[ExI] The NSA's new data center

[BillK]

On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 8:57 PM, Eugen Leitl  wrote:
> Database sizes are irrelevant, you're running a highly specialized system,
> not stock Oracle.
>
> It's perfectly possible to keep ~PByte/rack online, and I would put
> the limit at 10^4 racks/facility. So in practice you're looking at
> ~10 EByte/facility. It's probably more ~1 EByte/facility.
>
>


kilobyte (kB) 	10^3 	
megabyte (MB) 	10^6 	
gigabyte (GB) 	10^9 	
terabyte (TB) 	10^12
petabyte (PB) 	10^15
exabyte (EB) 	10^18
zettabyte (ZB) 	10^21
yottabyte (YB) 	10^24

The original article says 'as a 2007 Department of Defense report puts
it, the Pentagon is attempting to expand its worldwide communications
network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes
(1024 bytes) of data.'

Wikipedia says:
In January 2012, Cray began construction of the Blue Waters
Supercomputer, which will have a capacity of 500 petabytes making it
the largest storage array ever, if realized.
------------


So for yottabytes the NSA must either be thinking years in the future,
or planning many separate but linked data centres.


BillK