Estimates put the amount of data in existence at this time at more than a zettabyte (or a trillion gigabytes), which would be the equivalent of 75 billion fully loaded iPads. All this data is streaming into and through enterprises from transactions, remote devices, partner sites and user-generated content, with formats varying from structured, relational data to graphics and videos.
Enterprises are mandated to retain much of this data, and to be able to make the information available as users require, yet it is increasingly clear from a new database growth survey of 581 members of the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) that they are having difficulties managing the growing volumes of data, and there has been an impact on application performance.
The new research shows that while managing data growth is a priority for many companies, smarter responses are needed to address the challenge. The IOUG ResearchWire survey, was conducted in July and August 2010 by Unisphere Research, and sponsored by Oracle Corporation.
The IOUG survey looked at approaches being taken by organizations to manage their growing data stores. Among the key findings are that data is growing rapidly at nine out of 10 respondents' companies, and business growth is driving this expansion in data stores. Sixteen percent of companies are experiencing data growth at a rate exceeding 50% a year. Many companies have large numbers of both Oracle and non-Oracle databases.
And, an overwhelming majority of respondents say growing volumes of data are inhibiting application performance to some degree. The problem is even more acute at enterprises with the highest levels of data growth. However, most still attempt to address the problem with more hardware, versus smarter approaches.