A dedicated group consisting of three UC San Diego folks has tried to answer a well known unknown question that how much data we transfer around the world annually. The group’s finding after thorough research has been published by PhysOrg according to which some 9.57 zettabytes of information made its way in and out of servers all around the world during 2008.
1 Zettabyte means 9,570,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes or 957,000,000,000,000 Gigabytes. To visualize such amount of data imagine a stack of Stephen King’s longest novel (2.5MB of data) from Earth to Neptune and back 20 times (analogy from the original report).
The report further mentions that there are approximately 27 million computer servers around the world and the total server sales is about $53.3 billion (in 2008).
Further, low end servers costing around $25,000 processed about 65% of the 9.57ZB information with mid-range servers crunching about 30% and high-end servers costing $500,000+ handling the remaining 5%.
The research didn’t include the data processed by private servers built by Google, Microsoft and others because of which it is safe to assume that the 9.57ZB is an underestimated figure.
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Download the complete report (PDF).
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