Each Person Will Have Information Equal to 36 Tons of Book

According to a report, the amount of digital information produced and distributed by humanity is expected to reach 988 EBs (Exabyte, one EB equals 1024 PB), or 1.359 trillion GB by 2010. Last year, the digital information produced and distributed throughout the world stood at 161 EB.

This means that the era of the ZB (Zetabyte, one ZB equals 1024 EB, 1.737 trillion GB), which is known as the “dream unit” in the IT industry, will be launched. If the information contained in one ZB were printed, it would translate into 36 tons of books per person on the planet.

UCC Caused the Explosive Growth of Digital Information-

The major reason for the information tsunami is the rapid increase in the amount of information that individuals produce, including UCC.

The IDC estimated that 70 percent of the world’s digital information would be created by individuals by 2010.

As of 2007, there are more than one billion digital cameras (camera phones and CCTVs included) in the world, and the UCC-driven video clip frenzy is exponentially expanding the amount of large-capacity data.

The digitization of analog information, including paper works at companies and public organizations and films, is also pointed out as a reason for the expansion. The increase in e-mail is also an important reason. The number of e-mail accounts in the world grew to 1.6 billion in 2006 from 253 million in 1996.

The Capacity of PCs Will Increase to One TB-

Such an explosion of digital information is predicted to expand greatly the capacity of PCs and corporation information storage.

The PC industry says that the maximum storage capacity of PCs will hit the one TB mark (Terabyte, one TB equals 1024 GB) by the latter half of this year.

Corporate storage has reached TB-level capacity, but will be upgraded to PB (petabyte, one PB equals 1024 TB). In the corporate storage market, storage with one-PB capacity already appeared in August 2005.

Some overseas financial institutions, including Citibank, and Korean Internet service providers that offer video clip services, including NHN and Daum Communications, are managing PB-level data libraries. The database of resident registration numbers of Koreans is about two PB large.

mikemoon@donga.com