Impossible Situations, Increasing Storage, and Wasting Energy

I taught Sunday School for the first time two weeks ago and for the second time last Sunday. I told my students (10-11 year olds) to think of an impossible situation that they were in the God could help them with. The memory verse was, "For nothing is impossible with God." I had a boy and a girl who went to school together. The girl said her impossible problem was making the boy disappear. The boy said his impossible problem was getting the girl to be quiet. They both wrote a prayer to that effect. Christian love and brotherly kindness all around...

I read an interesting article in Forbes entitled Too Much Information (bugmenot.com; UN: "schmoe"; PW: "schmoe"). The article's point was when you get terabytes of information in a database, a single query can take days to run. A new company Netezza (sidebar of Too Much Information) makes computers with processors and memory (with a basic database program on it) embedded in the hard drives. The query is passed to the processors which query the data on their hard drive(s) and then only return the relevant info. A query that took 10 IBM mainframes 10 days to process now takes 30 minutes on this company's machines.

This was all incredibly interesting, but for me not very practical (our database is a mere 40 GBs). What I did find interesting is some new advances in magnetic storage that by Going Vertical (sidebar), disk capacity can be increased tenfold.

There are also some interesting quotes about the massive amounts of data storage space (that dude has an interesting tech blog) being utilized:

"A decade ago the biggest data centers in the U.S. had 10 terabytes of storage, and there were only five or ten of them. Today we have customers with 2 or 3 petabytes," says Gil Press, senior director of open software at EMC, the manufacturer of disk storage systems in Hopkinton, Mass. Visa, the credit card company, manages more than a petabyte, or 1,000 terabytes. EMC says one of its biggest customers, a global retailer, expects to buy 3 petabytes of capacity this year (not all from EMC). Two years ago the same company bought 300 terabytes.

Storage shipments this year will top 22 exabytes-or 22 million trillion bytes-of hard disk space, says market researcher IDC. That is four times the space needed to store every word ever spoken by every human being who has ever lived, and it's more than double the amount sold in 2002. By 2006 storage shipments will nearly double again, IDC estimates.

Plunging disk drive costs make this possible. Ten years ago a gigabyte cost $500. Today it's a buck. So why not save everything? In fact, why not save it twice, keeping backups in a remote spot in case disaster strikes? Doing just that, KeyCorp, the Cleveland, Ohio bank, will have 200 terabytes under management by the end of 2005, up tenfold in three years.

As I mentioned earlier, I got three 160 GB drives. I want to get a quad drive external Firewire casing for those three and another 160 GB drive I have for a total of 640 GB of storage. Puny in comparison to the numbers bandied about above. =)

I read an interesting column in Forbes (in case you're wondering: Yes, I did spend the evening reading Forbes cover to cover. I also took a very nice 1.5 hour nap. Both of these things were possible because Kids Klub was canceled because of a double-booked gym) about (don't you hate these long comments in parentheses that make you go back to the beginning of a sentence and start over to comprehend what in the world the sentence started out trying to say?) The Virtue of Waste. It makes an interesting read. It talks about how 6,600 watts of energy are needed to power a laser with a 20 watt output.

The author (coauthor of The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, The Birtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy and Hard Green: Saving the Environment From the Environmentalists) says this is an unavoidable result of the second law of thermodynamics. He finishes up:

This much is certain: It is by throwing energy overboard that we maintain and increase the order of our existence. Waste, in other words, is as virtuous as order, as virtuous as a tidy room, clean dishes, plaque-free teeth, a sterile operating theater or ice in the refrigerator. You cannot get or maintain such things without dissipating energy. Life and growth being inescapably dissipative processes, waste is as virtuous as life itself.

Certainly a different viewpoint from CW (I read the Washington Post; maybe my view of CW is more liberal than it should be), but an interesting and intelligent argument.