses.
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