With really, really big numbers being casually bandied about in both government and networking circles, it is instructive to put these numbers in context. A recent article on GigaOm by Stacy Higgenbotham does just that with regard to uploading massive databases to cloud computing sites. Since most non-math majors have difficulty comprehending the scale of really big numbers, a useful tool is to express it in terms of something they can grasp, and time is one of the easiest ways to do that.
It appears that the smart people at Amazon, which is investing heavily in cloud computing, have determined that even a state-of-the-art (10 Mbps) broadband connection would require 13 days to upload a 1 terabyte database. Since even the US Postal Service can easily beat that time, Amazon has launched a service called AWS Import/Export that uses, yes, regular mail to upload large databases to cloud-based storage facilities. Sounds like one more reason to engineer better broadband networks.
Pop quiz: the US federal government is expected to spend $4 trillion dollars this coming fiscal year. If they could spend $100 every second, 24 hours per day, 365 days per year, how long would it take to spend that $4 trillion (you can disregard the extra day in leap years, it’s not going to help that much)?
The answer is here.
