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The Zettastructure is a revolution for businesses that shall get ready, otherwise the transformation might destroy them.
As part of the series of guest posts named Thoughts Leaders’ Corner, here is a very interesting article from Roger Strukhoff, Director of Research at Altoros and Conference Chair of Cloud Expo. I hope you will enjoy it and if you are interested to the legal issues of blockchain, check my blog post here!
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Sometime during the past few years, we slipped into the greatest era of Information Technology so far.
The self-fulfilling prophecy of Moore’s Law is the main reason for this: our systems have suddenly become robust enough to begin doing what great thinkers such as Arthur C. Clark and have been prophesying for decades. We’ve also seen the cancerous intrusions into our lives predicted by George Orwell.
The ZettaStructure arrives
We are, suddenly, in an age of Artificial Intelligence (AI) 2.0, Machine Learning and Deep Learning (ML/DL), and blockchain, catalyzed by sufficiently powerful computing resources and sufficiently able software, distributed across cloud infrastructures. We are, to put it succinctly, in the Age of the ZettaStructure.
The word “ZettaStructure” was coined this year by UK IT executive George Rockett. It describes
“the physical layer of hardware, facilities, and networks that extend beyond the walls of the traditional data center environment and that together form the foundation of the digital economy.”
The name comes from the fact that the Internet will carry one million petabytes of data this year—i.e., one zettabyte—according to research from Cisco, and the computing systems of the world will create a few more zettabytes for internal use. The amount of data will double in periods of less than three years, according to Cisco.
Thus, the ZettaStructure has arrived, and is growing by more than 100 terabytes each second.
A century from now, this amount of data will seem trivial. But this period in time will be seen as the time when we crossed the Rubicon, when our systems finally became so powerful there was no turning back from them, good or bad.
What does this mean for your enterprise?
You should assume this means that all of your competitors—known, unknown, and to be known—are undergoing a digital transformation of some sort. They are working to make their services faster with a better customer experience.
We’ve reached the point that stable owners faced in the 1930s, when they realized they needed to convert from supplying horses and hay to supplying auto service and gasoline.
This is how fast things are moving:
- The zettabyte of data crossing the Internet this year breaks down to about 140 terabytes for each person on earth.
- That’s about 16 megabytes per hour for each person on earth.
- Netflix grabs about 35% of prime-time traffic in the US
- Even so, gargantuan user Netflix is hogging only a few percentage points of overall global Internet traffic.
Where does this fit into the big picture?
You can be concerned about the effect of data centers on the environment. Although data centers use only 2 to 3 percent of the electrical grid in most countries, they do have a significant footprint, and a growing one.
My opinion is rather than—or maybe in addition to—incorporating some sort of certified green program, your better bet is to support ongoing basic research into the use of light and organic materials in creating the systems of the near future.
The ZettaStructure represents a Crossing of the Rubicon of sorts. We cannot turn back, but we must be sure of our goals and the impacts of our thinking as we advance more deeply into the world of very large data.
If you found this article interesting, please share it on your favourite social media. And for more discussions around the topic, you can follow Roger Strukhoff on his LinkedIn and Twitter profiles. Also, if you want to contribute to the Thought Leaders’ Corner,here are the guidelines for guest posts.
