Appendix D: The Information Flood—One Zettabyte of Data
It’s no news that we are swimming in a flood of information. But, how much will we be inundated with? The Discovery Institute (discover.org) published a white paper (1/2008) titled Estimating the Exaflood. In it, he predicted U.S. Internet traffic in 2015. To get a grasp of the results, we need to know what a Zettabyte is. Note that a Petabyte is 1015 bytes, an Exabyte is 1018 bytes, a Zettabyte is 1021 bytes, and a Yottabyte is 1024 bytes. The white paper estimates the following in 2015 for U.S. Internet traffic:
• Movie downloads and P2P file sharing could be 100 Exabytes.
• Video calling and virtual windows could generate 400 Exabytes.
• “Cloud” computing and remote backup could total 50 Exabytes.
• Internet video, gaming, and virtual worlds could produce 200 Exabytes.
• Non-Internet “IPTV” could reach 100 Exabytes and possibly much more.
• Business IP traffic will generate some 100 Exabytes.
• Other applications (phone, Web, email, photos, music) could be 50 Exabytes.
Note that video and rich media account for much of the totals. The sum is 1,000 Exabytes, or 1 Zettabyte. A close analog from chemistry is Avogadro’s Number (6.023 × 1023, the number of atoms or units in 12 grams of carbon, a mole). So, a Zettabyte is about 0.0016 moles of bytes. Someday, the worldwide Internet will transport a mole of bytes per year. The U.S. Internet of 2015 will be at least 50 times larger than it was in 2006. Growth at these levels will require a “big bang” infusion of bandwidth, storage, and management capabilities throughout the Internet.
Outside Internet transport, according to IDC (Gantz), as of 2006 the total amount of digital data in existence was 0.16 Zettabytes. The same paper estimates that by 2010, the rate of digital data generated worldwide will be ~1 Zettabyte per year. IDC predicts that this will be twice the amount of available storage. By way of example, one single long-term experiment planned for the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva will create an amazing 300 Exabytes of data per year. So, as fast as vendors create storage, we will eat it up, and as Dickens’s Oliver Twist said, we too will say, “Please, sir, I want some more.”
References
John F. Gantz et al, March 2007; The expanding digital universe: A forecast of worldwide information growth through 2010: IDC, Framingham MA 01701 USA.
Gilder, George, Estimating the Exaflood, www.discovery.org. Jan 29, 2008.