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27 Billion Gigabytes to be Archived by 2010

Posted by timothy on from the if-not-sooner dept.

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."

2 of 178 comments (clear)

  1. Re:We have the prefixes, why not use them? by thomasdz · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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)

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  2. Re:We have the prefixes, why not use them? by mdwh2 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.