Case Study: Data storage at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research
PublicTechnology.net: Smashing protons together is very hard to do and, when it is done, 15 petabytes of data will be generated annually and stored on tape.
CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world's largest high-energy physics research establishment and approximately half of the world's particle physicists use its facilities. It has embarked on a multi-year effort to find and observe some of the most elusive particles in sub-atomic physics. To find them, CERN is building the largest and highest-energy particle accelerator in the world at its Geneva headquarters. This is the LHC, the Large Hadron Collider (protons belong to a class of subatomic particles called hadrons).