Have you ever heard of a zettabyte? If you work in IT, you’ll be hearing more and more about zettabytes, exabytes, and petabytes while the data terms we think are big, such as terabytes and gigabytes wane away from our vocabulary. Right now, we are growing our data stores by 50% year-over-year, and its only accelerating.
In 2010, we crossed the barrier of the zettabyte (ZB) across all online data. This year, we will produce 4 ZB of data worldwide. In 2016, global IP traffic will reach 1.3 ZB.
While data volumes are skyrocketing, the type of data is also becoming more difficult for traditional databases to handle. Over 80% of it will be unstructured file based data that does not work well with block-based data storage typical of your typical relational databases (RDBMS). So, even if hardware innovations could keep up to support greater volume, the kinds of data we are now storing break traditional RDBMS at today’s speeds.
The bottom line is the volume and types of data being stored is unrealistic for a single, monolithic, structured RDBMS data store. They need to be broken apart and re-architected to survive the Information Explosion we are experiencing today.
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