World's Servers Process 9.57ZB of Data a Year 170
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."
But... (Score:2)
Does this count Sony?
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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.
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I think we need to run a big data de-dupe.
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The only way to do this with modern technology is called an Arcade. Yeah, I went there.
If people have physical access to the hardware and software, all the security in the world won't stop them from doing what they want to it in the long term.
How many of those requests... (Score:3)
...involved "v1agra" and fake Rolex watches?
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That 'pile of books' would get you to Uranus.
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That 'pile of books' would get you to Uranus.
That's good. If each pill can 'double your penis', I'd only take me 46 or so go get there*
*Citation: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - 1737
Units of measurements (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Units of measurements (Score:5, Funny)
Both if you crash into Mars along the way.
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According to this [berkeley.edu] site that would be 9.57 billion Libraries of Congress. If you only consider the printed collection.
Official: the "Book lightyear" (Score:3)
I'd like to nominate the BkLy (about 5.5e26 bytes) as the new official information metric, to replace the sadly outdated LoC.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.
MOD PARENT UP (Score:2)
Not sure why I don't get mod points anymore, so I'll just do what I can by getting the more suggestible /. types to mod your post up by instructing them to do so in my subject line.
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I think you mean shit mega grammes.
What's that in (Score:2)
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How many cubic Watts are in that Furlong.
from Earth to Neptune and back to Earth (Score:1)
At what point in their respective orbits? The distance from Earth to Neptune varies by about three hundred million kilometers depending on what time of year.
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This would cause a variance of only 5%, which is insignificant.
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I'll just let the business know that this 5% downtime is insignificant. It's only 8.4 hours downtime a week guys, come on!
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we can just place copies of flatland or war and peace in the stack to cover the variations.
units (Score:1)
Glad to see we finally got rid of that silly "library of congress" unit.
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Of course not, silly. The Library of Congress is a measure of volume, not length.
Sigh, what do they teach people nowadays.
tired (Score:1)
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Have one of these, instead: xkcd.com [xkcd.com]
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a real nerd would calculate the speed of the top book in the stack relative to the bodies it would pass on the way, given that the stack is in a static location on earth.
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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.
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9.6 billion terabyte USB drives. ;-)
Better? Oh should I say: Nerdier?
And then it all collapsed (Score:2)
"By the year 2100, old had become so scarce that it was worth more than an ounce of silver, creating an energy drought. Citizens could barely afford to turn-on a 10 watt lightbulb..... forget the high expense of a computer and internet network."
Surely there must be some Science-based fiction that deal with this negative future?
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Yeah, I'm totally up for reading some good LED fic.
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LEDs use a Lot more power. They would not be used during an energy drought. Probably e-ink would be used (like the kindle), although it would cost $50 per battery charge (ouch). Maybe society would revert to paper, since it requires no energy to use a book.
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LEDs use a Lot more power.
No, they don't. Not light emitted per unit of electrical input, anyway.
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Maybe society would revert to paper, since it requires no energy to use a book.
LOL good luck reading paper books without gas for the chainsaws, diesel for the cranes and trucks to the mill, hundreds of megawatts of electricity for the paper mills, diesel for the trucks to the printers, oil for the printing press ink, propane for the pallet forklifts, diesel for the trucks to the store, gasoline to drive to and from the store...
Would be easier and probably more ecologically sound to stick to wireless kindles.
Also I find it unlikely a kindle charge would require $50 at present value...
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Because paper was invented after industrialisation, am I right?
Because the average citizen being able to afford more than one book (probably just a religious text) was invented after industrialization, you are correct.
There was time when "owning many books" was considered conspicuous consumption for rich people, not just "being weird or nerdy" like it would be considered now.
I would assume in the "post oil era" book ownership and reading would drop back to "pre oil era" levels, in other words, for 99% of the population, it would not be financially possible.
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"By the year 2100, old had become so scarce that it was worth more than an ounce of silver, creating an energy drought. Citizens could barely afford to turn-on a 10 watt lightbulb..... forget the high expense of a computer and internet network."
Surely there must be some Science-based fiction that deal with this negative future?
There's a seniors home near my place that's full of old. Come and get it.
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Come and get it.
But you have to hurry or all the old will be gone.
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Let's start stockpiling the fat from dead people and turn it into biodiesel. All those Western world lardasses must be good for something.
A stack of books... (Score:3)
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...that has only three words of text in it...
What are we going to do now? (Score:2)
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?
Re:What are we going to do now? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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You're not considering uniqueness for abbreviation purposes.
Anyway, next will likely be something starting with X, such as Xerta- (and xekto- (10^-27) and Xerbi- (2^90)), and continuing to work backwards through the alphabet, skipping T as it is already taken.
I expect there to be a fight over who gets naming rights for 10^±30 and 2^100 with resistance to using W for various reasons.
Also we're not beyond using characters not in our 26 letter set. See micro-.
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IIRC, there was a movement to get it named the hella-byte. (Or hecka-byte, maybe.)
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Zetta, Ita, theta, iota, kappa
"Z" is not the last letter, Omega is. So we have quite a bit of libraries we can acomodate
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There's a movement to do just that:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Official-Petition-to-Establish-Hella-as-the-SI-Prefix-for-1027/277479937276 [facebook.com]
heh.
Personally I'd have gone for "gigantor-"
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a Yottabyte?
"How you get so big eating food of this kind?"
We've come a long way (Score:2)
"I have travelled the length and breadth of this country, and have talked with the best people in business administration. I can assure you on the highest authority that data processing is a fad and won't last out the year." — Editor in charge of business books at Prentice-Hall publishers, responding to Karl V. Karlstrom (a junior editor who had recommended a manuscript on the new science of data processing), c. 1957
It's been hardly more than fifty years. Where will we be in another fifty years, say b
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I have travelled the length and breadth of this internet, and have talked with the worst people in web 2.0. I can assure you on the highest authority that people's hunger for unoriginal content is a fad and won't last out the year.
Better visual (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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i thought water was incompressible?
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So you would need about 6800 containers.
So about 1 Sendai tsunami's worth of containers?
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Maybe in Sendai alone.
This is about a thousand containers:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bcnbits/2859509269/ [flickr.com]
Doesn't look like much from that angle.
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> Most people cannot imagine the distance to ...
> Neptune, so that is a bad visual.
>
> If each byte in 9.57ZB was a water molecule. It
> would be slightly less than a teaspoon.
Most people can't visualize the size of a water molecule either. ;-)
Good HDD analogy though. I agree that the original "stack of books" one is dumb. Though I wouldn't even break it down to hard drives. Just say "it would take X many containers full of laptops* to hold all that data."
* or iPods.
Re:Better visual (Score:4, Funny)
A laptop HDD is about 3 cubic inches.
What's that in cubic centimetres?
A standard shipping container (40x8x8 ft^3) would hold about 1.5 million if they were packed tightly.
What's that in cubic metres?
That would be a train about 75 miles long.
What's that in km?
If each byte in 9.57ZB was a water molecule. It would be slightly less than a teaspoon.
You mean 5ml?
I think I'll go back to thinking of the distance to Neptune.
Who really cares? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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FTFA "Most of this information is incredibly transient: it is created, used and discarded in a few seconds without ever being seen by a person," said Bohn, a professor of technology management at UC San Diego.
XML overhead, HTTP headers, page reloads instead of AJAX/DOM updates. And much of it is identical, just served to different people, such as the dynamically generated static pages of slashdot.
There is no point to this number other than illustrating how much data goes over the pipes. And even then, it
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The vast majority of this data isn't stored.
Contrary to legislative intent.
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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.
Who cares? I'll tell you who cares -- Copyright holders. I may have a website, but I did not authorize you or all the intermediary routers to copy my work multiple times per view! Just because I put my HTML e-book on my web-server doesn't give you or your ISP the right to make so many duplications!
I'm positive if you further analyzed the data that was transmitted you would realize that there are Billions and Billions of illegal reproductions in that dataset!
iTunes doesn't license AT&T's routers t
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You read a soundbite filtered through multiple internet links at sites given to hyping soundbites and from that you conclude that all government science funding is going to producing soundbites.
Just how big is the cluebat hanging over your head?
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I read the COMMENTS on the site, to see if anybody else felt the same way I did.
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in tfa it read this
"The scientists estimate there were 3.18 billion workers in the world's labor force at the time, each of whom received an average of 3TB of information per year."
was only business workers. so your point is invalidated.
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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?
Astounding as it may seem, researchers don't just work on one project to the exclusion of all else. This is probably the "human interest" stuff they do on the side.
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Yes, but Netflix and porn sites don't need to buy enough servers to serve up THE ENTIRE INTERWEBS. How much bandwidth did Netflix use? If we're lucky, your movie site will be that big.
This (Score:2)
This needs to be put into A Library Of Congress context before I can understand it.
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Analogy (Score:2)
Getting close to a mole (Score:2)
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Great, I can just see someone at Best Buy in a few years:
"Yes, I'l like to buy a hard drive please, 0.2 mol dm^3 or more...
Innumeracy (Score:2)
Three significant digits?
base 10? (Score:2)
It's only 8.1 ZiB.
If they wanted to be impressive, they could've said it was more than 10^7 porn years [theregister.co.uk].
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I swear officer, she told me she was 10^7!
Why not use relavant terms? (Score:2)
Isn't a lot clearer just to say it's equivalent 9.57 billion terabytes?
I mean you could also make it seem really small by saying it was equivalent to the size of a 1 second clip of the beating of a fruit fly's wing recorded as uncompressed 4096x4096 video at 71.3 picohertz.
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It's 1.2e16 Lennas [usc.edu].
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Zettabyte already is a relevant term. It means 10^21 bytes. Using "billion terabytes" is more confusing because you're using two different scaling factors. It would make more sense to say "billion trillion bytes".
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It just seems that most people who use the internet know what a terabyte is. Terabyte size hard drives are pretty common, so it's easy to understand how much space that is. And although 10 billion is hard to imagine, "billion" is a commonly used term and understood.
Whereas people aren't familiar with a zettabyte, or a 10^21 bytes, or 1 with 21 zeros, any more then they are familiar with the space required to hold a 4096x4096 1second video running at 71.3 picohertz, or how much data is in a stack of books 5.
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Most people who use the internet have no idea what "terabyte" means. They probably think it's a marketing term like "Pentium".
And if I recall correctly, the U.S. uses "million" and "billion" differently than Europe does. I'm too lazy to Google the difference now but I don't think those translate very well either.
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Most would have a better idea of what a terabyte that is compared to zettabyte. And we are talking about network traffic, which is a subject that the people would would be interested in and the people that know what a terabyte is probably overlaps somewhat, I'm guessing.
Europe, right... and not the UK, though, because they use billion as the US does.. so people speaking other languages. I apologize, I should have thought about them.. I can't be English centric, regardless if we are talking about terms in th
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Using "billion trillion" is at least using two terms from the same nomenclature. Using "billion terra" is mixing SI nomenclature with standard counting nomenclature - which just seems silly.
And the only reason some number of people know what a terabyte is? Because people started using it when the term was appropriate, instead of using "one million megabytes". Now zettabyte is the relevant term and people need to learn it. Fortunately they can drop kilobyte from their memory to make room; no one cares ab
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Using "billion trillion" is at least using two terms from the same nomenclature. Using "billion terra" is mixing SI nomenclature with standard counting nomenclature - which just seems silly.
You didn't blink when I pointed out you just contradicted yourself, and then you hit me up with that?
Is "billion trillion" less silly? Why not thousand million million? How about gigaterabyte? Does that sound better?
Anyway, the term "billion trillion bytes" is confusing to more people than "billion terabytes", because terabytes is a more familiar term. When was the last time you saw a hard drive advertised that it held "one trillion bytes"? You even wrote,
Fortunately they can drop kilobyte from their memory to make room; no one cares about those any more.
If they can drop "kilobyte" from their memory alre
That's a messed up metric... (Score:2)
Why the hell would they measure the data in Zetabytes? That comes out to an unwieldy 9.57 ZB.
Books between planets? Common folk don't comprehend global scales, much less interplanetary scales... Want proof? Did anyone ask at what time of year the measurement was taken? An exact date would be required, and even then, most common folk don't know if we are closer or nearer to the planets mentioned at that date -- It's a ridiculously obtuse measure since the unit (planetary distance) wildly varies by da
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Then in 25 years. (Score:2)
We can carry that much information in our cellphones. We go back in history see this article and laugh at their puny attempt to impress our future selfs on the amount of data we once processed.
I remember back in the late 80's people were talking about the amount of data that can be stored on 3.5" Floppy. And was impressed they could fit the text of an encyclopedia onto it.
Blizzard And Activision (Score:2)
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! :)
WoW is surprisingly low bandwidth (Score:2)
WoW is surprisingly low bandwidth; it's even less than simple music streaming, much less video streaming.
20 Neptune high stacks of books (Score:2)
That would presumably cause a wobble in the sun's rotation, which could be detected at interstellar distances. We finnaly have a way of finding intelligent civilisations (even if they don't broadcast radio or TV signals.
How much of that is redundant? (Score:2)
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Sorry, could you repeat that?
Ringworld Units (Score:2)
It may be time to come up with a new unit: how many Ringworlds would that be?
Arbitrary precision (Score:2)
9,570,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes
As stated in the summary. While the mark of 9.57ZB implies that number, it does not inherently mean that exact number - especially in a situation like this where that precise of a measurement is pretty well impossible.
I immediately wondered... (Score:2)
... whether Sturgeon's Law applies to that business data. (Yeah... it probably does and it's likely an underestimation.)
How far is it in stone tablets? (Score:2)
What have books got to do with anything?
I know the zettabyte is really hard to conceptualize, but does it help to convert it to some equally ludicrous measurement? Neptune and back, 20 times? Is that when Neptune is closest to Earth, furthest, or some sort of average? I mean, there is the possibility of a 2 AU difference in EVERY STACK! 2 AU x 2 stacks x 20 round trips is 80 AU of uncertainty! That enough for at least a round trip to Neptune!
Or, to put it more understandable terms, that's at least 50 exaby
subject (Score:2)
"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."
I'm American. How many football fields is that?
And how much of that is only "information" in the most technical sense of the word, consisting of LOLcats, ASCII dongs and such?
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Hmm. That's about 25% of the world's GDP spent on internet access.
(Assuming, of course, that all that data actually transferred over the internet. Which is actually not all that likely: Much of that data would be data generated in-house, and transfered - if not not processed on the same server which generates it - over local networks. After all, if you generated a few TB of data every day that needed to be processed, why spend money to send it someplace if you don't have to?)
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wow 9.5699 ZB of Porn, porn, porn
Nah. Porn is measured in jigajigabytes.