IDC has coined a new term called “content depot“, defining it as a central enterprise repository set up specifically for managing the rapidly growing amounts of unstructured data. The content depot is often separated from the central enterprise data center.
The content depot is the hub for digital content/data gathered by the enterprise. IDC reports that 17.4% of disk storage capacity goes
toward creation of “content depots”, but “content depot” spending accounts for only 5.1% of all storage dollars. IDC is expecting that content depots will only continue to grow in size and importance.
Businesswire quotes Richard L. Villars, vice president of Storage Systems research at IDC as saying:
“By the end of 2008, content depots are poised to become major consumers of storage capacity, major influencers of new storage systems design, and major disruptors of existing storage systems business models. More so, many traditional organizations will evaluate the adoption of similar storage solutions for new applications that archive large amounts of unstructured data.”
IDC is calling on storage vendors to help relieve the storage growth pains that customers are feeling by doing the following:
- Improving data access rates, server provisioning, data reliability, and energy consumption with new HDD and solid state storage technologies
- Adding significant compute capacity on storage platforms (serverization)
- Delivering cluster file systems and supporting information management facilities for organizing, discovering, and managing large unstructured data archives
