We’re not even the first storage blog to pick up on this–Storagezilla posted yesterday–but cloud provider Decho (formerly Mozy) has come up with a truly compelling graphic on the coming “Petabyte age” to invoke what the data growth we’re experiencing represents.
Here are a few of its many eye-popping illustrative examples:
- Worldwide, data centers now consume as much energy as Sweden.
- A Gigabyte is 7 minutes of HD-TV video. A Petabyte is 13.3 years of HD-TV video.
- Worldwide computer usage increased 342% between 2000 and 2008.
- 1.5 Petabytes is all the photos on Facebook.
- And here’s one that REALLY got me: 50 Petabytes is the entire written works of mankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages.
Guys, this Petabyte thing is huge. If you think there’s even a shadow of a chance that your organization is heading in that direction–or even if it’s looking down the barrel of multiple Terabytes–I’d say it’s time to start thinking of a realistic plan for getting your data under control.
