The BBC’s reporting that a Google presentation posted up on the web included slides that said, among other things:
“With infinite storage, we can house all user files, including e-mails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc; and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc).”
I’ve been giving Google most of the benefit of the doubt with the questions surrounding privacy and their “Do No Evil” motto. The geek in me wonders about how they’re going to have monumentally huge storage and manage it. Their disposable server architecture for their web farms aren’t really built for storage density… but EMC’s January announcement of petabyte storage arrays sound like a fun way to do it.
Synchronizing data centers with this much storage (for redundancy) would be a great reason to have lots of fiber, which would back up my contention that they weren’t looking to build a fiber network for VoIP.