The amount of data that enterprises have to deal with is growing so fast that they are coming up against power and space limits and grappling with how to manage the information, according to analysts, users and IBM officials at a press event that the company hosted in San Francisco on Wednesday.

IBM highlighted two futuristic technologies that researchers are exploring now to address separate challenges: how to make primary data available faster and how to pack archived information into a smaller space. For the former, the company is , in which data is stored in different magnetic regions that travel over short, nano-scale wires when accessed. It may come on sale in five to seven years, according to Bruce Hillsberg, IBM's director of storage systems research. For the latter, researchers are using an unspecified magnetic technology that could store a petabyte of data in a standard 1U rack unit. Expect that in three years, Hillsberg said.

Storage Class Memory

IBM thinks "racetrack" technology will pave the way for Storage Class Memory, which will be nearly as fast as today's memory but be able to scale up to enterprise storage capacity. It's so dense that it could allow a portable music player to hold 500,000 songs.

With Storage Class Memory, the amount of space and power required to store large enterprise data sets could shrink dramatically by 2020. What would take 1,250 racks of hard disk drives today could be stored in one rack, with less than one-third the energy, Hillsberg said. The medium will also last longer than the flash SSDs (solid-state drives) now used for fast storage, he said.