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."

Comments

Better visual

[ShanghaiBill]

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.

Re:What are we going to do now?

[new death barbie]

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.