Cloud computing doesn’t really mean storing your data in a cloud: it means your stuff’s been stuck on a server in an enormous temperature-controlled room somewhere.
That doesn’t mean it has to be in a boring building, though: it could be down a mine, in something that looks like Dr Evil’s control centre or even off the coast of Suffolk.
Here are 10 weird places that data can be, will be or has been stored in.
» via TechRadar
It’s an odd statistic. How is that data measured? 90% of all documents? 90% of stored bytes? When they said “ever again” did they mean explicitly retrieved by name, or should we include free text searches in that statistic? How long an interval needs to pass before some piece of data is clearly identified as belonging to the 90%, so that steps can be taken to reflect its reduced importance?
These questions are just the starting point for an issue that demands quite a lot of thinking. It’s a fascinating finding to be offered to you by a vendor of servers, given that so few of the devices they try to sell to smaller organisations actually reflect this “fact” in their hardware and software specification.
» via PC Pro
File cabinets and human minds are information-storage systems. We could model computerized information-storage on the mind instead of the file cabinet if we wanted to.
Elements stored in a mind do not have names and are not organized into folders; are retrieved not by name or folder but by contents. (Hear a voice, think of a face: you’ve retrieved a memory that contains the voice as one component.) You can see everything in your memory from the standpoint of past, present and future. Using a file cabinet, you classify information when you put it in; minds classify information when it is taken out.
By way of stark contrast between the output of present day humanity and its pre-digital predecessor, experts estimate that all human language used since the dawn of time would take up about 5,000 petabytes if stored in digital form, which is less than 1% of the digital content created since someone first switched on a computer.This year, the planet’s digital content will blast through the zettabyte barrier to reach 1.2 ZB, according to the fourth annual survey of the world’s bits and bytes conducted by technology consultancy IDC and sponsored by IT firm EMC. A zettabyte, incidentally, is roughly half a million times the entire collections of all the academic libraries in the United States.
Hard disk systems have recently encounted a storage density ceiling. Most methods in use today have a limit of a few hundred gigabytes per square inch thanks to perpendicular recording. To try to keep storage density rising, scientists have looked at technologies from holographic storage to molecular polymers, but few have made it past the demonstration stage. In a paper in Nature Photonics this week, researchers describe a way to combine two hard drive writing methods to store data at densities of up to one terabyte per square inch, and suggest the media could be stable up to ten terabytes per square inch.
» via ars technica
Sony announced on April 23rd that they will be discontinuing sales of the classic 3.5 inch floppy disk in Japan in 2011. The news marks a major end to a nearly three decade history of the disk type that the company helped to pioneer.
According to Sony, they introduced the 3.5 inch floppy disk size to the world in 1981, and began sales within Japan in 1983. Sony had shipped approximately 47 million disks within the country at its peak around the year 2000, but that number had fallen to around 8.5 million by 2009, Sankei News reported.
» via examiner.com
This probably isn’t a response to the 3D onslaught or even “superbit” releases like the upcoming Avatar 2D disc, but just in case the standard 50GB Blu-ray discs were beginning to feel a bit — how do you say… cramped? — the Blu-ray Disc Association’s rolling out a new BDXL format capable of holding up to 128GB (write-once) or 100GB (rewriteable). Before you get too excited, you should know that you’ll need a new player to access these — even a firmware update won’t save the PS3 this time — since they go up to three or four layers deep and will likely need a more powerful laser.
» via Engadget
Digital doomsday: the end of knowledge
“IN MONTH XI, 15th day, Venus in the west disappeared, 3 days in the sky it stayed away. In month XI, 18th day, Venus in the east became visible.”
What’s remarkable about these observations of Venus is that they were made about 3500 years ago, by Babylonian astrologers. We know about them because a clay tablet bearing a record of these ancient observations, called the Venus Tablet of Ammisaduqa, was made 1000 years later and has survived largely intact. Today, it can be viewed at the British Museum in London.
We, of course, have knowledge undreamt of by the Babylonians. We don’t just peek at Venus from afar, we have sent spacecraft there. Our astronomers now observe planets round alien suns and peer across vast chasms of space and time, back to the beginning of the universe itself. Our industrialists are transforming sand and oil into ever smaller and more intricate machines, a form of alchemy more wondrous than anything any alchemist ever dreamed of. Our biologists are tinkering with the very recipes for life itself, gaining powers once attributed to gods.
Yet even as we are acquiring ever more extraordinary knowledge, we are storing it in ever more fragile and ephemeral forms. If our civilisation runs into trouble, like all others before it, how much would survive?
» via New Scientist
Recently I heard the chief information officer of a large technology company observe that the consolidation and convergence of IT infrastructure is forcing a consolidation and convergence within his own department. He observed that because platforms are converging around server virtualization projects and a future rollout of virtual desktops, narrowly focused IT administrative groups must also converge. In the future, IT competency will be in systems and services delivery rather than in stove-piped areas of expertise like servers, networks, and storage. Furthermore he believes that the IT jobs market will value “converged’ administrators.
As a final point, he observed that the role of the storage administrator within IT operations was disappearing—this from the CIO of a large storage vendor.
» via CNET news
Original Content — Copyright © 2010
Christopher D. Barth.
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