Spectra Logic CEO Publishes Book

Spectra Logic Corporation announced that its CEO, Nathan C. Thompson, with colleagues Bob Cone and John Kranz, published a new book, Society’s Genome: Genetic Diversity’s Role in Digital Preservation.

With nearly 40 years of experience as a storage industry leader and CEO, Thompson draws on the lessons of history and nature in addressing civilization’s unquenchable thirst for information and our need to find genetically diverse methods to preserve this collective knowledge base – society’s genome – for future generations.

The book is a guide to understanding greater trends in information storage and data preservation. It details how vital it is to store our information, and the astounding statistics around society’s digital data growth and utilization.

The amount of data stored in the ‘digital universe’
will reach 17ZB by 2025, largely driven by:

Scientific research – Zettabytes of long-term data are being created every year, which will ultimately be kept forever.
Genomics – The medical industry is expecting one billion people to have their genomes sequenced by 2025. (1) Genomic sequencing will reach 1ZB of outputted data per year by 2025. (2)
Video sharing – Six billion hours of YouTube videos are watched each month, with one billion of those hours accessed by mobile phones. Contractually these videos must be kept forever. (3)
Social media – LinkedIn has more than 300 million users and adds two new members every second; (4) and Facebook stores more than 250 petabytes of information and accrues another half petabyte every day. (5)
Cloud – Public cloud revenue continues to grow exponentially, with some projections showing over 40% growth year over year. (6)
Entertainment – Not only do we see continued growth in the output of movies, news, sports and regular programming, but the density of these programs is increasing as well. Moving from an HD format at 24 frames per second (fps) to 4K format at 60 fps requires roughly 30 times the storage. Most media and entertainment content is being stored forever. (7)

Society’s Genome: Genetic Diversity’s Role in Digital Preservation speaks to the enormous amount of society’s knowledge now stored in the digital universe. Mediums of storage change; what started with punch cards has advanced to magnetic and semiconductor storage, and may ultimately evolve to phase change or DNA-based storage.

As we continue to evolve from paper to digital storage, society will grow increasingly dependent on the availability of its historical data. To date, exceptional digital preservation has led to tremendous advances in healthcare, predictive planting, infrastructure and connectivity, benefiting humanity’s overall quality of life. Society will continue to leverage its digital information to move itself forward-both tomorrow and for the next several hundred years.

Just as genomes are the genetics of all organisms, the digital universe is the ‘genetic basis’ of society. Organizations can emulate nature’s proven successes to protect and preserve the digital universe through practices like multiple copy creation; incorporating ‘genetically diverse’ platforms within the data center; geographic dispersal of physical hardware for DR; and conducting checksums to ensure error reduction.

“New technologies, devices, population growth and the spread of the digital revolution all support the idea of explosive, exponential data growth,” said Thompson. “We developed this work to inspire a larger conversation on the digital universe, its importance to society and our joint responsibility to enduringly preserve it.”

The book may be purchased on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iTunes and numerous online bookstores. The Kindle and paperback versions are available for $7.99 and $16.95 respectively on Amazon here. The eBook is also available for download through Barnes and Noble and iTunes for $7.99.

“Society’s Genome is the story about the future of the technologies and societal behavioral issues (e.g., malware, cyber-attacks) that evolve and threaten it. It is essential reading to understand the diverse aspects of The Genome-aka all the digital memories from your PC’s store to all the storage that constitutes society’s memory. Finally, the book makes a case for storage-technology genetic diversity that system designers should only ignore at their peril,” said Gordon Bell, researcher emeritus, Microsoft Research Silicon Valley Laboratory.

“Colorado runs on its data. Agriculture, bio-science, energy, aerospace, health care, finance, and advanced manufacturing all require safety of their data and infrastructure against serious threats. Society’s Genome looks to evolution and epochal threats to derive methods for storage and digital preservation. It’s a fresh perspective and interesting story of historical loss-from Ptolemy’s map to American chestnut trees-and an optimistic look at preventing its recurrence,” said John Hickenlooper, governor of Colorado.

“If you live in the 21st century-and not in a cave-this book is for you,” said Michael C. Glaviano, PhD; futurist, author of Edge Station and Crows’ Gambit.

(1) Robert Gebelhoff, Sequencing the Genome Creates So Much Data We Don’t Know What to Do With It, Washington Post, July 7, 2015
(2) Zachary D. Stephens, et. al., Big Data: Astronomical or Genomical? PLOS Biology, vol.13, no. 7 (2015)
(3) Faiza Sareah, Interesting Statistics for the Top 10 Social Media Sites, Small Business Trends, July 26, 2015
(4) Faiza Sareah, Interesting Statistics for the Top 10 Social Media Sites, Small Business Trends, July 26, 2015
(5) Dylan Tweney, Facebook Explains Secrets of Building Hugely Scalable Sites, Venture Beat, September 16, 2013
(6) Various sources
(7) Calculations performed by Spectra Logic