Skepticism on IDC “Digital Universe” report

Silicon Valley Watcher and its commenters have an interesting reaction to IDC’s report yesterday (commissioned by EMC) that we’re generating more data than we can store.

SVW blogger Tom Foremski writes:

How is it that we would be able to generate almost 1 zettabyte of data in the first place–without having a place to store it…?

Surely, if we can generate it, we are able to store it, because data comes to us from data storage systems…

Is IDC talking about data that we might like to store but we won’t be able to store?

Then that figure is meaningless, because there is no end of data we might want to capture and store in the future. And there is no end of these type of useless market research forecasts, imho.

Commenter Roger Bohn adds:

The IDC conclusion that “we will produce more data than we can store” is poorly explained in their report. What they mean is that the ANNUAL data production will be greater than the CUMULATIVE storage. Not a big deal: much data is stored only for days to months, if at all. Example: email, surveilance videos, Bittorrent downloads. So, there is no inherent reason why the two numbers should be directly comparable.

Meanwhile, EMC blogger Chuck Hollis says this validates his previous theory of a digital “big bang”…Hollis and EMC have an obvious vested interest here, but what we find most interesting is Hollis’s discussion of the issue of “who owns information”, as well as long-term archiving.

Speaking of who owns information, it’s not directly storage-related, but anytime Microsoft starts doing battle with Google, you just have to make some popcorn and sit back to watch…