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World's Servers Process 9.57ZB of Data a Year
CWmike writes "Three years ago, the world's 27 million business servers processed 9.57 zettabytes, or 9,570,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of information. Researchers at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies and the San Diego Supercomputer Center estimate that the total is equivalent to a 5.6-billion-mile-high stack of books stretching from Earth to Neptune and back to Earth, repeated about 20 times. By 2024, business servers worldwide will annually process the digital equivalent of a stack of books extending more than 4.37 light-years to Alpha Centauri, the scientists say. The report, titled 'How Much Information?: 2010 Report on Enterprise Server Information,' (PDF) was released at the SNW conference last month."
Does this count Sony?
...involved "v1agra" and fake Rolex watches?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
How many libraries of Congress is one Neptune height stack?
libraries of congress per pencil sharpener?
...no human being would stack books like this.
Hellabyte is a word now, right?
At what point in their respective orbits? The distance from Earth to Neptune varies by about three hundred million kilometers depending on what time of year.
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equivalent to a 5.6-billion-mile-high stack of books stretching from Earth to Neptune and back to Earth
Glad to see we finally got rid of that silly "library of congress" unit.
My karma ran over your dogma
I'm getting a little tired of science stories dumbing down things to "piles of books", "libaries of congress" etc... This site's is news for nerds, not news for Joe Sixpack.
...neptunes of porn are contained in this?
"By the year 2100, old had become so scarce that it was worth more than an ounce of silver, creating an energy drought. Citizens could barely afford to turn-on a 10 watt lightbulb..... forget the high expense of a computer and internet network."
Surely there must be some Science-based fiction that deal with this negative future?
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
...so high, or just 1 really large PDF.
Give a hand, not a hand-out.
9,570,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of information. Researchers at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies and the San Diego Supercomputer Center estimate that the total is equivalent to a 5.6-billion-mile-high stack of books stretching from Earth to Neptune and back to Earth, repeated about 20 times.
Enough of the "book" analogy. How many 3 minute clips of porn is that?!
it would look cool hopefully
Wow, according to Bell Canada, that means those companies are paying $14.355 trillion a year on internet access alone, never mind the machines.
You could solve world hunger with that kind of money, and there's 27 of them? That's enough to feed everyone on the planet and pay for their housing for the next 6 years.
Hey, this is what your government believes...
After Zetta (10^21) comes Yotta (10^24), but then what? Are SI going to come up with new prefixes for values 10^27 and up?
that a significant part of those bytes is just pr0n.
"I have travelled the length and breadth of this country, and have talked with the best people in business administration. I can assure you on the highest authority that data processing is a fad and won't last out the year." — Editor in charge of business books at Prentice-Hall publishers, responding to Karl V. Karlstrom (a junior editor who had recommended a manuscript on the new science of data processing), c. 1957
It's been hardly more than fifty years. Where will we be in another fifty years, say by 2057? A virtual stack of books to circumscribe the whole galaxy? I, for one, am impressed that despite our propensity to beat each other into a bloody pulp over differences in opinions, we hairless apes have come this far!
--Udo.
where does the 'cats wanting cheeseburgers' section start and how big is it?
Most people cannot imagine the distance to Neptune, so that is a bad visual. Here is a better one:
9.57ZB is approx 10^22 bytes. A typical laptop HDD can hold a terabyte, so you would need 10^10, to about 10 billion. A laptop HDD is about 3 cubic inches. A standard shipping container (40x8x8 ft^3) would hold about 1.5 million if they were packed tightly. So you would need about 6800 containers. That would be a train about 75 miles long.
If each byte in 9.57ZB was a water molecule. It would be slightly less than a teaspoon.
The vast majority of this data isn't stored. The vast majority of it is streaming porn and Netflix. Why did we pay some "scientist" for 3 years (read the summary, it says "three years ago") to calculate this, so we can all be amused by it on /. for 10 minutes? Part of the reason nobody's working in science anymore is that most of our government- and university-backed science is fluff like this to get your soundbite, rather than stuff that makes a difference in our world. Figure out how to GET to Neptune, not how to stack virtual books that high with 30-second free trials of every porn site in Russia.
11,298,261,810,265,626,173,768 bytes... please multiply by 1024.
This needs to be put into A Library Of Congress context before I can understand it.
Unless you can quantify this in terms of number of football fields I cannot comprehend the size of this value.
Unless you count the bits, rather than the bytes. That gets you all the way to Alpha Centauri *and* three planetary blocks further down the starway to the nice, homely pizzeria at the intersection...
You're right, no human being would stack books like this.
Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. -HLM
This is within a factor of ten to a mole of bits. That's an analogy science geeks can relate to.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
Three significant digits?
Don't mess with The Phone Company. Piss them off and you'll be using two tin cans and a piece of string.
In related news, your brain processed 10 zettabytes in the four months. Seriously. Even if you take the minimalist view that each neuron is just doing a simple summation and threshold, and each synapse is a simple multiply, there are over 10^14 synapses in the human brain. The brain runs at 100 hz, meaning 10^16 bytes processed per second. There are about 10^7 seconds in four months, which comes out to 10^22 total operations, or about 10 zettabytes. So really, I'm surprised how *small* the number is for the worlds networks. Clearly, true AI is still a long ways off.
It's only 8.1 ZiB.
If they wanted to be impressive, they could've said it was more than 10^7 porn years.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Isn't a lot clearer just to say it's equivalent 9.57 billion terabytes?
I mean you could also make it seem really small by saying it was equivalent to the size of a 1 second clip of the beating of a fruit fly's wing recorded as uncompressed 4096x4096 video at 71.3 picohertz.
Why the hell would they measure the data in Zetabytes? That comes out to an unwieldy 9.57 ZB.
Books between planets? Common folk don't comprehend global scales, much less interplanetary scales... Want proof? Did anyone ask at what time of year the measurement was taken? An exact date would be required, and even then, most common folk don't know if we are closer or nearer to the planets mentioned at that date -- It's a ridiculously obtuse measure since the unit (planetary distance) wildly varies by date.
Besides: What size book? How many pages per book? Lines per page / Font size? Vellum or Parchment? Standard 20Lb copier paper? Every example in the whole article is totally inaccurate. Additionally, Libraries of Congress (as some commenter's have inquired about) is an antiquated measurement that also varies.
I prefer using the already firmly established measure, thus, TFS should read: "Three years ago, the world's 27 million business servers processed exactly 1 Internet of information..."
How much data is a 2008 Internet worth in today's Internets? Exactly 1 TL;DR.
(On a more serious note, are we sure they don't mean Zebbibytes?)
I more impressed with myself after reading this considering I know EVERYTHING!!
Even if each byte of these 9.57 zettabytes were assigned it's own IPv6 address the address space would suffice for additionally 35 Petayears.
We can carry that much information in our cellphones. We go back in history see this article and laugh at their puny attempt to impress our future selfs on the amount of data we once processed.
I remember back in the late 80's people were talking about the amount of data that can be stored on 3.5" Floppy. And was impressed they could fit the text of an encyclopedia onto it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I have a book which is approximately 1.88 inches thick. It weighs 2.8 pounds.
It takes 24 trees to create a ton of printing paper. Those trees would be 40 feet tall and ~7 inches in diameter. A ton of this book would have nearly 715 volumes.
2808 copies of this book would cover a mile and weigh a little less than four tons. A stack of these books going to Proxima Centauri would comprise 69.64 quadrillion volumes and weigh 13.92x10^14 tons (note our home planet weighs approximately 1.316x10^25 pounds) requiring a forest of 3.8976x10^15 trees. Considering a little less than 1250 trees per two and a half acres becomes 5000 trees per ten acres. 3,200,000 trees fill a square mile requiring 1.24x10^23 square miles for the trees.
Goodness knows how much water would be needed for irrigation, the biomass for fertilization, the joules necessary to render the wood into paper let alone the necessary distribution/dispersement and people power needed to make this a reality.
From this brief thought experiment I have come to one conclusion. The USA needs to convert to metric.
Don't these kind of stats bring home, presently, how utterly inefficient we are as a technoligcal species? With all that data being processed, how many times has the same problem, and scenario, been calculated, and recalculated again? How much information was processed, and power used to be more specific, that produced nothing of intrinsic, redeeming value to society or advanced civilization in some form more than the stifling the moments for the purpose of entertainment? Yes the social masses must have their break and lethargy, however it's hard to see the gold in stream when we muddy so much water.
I must apologize, though. Me being the dreamer that I am, hoped we'd be furthur along in our spacial exporations than we are at this point in time.
It's a good thing that the Zettabyte File System (ZFS) stores more than a few zetabytes or we wouldn't be able to go swimming anymore.
Deuteronomy 13:06-9
I wonder if this counted all of the World of Warcraft servers worldwide as well? Since 2004 I'm sure there's been a LOT of information sent back and forth between millions of players! :)
You must master your joystick like a fisherman masters bait! - Gimpy
I do not want to under appreciate the people that made this research, but I just don't believe it. At all.
Evey time I see any of this studies I wonder if there exist on this planet any way to know, not even an approximation, a thing like that.
Thousands of private servers can not be count on.
9.57 zettabytes ? Wow, how did you get the .57? Maybe it was rounded from the real 9.56873981273982173 zettabytes calculated.
A more serious conclusion would have been "about 10 zettabytes".
How much of this data is redundant? I'd be willing to bet on closer examination at least half the processed data is for backup purposes.
Oh, and don't forget what spam brings to the table.
>"total is equivalent to a 5.6-billion-mile-high stack of books5.6-billion-mile-high stack of books"
No it isn't. It's actually equivalent to a 5.5-billion-mile-high stack of porno mags with a 0.1-billion-mile-high stack of books on top.
That would presumably cause a wobble in the sun's rotation, which could be detected at interstellar distances. We finnaly have a way of finding intelligent civilisations (even if they don't broadcast radio or TV signals.
Nuff said!
Can we somehow harness all this information for NLS (near-lightspeed) space travel?
I'd like to nominate the BkLy (about 5.5e26 bytes) as the new official information metric, to replace the sadly outdated LoC.
For comparison, there are about 50 teraLoCs to the BkLy, or 2 attoBkLy in a LoC.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
In Porn.
Reduce the font size of all that data, then it will fall far short of Alpha Centauri. Brilliant.
Damn it! We had a 9 ZB cap. We would have been fine if it wasn't for Rebecca Black.
Not sure why I don't get mod points anymore, so I'll just do what I can by getting the more suggestible /. types to mod your post up by instructing them to do so in my subject line.
...and reposted RickRolls in YouTube
See question in my subject please, and thank you if anyone has any information that's been collected by a fairly reputable enough source (or any at this point for starters at least), on how much of what we see in webbrowsers online, by percentage, is ad banners. I have always wondered about that.
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It may be time to come up with a new unit: how many Ringworlds would that be?
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
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9,570,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes
As stated in the summary. While the mark of 9.57ZB implies that number, it does not inherently mean that exact number - especially in a situation like this where that precise of a measurement is pretty well impossible.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
wow 9.5699 ZB of Porn, porn, porn
... whether Sturgeon's Law applies to that business data. (Yeah... it probably does and it's likely an underestimation.)
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
What have books got to do with anything?
I know the zettabyte is really hard to conceptualize, but does it help to convert it to some equally ludicrous measurement? Neptune and back, 20 times? Is that when Neptune is closest to Earth, furthest, or some sort of average? I mean, there is the possibility of a 2 AU difference in EVERY STACK! 2 AU x 2 stacks x 20 round trips is 80 AU of uncertainty! That enough for at least a round trip to Neptune!
Or, to put it more understandable terms, that's at least 50 exabytes worth of stacked books in distance...
Help! Help! I'm being repressed!
of this 9.7699ZB was porn.
"the total is equivalent to a 5.6-billion-mile-high stack of books stretching from Earth to Neptune and back to Earth, repeated about 20 times."
I'm American. How many football fields is that?
And how much of that is only "information" in the most technical sense of the word, consisting of LOLcats, ASCII dongs and such?
I believe that the criminals too are in information overload. They have sooooo many stolen identities that they just don't know what to do with them all. .... NOW.... All we need to do is pollute that with bad information as to cause them and their customers to question the validity of the data and stop buying it.
WoW is surprisingly low bandwidth; it's even less than simple music streaming, much less video streaming.
Kind of a misnomer. Nobody comes near processing that. Pretty much just a loop from cache to network card/internet for most things I think. You can't really count the latest house episode as 100TB just because 100k people download it. It is far far less "processing" and much more ~1s of CPU time saying send this 1MB chunk now repeatedly. To me processing = actually computing something against the data. This simply isn't happening (at least on the server side) at this scale yet.
Thank goodness they present the quantity in terms of an intergalactic stack of books.