Petaboxes starting to ship

Petaboxes starting to ship. The Petabox: A Million Gigabytes of Storage.

In a phone call yesterday, Brewster Kahle mentioned that the wonderful Internet Archive's Petabox was up and running. That's one million gigabytes. What is a million petabytes?

[Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

Internet Archive's Petabox: a 1,000 terabyte array. The Internet Archive has just installed its first Petabox, “a machine designed to safely store and process one petabyte of information (a petabyte is a million gigabytes).” Bookmark this entry and come back to it in five years, when you get a Petabox's worth of storage (with, say, high-resolution scans of the contents of the entire Library of Congress) free under the lid of your lucky Super Big Gulp. Link (via Hack the Planet) [boingboing]

Now you know why I've been hanging out at the Internet Archievs recently.  What Brewster is doing will clearly change the world.  You don't see Bill Gates using his money to give us all free storage.  I saw 100T is one rack, which is 1/10th of a petabox. 

The whole thing draw as much power as four hair dryers.  Since you can store the entire Library of Congress in 25T – that means you can power the library of Congress with one hair dryer's worth of power.

Now that Blogware has shipped, look for Tucows to step up to the bar – as well.  the combination of Tucows and Internet Archives is going to create an amazing infrastrcture for open standards and open projects.  [Marc's Voice]

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