http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/11/01/nsa...http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/11/01/nsa-to-store-yottabytes-of-surveillance-data-in-utah-megar

Now, a yottabyte is a trillion terabytes, or only 500 billion of the new 2 TB drives. I sure would like the sales commission on that order!

And you think you've got data backup problems? :-)

Likewise, you think you have network traffic and congestion problems?

But maybe this new site IS the off-site backup. Why else would they put all of that data in one place, where it would be vulnerable to a natural or man-made catastrophe? But maybe the Mormons will erect some invisible shield over them.

Actually, the original article was speculating. Maybe they only need a couple of hundred petabytes.

The comments that follow are hysterical -- all this stuff about the government being 20 years ahead of industry, yada, yada, yada.

I've worked with and around NSA for going on 40 years, and so it is pretty easy to think back to what they had 20, 30, or 40 years ago, vs. what they have now. 40 years ago, they had Walnut, which was a high-capacity storage device built by IBM (where I worked at the time) that used relatively short strips of tape in a juke-box strip-picker. Boy, was that ahead of its time! Boy, did that technology NOT pan out!

(11-02-2009 12:13 PM)Suite B Wrote:  40 years ago, they had Walnut, which was a high-capacity storage device built by IBM (where I worked at the time) that used relatively short strips of tape in a juke-box strip-picker. Boy, was that ahead of its time! Boy, did that technology NOT pan out!

Isn't that a tape drive?

Yottabyte, that is a lot of TB drives.