Size of server 'universe'

When we transfer or upload our data into email, forum, imageshack, youtube,
web, or whatever, where are our data stored? Is it a place called as a server?
How much is the maximum data can be contained in our overall server 'universe'?
Is it unlimited? Or is it possible that one day comes a time when nobody can
upload or transfer anything anymore into this server universe because it is full,
and that the only way to overcome it is to clean up or delete the existing data?

 

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hey Inzomnia

how r u my darling??

i guess the server world will never completely fill up as we will just build more!!! unless of course we run out of the raw materials to build the components

 

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Hola Zak,

I am fine, thanks, except that the sky isn't Les Bleus

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And you?

Is a server a kind of place with tons of hard disk?

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A server is no different than the computer that you are typing on now.
Most of them have greater capacity and speed (though not all) - other than that, they are pretty much the same thing.

 

when you upload something, it is stored in the servers of the company whose services you are using

companies that deal with a lot of data, need lots of servers

google, for example, operates 450000 servers

a big data center looks like this

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People can also buy more storage

 

Yes. When we upload things, like the text of this post, to the Internet, it gets stored on a server or a cluster of servers somewhere. It may stay in memory for a while, but it will eventually end up on a hard drive, which is for longer term storage.

What do you mean by overall server 'universe'? Do you mean all of the servers in the world? Or do you mean all of the servers for a particular organization, like Google?

The maximum data that can be stored is finite either way. However, the amount of data computers can hold keep increasing. Hard drives continually get exponentially higher in capacity. It almost seems unlimited. We can hold a lot of data with our current servers, but that's nothing compared to what it will be like in 10 years.

The interesting thing is that our old data take up so little space compared to now, because when those data were created, we didn't have technology to hold huge files. Now we do. And that will always be the case.

For example, when I got my Elph (digital camera) 7 years ago, I thought it was a big deal. The pictures were very high quality for the time at 2 megapixels. They took up about half a megabyte for each picture. I thought my 128 CF card was awesome. I thought those pictures were huge and that my CF card was huge. But now, that's not the case. Now we can take pictures that take up 5 megabytes a piece and not worry about it, because we have 16 and 32 gigabyte flash memory, terabyte hard drives and USB 2.0 and Firewire to transfer those data very fast. In seven years those half megabyte files have become TINY and you can fit an incredible number of those pictures on a terabyte hard drive.

It doesn't matter that our files are huge because in short time, they won't be.

 

Wowww, thanx Varda! All this time I thought our data are stored between
'the cables'.. as I started to use wi-fi, I wonder, where are my data? is it
somewhere up in the air?

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If google operates 450,000 servers then I think we're save. I mean, 450,000
is something countable.. I wonder though how many boxes they need to install
per year? I mean, we are all keep uploading stuffs.. every minutes, everybody..

 

Yeah, I mean that one in the bold text. How long has google operates, does anybody
knows? Anyway, I will look up myself.

 

Oh 20 years google has been operating. Within 20 years, it has 450,000 servers... and
I assume it was, is, and will always be exponential??

 

Perhaps theoretically we may some day run out of places to put servers, but practically speaking it is not finite.

I suppose there is some theoretical threshold that can be breached at which point we are creating data faster than we can build drives and servers to store it, but I can see ever reaching that point.

The amount of data we can store is, for all practical purposes, infinite.

This matters little, because, as was said, you could always add more servers and we can already store multiple terabytes on a single drive array.

 

Some believe so:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_Law
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

 

What happened if one day suddenly there is fire and all those boxes of server
get burnt? Or say, terrorist act, somebody jealous with google and destroy
everything. Do we lose everything??

 

Thanks for the link, I'll look at them both.

 

Ten or twenty zettabytes.

~String

 

They are not all in one big building somewhere.
They are in many thousands of locations all over the world - including people's houses.
Most larger companies and hosting companies have backup servers in multiple locations so that if something happens to server A in location Y or something happens to location Y itself, then server B in location Z will take over.

 

Not even close yet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettabyte

 

Fascinating! Btw, transistor manufacturing gotta be such a big business then.

 

I'd agree with this. However, that's very different from actually being unlimited.

You're very wrong here. It matters a whole hell of a lot. Think about what you're saying. If computers didn't continually get higher in capacity, where would we be? When our capacity gets low you say we'd just add more servers. But would that have worked back in the 70s? Would we simply add more servers with more drives like this

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which hold maybe 100 megs? No. I mean, we could have, but we never would have advanced. If our technology stopped advancing, yeah, we could just add more terabytes, but the huge growth in capacity of individual computers makes a giant difference. Could we be running the advanced applications of today if we were using that hard drive posted above? No way. In the future, they'll look back to our present and say the same thing. So to say it matters little is incredibly superbly incorrect.

 

I disagree, but only time will tell.
I think practical application drives the progress, and we will start seeing a slowdown soon, as people stop spending money on bigger, better, faster, more when what they have now does so much more than they will every practically need.

We shouod revisit this in ten years.

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