World is running out of storage, warns Intel

Intel has warned that the world is generating more data than it has the storage capacity to hold.

Speaking at the company’s European Research conference here in Brussels, Intel fellow Jim Held claimed that data storage was growing at a rate of 60% per year.

“Vast amounts of data are being created at an increasing rate, already more than we can handle,” Held warned. “In 2007, we estimated that we didn’t have the storage to keep all of it.”

Vast amounts of data are being created at an increasing rate, already more than we can handle

Held – who somewhat ironically holds the job title of director of tera-scale computing at Intel – claimed the rapid data growth meant that the world would soon be entering the “yottabyte era”, which is equal to one quadrillion gigabytes.

“We’ve already gone up into the zettabyte range [roughly 1,000,000,000,000 gigabytes],” Held said. “We will have to go to the yottabyte pretty soon”.

Held claimed an increasing reliance on internet services, the proliferation of data-gathering sensors in smartphones and growing corporate demand was responsible for the exponential growth in data.

“Walmart adds a billion rows per minute to its database,” he said. “YouTube contains about as much data as all the commercial networks broadcast in a year. The LHC [Large Hadron Collider] can generate terabytes of data per second.”