And so it goes ...
[...] Inside, the facility [NSA Utah Data Center] will consist of four 25,000-square-foot halls filled with servers, complete with raised floor space for cables and storage. In addition, there will be more than 900,000 square feet for technical support and administration. The entire site will be self-sustaining, with fuel tanks large enough to power the backup generators for three days in an emergency, water storage with the capability of pumping 1.7 million gallons of liquid per day, as well as a sewage system and massive air-conditioning system to keep all those servers cool. Electricity will come from the center’s own substation built by Rocky Mountain Power to satisfy the 65-megawatt power demand. Such a mammoth amount of energy comes with a mammoth price tag -- about $40 million a year, according to one estimate.
Given the facility’s scale and the fact that a terabyte of data can now be stored on a flash drive the size of a man’s pinky, the potential amount of information that could be housed in Bluffdale is truly staggering. But so is the exponential growth in the amount of intelligence data being produced every day by the eavesdropping sensors of the NSA and other intelligence agencies. As a result of this “expanding array of theater airborne and other sensor networks,” as a 2007 Department of Defense report puts it, the Pentagon is attempting to expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes (10^24 bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a septillion bytes—so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.)
The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)
by James Bamford, wired.com --
03.15.12
Uh oh! The NSA is about to run out of data storage names -- once they outgrow those measly Yotta-bytes.
So what do you say -- let's help them come up with a new appropriate name for 10^27 bytes -- their next "mega" threshold ...
Yottabyte
Name (Symbol) Value
kilobyte (kB) 10^3
megabyte (MB) 10^6
gigabyte (GB) 10^9
terabyte (TB) 10^12
petabyte (PB) 10^15
exabyte (EB) 10^18
zettabyte (ZB) 10^21
yottabyte (YB) 10^24
...
????-byte (??B) 10^27