48 Terabytes is a lot to chew on…

We just announced the launch of our latest and largest version of GigaStor today, GigaStor Expandable, which holds up to 48 terabytes of data. This got me thinking of the evolution of network analyzers from a traditional three-pane display capable of 256 KB captures and performing basic protocol decodes to where we are today.

It used to be in a very flat network and switch-free environment, the analyzer could see everything. One of my colleagues described how back in the good old days before major internet use, applications, such as accounting software, were cleaner without any real fancy interface and only displaying scripts or characters from a database. Networks consisted of a few database servers, a file server, and several workstations; all communicating at speeds of up to 10 MB per second for Ethernet and between 4 or 16 MB for token-ring networks.

With your Novell LANalyzer, you might capture 80 Kb of packets, view them and parse the capture to 30 Kb, and then proceed to print each packet on a page. You could then fax the printed capture to the application vendor or Microsoft for help. While it was possible to send an attachment with e-mail using a Eudora client, this was a more tedious process. The attachment had to be UU encoded with a separate program before being sent.

Today analyzers have the ability to monitor and save every packet flying down a 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE) network. And certainly nothing can stop people from simply attaching and sending us anything from video clips to viruses.
These developments in part remind me of a poignant albeit somewhat cheesy video called “Did you know; Shift Happens” created by Karl Fisch and modified by Scott McLeod, which makes the point through simple text that the world is changing quickly in ways that we can’t comprehend.

The amount of information generated and searched daily is just mind boggling. 2.7 billion searches are performed monthly on Google where 10 years ago there were none. 3000 new books are published daily.

More space. More information. More worries. More challenges. It all points to more possibilities. The evolution from mega to giga to terabytes has been great to watch, but the future will be just as great to observe, especially as we go from tera to peta and eventually to my personal favorite yottabyte (1 million terabytes).

Related Resources
How much information is there? - Michael Lesk