Storage and enterprise archiving

Astudy conducted at the Berkeley School of Information Management and Systems concluded that the world generated more than 5 exabytes (5 billion gigabytes [GB]) of recorded information in 2002. This represents a 30% growth per year for the past 5 years. More information has been generated in the past 3 years alone than in the previous 40,000 years of civilization combined. The entire printed Library of Congress holds 17 million books, or 136 terabytes (TB) of data. Hospitals have seen a parallel data explosion, especially in the imaging modalities. A single 2000-slice computed tomography (CT) procedure captures 1 GB of information. Advances in molecular imaging, multispectral imaging, and physiologic imaging suggest that the rate of growth in storage requirements will only accelerate in the future. We have clearly entered the era of information overload, and our success now depends on how well we can capture, retrieve, and synthesize this avalanche of information.