If the Industrial Age relied on ore, the Digital Age relies on storage.
None of our now-necessary devices, from the most fearsome research-computing arrays to run-of-the-mill office computers to cell-phones to iPods, can work without storage. That’s why Richard Moore, director of Production Systems at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), smiles as he ponders the new IBM tape drives being added to the storage “silos” in the center’s already crowded computer room.
SDSC already has six storage silos, each of which holds about 6,000 tapes. With the new tape drives and media (IBM System Storage TS1120 tape drives with the new industry-leading 700-gigabyte tape media), Moore and his colleagues can now store 25 petabytes – that’s 25 million billion bytes – an upgrade from SDSC’s previously phenomenal storage capacity of six petabytes.
That will give SDSC and its host institution, the University of California San Diego, more storage capacity than any other educational institution in the world.
Moore uses several analogies to communicate the vast amounts of information SDSC’s computers can store and make available. “For reference, the digital equivalent of all the printed materials in the Library of Congress is about 20,000 gigabytes; this represents less than 0.1 percent of our capacity,” he says.
For students, he explains it this way: “If every high school student in the U.S. had a gigabyte of music on his or her iPod, all their music – billions of songs – could fit in our archive; although,” he says with a smile, “I expect that there’s a lot of redundancy in that data.”
At least you’d never have to comb through your home videos to discard useless edits.
Sometimes, the more data you have, the less information you have.
Think about it.
What would I do?
Well i would find a really fast search engine.
For some of you that is a lot of porn. lol 🙂
Finally, enough storage for all my MP3s. – Wait, is it available in an iPod yet?
What would I do?
Wonder how I’m going to back up all that data.
What you mean what would you do with 25 petabytes of storage?
PORN!!!!!
Download my consciousness so I can seize control of all computers and achieve world domination?
Design, build, operate and maintain my very own Earth Human Female (young) Android, the one that cooks, cleans and maintains an environment programmed to the most minute detail by my very own rather kinky mind. After proof of concept is operational, then build the starship that will carry us to the stars; after a few years at super luminal speeds time dilation effects will ensure that all those people who so vocally expressed their disapproval with my little project ( especially the torch bearing ones screaming for my blood) will be long dead.
most of the space will be wasted by Vista’s swap file.
I’ll go out on a limb and state 25 Petabytes is all the storage you will ever need. 🙂
What would I do with 25 petabytes of storage? I’ll tell you what I’d do, man: two chicks at the same time, man.
Damn straight. I always wanted to do that, man. And I think if I 25 Petabytes I could hook that up, too; ’cause chicks dig dudes with storage.
Admittedly, I haven’t read the full article, only the exerpt here, but it sounds like this is all TAPE storage. That means it is not “live,” accessible storage, but data can be retrieved as needed onto live storage for usage.
Now, if they want to offer an off-site tape backup facility to corporations, that’s impressive. Otherwise, useless information to me.
So what would I do with 25 PB of tape storage? That’d make a hell of a lot of rope (for those who’ve seen Cast Away).
5 beat me to it. GMTA.
I WOULD NOT save every movie on the drives and hook it up as a NAS for my Media Center PC!
I think I’d go to Disneyworld! Another thought, If I filled my 80 gig pod with tunes from the pple store, it would cost $10 000. I don’t think I can afford
a 25 petabyte device. Hope the math is right.
Did the math… For video, if you figure good compression for internet quality video is about 10MB per Minute, you would be able to store 4,756.47 years worth of video with 25 petabytes of storage… Thats a lot of porn.
I didn’t read the article either but compulsively must comment that this is the best restaurant I have ever eaten.
Forbin Project? Colossas? Terminator IV?
How do you back it up? to another array?
To bad it takes a 1200MW Nuke to power the array!!!
I’d offer free storage with every e-mail account and call it JMail.
Oh, wait…
Can we put two of these babies together in a RAID array?
Finally! A place for my video collection.
13,
I BET YOU WOULD…
And I’d be DLing everything I could off the news groups…