The CEO of EMC, Mike Ruettgers, was in old London Town this morning to unveil some high capacity storage systems and at the same time to give some facts and figures about why the world needs said big boxes. Ruettgers wheeled on Eddie Jordan first, who is the head of the F1 Grand Prix outfit and who apparently uses EMC kit to store all of that telemetry stuff it uses. Announcing the Symmetrix 8000 family, Ruettgers said that it supported up to 384 50Gb drives, giving a total of 19 terabytes. The IT industry, he said, represented a worldwide spend of $2.2 trillion this year, and will represent $3.3 trillion next year. And one of the problems is, he claimed, that large corporations double the amount of information they have each year while dotcoms can double their data requirements every 90 days. "During the course of this year, Global 2000 companies will double their data every 90 days," he said. Five years ago, said Ruettgers, worldwide storage demand amounted to 85 terabytes, but the Internet has changed all that. He gave some examples. Delta Airlines has moved to 80Tb in 12 months, Critical Path has moved to 80Tb in six months, while Driveway consumed 40Tb of storage in only 30 days. "In a couple of years this will be a Petabyte world," he said. EMC has a strategic relationship with Cisco and Oracle. Look, we know storage isn't sexy, OK? But it's pretty important. A garden shed is storage and your lawnmower would get pretty rusty without one. ®