Bignums
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Enterprise, Storage on
Did you ever have one of those days when everything seemed to be getting bigger?
I recently put the largest machine we’ve ever had onto our office network. A 64-bit server, with 6GB of RAM and 1TB of disk, it’s taken on the role of handling all our mail and files. When a new desktop PC arrives later this week, there’ll be over 7TB of storage on this small office network.
Just a couple of years ago we were surprised if we had more than 500GB of storage in an office. Turning back the clock still further, I helped design a UK-scale photo storage service, where we had a hierarchical storage system with a whole 3TB of spinning disk and 30TB of fast tape. Today’s fast external drives are making that architecture obsolete - our new server is using eSATA to do a whole server backup onto a 500GB drive. That back up? It only takes 30 minutes…
Outside out office the usual run of press releases seem focused on delivering larger and larger numbers. Cuil’s leaked launch (and the claimed size of its index) led Google to claim that it had indexed over 1 trillion web pages. That’s a pretty big number - 10 to the power of 12. It’s also the approximate number of bacteria living on the human body.
Closer to home, BT is claiming that it’s hooked up just under 17 million homes with broadband connections. It turns out that there aren’t many more homes to be connected, with broadband analysts Point Topic suggesting there are only around a million households that can migrate to broadband left - and around 9.6 million that don’t have internet access at all. The days of massive growth in broadband are behind us now, and what was a luxury is rapidly becoming a commodity. It would be interesting to see the spreadhseets at BT, as the company juggles the numbers to see how it can make money from running the data pipes.
After all, there’s plenty of scope for bringing the world online. Gartner recently suggested that there were over a billion PCs in use around the world (and soon there’ll be a billion transistors in each processor, thanks to Intel). While getting to a billion PCs in 30 years may seem a lot, there’ll be another billion in just 6 years, thanks to 12% annual growth. There
’s a lot of scope for significant social change here, as the emerging world (and especially the BRIC nations) start coming on line. The anglophile web will become just a part of a global, multi-lingual web - after all, even without the iPhone, China Mobile subscribers use more mobile data than any other network.
With all those machines, and all that information out there, there’s an issue of managing the information - and manging the storage it requires. The BBC has just such a problem.
The archive is currently managing about 700,000 digital items, with most of it still on discrete media (digital video tape, CDs, DVDs). There are about 280,000 actual master files, digitised from U-Matic video and 1/4″ audio originals, and from magnetic sound tracks. Then there are 60,000 viewing-quality video files, but these are held on CD-ROM in anticipation of a mass storage system. Overall they’re managing 12 petabytes, mainly on digital videotape - with a growth rate of about 400 terabytes a year, mainly on digital videotape.
If the numbers in your office are getting to big, be glad you’re not dealing with any of the really big numbers out there!
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