A Day in the Life of a Datum

Each day we create and consume massive amounts of data. This slide show illustrates the journey one datum goes through from inception to reality.

Big data and the Internet of things (IoT) are disrupting entire markets and merging our virtual worlds with our physical worlds. Within the last two years, more than 90 percent of the world's data has been created. IDC predicts that the data we create and copy annually will reach 44 zettabytes, or 44 trillion gigabytes, by 2020. Salesforce projects the number of connected devices available will reach 75 billion by 2020. Data surrounds us. Whether it's on our mobile phones, wearables, or home and/or office devices, we create and consume massive amounts of it each day. Have you ever stopped to think about where and how that data started its day? Who it touched before you? Or what happens to it afterward? In the following slide show, Calvin Hsu, a Citrix vice president, illustrates the journey one datum goes through from inception to reality, highlighting the phases of data—at rest, in use and on the move—and the types of devices, applications and services that data reaches along the way.

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Realising positive returns through eDiscovery

Investing in eDiscovery may seem like an unwanted expense, but could you really afford to do nothing? There are few organisations who can afford to do nothing, as the consequences of not being prepared can cost a company considerably more.

Bringing an eDiscovery solution in house and preparing for potential litigation, drastically reduces storage costs, legal fees paid to outside vendors and lowers IT operations costs.

This paper discusses the possible cost savings in the several stages of the process and illustrates how you can lower costs by being proactive towards organisation and management of relevant information.

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eBook: Storage Virtualization for Dummies

Understand storage virtualization and how it can transform your data center in this easy to read eBook. Virtualization is undoubtedly revolutionizing the storage environment, just as it has done for servers. Hitachi Data Systems Storage Virtualization for Dummies sheds new light on storage virtualization technologies while dispelling common myths. In this book, you’ll learn how to select, architect and deploy today’s most powerful storage technologies, while drastically reduce storage costs. Stop wasting valuable storage resources and learn more about making the transition to virtualized storage.

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Cloud Storage Economics for Dummies

Determine the real cost of storage infrastructure by understanding that the cost of acquiring assets is just a small percentage of their total cost to own. Data storage economics focuses on measuring the total cost of ownership to align information technology investments with corporate goals.

Download this free eBook from Hitachi Data Systems and understand why price doesn't alway equal cost and become an economic hero in your own organization.

As 60th Anniversary Nears, Tape Reinvents Itself

The 60th anniversary of IBM's digital tape is coming up in May. Oh yeah, and tape is dead. Or so industry pundits have declared, echoing similar prognostications for the mainframe.

But in reality, tape has a long life ahead of it. At 60, in many ways, it's just getting started.

That's because, unlike the mainframe, tape's role in the enterprise is dramatically changing. Only a few years ago, with the emergence of cheap, high-capacity disk drives, many pundits thought tape would be relegated to the dusty storerooms of long-term data archive. Gone were the days when tape was used for primary backup and recovery or streaming media.

But, with the performance of next-generation tape drives hitting 525MB/sec. -- and at a price of around $25 per terabyte of capacity -- tape is too fast and too cheap to write off. New open file formats are also making it possible to use tape in new markets.

IBM's first magnetic tape device for digital storage, the 7-track tape, was introduced in 1952. The IBM 726 tape was about the size of a pizza and held 2.3MB of data with a transfer rate of about 7.5KB/sec. That's about enough to store a minute and a half of a song on your smartphone.

IBM arrived in the tape market a year after the first magnetic tape was introduced. It was used to store data from the Eckert-Mauchly UNIVAC I, the enormous piece of equipment that was the first commercial computer in the U.S. That tape reel held just 224KB of data.

IBM's 726 tape unit was released in 1952. Each tape held 2.3MB of data.

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eBook: Storage Virtualization for Dummies

Understand storage virtualization and how it can transform your data center in this easy to read eBook. Virtualization is undoubtedly revolutionizing the storage environment, just as it has done for servers. Hitachi Data Systems Storage Virtualization for Dummies sheds new light on storage virtualization technologies while dispelling common myths. In this book, you’ll learn how to select, architect and deploy today’s most powerful storage technologies, while drastically reduce storage costs. Stop wasting valuable storage resources and learn more about making the transition to virtualized storage. Download this 74 pages eBook

Data Deduplication Background

The term data deduplication refers to a specific approach to data reduction built on a methodology that systematically substitutes reference pointers for redundant variable-length blocks (or data segments) in a specific dataset. The purpose of data deduplication is to increase the amount of information that can be stored on disk arrays and to increase the effective amount of data that can be transmitted over networks. Know more about data deduplication from this whitepaper