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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."

9 of 178 comments (clear)

  1. We have the prefixes, why not use them? by Valacosa · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --
    "Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
    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 Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      No, you'd only be a thousand millionaire.

    3. 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.

  2. So, in other words... by thesymbolicfrog · · Score: 5, Interesting

    From the summary:
    "E-mail growth accounts for much of that figure."

    We're archiving spam?

    1. Re:So, in other words... by goodtim · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Actually, I have a partial answer to this question. As a sysadmin for a Novell GroupWise email system, I can tell you that the actually message data for duplicate incoming messages (such as spam that is sent to many people at the same time) are only stored on disk once. Some sort of "pointer" is used to reference the messages to the individual users mailboxe's. Check out the docs if you are interested.

      That said with about 1400 users (spread across multiple postoffices), we have probably about 400gb of email data. We are able to keep it low, by having a 120 day retention policy. After that point, email can be archived locally, otherwise its deleted. Independant of that, and to comply with regulations and disaster recovery scenarios, email data is backed up and replicated offsite using disk-to-disk backup (eVault in case anyone is interested).

      This gives us the ability to archive email for up to 27 years or something like that (with relatively low storage costs because the disk-to-disk is incremental, storing changes at the per-block level).

      As for Microsoft Exchange, I have not the slightest clue how data is stored.

      --
      "Flee at once, all is discovered."
  3. E-mail growth... by Urger · · Score: 5, Funny

    E-mail growth accounts for much of that figure.

    They should have that looked at. A good dermatologist could remove it.
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    Ubiquitously - A Ubiquity Developer Community
  4. 2010 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  5. will someone think of the kids! by metamorfoza · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.