Skip to main content

Emergence of Content Depots for Storage

The continued explosion in creation and storage of unstructured data and the need to generate more copies of data for availability, analytics, and archiving will be primary drivers of new storage system developments over the next five years.

The most significant new development in storage consumption, however, is the emergence of content depots as a major consumer of enterprise disk storage capacity. These content depots are primarily in the business of gathering, organizing, and providing access to large quantities of digital content.

According to a new market study from IDC, these content depots will consume 17.4 percent of new enterprise disk storage capacity shipped in 2008, but only account for 5.1 percent of all spending, reflecting their focus on deploying storage solutions at very low costs.

"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," said Richard L. Villars, vice president of Storage Systems research at IDC.

More so, many traditional organizations will evaluate the adoption of similar storage solutions for new applications that archive large amounts of unstructured data.

Storage systems and software suppliers must rethink existing sales and marketing strategies to better match changing customer bases, and also address the fast-expanding and increasingly diverse storage needs of these customers through a number of technology initiatives, including:

- 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.

Popular posts from this blog

How Online Video Exceeded Pay-TV Revenue

The global streaming industry has spent the better part of a decade chasing subscriber counts as the primary metric of success. That era is now formally over. New market data from Omdia confirms that the industry has crossed a decisive threshold; one that shifts the competitive playing field from growth-at-all-costs to monetization discipline. For senior executives navigating media, advertising, and technology strategy, the implications extend well beyond entertainment. A Historic Revenue Crossover Online video revenue increased 13.5 percent to $176 billion in 2025, while pay-TV revenue declined 4 percent to $170 billion; marking the first time in the industry's history that streaming has surpassed legacy pay-TV in revenue terms. This is not a rounding error or a statistical artifact; it represents the culmination of more than a decade of structural disruption to the traditional broadcast and cable TV model. Global subscriptions to online video services reached 2.24 billion by the ...