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If you thought an increasingly paperless business world and tougher data retention policies were causing a data explosion, you were right – partly right.

Another trend is now causing storage to multiply rapidly: the ever-rising adoption of digital content and the businesses based on storing and sharing it. Today’s content-driven businesses need a different storage solution. The answer is extreme scale storage – and it’s about to change everything.

Companies like Snapfish, Google and YouTube are based on the ability to store vast amounts of user-generated, rich digital content and make it constantly available. Consumer-generated data is fuelling explosive demand for Web 2.0 applications and other storage-intensive business models. For example, in 2007:

• Consumers captured 5.6 billion gigabytes of video worldwide, a 59 percent increase over 2006.(1)
• 62 percent of mobile phone shipments were camera phones.(2)
(Nearly 3 billion people worldwide now own mobile phones.(3))
• Global shipments of digital still cameras including dSLRs reached 131 million units.(4)

But extreme storage needs extend far beyond the consumer electronics space.

United Kingdom police officers capture video evidence through digital cameras integrated into their helmets, while the rest of the country is monitored by some four million closed-circuit surveillance cameras.

Digital animation studios are transitioning to high-definition and beyond to 3-D. Oil and gas exploration companies are modelling the ocean floor. Genomic researchers are sequencing billions of DNA base pairs in search of answers and cures.

All this data must be accessible on demand and stored more affordably and simply than ever before.

Really big storage systems, designed for demanding corporate environments, have generally been a poor fit for extremely large environments where cost is a major concern. Faced with this situation, some early businesses built their own custom storage systems from scratch; today, new business models are being made possible by emerging extreme storage systems, meeting the needs of file-intensive endeavours:

• Extreme storage must scale two ways (by performance and by capacity), able to change with shifting needs.
• New Internet-enabled business models require extreme storage at a fraction of the traditional cost per gigabyte.
• To keep operational costs down and make new business models possible, administrators must be able to manage multiple petabytes of data.

With solutions based on HP StorageWorks Scalable Network Attached Storage (NAS), HP has already begun to address the escalating need for large-scale file-based storage. HP’s Scalable NAS Digital Media Solution has helped businesses meet extreme storage needs head on; the HP StorageWorks 9100 Extreme Data Storage System can feed content-hungry digital media and Web 2.0 applications with extreme storage scaling, at a fraction of the cost of traditional enterprise class storage systems.

With extreme scale file storage, you don't have to be Google, you don't have to be YouTube, you don't even have to be Snapfish to build a business on today's mind-blowing data.

Find out more about the Extreme Data Storage System.

(1) IDC
(2) IDC
(3) Open Handset Alliance
(4) IDC