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

We have the prefixes, why not use them?

[Valacosa]

In other words, 27 Exabytes?

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.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm no nerd (well I guess I'm a wannabe nerd since I'm reading Slashdot) and true, I wouldn't have known how much an exabyte is. But a billion is such a large number that I can't really comprehend that either. I agree with the op though that exabyte should have been used.

kilobyte
megabyte
gigabyte
terabyte
petabyte
exabyte

Seeing it like that, when you can relate it to the other ones, makes it easier to understand than "a billion, gajillion, fafillion bytes!"

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

[WaroDaBeast]

SI only seems to exist outside the UK and the US -- talking about the ordinary people.

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

[mdwh2]

I'm fairly sure he was saying 1.21 Jigawatts anyway

That's just a different way of pronouncing Gigawatts :)

Distributed Storage

[Anonymous Coward]

Some big projects are generating too many data that they have problems to deal with all that.
For example the Folding@home is implementing a distributed storage mechanism for their data and we'll likely have a new @home project soon - Storage@home.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage@home
http://www.stanford.edu/~beberg/Storage@home2007.pdf
http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Papers#ntoc7

duh...users store their files in their email!

[Maskirovka]

article summary:

Users in a lot of places use their email as a document management system. This is somewhat effective on an individual basis, but in large organizations shared documents get duplicated dozens or even hundreds of times as each user has their own copy. In the next few years products like Sharepoint will alleviate some of that, though storage is cheap enough that it may not be worth the cost to both reeducate users and build the infrastructure for it. A SAN can hold real a lot of word documents and PDFs after all...

Re:So, in other words...

[TapeCutter]

"You're just nitpicking ;-)"

Ummm, no. I have CS degree and 20yrs experience. What you are talking about is the attacking the problem of redundant information by comparing blocks, this has already been 'solved'. ;)