• HOME
• NEWS & EVENTS
• THE GRID

THE GRID

Individuals Power the Information Explosion
By Jerome Mapp, DISA Corporate Communications

Joseph Tucci is chairman of the board of directors and president and chief executive officer of EMC Corp., a global provider of software and systems for information management and storage. From his headquarters in Hopkinton, Mass., Tucci directs a company of more than 37,000 employees worldwide who are charged with storing and securing information from some of the world's most well-known corporations.

Tucci said that individuals, corporations, and organizations collect, store, and use information in a variety of ways that is beneficial to their individual or organizational needs.

"To put it in context, we all learned this basically in school, that it starts with data — ones and zeroes — from that data you create information, from that information you beget knowledge, and from that knowledge you can reap benefits," Tucci said.

Tucci said that companies such as EMC, for instance, store and use information to benefit the company. Noting the audience, he pointed out how the military, government, and industry representatives "in this room" would likely use their information more for mission and program requirements. "As an individual, you would want to get personal information for an individual benefit," he added.

Tucci, referring to a briefing slide shown on the conference hall's jumbo screens, likened what he termed the information "infrastructure way" to a building with a solid infrastructure.

"I'm telling you [that] if you do [information] infrastructure right, it's just like doing the [building] foundation and the plumbing and the electricity right," he said. "If you do it [information infrastructure] right, it makes the rest of the functions easier."

"Worldwide information growth is relentless," Tucci said. The growth has averaged 60 percent each year for the past 10 years. "So, every year, there was 60 percent more information than the previous year.

"How much information was created in 2007?" he asked. The answer is 281 exabytes, which is equivalent to 4 million times the information in all books ever written.

He said that when one thinks of information creation, there is tendency to think of big departments or agencies as the ones that create information because it is the responsibility of organizations to ensure the security, privacy, reliability, and compliance of information.

"But the facts are most information is created on the edge — is created by individuals," Tucci said. "Seventy percent of all information that is created is created by individuals."

Tucci pointed out that soldiers in the field using laptops or handheld devices and that satellites or aircraft taking mission-critical photos represent what he calls information being created on the edge.

"Information has to be shared to live. That's how it lives," he added.

Tucci said that the demand for information increases each time that shared information is passed along. He cited YouTube as one example of a source of shared information that has created a cottage industry of individuals who post their videos on the site to be potentially viewed by millions of people.

"As users begat more information, they create more information," Tucci added, citing lowered costs for the explosion of individual information creation. "Knowledge creates knowledge."

To illustrate his point, Tucci played a clip from YouTube of an amateur comic warbling a nonsensical tune. "I don't get this video," Tucci said to laughter from the audience. "But this video gets millions and millions of downloads."

Tucci said that the "on demand/on command" world has created the need for mega storage of information. There are four essentials of information storage: speed, cost, availability, and environmental friendliness.

You want to have easy and very fast access to information. You want it to be inexpensive. You want the information to be continuously available, and you want to be able to store it compactly.

He cited the flash drive as an example. It has the "input/output per second" (IOPS) capacity of 30 15-K fiber channel (FC) disks, and compared to disks, the flash drive has higher performance (30 times more IOPS), is 10 times faster, uses 98 percent less power, weighs 58 percent less, has greater flexibility because it comes in variable sizes, and is more reliable because it has no moving parts. In addition, the price of flash drives is dropping significantly.

He also discussed the importance of managing information intelligently and of protecting information, including recovery of information, identity and authentication for access control, encryption and key management. Information must be virtualized, managed, and automated.

To move toward information-centric computing, we must transition from information trapped inside devices and applications to the ability to use and manage information across silos, from fragmented views of information to consolidated views of information, and from policies applied haphazardly to common policies and safeguards followed everywhere.

We must constantly be assessing risks and seeking better, more efficient ways to get things done.

"If we don't disrupt ourselves, our competitors will [disrupt us]," he said.

EMC is going to spend $1.8 billion in research and development this year. "If you just defend with no offense, you'll have a short life in IT."

Return to The Grid Homepage