Guest Post by John Hodge:
If your enterprise-level storage server doesn’t have a petabyte of space, it may be time for an upgrade. The latest standard in storage is made to hold the equivalent of a million gigabytes of information.
Size Matters
A petabyte is, to put it simply, huge. To get a better handle on exactly how huge, consider that one gigabyte can hold approximately seven minutes of HD video. A petabyte, then, can store more than 13 years of high definition video and still have room left over for thousands of your favorite photos.
Last year, IBM Research set the world record in terms of data storage when it built a drive array capable of storing 120 petabytes of information. This amount of information is so large that the people at IBM had to come up with a new file indexing system just to handle it all.
If you think that’s big, however, wait until the Blue Waters Supercomputer is completed later this year. It’s expected to have 500 petabytes worth of storage when it’s completed.
Petabyte Storage in Business
You may not need 500 petabytes worth of storage space to back up your business data, but one to five petabytes may be what you need to scale up your capacity for handling data. As more information than ever is being digitized and stored.
In fact, it’s now becoming standard practice in many industries to hang on to every piece of data that they can in order to better analyze and interpret trends and customer needs. As the need for more data grows, so does the need for more capacity to store it. The petabyte-capacity servers are becoming standard in many organizations. Even small businesses are finding petabyte storage servers useful, as they scale extremely well.
What are your thoughts on petabyte-sized storage? Will you be upgrading your storage capacity any time soon? Let us know what you think in the comments.
John Hodge is a writer for RackMountPro.com. When he’s not writing he loves computers and everything related to them, gaming and spending time with his family. Connect with John on Google +. In addition to selling Windows and Linux servers, RackMountPro has been producing and selling rackmount servers and storage since 2001.
image via MYCE
