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"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."
Maybe you won't but then you are not CERN or the Hadron Collider
America, Home of the Brave.
Yes, 640 petabytes should to be enough for anybody.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
If every piece of digital data doesn't have a copy made of it, it is one hardware failure away from non-existence. Most of the storage space used in businesses that I administrate is not for the original data, but for multiple backup copies. Copies are not a bad thing, in the business we call them redundancy.
# Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)
* Torvalds, Linus (1996-07-20).
Don't you mean
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
1.21 zettabytes? Great Scott!
This beautifully illustrates how idiotic the concept of "copy right" and IP in general is in the digital universe. When 75% of 1.2 zettabytes is mostly untracked copies of other information, just storing the licenses alone would be an impossible task.
How do you maintain a business model built on the exclusive right to copy information in world where everything is a infinitely copied and copyable? It's like trying to legislate and sell access to saltwater while floating on a raft in the middle of the pacific.
- 1 zettabyte / 1.44MB floppy disk = approx 694,444,444,444,444 floppy disks.
- 694,444,444,444,444 * 3.5 inches per disk = 2,430,555,555,555,550 inches if you laid the floppies end to end.
- 2,430,555,555,555,550 inches / 63360 inches per mile = 38,361,040,965 miles
- 38,361,040,965 miles / 2.7 billion miles to pluto = approx 7 round trips to Pluto via floppy disk.
In conclusion: Don't kill NASA yet, President Obama. We've found a way to get to Pluto!.