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May. 2, 2012 03:40 PM EDT
| By Roger Strukhoff | Article Rating: |
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| May 16, 2011 06:34 AM EDT | Reads: |
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The mobile web is on the verge of accelerating worldwide computing and bandwidth requirements to a degree unimaginable just a few years ago. Only Cloud Computing will be able to handle this growth.
These thoughts occurred to me as I watched hordes of young Filipinos sampling the latest smartphones and pads at a local Globe Telecom center and the Power Mac store nearby.
The World in Microcosm
The Philippines remains a poor country overall, but it has a growing middle class and an insatiable cultural urge to communicate. Filipinos are known as the leading texters and most avid Facebook users in the world. They are also increasingly idroidberrypad addicts.
About 85% of the country's 90 million people have mobile phones, and my observation is that people swap out phones here the way most folks swap out ballpoint pens.
The percentage of smartphones is estimated to hit 38% of the market by 2015. In other words, there could easily be 30 million smartphones in use here within a few years.
If each of these people wants to store 100 gigabytes (about $10 USD) worth of photos and videos online, there'll be a demand for 3 billion gigabytes, or 3 exabytes of storage.
In the Philippines. What sort of numbers does this imply for all of Asia? For the world?
Getting a Grip
And how is anyone going to manage this much data? It's spiky, too, and continuously growing. Think kudzu, except in a good way. Think virtualization of resources and metered Cloud Computing as a way to tame it.
Three exabytes of storage alone costs about $200 million USD at today's prices. And that's hardly all the data that will be generated by IT in the Philippines by 2015.
So who's going to store it? And where? It seems that the more local a datacenter, the better. Latency and other performance issues come into play. And governments are just not comfortable having anything stored offshore. I can see more legislation to this effect throughout the world as politicians wake up to this issue.
The year 2015 is not an abstract concept; it falls within the term of current Philippine President Benigno Aquino III. Those exabytes are already accumulating, by the way.
If there are exabytes in the Philippines, that means there are dozens and hundreds of exabytes in China, India, Europe, and maybe even the good old USA. Who's going to get a grip on all of this, and how?
This is an insane problem, and it might require insane solutions.
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