2008 business information: 9.57 zettabytes

the annual business-related information processed in 2008 was equivalent to a 5.6-billion-mile-high stack of books from Earth to Neptune and back to Earth, repeated about 20 times a year.

Business information consumption in 2008: 9,570,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes

Scientists at UC San Diego have estimated the annual amount of business-related information processed by the world's computer servers in terms that Guttenberg and Galileo would have appreciated: the digital equivalent of a 5.6-billion-mile-high stack of books from Earth to Neptune and back to Earth, repeated about 20 times a year.

The world's roughly 27 million computer servers processed 9.57 zettabytes of information in 2008, according to a paper presented April 7 at Storage Networking World's (SNW's) annual meeting in Santa Clara, Calif.

The first-of-its kind rigorous estimate was generated with server-processing performance standards, server-industry reports, interviews with information technology experts, sales figures from server manufacturers and other sources. (One zettabyte is 10 to the 21st power, or a million million gigabytes.)

The study estimated that enterprise server workloads are doubling about every two years.

World Server Information, 2008

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The report is "How Much Information: 2010 Report on Enterprise Server Information", by James Short, Roger Bohn, and Chaitanya Baru.