A Yottabyte of Storage Per Year by 2013

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."

Which billions? Which gigabytes?

[LoonyMike]

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

Lottabyte

[davidwr]

I prefer the nebulous term "lottabyte."

Lottabyte: An unspecific term meaning the amount of storage you think you need but know you can't afford.

New prefixes

[CSMatt]

At this rate, we'll need to start defining new prefixes before 2020.

Re:A billion Gigabytes?

[neokushan]

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.

Re:I Believe It

[Hatta]

Data's easy to generate. It's useful data that's difficult.