A Yottabyte of Storage Per Year by 2013

Lucas123 writes "David Roberson, general manager of Hewlett-Packard's StorageWorks division, predicts that by 2013 the storage industry will be shipping a yottabyte (a billion gigabytes) of storage capacity annually. Roberson made the comment in conjunction with HP introducing a new rack system that clusters together four blade servers and three storage arrays with 820TB of capacity. Many vendors are moving toward this kind of platform, including IBM, with its recent acquisition of Israeli startup XIV, according to Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Mark Peters."

Comments

In a Galaxay Close to Home

[ColdWetDog]

Impressed, you will be.

Re:In a Galaxay Close to Home

[dreamchaser]

I think they should use 'Lottabyte' instead.

Re:In a Galaxay Close to Home

[Anonymous Coward]

How about nomnomnombyte?

I'm waiting until 2015

[WheresMyDingo]

When I can say "I have a lotta yottabytes"

Ha Ha have any of you jokers noticed

[Anonymous Coward]

A yotta byte is 10^24 which is a trillion terra bytes
or 10^12 * 10^12

I thought geeks hung out here......

Re:Ha Ha have any of you jokers noticed

[starglider29a]

yotta yotta yotta...

A billion Gigabytes?

[hansraj]

umm.. wouldn't that be one zettabyte? If I am not off then one yottabyte would be a billion terabyte

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yotta

Re:A billion gigabytes?

[gstoddart]

I believe a "yottabyte" is 1 billion petabytes, not gigabytes.

God, that hurts my head. I remember being at a university seminar in '91 or so, and one of the presenters was talking about petabytes.

At the time, it drew blank expressions and he had to explain that it was the one after terabytes (since that was an abstraction to most people).

I often find myself awed by just how much you can buy nowadays cheaply. I'm told that at Costco nowadays, you can buy a terabye of disk storage for about $250 CDN -- that's utterly mind-boggling to someone who remembers single-density, single-sided floppy drives.

Crazy stuff.

Cheers

Re:A billion Gigabytes?

[Kijori]

Remember, guys, "Billion" means two different things depending on which part of the world you're in, so make sure you're not getting into a debate between an american and a brit who are both probably right and wrong at the same time. "Billion" pretty much exclusively means 1,000,000,000 over here in Britain these days. I've never encountered anyone who uses it to mean 1,000,000,000,000, and style guides require the short scale. The closest I've seen to a long scale usage is newspapers still using "thousand million" to avoid ambiguity. Anyone using the term "billion" to refer to a million million in Britain now is almost certain to be misunderstood.

Re:Finally...

[Anonymous Coward]

I was getting concerned, it took over 10 minutes for someone to reference porn.

So confused

[UnknowingFool]

This new unit of data confuses me. I only think of data sizes in terms of Library of Congresses (LOCs), mass in terms of stones, and lengths in terms of horse hands. Now get off my lawn!

Yottabyte Fhtagn

[spun]

What, didn't you know Yottabyte was a Great Old One? First cousin of Nyarlothep, half brother of Shub Niggurath. Described as a multidimensional vortex of spinning disks emitting a terrible screeching, Yottabyte records the souls of the damned.

New prefixes

[CSMatt]

At this rate, we'll need to start defining new prefixes before 2020.

Re:New prefixes

[VeNoM0619]

No kidding, looking at how we got the prefixes in the first place we may run out of greek/latin words.

Hopefully it will come down to unobyte, dosbyte, or something with a number convention, otherwise we might be hearing "crazybyte" or "uberbyte".

A list for your edification

[Ralph Spoilsport]

I emailed the "onduty editor" before the article went live on the error of their calc on what a yotta is. So much for slashdot error prevention...

Anyway, I emailed them this link to the terms in question, and post it here, for your edification. I have a post-it note on my bookcase with these terms - I think that as time goes on, knowing EXACTLY what each one is will be of some use. Until the oil runs out and we are shivering in the cold, anyway...

;-)

Here's their names, abreviations and their power of ten, so you know how big/small it is.

yocto- y 10^-24
zepto- z 10^-21
atto- a 10^-18
femto- f 10^-15
pico- p 10^-12
nano- n 10^-9
micro- m 10^-6
milli- m 10^-3
centi- c 10^-2
deci- d 10^-1
(none) -- --
deka- D 10^1
hecto- H 10^2
kilo- K 10^3
mega- M 10^6
giga- G 10^9
tera- T 10^12
peta- P 10^15
exa- E 10^18
zetta- Z 10^21
yotta- Y 10^24

RS

Re:I Believe It

[Hatta]

Data's easy to generate. It's useful data that's difficult.

10^18 bytes ... isn't that "Exabyte"?

[KWTm]

If I recall: byte, kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, terabyte, petabyte, exabyte.
Unless we're talking about the British "billion"?

Re:Recycling

[Kattana]

And sometimes much more quickly that you would care to know.