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I take it math isn't your strong subject?

US debt is approximately $14 trillion. A peta- is 1000 times larger than a tera- and you are suggesting that the debt is 1000 time larger than that. That's OK, you only missed by a factor of one million.

sounds like there is a job for him in government somewhere!
just kidding
 
I think it's funny all the comments about "is that enough?" I think this proves two things...


1. Most people don't quite understand just how much a million/billion/trillion of something is.

2. People think that this 12PB amount must have been decided upon arbitrarily, as if Apple didn't do a crapload of research to decide what a good starting amount would be.

Here's another good visual representation of trillion, in dollars:
What does a trillion dollars look like?
 
On Stargate Universe last night they were saying Dr. Rush's entire human consciousness was something like 300 terabytes.. so how many people can Apple store in their systems? like 40?

I wanna be saved on a hard drive when I die!
 
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It'll take you little over 111 days to download it's entire capacity via Thunderbolt.
 
Well based on the news that Apple's new NC data center was the largest for a single company. I would say yes.

Largest single data center != largest storage capacity.

According to this link, there are ~170 million Gmail users. Lets say each as 250MB of email in their archive. I am assuming this would be a close average overall. That is 41,503,906.2 GB, or 39.58 PB.

Keep in mind, this does not include the movies (YouTube), Search Indexes or any of the other large-scale services that Google offers.
 
Petabytes didn't exist in my dictionary until today. Thank you, MacRumors.

My first thought has already been said.

Im curious how long that will suffice...

My first question has been asked.

12 petabytes? That doesn't seem like too much, actually. that's 1GB of storage for 12 million customers

My first concern has been noted.

---

This thread has read my mind today. I learned what a Petabyte is - today is a good day.

I am concerned about how long Apple will take to fill that space and need to expand, of course, this is the first round of storage purchasing, and I'm sure there is more to come - but I'm not as concerned as I am interested. The rate at which this storage is used, consumed, and expanded upon will really show how far we've come in terms of computing capacity.

An IT professor I know whom I saw today said, "It's a great time to be alive", and that has stuck with me very well for the past few hours. I truly am happy to be here to witness our expansion in technology. :)

~sheds single tear~
 
am I the only one that thinks this is not enough?

I agree, it doesn't seem like all that much, especially if it's meant to store video. According to Wikipedia, Google processes about 24 PB per day.

I wonder how much storage Netflix has? And their catalog of streaming video is still hardly comprehensive.
 
as a home mac user, im just interested in how these hard-core internet serving hard drives difffer from consumer ones. can any one explain the technical side of it?

do they work like raid and stripe data across load of drives?
what if one fails, do you swap it for a new module, and if so, how is its contents reinstated? also, anyone know what sort of storage system google uses?

just interested.

It's not just hard drives. There are filers on top of the drives and fiber optic connections between the components.

Your typical desktop hard drive runs at 7200 rpm. Depending on the system these may run at 10,000 or even 15,000 rpm. These drives are on a shelf in a rack. The shelves are connected to the filers with fiber.

There are multiple filers and head units. They are connected in such a way that if one fails then another can pick up the slack so you don't get an interruption in service. As the price of the filers go up so does the number of transactions it can handle.

The drives are indeed striped and/or mirrored in some way. How it is setup depends on the needs of the company. In addition to the mirroring and striping the hardware can perform snapshots and backups.

Enterprise storage is a whole different ballgame. Take a look at EMC to get an idea of the offerings.

Hope that made some sense. ;)
 
One thing to note is that this is 12PB of RAW storage. Raid it, add in hot-spares, take into account formatting, and you got yourself 8ish max usable.

decent amount, but not mind-blowing.
 
12 petabytes is mind blowing, i remember my first windows pc with 300mb of hdd space.

i'm not to keen on this whole cloud computing concept that is floating around at the moment. Anyone else have doubts?

I can remember much smaller disk drives, under 100MB that used 14 inch diameter patters and hydraulic pistons to move the read/write heads. The disk drive was about the same size and shape as a home washing machine. This was in the early 1970's.
 
I can remember much smaller disk drives, under 100MB that used 14 inch diameter patters and hydraulic pistons to move the read/write heads. The disk drive was about the same size and shape as a home washing machine. This was in the early 1970's.

Can we go back to floppy drives? I love the way those 5 1/4" floppys.. ummm flopped :)
 
I think it's funny all the comments about "is that enough?" I think this proves two things...


1. Most people don't quite understand just how much a million/billion/trillion of something is.

2. People think that this 12PB amount must have been decided upon arbitrarily, as if Apple didn't do a crapload of research to decide what a good starting amount would be.

Here's another good visual representation of trillion, in dollars:
What does a trillion dollars look like?

Here's what I understand about how much 12 PB is: My own video/music collection is a shade over 3 TB. That's .025% of 12 PB, and that's not taking RAID or similar backup/redundancy solutions into account. Considering how many movies and TV shows I don't own, 12 PB doesn't seem like all that much to me, if you're trying to be a media provider.

I'm generally inclined to trust that Apple knows what it's doing, and I'm sure they did their research well. When I wonder if this will be "enough", this implies that I have some expectations, or at the least hopes, for Apple's plans for this storage capacity. Point being: 12 PB may not be enough for what I'm hoping Apple will offer in the near future, which implies that Apple may not be planning what I'd hoped they were planning.
 
Isilon Systems

The Isilon gear is phenomenal. Lot's of huge players using that gear including Facebook, ABC, etc.

I may be biased (EMC Partner), but I think that is a great choice.
 
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Dwalls90 said:
Well based on the news that Apple's new NC data center was the largest for a single company. I would say yes.

No way ... each gmail account gets upwards of 7 gigabytes of storage ... do you even know how many gmail accounts there are?

Google definitely has more than Apple, it may be that they spread it over multiple data centers, so it's not counted as one.

Yea.. But they dot have 7GB actually sitting there for that one customer. They might have 10 allocated to 10 customers and add as they need to, because I bet 99% of gmail users don't have 1Gb on there! People don't think about stuff like this...

So of EVERYONE had a 64gb iPad that was going to have auto sync to these servers, a 64gb space might work for 2 or 3 customers that only have half or a third of their iPad filled. When a company says you get 7GB they don't hol that space for you, they just allow you to use that much.
 
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Yea.. But they dot have 7GB actually sitting there for that one customer. They might have 10 allocated to 10 customers and add as they need to, because I bet 99% of gmail users don't have 1Gb on there! People don't think about stuff like this...

So of EVERYONE had a 64gb iPad that was going to have auto sync to these servers, a 64gb space might work for 2 or 3 customers that only have half or a third of their iPad filled. When a company says you get 7GB they don't hol that space for you, they just allow you to use that much.

Yup, it's called Thin Provisioning.
 
My first computer had a tape drive. A Commodore Vic 20. I wonder how long a cassette tape needs to be to hold a TB not to mention a PB?

The Datasette transferred around 50 bytes per second.

1 TB = 1099511627776 bytes

1099511627776/50 ~ 21,990,232,556 Seconds or 366,503,876 Minute etc...
 
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