HP: 50 Zettabytes Of Data Created Each Year By 2020

By 2020, fifty zettabytes (fifty billion terrabytes) of data will be created every year, presenting a major challenge for businesses, according to Hewlett-Packard

HP Labs is working towards transforming this data at “the speed of business”, senior vice president of research at HP and the director of HP Labs Prith Banerjee  told the HP Discover event in Vienna.

At the Speed of Business

Information will becomes the world’s most important resource and  those who capitalise on it will become the most successful in the twenty-first century, Banerjee said. With 2.5 million tweets sent every day and 30 billion mobile devices arriving in the near future, the world is creating both structured and unstructured data at a rapid pace, he said.

HP’s predictions for increased data traffic are not isolated as earlier this year Cisco predicted that there will be 15 billion devices on the internet and traffic will increase to one zettabyte by 2015.

With businesses needing ways of transforming this information, Banerjee demonstrated one of HP Lab’s research projects, which he described as the “live analytics platform of the future.”

The technology tracks a variety of complex events which must be correlated so that patterns can be detected. Banerjee claimed that it could contextually analyse what customers say on twitter a mere ten seconds after the tweet is sent.

Instant Analysis

Another HP Labs project, Enterprise swarm, analyses data such as emails and world documents on a device in order to recommend the experts who could help solve a problem should one arise.

A scalable storage system for public and private clouds was also demoed. Banerjee explained that distributed data algorithms split multiple copies of a file, so that it can be recovered if there was an extreme data failure.

These HP Labs projects fit into a wider HP strategy of information optimisation as companies seek to make sense of the amount of data that is being created. Earlier this year HP acquired both Autonomy and Vertica and combined their technology in the recently announced Idol 10 platform which claims to be able to handle 100 percent of information.

Previous HP Labs projects have included apps which allow smartphone users to tag and bookmark pages that are relevant to their location and research which indicated that manure could be used to power a one megawatt data centre.