Companies are dealing with much more data than they were twenty years ago, so why are they still storing it the same way?

By Charlie Silver

Based on some estimates, our current growth pace of data is setting mankind on a course to produce nearly 10 trillion gigabytes - or 10 "Zettabytes" - of data by 2015, enough to store over one quintillion pages of text or almost 70 trillion hours of flash video. According to IDC's forecast of worldwide information growth, one third of this data comes from the enterprise and a majority of enterprise data is generated by individual workers.

As a result, the technology that helps enterprises make sense of this data -- business intelligence -- has quickly become a fast-growth multibillion-dollar market. Businesses are drawn to viewing things in charts and graphs, but the foundation of analytics -- processing and storing data -- is still archaic.

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