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A Yottabyte of Storage Per Year by 2013

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wed May 07, 2008 09:23 AM
from the more-bits-please dept.
Lucas123 writes "David Roberson, general manager of Hewlett-Packard's StorageWorks division, predicts that by 2013 the storage industry will be shipping a yottabyte (a billion gigabytes) of storage capacity annually. Roberson made the comment in conjunction with HP introducing a new rack system that clusters together four blade servers and three storage arrays with 820TB of capacity. Many vendors are moving toward this kind of platform, including IBM, with its recent acquisition of Israeli startup XIV, according to Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Mark Peters."
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  • by ColdWetDog (752185) * on Wednesday May 07 2008, @09:25AM (#23323632) Homepage
    Impressed, you will be.
  • by WheresMyDingo (659258) on Wednesday May 07 2008, @09:25AM (#23323634)
    When I can say "I have a lotta yottabytes"
  • by nuzak (959558) on Wednesday May 07 2008, @09:27AM (#23323652) Journal
    Under the new regime, wouldn't that be a "Yobibyte" or something similarly idiotic?
    • There's no way Yobi could kick Yotta's ass.
    • No, 'cos they really do mean yottabyte, 1_000_000_000_000_000_000_000_000 bytes (according to Wikipedia). It would be as silly to use powers of two for annual storage sales by HP as to use powers of two to measure Russian oil exports or the population of China.
    • Under the new regime, wouldn't that be a "Yobibyte" or something similarly idiotic?

      If it's idiotic you want then it's idiotic you get. "My computer storage has Yobibitybobityboodidybytes."

      What's infinity divided by zero?
  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 07 2008, @09:29AM (#23323680)
    A yotta byte is 10^24 which is a trillion terra bytes
    or 10^12 * 10^12

    I thought geeks hung out here......

  • A billion Gigabytes? (Score:5, Informative)

    by hansraj (458504) * on Wednesday May 07 2008, @09:30AM (#23323690)
    umm.. wouldn't that be one zettabyte? If I am not off then one yottabyte would be a billion terabyte

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yotta [wikipedia.org]
    • my conversions are long scale (followed in Germany among other countries). Check the table for short scale conversions that is followed in the US. Either way the summary is wrong.
    • umm.. wouldn't that be one zettabyte? If I am not off then one yottabyte would be a billion terabyte

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yotta [wikipedia.org]

      Yeah. If it were merely a billion gigabytes, and we assume (not unreasonably) that the average drive is 1 terabyte 5 years from now, then the summary implies that only a million drives will sell in 2013, which would be terrible. Hmm, it's equally hard to imagine a billion such drives shipping, so maybe I'm missing something.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      umm.. wouldn't that be one zettabyte? If I am not off then one yottabyte would be a billion terabyte

      FAIL all around

      A billion gigabytes would be an exabyte. A billion terrabytes would be zettabyte. A trillion terabytes or a quadrillion gigabytes would be a yottabyte.

      Wikipedia to the rescue [wikipedia.org]
    • No actually a billion gigs is an exabyte. A billion terabytes would be a zettabyte.
    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      No, a billion giga bytes is an exa byte 10^9 * 10^9 = 10^18 so a billion terabytes is 10^9 * 10^12 = 10^21 = zeta byte
    • by neokushan (932374) on Wednesday May 07 2008, @10:01AM (#23324020)
      Remember, guys, "Billion" means two different things depending on which part of the world you're in, so make sure you're not getting into a debate between an american and a brit who are both probably right and wrong at the same time.
      • by Kijori (897770) <ward.jakeNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Wednesday May 07 2008, @11:08AM (#23324936)

        Remember, guys, "Billion" means two different things depending on which part of the world you're in, so make sure you're not getting into a debate between an american and a brit who are both probably right and wrong at the same time.
        "Billion" pretty much exclusively means 1,000,000,000 over here in Britain these days. I've never encountered anyone who uses it to mean 1,000,000,000,000, and style guides require the short scale. The closest I've seen to a long scale usage is newspapers still using "thousand million" to avoid ambiguity. Anyone using the term "billion" to refer to a million million in Britain now is almost certain to be misunderstood.
  • Yottabytes (Score:3, Funny)

    by sm62704 (957197) on Wednesday May 07 2008, @09:31AM (#23323696) Journal
    Yow! That's a lotta bytes!!!!
  • I believe a "yottabyte" is 1 billion petabytes, not gigabytes.
    • by gstoddart (321705) on Wednesday May 07 2008, @09:38AM (#23323772) Homepage

      I believe a "yottabyte" is 1 billion petabytes, not gigabytes.

      God, that hurts my head. I remember being at a university seminar in '91 or so, and one of the presenters was talking about petabytes.

      At the time, it drew blank expressions and he had to explain that it was the one after terabytes (since that was an abstraction to most people).

      I often find myself awed by just how much you can buy nowadays cheaply. I'm told that at Costco nowadays, you can buy a terabye of disk storage for about $250 CDN -- that's utterly mind-boggling to someone who remembers single-density, single-sided floppy drives.

      Crazy stuff.

      Cheers
        • A floppy drive? You had it easy. In my day we had to use write our ones and zeros on a giant blackboard and programmed directly in electricity. [geekz.co.uk]

          Luxury!!

          Why, I once got my tie caught in the gears of the difference engine [wikipedia.org], and had to stay there until we hit the last digit of the calculation -- I was there for days. ;-)

          Cheers
  • Yottabyte? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Well, here is one compelling reason to stop developing ever larger and larger storage - silly names.

    And at the other end of the spectrum you have the nybble.
  • How much exactly does that mean?

    - 10^9 * 10^9 bytes
    - 2^30 * 2^30 bytes
    - 10^9 * 2^30 bytes
    - 10^12 * 2^30 bytes (non-american billions)
    - ...

    You never know, these days
  • I wouldn't be too surprised if we hit 10TB arrays next year, so this kind of progression seems like it's possible. Data's cheap nowadays!

  • How long before I can get one of those on a pen-drive?

    I refuse to dump floppies until then.
  • So confused (Score:5, Funny)

    by UnknowingFool (672806) on Wednesday May 07 2008, @09:44AM (#23323852)
    This new unit of data confuses me. I only think of data sizes in terms of Library of Congresses (LOCs), mass in terms of stones, and lengths in terms of horse hands. Now get off my lawn!
  • Shit (Score:4, Funny)

    by Ariastis (797888) on Wednesday May 07 2008, @09:45AM (#23323870)
    This means I have to find a whole lot more porn if I want to keep up...
  • New prefixes (Score:5, Insightful)

    by CSMatt (1175471) on Wednesday May 07 2008, @09:52AM (#23323946)
    At this rate, we'll need to start defining new prefixes before 2020.
  • by Ralph Spoilsport (673134) * on Wednesday May 07 2008, @10:10AM (#23324108) Journal
    I emailed the "onduty editor" before the article went live on the error of their calc on what a yotta is. So much for slashdot error prevention...

    Anyway, I emailed them this link to the terms [techtarget.com] in question, and post it here, for your edification. I have a post-it note on my bookcase with these terms - I think that as time goes on, knowing EXACTLY what each one is will be of some use. Until the oil runs out and we are shivering in the cold, anyway...

    ;-)

    Here's their names, abreviations and their power of ten, so you know how big/small it is.

    yocto- y 10^-24
    zepto- z 10^-21
    atto- a 10^-18
    femto- f 10^-15
    pico- p 10^-12
    nano- n 10^-9
    micro- m 10^-6
    milli- m 10^-3
    centi- c 10^-2
    deci- d 10^-1
    (none) -- --
    deka- D 10^1
    hecto- H 10^2
    kilo- K 10^3
    mega- M 10^6
    giga- G 10^9
    tera- T 10^12
    peta- P 10^15
    exa- E 10^18
    zetta- Z 10^21
    yotta- Y 10^24

    RS

  • by kaos07 (1113443) on Wednesday May 07 2008, @10:14AM (#23324136)
    Considering the fact that I'm just a regular user who doesn't run a server or data centre or anything particular storage intensive (relatively speaking) and I bought a 1TB (1000GB) last year, I'm wondering whether this claim is as "WOW!" as it appears to be on the surface. Surely there's at least 1 million users (1 million x 1 thousand = 1 billion GB, or 1 yottabyte) who've bought a 1TB hard drive? Or even 10 million who've bought 100GB hard drives. And this is just home users mind you. There must be thousands, if not millions, of companies around the world with servers and data centres with plenty of gigabytes of storage being purchased every year.
  • Bigger, Not Faster (Score:3, Informative)

    by Doc Ruby (173196) on Wednesday May 07 2008, @10:28AM (#23324304) Homepage Journal
    Server drives with high density need to be faster (seek and transfer times) to support more multiple users accessing different sequences of the disk's storage addresses in rapid interleaved succession.

    But personal drives don't need as high speeds for one person's use, especially when the high capacity is for large media content objects that are stored unfragmented. We don't need to spend the money on transfer speeds so much faster than our playback speeds that it's never used. Large builtin caches are useful for real random-access data in small chunks, like programs or numerical datasets, not media.

    Blu-Ray's max transfer speed is 54Mbps [wikipedia.org], though that's for recording - 48Mbps is max playback. 3x for buffering during FWD/REV scanning playback would be 144Mbps, 2.25MBps. Big drives currently recommended for personal use, like Seagate's 1TB Barracuda ES.2 [storagereview.com], get at least 53MBps transfer, over 23x as fast as the fastest it will ever really be asked to deliver. If it weren't so unnecessarily fast, maybe it would cost less, and an array of them for the same hundreds of dollars would hold more content.

    With 50GB Blu-Ray HD titles to store, getting more sets of 20 titles in each HD in a RAID is a lot more important than getting them faster than they can be played.
    • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 07 2008, @09:42AM (#23323838)
      I was getting concerned, it took over 10 minutes for someone to reference porn.
    • Not to be confused with the Lolitabyte, which is a unit of measure peculiar to 2chan style boards...
    • Lottabyte: An unspecific term meaning the amount of storage you think you need but know you can't afford

      Or in the vernacular: Crapload