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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."
E-mail is the biggest burden on the storage space, and so much of that is garbage (I'm not even talking about spam---most "legitimate" e-mail is garbage). I wonder if there would be appreciable negative repercussions to deleting most of it. It seems like as often as not, all you get from archived e-mails is well-documented and discoverable "smoking guns" when you get sued. What if we just stored less of it? Would it be that bad? How likely is it that you're going to need some random Word document from 1998? Not criticizing---I'd really like to know.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
We're archiving spam?
Which raises a question I find interesting, do we check for redundancy when archiving mails, in a way so that we can save a hell of a lot of space on spam (and other legitimate automated messages), since spam is by definition essentially the same message sent to a number of persons. Also, couldn't correlating stored mails for redundancy allow for better spam identification (although it would be no silver bullet since legitimate automated messages are often redundant).
You just got troll'd!
SI does exist for a reason: to allow for short, precise, descriptive, standardized measurements. However, the point of the numbers in this article is to show how absurdly large this amount of data really is. This isn't a scientific paper, it's a piece of journalism. In that case, there's nothing wrong with using numbers that aren't completely reduced to demonstrate scale.
Yeah, but before the 1985 "Back to the Future" movie came out, how many "general public" people knew the prefix "Giga"? That's when I started hearing regular people start to use it.
We gotta start using the prefixes before they start to become common. I'd rather see "27 Exabytes" followed by a parenthetical comment saying (27 Billion GigaBytes)
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
Better article summary:
Storage vendors want to sell expensive solutions to gullible execs, pay analysts to produce credible-sounding FUD scenarios.
"monthly e-mail traffic at more than 30 million messages, vs. 17 million just one year ago."
Like, wow. In the meantime 500GB disks cost the same or less than 250GB disks did a year ago.
"The university settled on an IBM storage infrastructure that will afford the institution 350TB of capacity"
350TB? 350 disks? Half that in a year and a quarter in 2? That's not really a huge amount of storage. Anymore. It's an amount of storage I could go order from my friendly online computer store and get delivered tomorrow.
The fact is, corporate storage isnt driving the market anymore, the consumer market is. Most people I know have more storage in their home PC than the average server requires. Companies want to save video? Consumers want their PVR's to save the cable-tv stream.
Yes, but in Back to the Future, there wasn't a real need to explain how large "giga" really was, it was just there as a scientific-sounding buzzword. So whilst using the term in this article might have made people become familiar with the word, they wouldn't have any idea what size it actually meant.
People didn't become familiar with Gigabyte because of Back to the Future anyway, they are familiar with it because that's what they now buy hard drives and ipods in. When they are sold in Exabytes, you'll see the term used in journalism too.
Joe Sixpacks digest technobabble at a rate that is relevant to them. While few would know what an Exabyte is, most would know what a Gigabyte is since they deal with numbers that size in relation to their own computing systems. I think it's less writing for sensationalism than it is writing in a language your audience will understand.