Major corporations and storage capacity vendors are running almost flat out in their attempt to keep up with the demand for data storage space. The speed at which raw information is growing is incredible enough, but we are no longer storing just words and numbers, which are fairly efficient in terms of space required. Much of today's storage is in graphic, audio, and video formats which requires a great deal more space.The way that we store data today is space and energy consumptive at levels that boggle the mind. Once, the NSA was infamous for measuring its data farms in acres. Now, there are a number of private companies that can measure that type of capacity in square miles, even with the incredible advances made in storage density. For all these reasons, our new future business computing paradigm needs to consider storage methods that are much denser and energy efficient.
Computer scientist are thinking not only of denser standard storage materials, but also of different kind of materials. There are very high hopes for holographic storage, and even things like purpose-grown vegetable matter have been mentioned. One of the leading contenders is nano-built tube and rod storage, closing in on binary storage at the atomic level.
It is good that these technologies are coming, and that they are both more dense and faster, with data sizes growing at more than the current Moore's Law rate. From an environmental point of view, the news is even better, since these new technologies require much less power than today's disk drives. It is apparent that our business computing future must also hold innovative storage technologies, and that computer scientists are up to the task.
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