Imagine having access to storage spacious enough to concurrently house every YouTube video ever created…plus the entire Netflix media library…plus a complete archive of Wikipedia…plus 50 billion more high-resolution images from platforms like Instagram and Facebook.
This staggering level of capacity is what the emergent digital unit known as the "exabyte" represents today. As consumer technology hurtles into an increasingly data-centric future, the terminology used to conceptualize our computing power must keep pace. Traditional measurements strained to properly capture massive growth. Thus, more expansive terms like exabyte became necessary additions to our technological lexicon.
But what exactly constitutes an exabyte? And why should we care today? By examining the exponential upward climb in digital information creation and storage over the decades, while also peering ahead at coming innovations, we can properly contextualize this exotic-sounding unit. Appreciating the exponential scale of this capacity not only illuminates how far computing has progressed, but also hints at a bigger-data future hardly fathomable right now!
A Very Brief History of Data Quantification
To comprehend today’s exabyte measurement standard, let’s rewind through some important historical context around computing storage units and timelines first:
1956 – The earliest known reference to a “byte” as a unit of digital information emerged this year in the planning documents for IBM’s first commercial computer disk storage system. Back then, a byte represented a very modest amount – just a single character‘s worth of data.
1970s – As personal and enterprise computing evolved through subsequent decades, relying on bytes as a primary measurement became increasingly impractical. Therefore, new terminology using metric prefixes was adopted, including: Kilobyte (KB) = 1,000 bytes Megabyte (MB) = 1,000 KB (or 1 million bytes)* Gigabytes (GB) = 1,000 MB (or 1 billion bytes)
This naming convention enabled more intuitive comprehension of exponentially rising data capacities.
1990s – By this period, even the gigabyte scale was growing inadequate for measuring cutting-edge computational systems and databases. So the term “exabyte” was first proposed by an IBM engineer to represent an exponential 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes!
2000s – While conceived earlier, the exabyte measurement only entered regular usage once the eruption of big data, cloud computing, social media and other digital platforms began generating utterly voluminous information flows. By 2020, an estimated 2.5 exabytes of new data got created globally every day!
Now firmly incorporated in the computing lexicon, exabytes look to become a standard quantification as data generation and storage scales continue rocketing exponentially higher each year.
Okay, But How Much is an Exabyte Actually?
We know from the history above that this novel term marks a profound quantitative leap. But what analogies and comparisons can provide more tangible context?
-
One exabyte could store approximately 500 trillion pages of standard printed text. Laid out end-to-end, this many pages would wrap around the Earth‘s equator over 1 million times!
-
If digitized into text documents, one exabyte could hold 100 billion copies of an average 300-page dictionary. If printed, that many dictionaries would fill a library the size of 70 Empire State Buildings!
-
One exabyte can contain over 5 billion hours of Netflix video content. To finish watching this much, a viewer would need to start over 600,000 years ago – when early Homo sapiens still roamed prehistoric Africa!
These analogies showcase the exponential scaling that the “exa-” metric prefix represents compared to more familiar units like gigabytes and terabytes. While astounding, exabyte figures will only climb in coming years as cutting-edge data infrastructures expand.
| Storage Unit | Bytes | Example Capacity |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Kilobyte | 1,000 bytes | A few paragraphs of text |
| 1 Megabyte | 1 million bytes | A 5-minute MP3 song |
| 1 Gigabyte | 1 billion bytes | A 2-hour HD movie |
| 1 Terabyte | 1 trillion bytes | All text from a large research library |
| 1 Petabyte | 1 quadrillion bytes | The entire Netflix catalog |
| 1 Exabyte | 1 quintillion bytes | 5 billion hours of HD video |
Data table showcasing exponential growth in units of digital storage
Exabyte-Scale Computing in the Real World
Clearly, exabytes represent an exponentially spacious leap up from consumer-grade storage capacities. Top-of-the-line personal PCs or cloud backup solutions today may support 1-2 terabytes at most. So where do cutting-edge exabyte implementations actually exist?
Primarily, this ultra-large unit sees usage measuring the collective distributed storage of massive-scale corporate cloud networks like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. Experts estimate that as of 2022:
- Total storage across AWS data centers approaches an estimated 12-15 exabytes
- The global physical infrastructure for Microsoft Azure likely maintains a similar 10-15 exabyte cumulative capacity
- Summed across all worldwide Google Cloud buildings and servers, total available space now likely exceeds 10 exabytes and keeps expanding quickly
These hyperscale cloud platforms represent the bleeding edge in terms of radically concentrated computing power and database capacity. Underpinning popular consumer services from streaming movies to social media, photos and online documents, vast interconnected data centers make exabyte-level storage a reality.
And as society’s data generation and collection grows massively year-over-year, even heavyweight tech titans must continually invest in next-gen infrastructure to stay ahead of demand. AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud all aggressively build new facilities regularly, incorporating cutting-edge hardware and processing innovations that push possible capacities higher.
Eyeing the Future: What Comes After Exabytes?
If present growth rates continue, some industry experts forecast that global data creation will explode from ~33 zettabytes in 2018 to ~175 zettabytes by 2025!
For context, each zettabyte can contain a thousand exabytes. So from humanity’s accumulated written works dating back millennia…to the entire photographic catalog since the invention of the camera…and the complete scientific record itself – all of this knowledge combined would total well under a single zettabyte today.
Therefore, while already unimaginably capacious compared to what previous generations considered possible, even the upper-most exabyte measurement risks future obsolescence from coming information explosions!
Ongoing storage demand aside, we should also be encouraged by constant upward technological momentum. Underlying infrastructure, transmission protocols, and processing hardware enabling exabyte Lifting, management and utilization all continue rapidly improving too. Previously exotic capacities eventually normalize and become commonplace thanks to human innovation.
So while the cyclopean exabyte scale dazzles right now, remember that the march of progress only accelerates going forward. Terabyte drives felt similarly mammoth and unreachable to early personal computer owners circa 1990! The next generations of quantum, biological and DNA computing could make capacities we can’t yet fathom seem as quaint as yesterday’s floppy disks one day…
References:
- The History of Data Storage in Computers by the IBPI
- Tracking the Rise of Exabyte-Scale Data Centers by ScienceDirect
- Global Data Sphere to Grow 175 Zettabytes by 2025 by IDC
- How Big is ‘Too Big’? AWS, Azure and Google Go Hyperscale in Different Directions by Blocks and Files
