New reports show that data storage is growing larger all the time. EMC recently released a report predicting massive increases in the amount of data we’ll be storing in the next 10 years. Forget terabytes and petabytes — even exabytes; think zettabytes. How much is a zettabyte? It’s a trillion gigabytes. It’s enough to make your head ache. Even amid the recession, data growth increased phenomenally. That doesn’t mean we’ll see petabyte hard drives this year, but all this data means that it will happen eventually, and probably sooner rather than later.

So what’s an IT admin to do to manage all of that growth? How can you wrap your brain around that much information, let alone protect all of that data? EMC says that we’ll have 44 times the amount of data we have now in 2020, so ignoring the problem won’t make it disappear.

The best thing you can do is find the most elegant solution possible and enjoy the ride. Now is the time to plan for data explosion and figure out how you’re going to protect all of that information. Not just the information you’re using right now, but the information you’ll be using in five years. Plus, there will come a time a few years down the road when you’ll have to have access again to all your current information. Can you trust that your tape archive will cut it?

ShadowProtect Server 4.0 has a pretty cool feature in it called VirtualBoot™. One of the great uses for VirtualBoot is giving you access to legacy systems and data.  Think you don’t have to worry about that? In six years, what operating system will you be using? Will all of the applications you’re currently running run on that system? VirtualBoot will allow you open your ShadowProtect backup image files and boot them into a virtual environment, for quick and easy access to all that data. Plus, it only takes one or two minutes to boot a large server volume, even one that’s a couple of terabytes in size. (Yes, that’s one or two minutes. It isn’t a typo.)

With ShadowProtect backups protecting your data, you won’t have to worry about your data getting out of hand. If you haven’t checked out features like VirtualBoot that are in ShadowProtect 4.0, we have all kinds of product information on the ShadowProtect Server page.