Data drives growth, promotes innovation and improves the customer experience. Therefore, data is invaluable to companies. The amount of data is therefore growing exponentially. In fact, IDC predicts that the global datasphere will reach 291 ZB by 2027.

As the volume and velocity of data increases, many companies across industries are unable to realize the full potential of today’s data-driven world. Not only do they collect and use only a fraction of the data they generate, but they also have data storage issues.

As more and more AI products come onto the market, the amount of data continues to explode. Enterprise data centers must therefore look for sustainable ways to scale with limited space, power and budget.

Pay attention to the (data storage) gap

With the AI ​​boom, both cloud and data center customers have invested heavily in and offered AI services to meet demand. Once this infrastructure is in place, the demands for both data storage and data management will rapidly increase and become overwhelming. To meet these challenges, data center operators must quickly increase their data storage capacity.

As an immediate solution, many manufacturers will increase their data storage capacity by increasing the number of disks in their hard drives. In fact, this is how most hard drives increase their capacity in the short term. But in the long term, the influx of data leads to complete overload, making this approach simply unsustainable in the future.

Each pane requires many materials, including non-renewable raw materials. The more drives are added to the hard drive, the higher the cost of building them, which drastically affects the amount of floor space required. Each additional drive also increases power consumption by up to 12.5%, and when scaled up in a data center, that represents a huge expense in power alone.

So how can companies increase the amount of data each drive can store? By increasing the surface density. Essentially, areal density means an increase in the amount of data each hard drive can store. And fewer hard drives mean less material and less performance.

The Impact of Surface Density Technology

The push for higher areal density is driven by exponential data generation across industries, from enterprise to cloud data centers, requiring more efficient and cost-effective data storage solutions.

Higher areal density allows data to be packed more densely on storage media, ensuring faster read and write speeds. This is a cost-effective solution, which in turn translates into better overall performance and responsiveness of data centers, helping them meet the demands of today’s data-driven applications and services.

Area density technology also increases the efficiency of modern data centers. The ability to store more data in a smaller space allows data centers to optimize their physical space requirements. This results in lower power consumption and reduced cooling requirements. Not only does this contribute to significant cost savings, but it is also in line with the global need to build a sustainable and environmentally responsible technology infrastructure.

Efficient data management

In order to drive innovation and realize the full potential of the digital age in the future, the ability to store, access and use massive amounts of data will be of great importance.

Companies around the world currently rely on the right data center infrastructure to harness the intrinsic value of all this available data. However, one of the biggest management challenges is the complexity of storing and managing distributed data. Data resides in multiple locations and is often spread across endpoints, the edge, and multiple clouds. This means companies are missing out on new opportunities and potential revenue.

Instead of immediately expanding their data storage capacity, enterprise data centers should pay attention to how effectively their data is stored. Ultimately, companies must ensure that the data collected is useful while managing the storage of the collected data.

However, attempting to capture all available data would strain existing IT infrastructure and increase costs. This is one of the many reasons why companies need to rethink data management. For example, identifying and classifying data early in its lifecycle enables faster cleanup. This leads to lower costs.

The future of mass capacity

The future of mass capacity begins now – and it’s clear that surface density technology plays a critical role in addressing ever-increasing data pressures. This increase in areal density will drive the development and growth of hard drive products over the next decade.

This is a post from Vincent Oostlander, Director EMEA Solutions Sales at Seagate. Click here to learn more about the company’s density innovations.