Business Information Consumption: 9,570,000,000,000,000,000,000 Bytes per Year

by Rex Graham

Three scientists at UC San Diego have rigorously estimated the annual amount of business-related information processed by the world’s computer servers in terms that Guttenberg and Galileo would have appreciated: 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.

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.)

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“The exploding growth in stored collections of numbers, images and other data is well known, but mere data becomes more important when it is actively processed by servers as representing meaningful information delivered for an ever-increasing number of uses,” said James E. Short, a research scientist at UC San Diego’s School of International Relations. “As the capacity of servers to process the digital universe’s expanding base of information continues to increase, the development itself creates unprecedented challenges and opportunities for corporate information officers.”  Report