Where’s the World’s Data Being Stored, and Who Owns It?
Have you ever wondered where all digital data of the world being stored? No one can provide you precise answer. But yes, all that data is being stored at multiple locations worldwide. Mozy, one of the world’s largest used online backup services, released an info-graphic showing how our data is being stored across the globe. The data shows the amount of data stored throughout the world in the 20 years span from 1986 to 2007. And the figure is amazing! 295 Exabytes (295 Billion Gigabytes) of data was stored worldwide during these years.
As per the storage capacity formula, which says storage capacity doubles every three years, in the current year we would be storing around 600 exabytes (600 billion gigabytes) of data. This is really an astonishing stat, and it’s just going to continue growing. Major forms of storing data are hard drives, optical drives, and digital tapes, to name a few. The myriad of storage solutions goes to show our obsession with archiving. Maybe its our datacenters that needs to be on an episode of Hoarders.
The info-graphic reveals how the year 2000 set the trend of storing data in digital format. 94 percent of data are being stored in digital format in last couple of years only. About 52 percent of this data is held on hard drives, 28 percent on optical storage, 11 percent on digital tapes and 9 percent of data is stored in some other forms.
“If we were to take all that information and store it in books, we could cover the entire area of the US or China in 13 layers of books.” Dr. Martin Hilbert of the University of Southern California said.
The world’s stored digital data is measured in exabytes. An exabyte is equal to one billion gigabytes (GB) of data. There are so many data centers in the world that hold these data. Among them are ten of the world’s largest datacenters, namely Microsoft’s Quincy Washington Data Center, Microsoft’s Chicago Data Center, and QTS data center.
Big data and cloud storage have really boosted the evolution of data storage. Every day, emails, pictures and videos are being uploaded and archived, and searches too. These all contribute to this mounting amount of data out there, both structured and unstructured. Sooner or later the cloud will become the compute and storage platform for big data storage.
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