How much data do mainframe computers hold?
I’m starting a security job guarding this mainframe computer which is huge. I didn’t think they were that big anymore. They have me armed so whatever is on there must be important and there must be alot of it
Tagged with: mainframe computer • security job
Filed under: Computer Data Security
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Today mainframe computers are used for several reasons. Yes, one reason is to hold, process and distribute huge amounts of data. They are also used to run large networks. Really huge mainframes are used by the government for research and by the financial sector. The storage size has been in the terabyte range for sometime now. You know terabyte don’t you? There’s a bit, a byte, a megabyte, a gigabyte and a terabyte. Recently a storage size larger than a terabyte came out, it is a petabyte (derived from the SI prefix peta- ) is a unit of information or computer storage equal to one quadrillion bytes (short scale), or 1000 terabytes.
They can hold literally billions of files and millions of Gigabytes of information.
While I was in school, I toured a place that had a mainframe server "room" that was the size of a gymnasium. There were a lot of servers in there but all of them were huge like you mentioned. The company I toured kept medical records for companies that were located throughout the entire US so I’m sure you could imagine the amount of data that would be held on each one.