Data storage is the collective methods and technologies that capture and retain digital information on electromagnetic, optical or silicon-based storage media. Storage is used in offices, data centers, edge environments, remote locations and people''s homes. Storage is also an important component in mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. Consumers and businesses rely on storage to preserve information ranging from personal photos to business-critical data.
Storage is frequently used to describe devices that connect to a computer -- either directly or over a network -- and that support the transfer of data through input/output (I/O) operations. Storage devices can include hard disk drives (HDDs), flash-based solid-state drives (SSDs), optical disc drives, tape systems and other media types.
With the advent of big data, advanced analytics and the profusion of internet of things (IoT) devices, storage is more important than ever to handle the growing amounts of data. Modern storage systems must also support the use of artificial intelligence (AI), machine leaning and other AI technologies to analyze all this data and derive its maximum value.
Today''s sophisticated applications, real-time database analytics and high-performance computing also require highly dense and scalable storage systems, whether they take the form of storage area networks (SANs), scale-out and scale-up network-attached storage (NAS), object storage platforms, or converged, hyper-converged or composable infrastructure.
By 2025, it is expected that 163 zettabytes (ZB) of new data will be generated, according to a report by IT analyst firm IDC. The estimate represents a potential tenfold increase from the 16 ZB produced through 2016. IDC also reports that in 2020 alone 64.2 ZB of data was created or replicated.
The term storage can refer to both the stored data and to the integrated hardware and software systems used to capture, manage, secure and prioritize that data. The data might come from applications, databases, data warehouses, archives, backups, mobile devices or other sources, and it might be stored on premises, in edge computing environments, at colocation facilities, on cloud platforms or any combination of these.
Storage capacity requirements define how much storage is needed to support this data. For instance, simple documents might require only kilobytes of capacity, while graphic-intensive files, such as digital photographs, can take up megabytes, and a video file can require gigabytes of storage.
Computer applications commonly list the minimum and recommended capacity requirements needed to run them, but these tell only part of the story. Storage administrators must also take into account how long the data must be retained, applicable compliance regulations, whether data reduction techniques are being used, disaster recovery (DR) requirements and any other issues that can impact capacity.
A hard disk is a circular platter coated with a thin layer of magnetic material. The disk is inserted on a spindle and spins at speeds of up to 15,000 revolutions per minute (rpm). As it rotates, data is written on the disk surface using magnetic recording heads. A high-speed actuator arm positions the recording head to the first available space on the disk, allowing data to be written in a circular fashion.
On an electromechanical disk such as an HDD, blocks of data are stored within sectors. Historically, HDDs have used 512-byte sectors, but this has started to change with the introduction of the Advanced Format, which can support 4,096-byte sectors. The Advanced Format increases bit density on each track, optimizes how data is stored and improves format efficiency, resulting in greater capacities and reliability.
On most SSDs, data is written to pooled NAND flash chips that use either floating gate cells or charge trap cells to retain their electrical charges. These charges determine the binary bit state (1 or 0). An SSD is not technically a drive but more like an integrated circuit made up of millimeter-sized silicon chips that can contain thousands or even millions of nanotransistors.
Many organizations use a hierarchical storage management system to back up their data to disk appliances. Backing up data is considered a best practice whenever data needs to be protected, such as when organizations are subject to legal regulations. In some cases, an organization will write its backup data to magnetic tape, using it as a tertiary storage tier. However, this approach is practiced less commonly than in years past.
An organization might also use a virtual tape library (VTL), which uses no tape at all. Instead, data is written sequentially to disks but retains the characteristics and properties of tape. The value of a VTL is its quick recovery and scalability.
Digital information is written to target storage media through the use of software commands. The smallest unit of measure in a computer memory is a bit, which has a binary value of 0 or 1. The bit''s value is determined by the level of electrical voltage contained in a single capacitor. Eight bits make up one byte.
Computer, storage and network systems use two standards when measuring storage amounts: a base-10 decimal system and a base-2 binary system. For small storage amounts, discrepancies between the two standards usually make little difference. However, those discrepancies become much more pronounced as storage capacities grow.
The differences between the two standards can be seen when measuring both bits and bytes. For example, the following measurements show the differences in bit values for several common decimal (base-10) and binary (base-2) measurements:
Storage measurements can refer to a device''s capacity or the amount of data stored in the device. The amounts are often expressed using the decimal naming conventions -- such as kilobyte, megabyte or terabyte -- whether the amounts are based on the decimal or binary standards.
Fortunately, many systems now distinguish between the two standards. For example, a manufacturer might list the available capacity on a storage device as 750 GB, which is based on the decimal standard, while the operating system lists the available capacity as 698 GiB. In this case, the OS is using the binary standard, clearly showing the discrepancy between the two measurements.
Some systems might provide measurements based on both values. An example of this is IBM Spectrum Archive Enterprise Edition, which uses both decimal and binary units to represent data storage. For instance, the system will display a value of 512 terabytes as 512 TB (465.6 TiB).
Few organizations require a single storage system or connected system that can reach an exabyte of data, but there are storage systems that scale to multiple petabytes. Given the rate at which data volumes are growing, exabyte storage might eventually become a common occurrence.
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