Zettabyte
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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.
PS: If you are missing your newsletters, let us know at sscupgrade@sqlservercentral.com. We're migrating to new servers over the next week.
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It is probably worth considering that it is not the data it is what you do with it that counts. My boss keeps reminding me that they managed to fly to the moon with the computing power of a ZX Spectrum in the 1960s. I guess that means no more toys for me.
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hmmm ... so much to store ... the scenario gets even scarier ... how do you back it up ? where do you store it ? what about redundant storage ? what about disaster recovery ? how do you plan and test for this ?
We are headed for really challenging times. Even at present there are many systems out there that are 'recoverable' in theory but in practice, and more importantly, practicality . I state this from being in the state of the 'present'. Healthcare, for example, has many vendor systems that store imaging data. Whether this data is actual X-rays, MRIs, PET scans, or images of written records. Most if not all of these items have a retention period ranging at least 5-7 years in very, very limited cases but usually forever (I am hoping that practicality ends up somewhere in the 50-100 year range). A good many of these systems we presently have have been in place anywhere from 5-8 years and those vendors have not even included archival in their architecture ! The databases and file storage just keeps growing. Most have it in the plans somewhere in the next 2-5 years !!!
As an example an imaging storage system upgrade we just finished took almost 6 months due to the amount of storage and the architecture of the system ... and guess what, another upgrade is needed again - data volumes have almost doubled in the interim.
"It's better to be a dog in a peaceful time than be a man in a chaotic period."
RegardsRudy KomacsarSenior Database Administrator"Ave Caesar! - Morituri te salutamus."
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Backups are a problem. I remember in 94 we had an imaging system and we got to the end of our disks. They were large at the time and external arrays weren't the answer because of our volume of growth. We'd have been in the same situation in a year. We moved to optical, which has a decent lifetime for business documents, and a changer. The software was good, even pinged an administrator when an old disc needed to be reinserted.
However
Making copies was something we hadn't thought of. Getting full copies of the optical system offsite, etc. There were real administrative and logistical difficulties that are hard to automate or expensive. It's the same problem, just a smaller scale.
I hate to think of someone trying to call up my digital X-rays in 40 years.
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This is what makes me seriously consider becoming an embedded systems programmer. I actually liked the challenge of fitting a nice game or spreadsheet or something into 3.5K of memory
(That's one reason I have so much fun with my LEGO NXT, cuz it actually runs out of memory if you try too much and aren't efficient with it)
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