In many industries, machines already keep maintenance informed about their operating condition, allowing them to be repaired just before they are about to fail. But if all the machines in a production line could be fully networked, management would be able to switch an entire production process to a single desired configuration?change the car’s bench seats, for example, to buckets, or its color from bottle-green to battleship gray?from half a world away. Once manufacturers can do that reliably, the dream of on-demand manufacturing truly has been achieved.

However, properly managing the thousands of sensor-actuated loops that form device networks requires retaining the history of their states, often in their raw, unsummarized form, for months and possibly years. To do that, you need to be able to store data in petabytes.

Finally, petabyte levels of storage would allow simulations and predictive models of enormous complexity. For instance, retail managers currently worry about how they can persuade a casual visitor to make a purchase. While this is an important problem, even more critical is how to turn a casual buyer into a loyal, recurring one. Over the long term, this second kind of conversion can deliver even more value to the enterprise.

But brand loyalty doesn’t happen overnight, points out Richard Winter, president of the Winter Corp., a Waltham, Mass-based consultancy specializing in the architecture of very large databases. "[Transforming] someone into a repeat customer means presenting her with just the right information or opportunity at the right time," he says. "Knowing what to present can mean retaining huge amounts of information on that customer?what they’ve looked at, checked prices on, asked about, what they’ve not looked at?over long periods. Often the relationship needs to be followed from the point the customer first appears. Right now, that’s impossible because raw, unsummarized, clickstream and transaction data is generally discarded after 30 to 60 days."

The reason it’s discarded is because heretofore it was impossible to store. Petabyte levels of storage will change that.

Petabyte Problems

It’s easy to think of reasons why management might want to ask the CIO to lead the enterprise through the petabyte door. The next issue is finding ways to do that without getting fired.

If you assume storage-related costs (especially the time penalties) scale linearly, then the headaches that come along with petabyte management will dwarf the headaches associated with a terabyte of data as an eight-story building towers over an inch-high matchbox.

Does that make you cringe? Wait. It gets worse.