27 Billion Gigabytes to be Archived by 2010

Lucas123 writes "According to a Computerworld survey of IT managers, data storage projects are the No. 2 project priority for corporations in 2008, up from No. 4 in 2007. IT teams are looking into clustered architectures and centralized storage-area networks as one way to control capacity growth, shifting away from big-iron storage and custom applications. The reason for the data avalanche? Archive data. In the private sector alone electronic archives will take up 27,000 petabytes (27 billion gigabytes) by 2010. E-mail growth accounts for much of that figure."

Comments

E-mail growth...

[Urger]

E-mail growth accounts for much of that figure.

They should have that looked at. A good dermatologist could remove it.

2010

[Anonymous Coward]

All these archives are yours except Europa. ATTEMPT NO WRITINGS THERE.

Re:2010

[AndroidCat]

Oh my God, it's full of pr0n.

Use standard units people understand.

[jd]

Things like Libraries of Congress, Libraries of Alexandria, Spams per Square Inch. You know, the units that people have become familiar with. Besides which, are they power-two gigagytes or SI gigabytes? Also, how much bandwidth is needed to shift all that data? In the standard Imperial units of Clay Tablets per German Juggernaut per unit of French motorway, naturally.

Re:We have the prefixes, why not use them?

[mincognito]

Note to science and tech journalists: please stop stringing together "millions" and "billions" in an attempt to make the numbers seem large, impressive, and incomprehensible. Scientific notation and SI exist for a reason.

Exactly! For the thousandth time, let's cut out the exaggerated and sensational writing Slashdot! If I had a dollar for every sensational headline I've read here, not to mention the gazillion overstated comments I read here per day, I'd be a billionaire by now!

Re:We have the prefixes, why not use them?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you'd only be a thousand millionaire.

This is starting to be Manditory

[Smordnys s'regrepsA]

Only 27,000 petabytes? n00b!

My pr0n collection takes at least 3 Internets* to store, archived.


*(sorry, forgot the conversion rate for Libraries of Congress)

Moving away from Big Iron?

[HockeyPuck]

FTFA:

Mounting interest in these approaches highlights a pronounced shift away from "big-iron storage" - traditional storage arrays typically composed of custom application-specific integrated circuits, RAID controllers, and fixed-disk and cache-scalability ceilings. Now TFA goes on to say customers are turning towards Network Appliance as a company that uses COTS parts and software. They use an intel CPU and FC/GigE adapters from other vendors, but I wouldn't call them 100% COTS. It's not like it's a generic PC built from FRYS with JBOD on the back.

NetApp is a great company and makes a great product aimed for a specific market segment: Fileservices (NFS/CIFS). I don't see many customers tossing out the EMC DMX, HDS Tagmastore or IBM Shark for a FC enabled netapp array. I also don't see a lot of FICON shops asking netapp to support FICON.

Now the phase storage mgmt is entering is the 'good enough' phase. Does my organization need the current generation of "high end" arrays? Maybe not. The current generation of midrange with its better or cheaper $/GB and increasingly parallel featureset to the highend arrays, is starting to looking more attractive to many customers.

Re:Moving away from Big Iron?

[HockeyPuck]

FRYS isn't an acronym... :)

and yes I do.

Re:Moving away from Big Iron?

[HockeyPuck]

We're talking storage (sorry DASD) here... It's all about...

Hooking up a pair of EMC DMX's (or IBM ESSes, or HDS USPs) over a pair of OC48s for SRDF/PPRC/USR unless you are a zOS shop, then you could run XRC. Since this is a BC/DR plan, we'll run it over FCIP protected by IPSec over a DWDM leased line, which must be protected by a UPSR/BLSR, otherwise in the event of a link failure, the R1s will split from the R2s.

Then you're SOL.

will someone think of the kids!

[metamorfoza]

Does it bother you that much that these journalists want to make it easier for the general public to understand how big data storage they are talking about?

I agree. However, I would go even further and instead of using geekish bytes and bits we should use something like 400 billions of mp3s. You know, so that myspace user out there can understand TFA. They clearly have interest in this sort of news.

Re:nibbles!

[broggyr]

I thought half of a byte was called a nybble...

no need to check for redundancy

[Anonymous Coward]

just compress it with 7ZA and the 27 exab's should come down to about 640KB or so.

The solution is data compression

[careysb]

Just ZIP up the data to a smaller zip file. Then zip the zip file to and even smaller zip file. Repeat until all your data is compressed into a couple of megs. :-)

Re: I need a SB of storage

[Douglas Goodall]

You know, a SaganByte of storage. It would have to store Billions of billions of bytes.

Re:We have the prefixes, why not use them?

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you yanks please learn to count! Million Millionaire.

Re:a helpful reference page for large numbers

[Anonymous Coward]

Hamster Canyon will be where you select a hamster and the Grand Canyon and you'll see a picture of the Grand Canyon filled with hamsters and a number that indicates the total number of hamsters required to fill the canyon. That's much better than Libraries of Congress. Most people haven't even seen the Library of Congress, but who hasn't seen huge piles of hamsters?

Even Worse ...

[PPH]

... most of this will be documents in formats older than Office 2003.