Storage Strategies for the Data Flood

  Business Intelligence   Strategy  

Kilo, mega, giga, tera, peta, exa--all Greek prefixes that have the word "byte" appended to them. A kilobyte is equivalent to 1000 bytes, a petabyte is equal to 1015 and an exabyte is equal to 1000 petabytes. To provide a frame of reference for the volume of data in the smaller and larger entities, consider the following examples:

• Most of the text e-mails that we exchange with each other on a daily basis contain kilobytes of data.
• The entire U.S. Library of Congress holds 20 terabytes of text.
• The total amount of printed information in the world is estimated to be about 200 petabytes!

In the '70s and '80s, we were concerned with managing kilobytes and megabytes of data. In the '90s, giga became the storage size of choice. In the new millennium, the tera era is upon us and we are pushing quickly to "peta" space. The Stanford University Linear Accelerator Center where scientists collect data from the particle accelerator has grown to over 1 petabyte in size. The information flood will only grow as we move forward and look to collect data to satiate our information analysis appetite.

We have expanded our storage needs due to three primary factors: an increase in our analytical acumen, a penchant for historical records for trend analysis and the detail to which we measure.

Over the last few years, our capabilities in the …

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