For big business, more is more when it comes to data. Often referred to as the new oil in the digital economy, the more data you can afford to keep, the better insights and history you’ll have access to.

“A big trend with the hyperscalers – the big cloud providers like Facebook, Amazon, Apple and so on – is that they’re all spending a lot of money to keep a lot more data,” says Robert Haas, department head of cloud and computing infrastructure at IBM Research in Zurich. The cost of keeping storage infrastructure running when you need to hold petabytes – even zettabytes – of data could exceed the $1 billion mark, which is why technology labs are researching better ways of building large-scale data storage systems and the underlying storage technologies that underpin them.