Monday, September 04, 2006

Information overload

Information overload:

As and when i type out, the keys that i press are transformed to ones and zero's and then its pushed to the computer, that displays the keys are they are "supposed" to appear. now, the word document that saves the words that are typed by me is again saved as ones and zeros. the now the whole world, has been converted to ones and zero's. this means that these one's and zero;s are growing faster than the fusion on the sun, and this information explosion is going to hit us so hard, we wont know what hit us?

to us what is a file that is being saved? 45KB that is saved on my 40Giga Byte harddrive. gone are the days that a 128Kbyte harddisk is top of the line, now a days, disk players are coming with more memory than that.

So where is this going?with one document after another being churned out every minuute, the frantic typing of keyboards shows that there is information going into the system to be stored. now this systems then gets put onto the internet, and displayed for the world to see. However, there is a physical aspect to the whole thing.

Where there is a physical dimension, there will be a limit, where there is a limit, there will be a cost.

So where is the information overload heading? Currently, there are the Terra bytes, and so on, and Apple's XSAN claims to be able to handle PetaBytes, thas the size of the GigaByte, raised to the power of five! So where does all this lead to? The cost of storage is skyroketing! with cost per GB gradually declining due to the technology cost time curve, the volume of the storage is increasing at rates of close to 100%. Now with social sites coming and people "connecting" there is a spurt of storage requirement. Take for example "you tube" or "flickr", a site that allows people to upload and share photos. There is a poitn where it costs the user nothing to share, but the company to provide the storage space, and as and when this stoage grows, the costs allocated to the company's storage also grows?

there needs to be a more streamlined thought process on Data & storage dynamics.People should be more concious on where what when how. there are always, multiple copies of files stored in multiple locations. Companies taking
backups are taking the backup of the same data.

There was a report that said 60% of the information on certain systems were accessed last about twelve months ago.

That leaves us with the picture that more than a couple of TB of data is lying blocked. It is not an asset now but a liability, and hence a white elephant.

People need to be taking an active role in making sure that the data that is stored is of use and not something that will not be seen after a while. if there are internet links that have interesting documents, the best thing to do is either save the links on files, or other bookmarking sites like www.del.icio.us can be made use of to save on stoage space by bookmarking the sites.

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