Today we have an editorial originally published on Mar 13, 2007 that is being re-run as Steve is on vacation.
What's a zettabyte (ZB)?
It's a bunch of data, that's for sure. There's a prediction that the world's data will grow to a ZB by the year 2010. It's expected that this year the amount of data stored and replicated will get to 255EB, that's exabytes and it's a the step below a zettabyte. It's also more than the storage available in the world, which is estimated to be 246EB. I have no idea how they measure or guess this, but I think we may see this total grow much higher.
So what's a zettabyte? It's defined as 270 bytes, or 3 jumps up the naming scale from a Terabyte! It's a lot of data, in fact, it's such a huge scale that it's hard to comprehend.
A GB is easy enough for us to understand, though I can't remember if I had a hard time comprehending that data size when my PC had 4MB of RAM.
I still think that a zettabyte by 2010, a tripling of the world's data in 3 years, seems low. I can easily be carrying 3.5GB around in my pocket between my phone, camera, and the two flash drives I have. Heck, I have over a TB of storage within coffee-spilling distance right now as I write this. I think that with the tremendous explosion of media and data, we still have some acceleration coming in our data growth. And much of that data will come to be stored in databases. Databases that we manage.
This profession looks better and better every year.