How Much Space To Store Pi…

By Guy Bunker | August 31, 2010 | Leave a Comment

3.141592654… is about my limit when it comes to remembering Pi… and that seems to have worked for me. However… there is a new world record… Pi to 5 trillion places! (It’s a ’2′ if you were wondering…)

However, the real news here is how much storage it took… 6TB. Not too sure what the real point of doing this is, but it does raise an interesting point on how data is expanding – and what was previously thought as adequate and used to take a few bytes now takes MB or even GB… they call it progress.

20 years ago WordPerfect was my word-processor of choice, and I struggled to get files more than a few kilobytes, these days the average presentation is a few megabytes. Time moves on and organizations are increasingly using multi-media for internal as well as external communications programmes (and even as integral parts of presentations) - the move from ‘standard’ video to HD is another area which is driving storage requirements through the roof at 40GB per hour. When planning for future storage needs, these new technologies and ways of working need to be taken into account. It’s not just the storage that is affected, bandwidth can also be crippled with ‘legitimate’ video use which effects overall performance.

Fortunately, backup technology – both from the application and the backup media perspective are keeping up, but you still need to plan for changes.

Guy Bunker

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