ABA Banking Journal - July 2008 - (Page 46)
Tech topics Webnotes duce 6% of the global economic product. The industry’s share of the digital universe will fall to 3% in 2011, IDC predicts. The reason? Not much digital imaging going on (i.e. video imaging), IDC says. At the other end of the economic-productivity spectrum, broadcast, media and entertainment industries generate only 4% of the world’s output but generate 50% of the digital universe. IDC predicts that those percentages will be even more lopsided in the next ten years, when most countries will be broadcasting digital TV and most movies will be digital. ing of the changing information environment, an enterprise can devise flexible policies that will be managed by IT and applied to every part of the organization, its customers, and its suppliers. The biggest challenge may be to “rush new tools and standards into the organization: storage optimization, unstructured data search, database analytics, and resource pooling (virtualization).” is typically about one-fifth of the needed capacity. Thus, 100 terabytes actually used implies a 500 terabyte capacity. Although no banks have yet made it into the world’s top ten databases in the WinterCorp series, Winter says that banks are now planning data warehouses in the topten range. “ The next five to ten years will bring dramatically new and different architectures and products for the management of data. With every dimension of database scale racing upward at exponential rates, I believe we will need products that are substantially simpler to use and administer. . . in a more Needed: new warehouse architecture Obviously, every enterprise will need to spectacularly expand its data warehouse capacity, Storage, storage, storage The IDC report cites elements in an enterprise’s digital environment for which executives can be held—sometimes legally— responsible: information security, privacy protection, copyright protection, screening for obscenity, detecting fraud, and reporting on, archiving, searching, retrieving, and disposing of content. All of it involves storage. Wells Fargo—following the lead of Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and others— recently announced vSafe, a cyberspace storage facility. The service will upload and give customers online access to such data as tax returns, marriage and death certificates, passports, wills, and digital pictures. The cost: $4.95 a month for a gigabyte of storage and access. That’s surely a nice way to clean out an attic and obviously could sometimes be more than just a convenience. But it also means the 90% or more of stored data that will never be needed will forever be part of the digital universe. The IDC study found that in 2007 the amount of stored information was about equal to available storage. By 2011, almost half of the digital universe will not have a permanent home. To cope with the exploding mass of information in every part of an enterprise, IDC says that management must “Transform their existing relationships with the business units. These are the groups that will classify information, set retention policies, deal with customers whose data the company holds, and face the public if data is lost, breached, compromised, or simply handled badly.” Then, based on continuous sens- TB 1000 800 S Data warehouse growth trend (size in terabytes of user data) Size of the largest data warehouse in the Winter TopTen Survey CAGR = 173% 600 400 Actual Projected 200 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 S Source: Winter Corporation. Waltham, MA either in-house or outsourced. That’s already happening—fast—according to Richard Winter, president and founder of WinterCorp, consultants in large-scale data management. Every few years the firm identifies the world’s ten largest and most heavily used databases. From 1998 through 2005, year of the latest survey, the size of the world’s largest data warehouse tripled approximately every two years, yielding a compound annual growth rate of 173%. In 2005 the largest warehouse contained 100 terabytes (trillions of bytes) actually used. If that rate continued, the number should now be in the range of 900 (see chart). Winter points out that his firm measures data actually used—which he says fully automatic manner.” Winter noted with approval the May announcement by Aster Data Systems of an innovative solution that transforms off-theshelf, commodity hardware into a self-managing analytic database. The new solution is being used by MySpace, the popular social network, to analyze customer preferences using a cluster of 100 server nodes, an aggregate volume that comes to more than one terabyte of new data every day. Aster CEO and cofounder Mayank Bawa says he wants to open a market for the kind of clustered database successfully used by Google and Yahoo. By Bill Orr, contributing editor billorr@ibert.org 46 JULY 2008/ABA BANKING JOURNAL Subscribe at www.ababj.com
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