Dear Commons Community,

John Hayes unveiled his Pure Storage Box yesterday which ushered in a new era of digital data storage capacity.  Big as a slim refrigerator, it holds 16 petabytes of data, roughly equal to 16 billion thick books. Currently, most data storage is measured in terms of gigabytes and terabytes (see table below)   As reported in the New York Times:

“People are going to have to think about things to put into this,” he [John Hayes] said, surrounded by the clutter of his office at a Silicon Valley company called Pure Storage. “But that won’t take long — there’s a demand for data that nobody was ready for.”

Each month, the world’s one billion cellphones throw out 18 exabytes of data, equal to 1,100 of Mr. Hayes’s boxes. There are also millions of sensors in things ranging from cars and appliances to personal fitness trackers and cameras.

IBM estimates that by 2020 we will have 44 zettabytes — the thousand-fold number next up from exabytes — generated by all those devices. It is so much information that Big Blue is staking its future on so-called machine learning and artificial intelligence, two kinds of pattern-finding software built to cope with all that information.

Making storage products has long been a major part of the tech industry. It has also been one of the dullest, with little in the way of innovation. Now the surge in data is leading both start-ups and some of tech’s biggest companies to rethink how they approach the problem.

Pure, co-founded by Mr. Hayes, a 38-year-old former video karaoke engineer, is one of several companies trying new approaches.

Mr. Hayes’s box, which was unveiled on Monday, holds five times as much data as a conventional storage device, thanks to a combination of so-called flash storage technology and clever engineering. Sometime in 2017, he said, it will hold twice that much, as Pure tweaks the product. Power consumption, the company says, is 4 percent of the current standard.”

Advances in data storage capacity has been one of the major drivers of digital technology over the past seventy years.  The Pure Storage Box is major leap forward and sets the stage for even greater development over the next ten years.  The article rightfully points out that this type of storage capacity portends very advanced applications such as artificial intelligence.

Tony