World's information consumption: 9.57 zettabytes
A team of computer scientists from the University of San Diego has quantified how much information got crunched by business-related servers around the world in 2008 - and it's quite a number: 9.57 zettabytes of information, almost 10 to the 22nd power, or ten million million gigabytes.
Their report, delivered at a trade conference in Silicon Valley earlier this week, marks the first time researchers have put a number on the world's annual information consumption workload. The study also projects a continuing appetite for server use demand, which it estimates will double roughly every couple of years. Viewed another way, the amount of server data getting processed by the year 2024 will be equivalent to "a stack of books extending more than 4.37 light-years to Alpha Centauri," the report's authors estimate.