PRINT THIS PAGE It’s all about information
25/01/2006. Source:Israel Venture Capital Journal (IVCJ). Erez Ofer, Greylock Partners
Dealing with the huge amounts of information being generated has become an important issue for enterprises and individuals alike. In this Israel Venture Capital Journal article, IT and software expert Erez Ofer of Greylock Partners discusses the challenges and opportunities ahead for venture capitalists. August 9, 2005 marked the 10th anniversary of Netscape's IPO. These ten remarkable years - with anything Web related taking center stage - have brought enormous change to how we conduct business and go about our daily lives.
In ten short years, enterprises such as Netscape, Amazon, Yahoo, eBay and Google came to life and forever changed how information is accessed and how business is handled around the world. Could you imagine life without them? It is estimated that the total number of Web pages available today, including automatically generated pages, exceeds 600 billion! Calling this an information explosion is an understatement.
But, it is not just about Web pages. Individuals as well as enterprises of all sizes have started to generate and accumulate more information than ever before. On a personal level, think about MP3 files, digital photos, digital movies, blogs and voice recordings. P2P just amplified the generation of multiple copies of information. Enterprises on average hold terabytes of information in their data centers, with petabyte levels becoming more commonplace every day.
It is now estimated that the amount of data in the world doubles every 24 months. So, where do we put all this data, and how do we manage it? In a recent report, IDC calculated that in Q1 2005 409 petabytes of external disk capacity were shipped worldwide. This is close to a 60 percent growth year to year. However, revenue growth is only around six percent annually.
What gives? The answer is simple. The hunger for storage capacity is still there in a massive way, but the drop in prices does not allow for substantial revenue growth. The storage aspect of information is well understood. Enterprises know how to store data at different price points and in different access options. The question now is how do individuals and enterprises manage this data and more importantly - how do they manage the information?
The distinction between storage, data and information is important because it will help emerging companies in this space understand where they can derive the most value.
The storage domain is the whole universe of containers that hold data - SAN, NAS, CAS, Tape, etc. and the pipes that connect them. These devices fall into a fairly wide price range and have different uses today. Some major forces influencing this landscape are:
- The emergence of storage virtualization - bringing the power of intelligent networks into the realm of storage management and eventually changing how storage arrays are built, as evidenced by the new grid architectures proposed by some of the leading vendors.
- The emergence of SATA and FATA drives and the ability to store data at much lower price points, including the very strong push to use disk as a medium for backup (D2D - disk to disk backup).
- The emergence of iSCSI that will over time become a popular connectivity option for storage, although not as fast as some industry participants would like.
Data management is the next step and deals with anything that has to do with the movement of bits and bytes between containers. Data are moved for many reasons, some of which are backup, replication for disaster tolerance and recovery, archiving and cost savings.
Some of the same factors mentioned above also influence software developed for data management, such as disk to disk backup and the emergence of less expensive disk systems, but others include:
- Strong emphasis on compliance and data retention polices that force enterprises to look differently on how they save, archive and delete data, including email.
- Strong emphasis on recoverability of data and applications. With a 24/7 economy and a higher sensitivity to disaster recovery, businesses today can not afford downtime and thus invest in new and improved methods to protect and recover data (D2D backup, virtual tape, asynchronous replication) as well auditing to assure that these operations are indeed done correctly.
Expect more innovation in this segment for more efficient backup, making replication and recoverability more transparent and manageable, and eventually leading to the need for data movement to converge into a more unified framework.
When we come to Information Management we once again go up a level of complexity. Assuming we know how and where to store data, and assuming we know how to move the data around for the purpose of protection, archiving and regulations, how do we actually leverage the knowledge about information to manage it more effectively? This is where innovation is emerging around content management, data classification and information asset management. With the growing volumes of information, enterprises now need tools that will enable them to make sense of it all:
- What data should be kept and what data should be deleted, and when?
- What retention policy should be applied to different data elements?
- What storage type should be applied to different types of information?
- Who generates each piece of information and who can use and view it?
- What information can be allowed to travel outside the enterprise and to whom?
- Can more business value be extracted from the information?
Finally, information, data and storage management cannot be viewed in a vacuum. The emergence of virtualization and more transparent movement of data complement well the emerging trends on the compute side of the data center towards a utility model where resources are virtualized and allocated as needed. This will allow businesses to eventually have flexibility to harness, compute, network and utilize storage resources as needed.
This grand vision will not happen overnight. However, it is clear that in order to cope with the challenges of data growth and flexibility required from data centers, coupled with the need to control and benefit from information in any organization, new frameworks for information and infrastructure management will emerge. Just think about how far we have come since August 9, 1995.
This article first appeared in the Israel Venture Capital & Private Equity Journal (IVCJ). IVC Research Center publishes the Israel Venture Capital & Private Equity Journal, a quarterly review of trends and developments in the Israeli-related venture capital industry. IVCJ, distributed worldwide, is dedicated to provide wide-range coverage of Israel's venture capital industry. For more information please visit www.ivc-online.com
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