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ReadWrite – Peta, Exa, Yotta And Beyond: Big Data Reaches Cosmic Proportions [Infographic]

Written by Brandon Klein | Nov 27, 2012 4:50:10 PM

Since the advent of big data, it's been a struggle for some to get a real sense of just how big big data really is. You hear strange terms like "peta," exa" and "yotta"… but what does all that really mean? When managing massive amounts of data, the scales were talking about can quickly reach astronomical proportions.

Coming from Indiana, where the value of Pi might have once legally been 3, it would be easy to just slap the label "gi-fracking-normous" on the scales we're talking about, but I'm going to push past my native upbringing and focus on recent efforts to quantify big data. A recent infographic from clearCi is one such effort, outlining the scale of data produced on the Internet each day: 2.5 quintillion bytes of data.