ft.com/techblog

Just how big is the digital universe? The amount of data captured or stored on PCs, digital cameras, plasma TVs and other digital devices last year was 161 exabytes, according to a new report by IDC, the market analysis group.

That’s 161,000,000,000,000,000,000  bytes of data - or 161 million million megabytes - equivalent, according to IDC, to 12 stacks of books stretching from the Earth to the sun.

If IDC’s growth assumptions hold true, the amount of information captured and/or stored on PCs, cameras, televisions, and other digital devices could hit 988 exabytes by 2010, driven by growth in video and growth in the amount of information stored by businesses.

The IDC study was sponsored by  EMC, the world’s biggest maker of data storage equipment and software, so naturally there is a storage angle in all this. IDC says this year could be the first year that the amount of data produced surpasses the amount of available storage:

Whether this information gets stored permanently or not, it will be transported over networks, shuttled from switch to switch, stored temporarily somewhere and otherwise require use of networking and storage infrastructures, both those in organisations and those in carriers, hosting firms, and other digital information service providers.

Little wonder  that companies like EMC and Cisco are bullish about the future.

March 6th, 2007 in Digital media | Permalink