How can you stop buying storage?

First, two baseline numbers are important. Industry analysts peg average storage utilization at 35% and the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for storage at 50%. We can now apply these two numbers whatever assumption we wish. To make the calculation easy, assume that we have a total capacity of 100 TB with a 35% utilization (35 TB). With a 50% CAGR, we would utilize 52.5 TB (52.5%) and the end of 12 months and 78.75 TB (78.75%) after 24 months. Thus, the “average” organization can survive up to two years without buying another byte of storage, if only they can find a way to utilize what they have. If you know your utilization and CAGR, you can easily apply this calculation yourself to see how long you can survive without buying more capacity.