New! - ALL DATA IS INDISPENSABLE: The Staggering Immensity of an Active Archive - August 2025

As Generative AI (GenAI) drives unprecedented demand for high-speed data access, it’s easy to overlook that not all data needs to be accessed in real time. In fact, over 70% of enterprise data could be more efficiently managed as active archives—data that remains accessible but does not require the performance (or expense) of SSDs and HDDs. Yet in 2024, SSDs and HDDs managed 83.9% of all enterprise data, while cost-effective and power-efficient tape accounted for only 16.1% of shipped capacity. This imbalance results in excessive costs and unnecessary energy consumption, especially as the storage footprint grows to a multi-zettabyte scale.

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In this report, co-authored with John Monroe, we explore the potential impact of this dramatic growth on end-user data storage spending for the period 2025-2050. Our analysis includes projections of shipments and customer spending for enterprise SSDs, HDDs, tape, and emerging storage technologies. The installed enterprise install base is projected to grow from 7.7 ZB in 2025 to 20.2 ZB in 2030 to 243 ZB in 2050, and customer spending is projected to grow from $68 billion in 2025 to $101 billion in 2030 to $145 billion in 2050.

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We are anticipating innovative storage technologies specifically designed for low-cost, long-term data storage will come to market in the latter half of this decade, and that will meaningfully impact industry shipments and revenue. In addition, we project that the overall data growth rates will moderate after 2030 in light of financial constraints and the deployment of GenAI to reduce the quantity of stored data by eliminating redundancies and enforcing data retention policies.

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The economic and ecological benefits are explicit, and financial constraints will drive organizations to adopt and utilize lower-cost, more sustainable storage solutions. Data center managers who proactively integrate active-archive technologies will not only optimize costs but also position their organizations to meet emerging compliance mandates and energy constraints. The full report can be accessed at this link.