Here Comes the Zettabyte Age

How much information is out there?

For most of us, “a crapload” is a sufficiently accurate answer. But for a few obsessive data analysts, more precision is necessary. According to a recent study by market-research company IDC, and sponsored by storage company EMC, the size of the information universe is currently 800,000 petabytes. Each petabyte is a million gigabytes, or the equivalent of 1,000 one-terabyte hard drives.

If you stored all of this data on DVDs, the study’s authors say, the stack would reach from the Earth to the moon and back.

That’s a 62% increase over the amount of digital information floating around the year before — but it’s just a down payment on next year’s total, which will reach 1.2 million petabytes, or 1.2 zettabytes.

If these growth rates continue, by 2020 the digital universe will total 35 zettabytes, or 44 times more than in 2009.

It’s interesting to compare IDC’s study with a recent UC San Diego report on how much information Americans consume per year. According to that study, media consumption in 2008 added up to�3.6 zettabytes and 10,845 trillion words, or about 34 gigabytes per person per day.

Much of the media we view (TV shows, streaming video from YouTube) is centrally stored, on internet-connected servers, so the totals for consumption are naturally higher than the storage requirements.

IDC notes that while data storage will increase 44-fold by 2020, the number of IT professionals worldwide will only grow by 40%, which means each IT guy is going to have a lot more data to oversee.

Good luck with that, guys!