OREANDA-NEWS. With the world's population expected to exceed nine billion by mid-century, the issue of how to make the most of limited energy resources has risen to the top of the global agenda. There is growing recognition that the smart community is an effective way of tackling this pressing issue. Smart communities are environmentally friendly, economic, and achieve stable electricity supply by striking a balance between electricity demand that changes with on the season and the time of day and electricity supply, including power generation using renewables.

At the heart of every smart community will be powerful IT infrastructure and mechatronics that estimates electricity demand, the amount of electricity generated, etc. by analyzing the big data gathered from smart meters, surveillance cameras, medical sensor terminals, social networking services (SNS), and so on. IT infrastructure consisting of servers and storage systems connected over the Internet sustains cloud computing and will continue to grow as an element of large-scale, efficient and advanced social infrastructure.

Total Storage Innovation is Toshiba's shorthand for the suite of capabilities required to efficiently store big data, output data as necessary, and process it appropriately. We aim to meet diversifying storage requirements by offering high-quality, differentiated solutions employing the cutting edge technologies.

Big data has three essential attributes: volume for over petabytes data, velocity for real time data processing and analytics and variety for mixture of structured and unstructured data. The key to product differentiation lies in real-time analytics of that data to maneuver social infrastructure system in timely manner. Towards that Toshiba will offer storage solutions that address each of the 3Vs.

Mindful of fast-emerging possibilities, not least those associated with cloud computing, in fiscal 2013 Toshiba is focusing on the following storage products.