Vision of the future drawn from memory

In the virtual world, as in the bricks-and-mortar world, it is not exactly a riveting topic. But storage - the question of where to put all those digital bits of information that businesses, and increasingly individuals, are generating - is turning into a big issue.

Every 30 minutes, 94 million new e-mails are generated, as well as 4,000 new phone users, and 12,000 new Internet users, said Mr Aidan Higgins, managing director of Dublin storage firm Xnet, which sponsored a conference on the subject earlier this week.

Information is generated by computer applications, databases, file services, e-mail and the Internet. Today, experts say that translates into about 2,000 petabytes of digital information held worldwide and this is expected to bloat to at least 10,000 petabytes by 2005. A byte is the amount of digital space needed to represent a single letter and a single petabyte is a quadrillion bytes, or 10 to the 15th power. Thus, it's not surprising that storage, already a $44 billion (€49.75 billion) market, is expected to be a $100 billion market by 2005.

Consider the heavy reliance of businesses on the information they hold on their computers. Lose that information, said a wide range of storage experts speaking at the conference in Dublin, and the business may go down the drain as well.

Mr Adrian Groenevald, a marketing associate for storage company Veritas, noted the consequences of loss of data for the companies that were in New York's World Trade Centre when it was badly damaged by a bomb several years ago. Fortythree per cent of companies went out of business almost immediately, he said. Two years later, only 6 per cent were still operating.

Even a relatively brief loss of the digital data a business needs can be shockingly costly - say, when a website goes down for a stretch of time, a widely reported problem for Amazon.com and several other online retailers so far this holiday shopping period. According to a study by US research firm Contingency Planning Research and Datamation, the cost to an online brokerage if their computers go down for an hour is a whopping $7.84 million.

A credit card verification and authorisation service would lose $3.16 million, an airline reservation system would lose $108,000 per hour, and a home shopping television network, $137,000.

Mr Groenevald translated that into another figure businesses can understand - the overall reliability of the systems expressed in expected downtime per year. A network that was up 99.9 per cent of the time - seemingly a very high level of reliability - actually means it is down for 8.75 hours per year.

Another speaker, Mr Vincent Franchesini, director of data networking at Hitachi Data Systems, noted that analysts had estimated the lingerie retailer Victoria's Secret lost more than $10 million when its website failed to handle the numbers interested in watching its saucy webcast fashion show this year.

As Mr Thomas Burns, sales support director for data warehouse giant EMC2, noted: "Twenty-four by forever [24hour, constant accessibility] is absolutely essential."

He believes that the growth of fibre optic networks, from 20 million miles today to one billion miles by 2005, means bandwidth will be cheap and unlimited.

Although businesses are obvious sources of data, "the big growth is in personal data", he said. "It's not out of the question to think that a single individual will be responsible for a terabyte [a trillion bytes] of data." That terabyte might typically be composed of medical images in our medical records, photos, webcams, communication data such as e-mail and voice files, personal history files, commercial records, even computer-generated architectural drawings for our homes.