Peta
The cost of information storage is now approaching a billionth of a cent per byte.
This is the world of peta (numbers of the magnitude 10 to the 15th power, a million billion): petabytes, petaops, petaflops.
Google rules a total database of hundreds of petabytes, swelled every 24 hours by terabytes of Gmails, MySpace pages, videos – each day’s growth larger than the whole Web of a decade ago.
There are about two dozen Google data centers, with 450,000 constituent servers, according to the lowest estimate.
The extended Googleplex comprises an estimated 200 petabytes of hard disk storage – enough to copy the entire Net dozens of times – and four petabytes of RAM. To handle the current load of 100 million queries a day, its collective input-output bandwidth must be in the neighborhood of 3 petabits per second.
In 1991, a 100-megabyte drive cost $500, and a 50-megahertz Intel 486 processor cost about the same. In 2006, $500 buys a 750-gigabyte drive or a 3-gigahertz processor. Over 15 years, that’s an advance of 7,500 times for the hard drive and 60 times for the processor.
In the last decade, the speed of the Internet’s backbone traffic has accelerated from 45 Mbps to roughly a terabit per second. That’s a rise of more than 20,000 times.
Even bigger shocks are coming: the avalanche of digital video will be measured in exabytes (10 to the 18th power, or 1,000 petabytes).