What does ZB stand for?

s Zettabyte File System (ZFS) in Mac OS X appears dead, a likely victim of complications from lawsuits over ZFS and Oracle Corp.

Networking specialist Cisco estimates that yearly traffic will increase at an average compound rate of 40 per cent to exceed two-thirds of a zettabyte (one sextillion bytes) within the next four years, with the Middle East and Africa region expected to post the fastest growth at 51 per cent.

With global IP traffic expected to increase six-fold by 2012 -- driven largely by video content -- service providers are faced with passing over a zettabyte of data across their networks.

Aside from testing students on a deeper level of science understanding, computer-based simulations will generate zettabytes of data about how students solve problems, another boon to the science education community.

Speaking volumes Kilobyte (KB) 1,024 bytes Megabyte (MB) 1,048,576 bytes (approx 1,000KBs) Gigabyte (GB) 1,073,741,824 bytes (approx 1,000MBs) Terabyte (TB) 1,099,511,627,776 (approx 1,000GBs) Petabyte 1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes (approx 1,000 TBs) Exabyte 152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes (approx 1 million TBs) Zettabyte 1,180,591,620,717,411,303,424 bytes (approx 1 billion TBs) Yottabyte 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 bytes (Approx 1,000 billion TBs)

Some experts talk about Exabytes, Zettabytes, and the ultimate Yottabyte.

1) Source: Enterprise Strategy Group 2007 File Archiving Survey and Market Forecast (2) Source: ComputerWorld Storage, "A Zettabyte by 2010: Corporate Data Grows Fifty-Fold in Three Years," March 2007 (3) Source: SearchStorage.

A Cisco report last June predicted that annual Internet traffic will grow 40% year over year, quintupling by 2013 and reaching two thirds of a zettabyte, roughly 10 billion DVDs worth of data a month.