back to article Digital Universe adds sextillions to hit 487 billion gigs

IDC has under-predicted the growth in the amount of digital information, again, with millions of gigabytes of extra data created in 2008. The tech research firm claims business CIOs are having to make tough decisions, as huge information growth places ever-increasing demands on shrinking resources. John Gantz, IDC's chief …

COMMENTS

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    What are the effects?

    "A usually unreliable source tells us that Data Domain is commissioning a report on the effects of de-duplicating the digital universe."

    Effect #1: The digital universe slows to a crawl.

    Effect #2: You log a support call, and are then informed that your digital universe contains too much 'already-compressed' data: videos, mp3s, photos.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Figures

    Since you are talking about something that is almost scientific use scientific notation NOT the funny US monetary notation in which a billion is only a thousand million and not a million million.

  3. TeeCee Gold badge

    487 billion gigabytes

    400 billion of which nobody knows whether they're actually needed or not, but they won't delete them "just in case".

    After all, disk is cheap (pound in swearbox).........

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    Ha ha ha

    Where are your data retention laws now Mr.Government? that's right, up into the wee small hours away from house and hearth, to search for that oh so terrible hint of potential terrorism. Don't say I didn't told you so.

  5. Will Godfrey Silver badge
    Unhappy

    No good

    This expression will never catch on in the UK.

    Anyone who tries to use it will quickly find their details on the se^H^H procreation offenders register.

  6. Moss Icely Spaceport
    Boffin

    Quick!

    Buy more tubes!!!!

  7. Neoc

    "Those who fail to learn from history..."

    "...commissioning a report on the effects of de-duplicating the digital universe. Preliminary research indicates that it could shrink by up to 70 per cent,..."

    Anyone who has ever worked with large databases *knows* that there is not such thing as an ONF database. For those of you who don't grock, ONF means that the database has no data-replication *anywhere* except for keys (duh).

    While ONF is a worthy goal on paper, real life HW constraints means that to get data in decent time, *some* data replication is required. The actual amount of replication varies from DB to DB depending on the needs of the business, but it is *always* there.

    Same thing here - some "information" is so retrieval-time-critical that local duplication will be preferable to singularity.

  8. Mayhem

    De-duplication

    And five minutes after the de-duplication is completed, a hardware failure occurs and all their nicely redundant data backups are no longer there...

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