Infographic: Visualizing the Petabyte Age

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In this infographic supplied the online backup company Mozy, we get a glimpse of the scale of a petabyte, which is equal to one quadrillion bytes of data.

Since this graphic was created by Mozy, you might be wondering how many petabytes Mozy has stored, and the answer to that question is roughly 15 petabytes. The graphic contains many intriguing facts, such as the fact that that worldwide datacenters now annually consume as much energy as Sweden. Hardrives are getting larger and larger, but they remain affordable because the price of them continues to go down. In 2007, Hitachi announced the world’s first terabyte hard drive which holds 1000 Gigabytes. One company, Colossal storage, predicts that it will have a 1.2 petabyte hard drive on the market in the next 2-5 years.

Read the Full Story at The Infographics Showcase. And to put all this in the perspective of HPC, check out John West’s excellent article from SC10: Zettabytes, Petabytes, and All That: The Intersection of Supercomputing and all the Data We Create.