Data center storage capacity worldwide: consumer and business segments 2016-2021

Compute instances are expected to have the highest share of global data center storage capacity by 2021, with the capacity forecast to reach around 470 exabytes by then. Other enterprise workloads, such as business application and collaboration workloads, will also make up big portions of overall data center storage capacity in 2021. Consumer workloads such as social networking and video streaming are projected to witness rapid growth during the forecast period.

Data center storage

Data center storage refers to the tools, technologies, hardware, software and processes used to manage storage resources within data centers and infrastructure. It is forecast that by 2021, there will be 7.2 million date centers in the world. The advancement of our digital society has generated an ever-greater amount of data and it is projected that by 2021, around 1,327 EB data would be stored in data centers – almost an 8-fold increase from 2015. Big data is an important driver of growth in stored data and is projected to make up a bulk of overall data stored in data centers.