CERN Data Centre Passes the 200 Petabytes

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
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Let's start with what is a Petabyte? I will give you a hint. I will give you a hint. It is not a wound inflicted by your neighbor's dog.

The petabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. The prefix peta indicates the fifth power of 1000 and means 1015 in the International System of Units SI, and therefore 1 petabyte is one quadrillion (short scale) bytes, or 1 billiard (long scale) bytes. The unit symbol for the petabyte is PB.

So....1 PB equals 1,000 Terabytes, or 1,000,000 Gigabytes. Wow. Now my 512GB SSD seems very very small. I now have petabyte envy. Anyway, the post of this news post is to report that the CERN data center now houses over 200PB of data that it has collected, and it only keeps the "interesting" stuff...ON TAPE! 200PB is 2e+8GB, if you were wondering.

On 29 June 2017, the CERN DC passed the milestone of 200 petabytes of data permanently archived in its tape libraries. Where do these data come from? Particles collide in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) detectors approximately 1 billion times per second, generating about one petabyte of collision data per second. However, such quantities of data are impossible for current computing systems to record and they are hence filtered by the experiments, keeping only the most "interesting" ones.

Of course the real question is how long will it take to download it all if they change cloud TOS and need the data back?
 
Glad I don't have to figure out a back up solution for that much stuff. And I though 80tb was bad to deal with.
 
How many pornhubs per petabyte?

I need to understand it like football fields to yards.
 
Not that surprising considering the amount of data they must generate.

I currently support over 200TB on the servers I manage at the small company I work for. :eek:

You could also add about another 100TB when you include desktops, laptops, and various test systems.
Just got a request for a couple more servers with an additional 28TB of storage.

Might have to upgrade the tape drive soon, as the 2.5TB LTO-6 tapes are starting to seem a little small.
 
Where I work, we have about 1.5PB of storage in a single rack with our latest hardware arch. We have about a dozen of those racks in production, and one or two in the lab. So, 200PB doesn't seem too giant to me, but, it is still quite a lot of bits out there.
 
Where I work, we have about 1.5PB of storage in a single rack with our latest hardware arch. We have about a dozen of those racks in production, and one or two in the lab. So, 200PB doesn't seem too giant to me, but, it is still quite a lot of bits out there.

So - Do you work at Visa or MasterCard?
 
"Centre?" What are you British (or Canadian, Irish, South African, Australian, New Zealander or dyslexic)? :p Someone get this guy a Freedom Dictionary stat!
 
So 1 second of data generate 1 PB? So they have 200 seconds of data?
 
How old is that graphic that was used showing how big a petabyte is? 10+ years? It says 20 petabytes is the total hard drive space manufactured since 1995. I would have thought we surpassed that last decade.
 
How old is that graphic that was used showing how big a petabyte is? 10+ years? It says 20 petabytes is the total hard drive space manufactured since 1995. I would have thought we surpassed that last decade.

It says the total hdd space manufactured IN 1995, not SINCE.
 
So when are they going to process this data and solve the universe ( and start passing red pills)
 
That's a lot of 1s and 0s.

If I use high compression, will that fit on my old IOMega ZIP drive? Think I'll need more than one or two disks?
 
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