What would you do with 25 petabytes of storage?
If the Industrial Age relied on ore, the Digital
Age relies on storage.
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.”
You’d never have to comb through your home videos to discard useless edits.
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.”
You’d never have to comb through your home videos to discard useless edits.
Posted: Mon - November 6, 2006 at 11:34 AM