[Term of the Day]: zettabyte (ZB)
Term of the Day
“zettabyte (ZB)”
Definition — What does zettabyte (ZB) mean?
A zettabyte is a unit of measurement used by technology professionals and the general public to describe a computer or other device's storage capacity. The number of bytes is equal to 2 to the 70th power, also expressed as 1 sextillion bytes.
One Zettabyte is approximately equal to a thousand Exabytes, a billion Terabytes, or atrillion Gigabytes.
For more than a decade, Cisco has been tracking and projecting global Internet traffic growth and associated networking trends through the Visual Networking Index (VNI). From day one, the Zettabyte has been a benchmark that their analysts have targeted as a major networking milestone.
According to their assessments and considering the fact that the Internet essentially began to scale for global consumer and business use in the early 1980s (see Wikipedia for an independent Internet history), the world’s collective global Internet traffic reached an annual run rate of one Zettabyte on September 9, 2016. It’s taken nearly four decades of global innovation and expansion to reach this digital peak.
While it took nearly forty years to reach the global Zettabye annual run rate, it is predicted that it won’t take nearly that long to reach two Zettabytes. Based on their current projections, the world will reach 2.3 Zettabytes of annual Internet traffic by 2020 (in just four years!).
It is also estimated that Annual global IP traffic will reach 4.8 ZB per year by 2022.
Thinking in terms of bytes alone doesn’t really do this milestone justice. On a fun side note, Cisco's VNI analysts developed a non-networking Zettabyte equivalency to help visualize and quantify the ushering in of a new era.
- If each Terabyte in a Zettabyte were a kilometer, it would be equivalent to 1,300 round trips to the moon and back (768,800 kilometers).
- If each Petabyte in a Zettabyte were a centimeter, then we could reach a height 12 times higher than the Burj Khalifa (the world’s tallest building at 828 meters high).
- If every Gigabyte in a Zettabyte were a meter, it could span the distance of the Amazon River (the world’s longest river at 6,992 kilometers) more than150,000 times.
- If each Gigabyte in a Zettabyte were a brick, 258 Great Walls of China (made of 3,873,000,000 bricks) could be built.