OK, so the entire Internet is already in the box on your desk, and possibly most of it fits inside your phone, but Sun’s partnership with The Internet Archive means that 3 petaflops petabytes of archived web pages is also stored in a shipping container. Yes, I have this thing for data centers in a box, but if a group is going to corral the bits and bytes required to generate a historical record of the web, cramming them into a shipping container rather than a large data center seems like a compact (and efficient) way to do it. Check out Sun’s tour for a closer look.
Petaflops as a measure of storage???
i sometimes wonder why sun producing all these great products and open source software stacks does not translate to good figure in balance sheet ?
I think you mean petabytes.
Lady, if you don’t know a flop from a byte, it’s time to get out of tech journalism. At least get an editor to read before posting.
looks like slip of mind ……..must be side effect of late night bloging ?…no need to be so harsh
I did mean petabytes. As GP surmised it was a slip of the mind brought on by my years of covering supercomputers as well.
What a bullshit headline. Not even Google has any idea what the “ENTIRE INTERNET” looks like. The Internet Archive is a light sampling of what the Internet looked like ten years ago. It’s a PR stunt for a crateload of Sun servers and that’s all.
The article also appears in the New York Times, 2009 March 26.
The link to the Sun site:
http://www.sun.com/featured-articles/2009-0325/feature/index.jsp
there and the link here point to Sun’s page,
which says in part:
“If you had to store three petabytes of data and keep it online for the entire Internet community”
So the error was generated by author or the editing process, and
The NY Times didn’t catch it.
“Internet in a box” was the name of a company in Seattle that offered exactly that in 1993. Allowed you to get started on the net. The company I worked for invested in them. Internet offerings have come a long way in a short period of time
Also see Professor Gelernter’s book:
Mirror Worlds: or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox
http://www.amazon.com/Mirror-Worlds-Software-Universe-Shoebox-How/dp/019507906X