Internet time travel powered by Sun
Friday Mar 27, 2009
As a big sci-fi fan, I've always loved the idea of time machines and time travel. I'd love to be able to travel back 200, 500, 2000 and 2 million years ago and see what the Earth and life was like then. That's one reason why I love visiting museums - it gives me a glimpse into different eras and what life might have been like then. I also find books about different time periods fascinating.
That's why I'm so excited about this. The Internet Archive, one of the fastest growing digital libraries in the world, has migrated its digital archive efforts onto Sun's open hardware and software platforms and established a new primary datacenter that will be housed at Sun's Santa Clara, California, campus. The Internet Archive chose Sun to help move away from its customized storage architecture into a flexible and open Sun Modular Datacenter comprised of open storage technology like Solaris ZFS and low-cost industry standard Sun Fire systems.
Founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle, the Internet Archive is a non-profit organization that has built a library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form that include moving images, live audio, audio and text formats. The Internet Archive offers free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public; and also features "The Wayback Machine" -- a digital time capsule that allows users to see archived versions of Web pages across time.
At the end of 2008, the Internet Archive housed over three petabtyes of information, which is roughly equivalent to about 150 times the information contained in the Library of Congress. Going forward, the Internet Archive is expected to grow at approximately 100 terabytes a month. Wow! You can check it out here.
Just for fun, I looked up Sun's website at the beginning of 2000, when I first started working at Sun. My how things have changed! Take a peek.
Not quite as cool as the time travel H.G. Wells might write about, but it's up there! 
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