World’s business servers process 9.57 zettabyes a year

May 10, 2011

The annual amount of business-related information processed by the world’s computer servers is 9.57 zettabytes (9.57×10^21 bytes) per year, scientists at the University of California, San Diego have estimated.

This is the digital equivalent of a 5.6-billion-mile-high stack of books from Earth to Neptune and back to Earth, repeated about 20 times a year. The report complements an earlier report on information consumption, which
estimated 3.6 zettabytes of information was consumed by American households in 2008.

The study estimated that enterprise server workloads are doubling about every two years, which means that by 2024, the world’s enterprise servers will annually process about 1.2 yottabytes (1.2×10^24 bytes), the digital equivalent of a stack of books extending more than 4.37 light-years to Alpha Centauri, our closest neighboring star system in the Milky Way Galaxy.

Their report, How Much Information?: 2010 Report on Enterprise Server Information, was released at Storage Networking World’s conference last month.