In the case quoted above, the CIO believed that his IT department had been on a storage buying binge and it was high time to in fact use more of the raw disk capacity on the machine room floor that was already powered-up and spinning.

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In the new world, larger machines "virtualize" the actions of smaller computers inside their systems, changing capacity as needed inside the machine.

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What we really have now is primarily a memory-based machine with a lot of disk to expand the capacity of it.

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Other factors that will increase storage capacity growth are the creation and sharing of user generated content and the growth of machine to machine communication (and thus information storage) such as smart grid networks, video surveillance, big science in astronomy and physics and other emerging automated users of storage capacity.

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Again, you would need to fall in the window of number of samples x regions of interest x barcodes x machine capacity.

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