Autonomy private cloud hits 17 petabytes

Autonomy is a software and infrastructure company that was a wide range of offerings including running a private cloud for storing information and other uses for its customers. The company has announced that its private cloud computing platform has hit an impressive milestone. The private cloud now manages more than 17 petabytes of information.

That is a huge amount of information to be stored on a single cloud network. It's hard to wrap your mind around how large 17 petabytes is. If you work that out to gigabytes, 17petabytes is 17,825,792GB of data. Try this figure on for size, scientists estimate that the human brain can hold about 2.5 petabytes of memories.

In figures that geeks can relate to a bit better, 17 petabytes is enough space for 226 years of HD video and 11 times more than the 10 billion photos on Facebook today. All that data on the Autonomy cloud encompasses things like email, multimedia data, and documents and is spread around on 6,500 servers across eight data centers around the world.