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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."
...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?
Sony don't process, they just prosecute, at least when they don't leak data like a sieve, and then prosecute others for their own mistakes.
...so high, or just 1 really large PDF.
Give a hand, not a hand-out.
Have one of these, instead: xkcd.com
--Udo.
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.
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?
Lotta
Buncha
Loada
Tonna
That should hold us for a while.
It's supposed to be completely automatic, but actually you have to press this button.
This site's is news for nerds, not news for Joe Sixpack.
That's precisely the reason it's measured in books and not in football fields.
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...
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'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"?