Remember the megabyte and the gigabyte era? That was not too long ago. Megabytes and gigabytes may not be enough to count storage capacities by 2016 and the technology world is getting ready for zettabyte as informed by Cisco Systems. What is a zettabyte? It is one trillion gigabytes of data.

Global data traffic is increasing by about 21 percent a year according to a recently published report by Cisco Systems. In 2007, according to the same source global data traffic was around one Exabyte, equal to one billion gigabytes. The next step will be to reach one zettabyte by 2016. What’s after that and when will we reach the next level? According to Cisco Systems beyond zettabyte will be yottabyte, which is 1,000 zettabytes. In other words this equals to 250 trillion DVDs. Cisco estimates that we will reach that capacity soon after 2016. What is fueling this crazy expansion? According to Cisco System it is video. It estimates that video streaming will occupy more than 79 percent of data traffic by 2018, from the current 66 percent. Netflix and YouTube combined are responsible for more than 50 percent of downloads in North America.