Which social media company just bought a whopping 85 petabytes of object-based storage? That’s the question on our minds after Jason Capitel, EMC’s COO for the EMEA region, referred to the sale onstage at our Structure:Europe conference in London.
A petabyte (PB) is a quadrillion bytes. To give you a sense of the scale we’re talking about here, Facebook’s photo-filled data warehouse, built up over many years, stood at 250PB a few months ago.
“We just shipped to a customer 85PB for social media,” Capitel said on Thursday. “We believe it’s the largest capacity we’ve ever shipped.” Well sure, that’s a big shipment – any more details? “The mobile boom created a [requirement] for massive amounts of space,” he said shortly after. “Often a lot of these things are stored elsewhere (off the device).”
Not quite enough to identify the buyer, so it will have to remain a mystery for now.
Check out the rest of our Structure:Europe 2013 coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:
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