Petabytes is Passe, Zettabytes Arrives

Until now, Petabyte, a unit for measuring humongous amounts of data was considered to be a sufficient for most purposes.


However, as the Internet came of age and after the recent explosion of social networking and IMs, we humans are creating more data than we have ever done before. In the past, it was never thought that one day, the Petabyte would be insufficient to represent the ever growing data content on the planet. That is exactly what has happened now.



To start with, a Petabyte, according to Wikipedia, is a unit of information equal to one quadrillion (short scale) bytes, or 1000 terabytes. It is abbreviated PB. The prefix peta- (P) indicates a power of 1000.


According to a new IDC, report, the current total digital output by us humans now is just over 8,000,000 petabytes - which each represent a million gigabytes. With the numbers too big for even Petabyte to represent, we have a new scale for measurement - the Zettabyte. Now, One zettabyte is equal to one million petabytes, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 individual bytes. 


To give a brief idea as to how much data this, it would take little over 75 billion iPads to store all this data. Another revelation is the startling fact that most of this data is being generated by common individuals like you and me. All this data, however, is stored by companies like Google, Flickr and YouTube. 


It is pertinent to note that back in 2007, when the first survey was conducted, the total data in the digital universe was pegged at 161,000 petabytes. The future would see continuous explosion of the digital universe with the survey expecting it to expand by a factor of 44 over the next decade.