The amount of information being created annually is immense. A research project at the Berkeley School of Information Management (BERK) estimates that the world's total annual production of information amounts to about 250 megabytes for each man, woman and child on earth. If we restrict our view to information that may be considered relevant in the business world each year, 7,500,000,000 office documents occupying 195 terabytes of storage are created (i.e. 195 billion megabytes). There are huge volumes of e-mail in circulation, estimates varying between 600 billion and 1,100 billion messages in 2000 alone and reported to be growing by 29% a year. To combat the rapid increase in data, storage manufacturers constantly battle to increase the data density and the disk storage space. This has resulted in data density increasing 60% per year and in the last 6 years the average data store capacity has increased 18 tunes. In the same period of time however the price for a megabyte of storage has dropped by a factor of 50 according to DiskTrend's data (Disk). It has been noted that organizations typically only use 30 to 60 percent of their total storage capacity (GIG). As companies lack understanding of their storage problems, they cannot locate the unallocated space or where data resides, they simply tackle the problem by adding more servers and storage. The problem, as we advance into the digital age, is that files are not only increasing in number but also increasing in size. As many more users have access to a range of connected devices such as digital cameras, mp3 players and personal video recorders, it becomes more important for them to store and share these associated files.
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