27 Billion Gigabytes to be Archived by 2010 178
Lucas123 writes "According to a Computerworld survey of IT managers, data storage projects are the No. 2 project priority for corporations in 2008, up from No. 4 in 2007. IT teams are looking into clustered architectures and centralized storage-area networks as one way to control capacity growth, shifting away from big-iron storage and custom applications. The reason for the data avalanche? Archive data. In the private sector alone electronic archives will take up 27,000 petabytes (27 billion gigabytes) by 2010. E-mail growth accounts for much of that figure."
We have the prefixes, why not use them? (Score:5, Informative)
Note to science and tech journalists: please stop stringing together "millions" and "billions" in an attempt to make the numbers seem large, impressive, and incomprehensible. Scientific notation and SI exist for a reason.
Distributed Storage (Score:3, Informative)
For example the Folding@home is implementing a distributed storage mechanism for their data and we'll likely have a new @home project soon - Storage@home.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage@home [wikipedia.org]
http://www.stanford.edu/~beberg/Storage@home2007.pdf [stanford.edu]
http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Papers#ntoc7 [stanford.edu]
duh...users store their files in their email! (Score:5, Informative)
Users in a lot of places use their email as a document management system. This is somewhat effective on an individual basis, but in large organizations shared documents get duplicated dozens or even hundreds of times as each user has their own copy. In the next few years products like Sharepoint will alleviate some of that, though storage is cheap enough that it may not be worth the cost to both reeducate users and build the infrastructure for it. A SAN can hold real a lot of word documents and PDFs after all...
Re:We have the prefixes, why not use them? (Score:1, Informative)
kilobyte
megabyte
gigabyte
terabyte
petabyte
exabyte
Seeing it like that, when you can relate it to the other ones, makes it easier to understand than "a billion, gajillion, fafillion bytes!"
Re:So, in other words... (Score:3, Informative)
Ummm, no. I have CS degree and 20yrs experience. What you are talking about is the attacking the problem of redundant information [wikipedia.org] by comparing blocks, this has already been 'solved'.
Re:We have the prefixes, why not use them? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:We have the prefixes, why not use them? (Score:2, Informative)
That's just a different way of pronouncing Gigawatts