The wilting plant in the corner of your room beseeches you to put it out in the sun and give it water. You come up with a punchy one-liner that you must share with your friends on social media, but you can’t find your phone, so you use your refrigerator instead. Or, you pause a movie on your phone and cast it on your television set to pick it up on a bigger screen precisely from the part where you had paused it.
These scenarios are not a fragmentation of a sci-fi writer’s imagination anymore. This is the reality of our connected lives.
The Internet of things (IoT), with the help of smart sensors, software, networking capability, and the cloud, has made it possible to talk to or manage plants, animals, and even non-living objects- from our washing machines, toasters, and refrigerators to our water heaters and lights.
The IoT landscape is evolving rapidly – with an estimated 55.7 billion1 connected devices generating almost 80 zettabytes (ZB) of data by 2025. A robust data architecture is critical to properly capture, preserve, access, and transform this data in its journey – not just in cloud data centers, but at edge servers and endpoints.
Why is IoT data Important?
To understand the importance of data generated through IoT devices, let’s look at a couple of examples.
Globally, over 1.1 billion2 connected wearable devices are expected this year (2022). These smart wearable devices are helping generate data. For example, they can track our every movement like sleep patterns, daily movements, pulse, oxygen saturation, respiration, temperature, mobility, and other vitals. Collected over a period of time, this data can help unlock patterns and identify opportunities to improve health habits using data-informed decisions. It can even help in uncovering previously undetectable diseases before they are clinically diagnosed, as well as design personalized and proactive treatments, especially as telehealth and remote healthcare continue to progress.
Connected vehicles offer another interesting example. Loaded with sensors and other data-generating devices, they are estimated to have an average storage capacity from a minimum of 2TB3 to as much as 11TB in the not-too-distant future, driven by advanced car entertainment systems, telematics, and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). The data generated is used to inform real-time driving decisions using technologies such as 3D mapping, ADAS, and more. Additionally, IoT data creates value in personalized infotainment and in-vehicle services that can improve the driver and the passenger experience.
Understanding IoT data Journey- Endpoints, Edge and Cloud
Let’s begin at the beginning. Data is generated at the endpoints by connected machines, smart devices, and wearable devices. Here the key is to reduce network latencies and increase throughput for data-intensive use cases. Western Digital’s industrial microSD cards, sometimes as small as a fingernail, deliver superior endurance, reliability, extended temperature range, and longevity for industrial applications across a wide range of applications, including drones, action cameras, home surveillance, gateways, servers, and network equipment.
Then, we migrate to the edge, where data is often cached in distributed edge servers for real-time applications such as autonomous vehicles, cloud gaming, manufacturing robotics, and 4K/8K video streaming. Leveraging decades of expertise in NAND flash memory and storage systems, Western Digital industrial-grade iNAND® devices, including UFS and e.MMC, deliver edge storage solutions for industrial and IoT applications requiring durability, high reliability, and high-intensity recording across a wide range of operational requirements. And finally, move to the cloud where high-capacity drives such as Western Digital’s Ultrastar® 22TB CMR and 26TB SMR hard drives store massive amounts of data, including from IoT devices, for big data use cases, further analytics, and cool or cold storage to keep the data over time.
IoT opens up a new world of possibilities, which will be fueled by data. The future may bring use cases and benefits that are unimaginable today, which means that storage must continue to evolve to help IoT unlock its true potential.
