"Digital Universe" Enters the Zettabyte Era

miller60 writes "In 2010 the volume of digital information created and duplicated in a year will reach 1.2 zettabytes, according to new data from IDC and EMC. The annual Digital Universe report is an effort to visualize the enormous amount of data being generated by our increasingly digital lives. The report's big numbers — a zettabyte is roughly a million petabytes — pose interesting questions about how the IT community will store and manage this firehose of data. Perhaps the biggest challenge isn't how much data we're creating — it's all the copies of it. Seventy-five percent of all the data in the Digital Universe is a copy, according to IDC. See additional analysis from TG Daily, The Guardian, and Search Storage."

Comments

A zettabyte is EXACTLY a million petabytes

[swillden]

By definition. And since EMC is a storage company, they're almost certainly using the SI prefixes properly.

The author of the summary is, I think, confusing zettabytes and petabytes with the base-2 units, zebibytes and pebibytes. For all of the binary prefix haters, when you get up into these sizes the difference between base 2 and base 10 units is more than big enough to justify the effort to use the correct terms. The difference between one zebibyte and one zettabyte is over 180 exabytes.