[ExI] The NSA's new data center

[Eugen Leitl]

On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 09:26:18PM +0100, BillK wrote:

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

If we can handle 10 EBytes/data center today, and we should have an order
of magnitude increase in storage (Seagate just announced progress
allowing up to 60 TByte in 3.5") then 0.1 ZByte/facility in
near (~decade) future is a reasonable expectation.

I agree that geographical separation of data centers is
the way to go.

I don't see much point in pushing the envelope of storage
size too much though, since your bottleneck is data mining
and analyst eyeballseconds, which is not scalable.

It is extremely easy to drown into mountains of data. 
So at least you want to segment into the highly relevant
(numeric or biometric ID) and proactive storage (e.g. Tor
exit or bulk surveillance audio/video) which may be attacked
or transcribed with future technology, but is effectively
dead data for time being.