Some sweet specs on Google and Hubble

Our story on Google’s storage assistance to academic and research institutions focused on the Archimedes Palimpsest, but this article in Wired has some interesting further info on the Hubble telescope project, which was also mentioned but not interviewed for our piece.

How do you get 120 terabytes of data — the equivalent of 123,000 iPod shuffles (roughly 30 million songs) — from A to B? For the most part, the old-fashioned way: via a sneakernet. It’s not glamorous, but Google engineers hope to at least end the arduous process of transferring massive quantities of data — which can literally take weeks to upload onto the internet — with something affectionately called “FedExNet” by the scientists who use it…The near totality of all the astronomical data and images that Hubble has ever collected [is] about 120 terabytes.

Do also check out the glamour shot of Google’s open source program manager Chris DiBona posted with the article–we reckon we’ve never seen such a creative executive headshot.

(Via Scobleizer)