I long ago concluded that storage is the most difficult problem in information technology because entropy is always working to destroy our data. But then I came across this from a speech given by British mathematician, computer theorist and pioneer and Bletchley Park code breaker Alan Turing.
You’ve heard of the Turing Machine and the Turing test for artificial intelligence? Same guy.
It’s from a speech he gave in 1947 to the London Mathematical Society, when he was working on the design of the British ACE computer:
In my opinion this problem of making a large memory available at reasonably short notice is much more important than that of doing operations such as multiplication at high speed. Speed is necessary if the is to work fast enough for the machine to be commercially valuable, but a large storage capacity is necessary if it is to be capable of anything more than rather trivial operations. The storage capacity is therefore the more fundamental requirement.
The StorageMojo take
Yes, storage is vital and it is hard.
Everyone who’s working in the trenches to make better storage, or working to keep those pesky bits in their proper place, should take a moment to reflect on the importance of what we do. No digital storage, no digital civilization.
Courteous comments welcome, of course. I’m a big fan of the Turing Archive.
Robin,
Alan Turing was _The Man_ (some would dispute this because he was gay :-). We owe him the computer and the digital age as we know it and perhaps the whole Western Civilization as his team broke the Enigma code that the Germans used to communicate and helped the Allies to win WWI. Alan Turing was a genius, one of the rare mankind had the pleasure to meet. And, anyway, one don’t to be a genius (but there are a lot of dumb people out there) to realize that storage equals memory. If you don’t store your data appropriately or have enough storage room (I do consulting and among my clients there are companies that do media, I know the problem very well)…. Well, you know.
I still think the biggest problem is not storage capacity and/or costs. It is effectively managing all that data spread across devices and systems. When you can buy 3 TB of raw storage capacity for about $100, you can solve the data entropy problem with redundancy and migration to new media. The problem comes in when you get so much data on dozens of systems that it becomes a nightmare to find, backup, and organize. We need better data management systems that don’t force different data sets into ‘silos’ that don’t talk to each other.