Publications
ALL DATA IS INDISPENSABLE: The Staggering Immensity of an Active Archive - August 2025
As Generative AI (GenAI) drives unprecedented demand for high-speed data access, it’s easy to overlook that not all data needs to be accessed in real time. In fact, over 70% of enterprise data could be more efficiently managed as active archives—data that remains accessible but does not require the performance (or expense) of SSDs and HDDs. Yet in 2024, SSDs and HDDs managed 83.9% of all enterprise data, while cost-effective and power-efficient tape accounted for only 16.1% of shipped capacity. This imbalance results in excessive costs and unnecessary energy consumption, especially as the storage footprint grows to a multi-zettabyte scale.
In this report, co-authored with John Monroe, we explore the potential impact of this dramatic growth on end-user data storage spending for the period 2025-2050. Our analysis includes projections of shipments and customer spending for enterprise SSDs, HDDs, tape, and emerging storage technologies. The installed enterprise install base is projected to grow from 7.7 ZB in 2025 to 20.2 ZB in 2030 to 243 ZB in 2050, and customer spending is projected to grow from $68 billion in 2025 to $101 billion in 2030 to $145 billion in 2050.
We are anticipating innovative storage technologies specifically designed for low-cost, long-term data storage will come to market in the latter half of this decade, and that will meaningfully impact industry shipments and revenue. In addition, we project that the overall data growth rates will moderate after 2030 in light of financial constraints and the deployment of GenAI to reduce the quantity of stored data by eliminating redundancies and enforcing data retention policies.
The economic and ecological benefits are explicit, and financial constraints will drive organizations to adopt and utilize lower-cost, more sustainable storage solutions. Data center managers who proactively integrate active-archive technologies will not only optimize costs but also position their organizations to meet emerging compliance mandates and energy constraints. The full report can be accessed at this link.
Managing the Data Explosion - The Strategic Advantage of Tape - September 2024
With modern innovations—such as S3-compatible interfaces—tape can now be easily integrated into existing storage environments, eliminating the need for specialized infrastructure or expertise. For organizations seeking lower costs and greener operations, now is the time to reconsider tape. The paper may be downloaded at this link:
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 - Feb 2024
In this whitepaper, which I co-authored with John Monroe of Further Market Research, we examine 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. We estimate that at the end of 2022, 4.8 Zettabytes (millions of Petabytes) of data was stored on all media types. Further, we project that stored digital data will grow to over 40 Zettabytes in 2035. This dramatic growth is driven by social media, video, 5G networks, scientific research, medical records, video surveillance, media and entertainment, data mining, and artificial intelligence.
While more and more information is being stored, much of it is infrequently accessed. In fact, we estimate that as much as 70-80% of all data is cool, cold, or frozen with access frequency from days to weeks to years to never. Despite its infrequent access, much of this information is currently stored on HDD systems when it could be stored much more cost-effectively on tape storage. We estimate only 15% of the 2022 industry (SSD, HDD, and Tape) was tape storage.
We have projected that 62% of all storage shipments in 2035 will be tape or emerging enterprise archive storage technologies to reduce costs while reducing energy consumption. This shift will be enabled by the emergence of new storage management software combined with artificial intelligence and the growing awareness of the substantial benefits of moving infrequently accessed data to less expensive and more environmentally friendly storage technologies. The paper can be accessed at this link.