The Zetabytes are Back!

Just when you think you're processing way more than your share of the bits in the digital deluge, UC San Diego's Roger Bohn and co come out with another study about zetabytes.

Today's zetabyte story, excerpted from the UC San Diego press release:

The world’s roughly 27 million computer servers processed 9.57 zettabytes of information in 2008, according to a paper to be presented April 7 at Storage Networking World’s (SNW’s) annual meeting in Santa Clara, Calif. The first-of-its kind rigorous estimate was generated with server-processing performance standards, server-industry reports, interviews with information technology experts, sales figures from server manufacturers and other sources. (One zettabyte is 10 to the 21st power, or a million million gigabytes.)

How much info is this? According to the press release, it's "the digital equivalent of a 5.6-billion-mile-high stack of books from Earth to Neptune and back to Earth, repeated about 20 times a year."

I wonder what kind of books...maybe the hard-copy encyclopedias that we don't look at any more.

Check out Gary Robbins' story on the topic in the San Diego Union Tribune:  "Business data could fill books reaching to Neptune and back."