"It's allowed us to not grow [our staff] as quickly as we were previously," he says. "We still do grow, but at a much slower rate than we did with the previous generation of gear. The daily maintenance workload has declined. Administrators get to spend more time on interesting proactive projects. Their workloads have shifted to what I would call additive work. It's good from a growth perspective and a job content perspective."

While Shutterfly is an Internet company that deals with volumes of data that dwarf what most enterprises today have to deal with, companies across the board are storing ever-increasing amounts of data.

"Our archive size in five years is going to look pretty pedestrian, though we'll still be orders of magnitude larger than the average" he says. "One of the things that's really interesting right now is in the last four or five years you've seen a bunch of applications and technologies enter the marketplace that make it possible to deal with very large datasets. Those are really exciting because they allow companies to gain deeper insights into their business by actually looking at the fine-grained data."

"That's a positive move in the industry," Day says. "We're just at the very early stages of that coming into play. Another factor that's pretty interesting is that as businesses do more with real-time customer interactions, with online, with mobile, they're also generating just massive amounts of data. It's now possible to analyze that data for really impactful business insights. But all of that depends on the ability to store massive amounts of data and do it reliably."