Imagine measuring the world’s digital data – every download, every blog post, and every “tweet” that’s created and duplicated on the web. In May 2010, the International Data Corporation (IDC) created a study predicting that all of the world’s digital data would reach 1.2 zettabytes (or 1.2 million petabytes) by the end of 2010 and 35 zettabytes by the year 2020.
This is quite an extraordinary number, but how are we supposed to house all of this data? Virtualization and deduplication are options, but the IDC believes that cloud computing will play a vital role in the storing these extensive amounts data. However one thing is certain, as the amount of digital information continues to skyrocket, many of us are exploring and finding different ways to store all of this data.