Serious Storage

  • Comments posted to this topic are about the item Serious Storage

  • Thanks Steve - an intersting article about the Vatican's project - good on them for being so forward thinking.

    So, yes - an enormous amount of storage eh? - yes, 2.8PB is huge by today's standards. However, when I started in computing, 1MB was almost unimaginable. My first serious piece of commercial computing work was at Barclays Bank and there we had branch servers with 2GB Hard disks. Well, my phone has 4 times that, and even that is modest by today's standards!

    The question I ask is this - how long will it be before we can store the whole of the Vatican's library on our hand-held devices?

    By my reckoning, I'd say 10 years or less...

  • Perhaps. I think we'll have 1TB on cell phones in 5 years. Not all phones, but higher end ones. Especially since Kingston announced a 1TB flash drive.

    http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2414107,00.asp

    I can foresee 1PB in desktops in 10 years.

  • Along the way I have been reading about the progress of noSQL databases and how they organize data and indexing for both objects and content. And I have also read opinions and articles on BigData both here and in other pupublications The non-relational model with "tables" and "rows" is very interesting. Looking into what would be required to store the images as well as the associated text and metadata for each of the historical docs may lead to an interesting hybrid approach to a datastore. While the ISO document image that EMC may use is probably not searchable or able to be indeded, the associated metadata, keys, images, foreign keys and other elements might be very interesting and could be ground-breaking for this type of data collection.

    What a huge educational opportunity this is. To make this collection of history available on one datastore is incredible. To that end I have heard some say over the years that bigger is not always better. But in this case the bigger storage capacity is really going to provide something very valuable.

    Thanks for the insight. It is great that current innovations on the technical frontier can better expose the historical path we have taken to get to this point.

    M.

    Not all gray hairs are Dinosaurs!

  • 1991? Sheesh. I didn't even own a PC until 1994, and that was a 40MHz 386SX with 100Mb of disc space and 1Mb of RAM...the most powerful machine in the office I worked at the time was a 486/33, forget the other specs of that one. Ah, the joys of trying to trace the faulty connection that was preventing the 10base2 network working... 😀

  • This might give you a more concrete idea of the future.

    http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-57357938-52/ibm-creates-data-storage-at-the-atomic-level/

    I remember reading about open-gated phased arrays in SciAm maybe ten years ago and being amazed to see them in all sorts of electronic devices within maybe 5 or 6 years. I wouldn't be surprised if this took less than 10 years.

  • One thing I find interesting about our digital age is the ever-increasing rate of storage usage. 2.8PB is not a trivial number by any means, but how many decades and centuries did it take to build up that library? And now worldwide we're probably generating that much new data every day, perhaps every hour.

    Perhaps even in the time it took me to type out this post 😀

  • Randy Rabin (3/19/2013)


    One thing I find interesting about our digital age is the ever-increasing rate of storage usage. 2.8PB is not a trivial number by any means, but how many decades and centuries did it take to build up that library? And now worldwide we're probably generating that much new data every day, perhaps every hour.

    Perhaps even in the time it took me to type out this post 😀

    The last current rate I saw was about a 2 exabytes every month. Gutenburg's press for the next 500 years was about 1EB.

  • Here we are talking about the massive storage and where it might be in 10 yrs or so. I am sitting on the other hand thinking that these large projects like the Vatican would be fun. It would be great to be able to work on something like that.

    Jason...AKA CirqueDeSQLeil
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