There’s an interesting article in the current New York Review of books (predictably, a book review) detailing the history of the National Security Agency, that shadowy power-behind-the-power to which we surrender much of our privacy. That in itself is interesting, but I found the introduction a bit shocking: the NSA is constructing a datacenter in the Utah desert that they project will be storing yottabytes of surveillance data. And what is a yottabyte? I’m glad you asked.
There are a thousand gigabytes in a terabyte, a thousand terabytes in a petabyte, a thousand petabytes in an exabyte, a thousand exabytes in a zettabyte, and a thousand zettabytes in a yottabyte. In other words, a yottabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000GB. Are you paranoid yet?
The more salient question is, of course, what are they storing that, by some estimates, is going take up thousands of times more space than all the world’s known computers combined? Don’t think they’re going to say; they didn’t grow to their current level of shadowy omniscience by disclosing things like that to the public. However, speculation isn’t too hard on this topic. Now more than ever, surveillance is a data game. What with millions of phones being tapped and all data duplicated, constant recording of all radio traffic, 24-hour high definition video surveillance by satellite, there’s terabytes at least of data coming in every day. And who knows when you’ll have to sift through August 2007’s overhead footage of Baghdad for heat signatures in order to confirm some other intelligence?
As for the medium on which the data might be stored on, that’s anybody’s guess. Whoever’s making the estimates is probably playing a bit fast and loose with exponential curves, but if any of the alternative storage technologies we cover here on CG are any indication, yottabytes won’t seem so big a few years from now. We can be sure, however, that despite their better dollars-per-gigabyte cost, spinning hard disks won’t be in use as a main medium. The electricity required, mean time before failure, and other maintenance issues are probably unacceptable for an economy-minded government agency — interestingly, it seems that lack of electricity is one of the NSA’s primary concerns.
The article mentions that the NSA’s equivalent in the UK, the Government Communications Headquarters, asked that all telecoms providers store and hand over a huge amount of customer data for an entire year. They refused, citing “grave misgivings” and noting that at any rate the level of data collection expected was “impossible in principle.” Tut tut! Those Brits lacked the American can-do spirit. Thus it was that AT&T and other telecoms instantly complied with US mandates following September 11. The extent of the government’s meddling with switches, routers, antennas, and so on may never be fully known, but I wouldn’t be surprised if everyone reading this article isn’t on the record somewhere. Storage capacity of this magnitude implies a truly unprecedented amount of subjects for monitoring.
There is talk of the NSA shutting down altogether or being rolled into another agency, but I suspect that the “too big to fail” idea, as well as the “our safety is worth any price” dogma, will prevent that eventuality. It’s more reasonable to ask when or if its expansion will cease being sustainable. These datacenters, and the yottabytes they will hold, are extremely expensive as well as practically having bulls-eyes painted on them to the enemy (whoever he is) — though at under $10bn the NSA’s budget is a footnote compared to other programs and agencies. So is the increasingly (to use a semi-word that is only rarely usable) tentacular NSA a necessary evil of the digital age, or a cancerous money sink born from the colossal intelligence competition of the Cold War?
The answer will only be visible in retrospect years from now, perhaps when a sequel to the book being reviewed (The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency, by Matthew M. Aid) is released covering the heavily-redacted records of the early 2000s. In the meantime, it’s probably best to assume that the walls have ears.
(Updated with a note on storage medium)
Update 2: A commenter points out that in the study cited, yottabytes are only one possible estimate for total storage requirements. The more realistic estimates are in the hundreds of petabytes, which is much easier for a datacenter to accommodate. That said, I’m leaving the post as it is because the speculation still stands with “only” hundreds of petabytes being stored in these datacenters. However, adjust your tinfoil hats accordingly.
Update 3: A tipster informed us that this facility is not being set up in the desert, but actually in suburban Salt Lake City, near the municipal airport. Interestingly enough, they’ve built massive earth berms to conceal the massive amounts of military hardware being relocated to this location. There are also constant flights of black, unmarked helicopters flying in attack formation over the valley, making the residents quite nervous. So whatever it is they are building, it’s very well protected. Apparently you can see all this for yourself from the Jordan Commons shopping mall.
Oh, and sorry Robert. The NSA already knows it was you who told us about this.
[via Metafilter]
Are you sure this is actually true? Even without any sort of RAID, they’d need 1,000,000,000,000 1TB hard drives for just one yottabyte. With 1.5TB hard drives, they’d need fewer though, only … 666,666,666,667 of them.
That’s simply ridiculous. Ignoring the fact that producing those drives would be pretty much impossible, if you said they had just RAID 1 on everything, so 2,000,000,000,000 1TB hard drives, that would cost $200,000,000,000,000. That’s 200 trillion dollars.
Could be using holographic storage technology.
Like the HVD for example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_Versatile_Disc
I’ll admit they’re probably *not* going to be using HDDs, but still – they might well have more redundant and higher density storage, but without some truly gigantic revolution in technology I’d say an exabyte for a device the size of a HDD is the most we might be looking at. Personally I’d say around 25TB, 1 exabyte is simply to be safe.
That’s still 1,000,000,000 drives. I’d be prepared to accept it might be possible to get a million/equivalent, if you said that other government branches were contributing from their budget, but a yottabyte is really just taking the piss.
I bet NSA employees are reading your comment and laughing. It is relatively well-known that government technology is often decades ahead of technology lowly consumers use. It is very likely that they have petabyte hard drives or some such thing.
For example, GPS was being used for many years by the government before consumers were “allowed” their hands on it.
I’m guessing they’re using Hierarchal Storage, with tape storing the brunt of it. LTO-4 does 800GB /per tape/. A quick google is $810 for a pack of 20.
As for “decades-ahead”, they tend to only invest that heavily in things needed that don’t have civilian R&D going on. The rest is COTS, with some special requests in exchange for good patronage.
So much math made you dizzy. 1 yottabyte is 1mln 1exabyte drives, not 1bln. Either, way, it’s quite improbable.
Could they be utilizing Memristor technology?
Actually, they probably get the Government discount so make that $400,000,000,000,000.
I would guess they are already building the infrastructure, so they can add drives of 4TB, 10TB, 100TB, .. in the future.
The original article notes that 2015 is the expected date when such a capacity might be in operation – I think they’re being liberal with the storage capacity trends, but whether it’s yottabytes or hundreds of exabytes, it’s still a hell of a lot of data.
Wait—I heard that the world only has about 0.5 yottabytes of data. So the NSA wants to torrent all the data in the world twice?
By 2015 we will probably have more than that. And if they build something like that, they would have to think of the future, you know?
Need a backup of it too.
God bless America.
And let the geek wars start over yobibytes vs yottabytes. Who’s counting?
Is it even possible to reliably store that much data?
I wonder what filetypes they are saving? Video files can be pretty large so maybe they are storing lots of survalence camera footage, or maybe they are back-logging youtube.
Anyone have any ideas what they might need that much space for?
They probably got a couple of back-ups at well
Pardon me.
I need to put on my tinfoil hat.
The NSA has been out in front.
They are just planning ahead.
20 years from now, YBytes will be normal.
The NSA (may they swallow their own plutonium implosion trigger components) just wants to store (al queda is all powerful) everything. They can’t help themselves.
@michael – it’s the government, do you really thing they are stuck using 1 or 1.5tb drives like the rest of us consumers? They always get the most high tech gadgets months/years before us. More than likely they had 1tb drives 5-10 years ago.
I wouldn’t doubt it if they already using 25tb (hell, maybe even 50 or 100tb) single drives or some other format of storage unknown to us citizens.
Exactly: unknown to us citizens. Did you know that in some laboratories the R&D departments are testing a system that will allow to store 10^20 GB in a USB stick like we have today? They only have one problem: it’s still slow as shit! And wait until they really come up with the quantum computer.
god you ARE stupid.
10^20 GB means 10^29 bits. you’d need half the earth atoms just for the bits.
but Obama is going to stop all that patriot act stuff. And give us more transparency. And let gays in the military. So have no fear.
And what’s the big deal. Google has all that info anyway. And they seem to be pretty cozy with the feds anyway.
And don’t forget, Facebook has ties with the CIA…
World Data doesn’t mean internet data!
Let’s think about this for a second. That amount of data sounds more like a raw data dump than actually useful information. Plus, anything worth saving needs to be backed up to an off-site location.
Even more interesting is how many computers needed to shift through that much data. I mean, unless they’re analyzing it in real-time, they’re going to create a tremendous backlog of data to be looked at that’s going to need a power plant to provide enough juice to power all those servers.
I really like the NSA employment add popping up in the top right.
Oh yes, they’re big sponsors of ours. Did I not mention that?
that’s about 150 1TB drives per person on earth… how much electricity will it take to keep them all spinning? They’re also gonna need a fast network.
for once im thrilled by the british lack of can do spirit. ( and the scruples)
the thing that struck me about the size of a yottabyte is that i didnt even know the word for the number used to describe the size of a yottabyte. apparently its a quadrillion gigabytes.
Store it?
Ok lets take it for a given that they can _store_ it.
Now, go ahead and search it, and remember you only have 24 hours before jack bauer kills all the suspects, Good Luck.
No Such Agency: “In God We Trust…all others we monitor.”
Well we trust some stuff that we do not have a clue exist and we try to monitor all so that we might get a clue about the existence of god. I guess, earlier empires died not because they lacked surveillance but they lacked sense of changing times in their capital. If US really want to maintain its hegemony then it has to be more cooperative and liberal not draconian. US can never and should never be the police of the world.
The PTB publicly admitted, in Wired Magazine, to having full optical diamond processors. That was in 1995.
That means they had already had them for at least 15 years before that.
They are using storage technology that won’t be publicly announced for another 15 to 20 years.
How do you think Google indexes the entire Internet continuously? They are state sponsored of course.
The technology of the Evil Empire is at least 100 years advanced of mainstream Rockefeller/Rothschild sponsored ’science’.
BS — stop it. Technology is behind physics and agencies are behind technology. And before that Math is ahead of physics. I am a physicist. So just stop the BS of NSA taking over the world!
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I personally approved this comment due to extreme weirdness.
It’s NSA Spook words, from http://attrition.org/misc/keywords.html
ha! so awesome.
“Bubba the Love Sponge” is a spook word?
I always knew redheads were cooler than other women.
Vivzizi
Likely it was an attempt at steganography. I’m guessing the caret and the 69 were the signal amongst the noise.
If those data centre volume estimates are reliable, perhaps we can surmise that NSA is trading-off storage for processing power to solve some of the more intractable crypto algorithms. If it would take x million CPU years to guess a key, how much less if you’ve already indexed a very large number of products of primes?
This page flagged by the government due to specious keywords in 3…2…1…
I’m trying to resist the urge to add that to my standard email footer.
You forgot punch cards!
One way it is good for national security point of view.
Whether our privacy on all our stored information.
Very good advancement on many fields.
This is a added application to their operations.
For fun, let’s do a calculation:
6,794,000,000 people on earth * (24 hours/day * 365 days/year * 80 years/person) = 4,761,235,200,000,000 hours
Now, you can store approx. 2 hours of high quality video using 1 GB. Thus, in order store the entire life of every person on earth in video format you would need:
4,761,235,200,000,000 hours / (2 hours/GB) =
2,380,617,600,000,000 GB =
2 yottabytes
That’s awesomeness!
was it fun?
Sure it was fun. Here is another one for you:
Estimated number of total bytes sent over the internet in 2008: 78 exabytes.
If you stored all the traffic sent over a 2008-sized internet for 12,821 years you would have:
78000000000 GB * 12,821 years
= 1000038000000000 GB
= 1 yottabyte
Some of the comments above are funny but show how people jump to the conspiracy theories when they don’t understand something. This must be why people invented God thousands of years ago before they understood much about their environment. I’m surprised nobody has hinted at how the government is using reverse engineered alien technology for the storage and the ability to search through all the data.
Seriously though, I’m writing this comment on a modest laptop that has more than 400,000 times the storage of the first computer I owned 27 years ago. Based on some of the comments above mentioning that the gov has technology 20 years ahead of what we have right now, then yottabytes are not such a stretch of the imagination.
What really blows my mind is how they will search through all that data efficiently enough to make it useful. Or, are they just storing it like the Police do with evidence, knowing that in the not so distant future the technology will be developed to use it?
…almost thought we were talking about Google here…
Yep. If Google is paying attention to this, they have an opportunity to mesh itself further into the underlying structure and security of our nation. They need to send a sales rep to the CIA immediately.
Justin-
You misspelled Stanford. Just sayin’.
This is a misleading article. Here’s what the actual report said:
“There is a perceived notion of a “capability gap” as regards future re-
quirements for data management, with some forecasts predicting total data
requirements in excess of a Yottabyte (1024 Bytes) by 2015 if current trends
in sensor capability continue. These analyses are not credible in our view,
in that they simply posit an increasing rate of data production without un-
derstanding the associated end-user requirements.
It is of value to consider
the evolution of data storage requirements arising from data-intensive work
in scientific fields such as high energy physics or astronomy. Both these com-
munities are faced with significant storage and analysis requirements, but
by matching the specific end requirements of their respective scientific goals,
data filtering strategies have been developed, which in turn lead to more
modest estimates for both storage and bandwidth. Typical data set size es-
timates for these communities will grow exponentially to a level of 100’s of
Petabytes by 2015. ”
http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/dod/jason/data.pdf
Thanks, EJ. I’ve added that to the post. Hundreds of petabytes is still enough to worry about, though.
Great! But just how do they plan on making backups?
Time Machine
Duh…
mozy?
(yes, I earn an extra 250 MB for everyone that signs up for a free mozy account)
The article doesn’t actually say they’re planning on storing yottabytes, it simply states sensor data volume could reach that level. We have no idea what kind of process the NSA goes through for analysis, discarding and eventual compressed storage of data, but I’m betting it’s a much smaller number.
Imagine you have a dude out in the field. He records 24 hours a day of uncompressed hi-def video via 50 cameras, audio, you get the sensory data from the guy himself, tracking data for every little movement of everyone being tracked, etc, etc. However, the data will probably be streamed back to NSA Super Lab where it’ll be analysed, compressed, discarded as needed, whatever. The end storage won’t be anywhere near the original data amounts.
Kind of like measuring how much data goes through your computer’s memory than what is actually stored to your hard drive. Gigabytes of data is generated by CPU but very little of it is actually stored at the end of the day, it floats in and out of memory and is mainly discarded. What we write to a disk is minimal. In the course of a year, it could easily be many terabytes or even petabytes, but the data kept is measured in gigabytes (most of the time :) )
If this is indeed credible, this could be a game-changing deal for whichever company (or companies) get the contract(s). In addition to HDs this could also change the price of world markets for just about every server component.
@abhiroopb:Some of them might cry when reading the comments.You see, for them and their families also, the provided health services are too the “lowly consumer available” . Statistically speaking for at least one of the Nsa employees at this moment, the current level of health services is not enough to save them.Well folks that’s life.
ps As intelligence sources commented in the past to the press for some technologies “it’s impossible to provide them at present to the public,that’s life”.
Man, now this blog has surely stretched my imagination and definitely *I can do* feelings… ha haa…
We can do this …. I knew it.
Depending on technology available, it’s going to be billions either case if this is really true, why don’t the US government just acquire Google :-)
Seagate is gonna make a Windfall in profits
considering that they are trying to exclude the use of electricity and how hot seagate 15k rpm drives get, I doubt that!
Puts my still-working floppy drive to shame.
Would those be 8″ Floppies or those new fangled 5 1/4″ floppies?
I am not surprised, although we’re speaking of INSANE amounts of data here, they might be using holographic storage and / or huge tape drives.
It’s possible, and besides government technology is somewhat ahead.
Also, I thought the NSA had a significant black budget in which no one knew how much was spent.
Interesting indeed.
Has anyone made the point that this is a terrible idea, incidentally completely consistent with federal planning? The Utah desert is a hot place. Especially in the Summer when it goes up to about 120. I know, I lived in Utah, not in the desert thankfully. But still, datacenter’s enemy is heat. That’s why some are being built in Iceland, costs of cooling all those components in yottabytes of data? When its in Utah? Why do I have to pay for the government’s stupidity?
Why do you assume their data storage will need to be cooled. Maybe heat will even help this technology run. Just assuming it’s simple hard drives is very naive.
I seems the time has come to learn about what our government has planned for us. Not only are many Americans reluctant to know but it is easy to say, “…this only happens in other countries…”.
From now it is necessary to find out what is going on and when it is planned to take this data and come after us with it!
i can haz yottabyte, you i will have yottabyte
cant wait for the 1,000,000,000,000,000GB ipod nano!
Perfect. Several hundred orbiting satellites masquerading as nex-gen GPS filming everything and everybody 24/7
Next time a crime happens, pull out the video and fast forward it till you find out where they currently are. Tivo for crime fighting.
Information is an useless raw material by itself. It becomes meaningful when interpreted in its intended context.
You could store a Vendekabyte of information and still being clueless about the behavior and intentions of an Afghan hound or a turkey.
I find it hard to imagine a turkey having intentions. I’m not sure about an afghan hound. But then they may think the same about us. What is a vendekabyte?
Welp, we’ll finally get to see what ZFS can do!
They are probably recording the full electromagnetic spectrum and then combing it as needed for certain tuned signnals.
That’s what they did in Columbia to catch the drug cartels cellphone conversations. They couldn’t tune them in real time so they recorded the WHOLE celllphone spectrum from an aircraft and then selectively tuned it from the recorded record to follow cellphone conversations.
That would be a lot of data for big areas.
Vivzizi
that makes sense. Now I know why the government wants to ban software-defined radios, and gnu radio-related equipment. You’ll always be able to build your own, though!
ZFS makes sense. Not likely to be a single file-system, so ZettaByte may work well.
What else would they use? Floppies could be a tad cumbersome :)
The privacy implications not withstanding, a colleague previously involved in military technology once informed me that military and security related technology is often 10 to 20 years ahead of that in the consumer and commercial space. For example, flat panel (orange or green on black) plasma displays where in use by the military, not in the 1990s, or the 1980, or even the 1970s, but the 1960s. (Hitachi and Matsushita Electric pioneered the technology, just as Sharp did with the microchip after the US space race prior to the invention of the microprocessor by Intel.)
So, chances are, this dubious entity is going to use some storage technology we will not see on our desktops and cloud tops for quite a while. Quantum computing memory? Solid state holographic? (As mentioned elsewhere here.) Etc.
This is all enough to cause a great deal of concern and I do worry, perhaps like many of you, that all of a sudden in the not too distant future, we are going to live very repressed lives that we cannot escape from. Not because of some evil conspiracy, but because automated ‘public order’ control systems will simply gain too much power under the control of clueless civil servants with a serious inferiority complex. It’s happened before and millions died to be rid of it.
So next time I accidentally hit SHIFT + DEL on an important mail, I can call up NSA…
Here’s to hoping Google will add that to Gmail Labs soon.
lol, i love that.
Sounds like an obscenely large number.
“Even without any sort of RAID, they’d need 1,000,000,000,000 1TB hard drives for just one yottabyte.”
Hey dumbass, they wont be using ‘hard drives’, didnt u read the issue of mean-time failure?
And that ‘hard drives’ arent a feasible medium for this??? get a life arsehole.
Well, nice to see how many people here called me a dumbarse/arsehole/etc (please go back to 4chan now). Getting back to the main topic here, see http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/16/tower_of_power/ – probably a reasonable option for what they might be using, though feel free to tell me I’m delusional and that ‘they’ have technology we consumers will only get in [insert arbitrary # > 30 here] years.
OK…Now i understand. The 2 trillion healthcare bill with its 2000 pages is really a facade to found the NSA’s project openly in the public..
very smart….
hello. I remember in 2008 I worked for a small chemical company back in Utah. A *big* order came from government organization that everyone knew its NSA but nobody wanted to tell $$ numbers. We were designing a part of larger project that we were not involved in. The result of our work was sort of a special liquid that we did not make a name for, but this liquid was so thick (imagine 1000 times thicker than a car oil) that when you tried to put another object in it, it took incredible force for at least an hour for this liquid to “swallow” an inch of it! Nobody knew what NSA needs it for, but at least it looked we designed what they wanted to, because at the end the paid in full and did not complain. Later 2008 by accident I met a guy on a seminar and told him our company had a project with NSA – he replied they did a project for NSA too! he told me they received a brick of “solid” liquid (!!) and were designing a special laser beam to “burn and heal” pores in it. He said they were able to produce a capacity of zattabyte on one square inch (!!) with quick access and power usage of 1/10 of todays hard drives. too bad I never had a chance to look at the final product, but this just gives me an overwiev we civilians are 250 years behind the government!!
Wow. You could store a lot of porn on a yottabyte drive…
heh
heh…
Wow. The amount of storage is almost beyond comprehension- Big Bro has got your number …
That’s only about 7 quintillion of those little 3.5″ floppies.
I believe it’s the Jordan Landing shopping mall, not Jordan Commons. There’s no airport near Jordan Commons, and I live near Jordan Landing and have been seeing these Blackhawk helicopters.
Oh, and I’d be happy if they could just get Fiber out in that area. If the NSA’s out there the least they could do is share some of their bandwidth ;-)
Searching for stuff is easy.
Just type
“grep -ri “NSFW” /yottabytesDrive/”
go to lunch and come back after you retire!
Are you guys kidding me? People in here actually asking whether or not the NSA is even capable of a yottabyte? For one, they have an endless budget I don’t care who says otherwise… Either from taxpayers or directly from our friends (international bankers) who need the surveillance to keep us under control. And no, they are not 10 years ahead of us, come on… more like 30-50. Seriously. To be honest with you our government assholes in there do what they want, when they want, and then DECIDE when to tell us about it. Have you not noticed this trend? I only one?
You must have watched too many movies involving the little green men.
If NSA is soooo powerful, how did 911 happen???
Is it that 911 isn’t important enough to be bothered with NSA’s “superior technologies”?